We just passed the 25th anniversary of the GeForce 3, which felt like a good reason to dust off the April 2001 issue of Maximum PC. We reflect on both a quarter-century of programmable pixel shaders -- the tech that's defined 3D rendering ever since -- and Will's cover story on the new GPU, including the secretive trip to Nvidia to benchmark it, a random Tim Sweeney interview, and more. There's also plenty of other fun retro tech to dish about in here, including super-early home wi-fi devices, the reveal of Windows XP, Pentium 4 RD-RAM weirdness, some classic Gordon Mah Ung hijinks, and more.

The Maximum PC issue for this episode: https://archive.org/details/maximum-pc-the-nearly-complete-collection/Maximum%20PC/2001/031%20Maximum%20PC%204-1-2001/page/n1/mode/2up

A clip of the Jack Matthews Metroid Prime interview (full interview also on the channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oiIm5Ymu6s

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It's another glorious bounty of listener questions for the monthly Q&A, touching on a bunch of subjects like modern HDMI switchers, enormous turn-of-the-century TVs, MikroTik network gear, Pluribus, why the PCIe retaining clip exists (and how to defeat it), Unix on the desktop, our wishlist ESP32 projects, and the exact moment when cell phones became widespread -- and whether phone numbers are increasingly useless, at least in the US.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

There's... a lot going on lately, so we're rounding up some of that news this week, starting with Discord's forthcoming age verification policy rolling out globally, with cursory discussion of some of the alternative platforms starting to assert themselves out there. We also touch on the targeting and compromise of Notepad++ by state-level actors, and the latest effects of the computing supply crisis on hard drives, the Steam Machine, and the PlayStation 6. Lastly, we talk about the bizarre case of the autonomous AI agent that started a flame war against an open source maintainer that... well, you really need to just hear/read about that one yourself.

Discord's age verification announcement: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally

Notepad++ compromised: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/hijacked-incident-info-update/

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

(Much more has emerged about the AI agent story since we recorded, including contact with the agent's operator, all described at the link above.)

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod