Intel just unveiled Puma, a photonic chip that sounds less like a real thing
and more like an April Fools' joke from the time before most tech companies
decided that was cringe. Razer didn't get the memo. I'm Riley Murdoch, this is
TechLinked, and you might want to sit down as I tell you that the prototype
CPU Intel showed off at Hot Chips 2023
is based on a custom RISC architecture
with eight cores and 66 threads per core
for a frankly offensive 528 total
threads. Wow. Modern x86 CPUs usually only have
two threads per core, but that hasn't always been the case. Intel's old Xeon
Phi could do four threads per core, IBM's Power 8 could do eight, and Sun's
SPARC chips thought they were fancy going up to 16. But adding threads makes
each thread weaker, and a ton of weak threads wouldn't benefit most workloads
today. Except for the petabyte-scale workloads Intel has designed this CPU to
tackle with its 1 TB per second of data
throughput and optical interconnects between chips so they can be connected
together in eight-socket server sleds
that in turn connect to each other to create Sam Altman's wet dream. Pam
Anderson, what are you doing here?
She's like made of silicone. iFixit is taking the right to repair
fight to McDonald's because everyone
deserves a burger with all the fixings.
No, the target here is McDonald's notoriously unreliable ice cream
machines. iFixit bought and tore down
one of the machines, which aren't terribly complex. The problem is that
they're prone to overheating. Not ideal in an ice cream machine, and
their error codes are just simply baffling. Employees have tried to read
the effing manual, but the manual appears to have been written by an
infinite number of chimpanzees with a grudge against the working class. The
machines are built and must be repaired by Taylor, which is either an ice cream
machine company or a 19-year-old sorority sister. Taylor
Taylor is infamously slow to respond to repair requests, probably because she's
so busy with cheer practice. Is this based on a personal experience
of yours, Jessica? Okay. Despite that, 25% of Taylor's profits
come from service technician call-outs, which cost $315
per 15 minutes of work. That's like $1,200 an hour. Franchisees
would obviously prefer to work with a cheaper, more responsive repair service,
but the DMCA is what allowed Taylor to put in a digital lock that prevents
anyone else from getting in there. So, now iFixit is petitioning the Copyright
Office for an exemption that allows third-party repair workers to fix these
machines and for Congress to fix the DMCA in general because working at
McDonald's is already punishment enough. YouTube will be changing its community
guidelines policy so that creators can get violation warnings removed from
their channel if they complete an educational training course. The course
is intended to explain YouTube's content policies and help creators avoid future
infractions, kind of like sensitivity training for live streamers, which many
of them desperately need. If creators complete the course and go 90 days
without violating the same policy again, then the warning will be lifted. Prior
to this change, that one-time warning would simply stick around forever,
increasing the risk that if a creator accidentally fell afoul of the rules
again years in the future, it might lead to a formal strike against the channel.
According to YouTube, more than 80% of creators who receive a warning never
violate their policies again. And I guess they think that last 20% are
repeat offenders because they simply didn't know being racist is bad.
No one told me. But not every flagged video deserves it. Due to the sheer
scope of YouTube, it's sometimes nebulous guidelines and its limited
number of human content moderators, it's unfortunately easy for videos to get
inappropriately flagged as inappropriate. If that happens, at least
the falsely accused will have the opportunity to think about what they
haven't done. Now, it's time for Quick Bits, brought to you by Enlisted, the
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free bonus just for signing up. You know, just when I thought the bits
couldn't get any quicker, and there they go. So, it's like, "Well."
Get out of the way. They don't stop for people. In a spot of
good news for people who like smartphones that fit in normal-sized
hands, ASUS has declared that the rumors of the Zenfone's demise have been
greatly exaggerated. The company says they have a strong commitment to their
smartphone business and even potentially teased a Zenfone 11 release in 2024. So,
maybe we can finally get Riley to stop crying. I did, just in time to film
this. Thank god. Elon Musk live-streamed
a demonstration of Tesla's updated full self-driving beta, which impressively
uses only cameras and algorithmic intelligence rather than also relying on
other sensors like lidar and radar, which they removed from the cars. During
the demo, Musk sat in the driver's seat filming on his cell phone and
interacting with commenters in violation of automated driving policies put in
place by none other than Tesla. At one
point, the car attempted to accelerate through a red light, requiring Musk to
look up from his phone and intervene. So inconvenient. Police will not be issuing
a ticket for distracted driving because despite the thousands and thousands of
witnesses, if it doesn't happen in front of the police, it doesn't count. Google
is launching Duet AI for Workspace, which is basically Microsoft's Copilot
AI for Microsoft 365 in both function
and price, but you get to choose which
multi-billion company gets your money. After the free trial, Duet will cost $30
per month per user for large organizations, which is exactly how much
Microsoft charges. However, there's no word yet if Duet will be able to sing
the share part of "I Got You, Babe" at
your company's annual karaoke night. It's the only thing I would really use it for, so I don't see the point right
now. The FBI announced they were able to dismantle and destroy the QakBot botnet,
a network of infected computers responsible for worldwide ransomware
attacks and other cybercrimes. The FBI-led Operation Duck Hunt, that's
real, identified 700,000 infected computers worldwide and disrupted it by
tricking those computers into downloading an uninstaller from FBI
servers, which must have come packaged
with a GIF of the Super Nintendo dog laughing in your face. But actually, I
think that would require the FBI to have the sense of humor that they inevitably
lost by seeing what you all do in front of your webcams. I used to love spying
on the populace, and now? I didn't even know you could do that with a cantaloupe. And after nearly a year of
waiting, Meta's virtual avatars finally have legs. The beta for the new limbs
will roll out in Quest Home over the next few weeks, but not in Horizon
Worlds, where players will continue to resemble a levitating Lieutenant Dan,
but with significantly less existential angst. There are still a few issues to
buff out. For example, you can see your avatar's legs if you look into a virtual
mirror, but not if you look down at your own hovering virtual torso. It's all in
your head, man. Your reflected avatar also doesn't track when you crouch.
Instead, the camera just sinks about a foot and leaves you staring at your own
digital belly button, which honestly, I've wanted to do my whole
life. It's so hard.
That sounds weird. And all this after only 11 months of development. Truly, we
live in an age of wonders. The developers wanted to work on the
feature, but Mark Zuckerberg just keeps challenging everyone to bouts of jiu-jitsu.
With the senior dev in a rear naked choke.
You can work on that later. Come here, I want to show you something. And it would
be truly wonderful if you came back on Friday for another episode of
TechLinked. If you don't show up, we don't we just we don't really have anything to do, so I just please
clear your schedule cuz it's lonely in here.