We don't normally do serious intros here at Techlink, but it sounds like a ton of
people are about to lose their jobs, and that really sucks. What happened to
Intel? You used to be cool, man. You used to be cool. Effective July 15th,
the first phase of Intel's plan to reduce their workforce by 20% that they
announced earlier this year will commence with 107 jobs eliminated across
four facilities in Santa Clara. These are related to their automotive
business. But Intel has an automotive business. Had
an automotive business and it's getting shut down. But don't worry, it gets
worse. Xbox is also laying people off next week. According to Jason Shrier,
this was originally supposed to be thousands of Microsoft employees, but
apparently these jobs are going to come almost entirely from the Xbox team. Wow.
Windows search team dodging a bullet again. But three is the magic number,
right? Well, dating app Bumble is empowering management to make the first
move and laying off 30% of their workforce because business is down as
people have slowly realized that dating apps suck for all genders. Of course,
all of these terminations from all three companies have been in the name of
profits because capitalism demands that you must be over 6 ft. And regular LT
sponsor Dbrand is facing their own capitalistic crisis after telling their
customers whose Joy-Cons were detaching that they were just holding their kill
switch too wrong. The company issued a massive first response to users
complaining about the switch to accessory explaining why and how the
issue was clearly just user error only
to receive backlash from the community. Part of which included a screenshot of
our own Linus Sebastian holding it the same wrong way. Now, this might be
victim blaming, but don't base your model of how you hold things on the guy
who has half a dozen dropping compilations. Okay, just think for a
second. However, it seems that the you're holding it wrong strategy is
working about as well for Dbrand as it did for Apple 15 years ago. And Dbrand
has since done a 180 and issued an apology statement with a better plan to
properly fix the kill switch 2 with another update coming on July 10th. But
don't expect any apologies from AI companies anytime soon because US
District Judge William Alup als
has ruled that yes, you can train large language models on copyrighted works as
long as those works were purchased. And I don't mean purchasing the rights. I
mean you literally have to buy a copy of the book. It's definitely better than
them just pirating everything. At least for now, they've got to pay hundreds or
or no, thousands of dollars to acquire training material, but that seems like a
pittance compared to the potential revenue they'll earn from the trained
models. The law is murky, and Judge Alup came to this copyright conclusion at
least partially because authors admitted that training these LLMs didn't result
in direct copies or infringing knockoffs. Uh, officer, I'm just buying
a lot of guns, but I'm not going to use them. Come on yet. Anthropic, the
company being sued in this case, is happy with this result, no doubt, but
will be back in court to fight the accusation that they pirated 7 million
books to build a research library. There it is. There's the piracy. And here's
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I'm sorry. I was just trying to finish off these quick bits.
NVIDIA has announced another card that's dead on arrival, the RTX 5050. It's only
going to be $50 cheaper than the 5060 while offering way fewer CUDA cores and
based on what we can glean from the spec sheet, way fewer frames per second. Now,
NVIDIA isn't planning on sending any of these out for review, but I will still
provide you with my preliminary review. You NVIDIA, and if you want a purchasing
decision, do yourself a favor and pretend the 50/50 doesn't exist. You
know what does exist? Maybe uh the all black iPhone 17 Pro. Imagine Buu himself
has leaked images of the upcoming devices, and the design is uh well, it's
it's another iPhone, but there's now another bump below the camera bump. That
is the innovation we like to see. We'll just have to wait to see how annoying
it's going to be when the camera bar gets caught sliding under your pocket like a Pixel or something. Speaking of
minor design improvements for expensive hardware, Noctua put out a 9 and a half
minutee video explaining the new NF A12 X25 G2 mm fan is about 9% better than
the last one. Now it comes with a progressive bend impeller. You know what
else has a progressive bend? What I don't have though is a centrifugal turbulator hub, an ETA Perf motor, or
super torque. What? How's a guy supposed to compete in this market? Come on. And
when I say come on, I mean tell me more about those HDMI 2.2 specifications that
are getting into the hands of manufacturers. Who knows when consumers
will be able to get the cables? And who knows how long the cables will be when they have to support 96 Gbits per second
of bandwidth, but I look forward to when I can game at 16K at 60 FPS. What a m.
Honestly, while I can't get anywhere close to saturating all of that bandwidth, maybe Asus China's general
manager can. Tony U managed to pull about 1,900 watts of power through an
RTX5090 with BTF connectors. You know, the ones that are on the back. To
accomplish this feat, the Mad Lad used two power supplies and both the 16 pin
connector as well as the GCH power connector that ASUS has been working on.
And magically, none of the cables melted yet, but I'm starting to melt under
these blazing hot studio lights. So, come back next time for more tech news.
I'm melting. Oh, I'm melting.