hear ye hear ye
the tech news is nigh
open thine ears peasant that i may
wiggle my tech news pinky in them
it's all over humanity is doomed because the alpha ai developed by deepmind has
beaten human professional starcraft 2 players for the first time our most
cherished and complex game i i mean that's only partly sarcasm
sarcasm starcraft starcraft is much
much more complicated than both chess and go which have already been mastered
by deepmind's ai this one called alpha
star prepared for its matches by playing versions of itself over and over again
at an accelerated rate playing 200 years worth of games
in about a week let's take that korea alphastar was put up against the
starcraft pros known as tlo and mana
beating them both five to zero however
while deepmind did set human-like limits
on alpha star's ability in order to make it a fairer matchup the ai was able to
essentially see the entire game map out oh come on
though it couldn't see through the fog of war
and deepmind's analysis did show that alpha star focused attention on specific
areas at specific times
mana has defeated alpha star once this advantage was removed however
mana was able to defeat alpha star in one last game so the headlines probably
should read ai defeat starcraft 2 pros with screen
peeking send one over deepmind i'm gonna take it
on myself no i'm not now we all love to bash facebook but
they also own instagram and whatsapp another two of the most popular social
networks and soon they won't be that different mark zuckerberg has announced
plans to integrate the messaging services of instagram whatsapp and
facebook messenger in order to consolidate facebook services and keep
users engaged with the what the hell are they doing
this is literally straight out of the how to acquire something totally destroy
it and make nobody care about it anymore playbook
under the new system all three messaging services will effectively be the same
system incorporating end-to-end encryption which whatsapp has already
and allowing users on any one of those platforms to send a message to either of
the others i mean that's why people are on instagram so they don't get messages
from mom on facebook you're upset the move represents a sharp redirection as
facebook has previously allowed instagram and whatsapp to operate
largely autonomously it also arrives alongside an op-ed from zuckerberg
published in the wall street journal defending facebook's business practices
and expressing openness to federal regulation in response to its many
scandals during the year of 2018 which
wasn't that long ago so whether you feel the need to hashtag delete facebook or
not they're not deleting themselves anytime soon they're just making it so
we won't care about them good job and google has petitioned the us supreme
court to overturn a ruling that would have potentially disastrous consequences
for the software industry you see in 2010 oracle the company that owns the
rights to the java programming language sued google for implementing java apis
in some of its software like the Android operating system in 2014 the case
reached the federal circuit appeals court which ruled that google had
breached oracle's copyright but copyright laws had never been used to
restrict the use of apis before and google believes that they shouldn't so
they appealed it there was a second ruling last year which upheld the
original ruling and now in a massive shocker google is appealing
that ruling because they still don't agree the reason this is such a big deal
is that new software is often based off of existing apis and if every developer
was forced to pay licensing all the way back up the chain it could drastically
alter the landscape of software development you know what come on oracle
mr ellison don't you don't you have anything better to do you guys you guys
basically have a monopoly on database software just enjoy your billions upon
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like wow they got watches.com yeah vincero watches doc whatever the links
below now on to the blip loops earlier this week may zoo announced the xero a
smartphone for people with a lot of gray matter
no no that's what is that the name up zero buttons ah it's a smartphone with
no buttons or ports and then get this
vivo has now announced their own super smooth phone the apex 2019 which also
has no buttons or ports i mean we knew this was coming but we were like kind of
joking you know like back remember okay remember when phones kept getting
smaller and smaller and people would make these funny videos where they're
just like holding a phone that's the size of a tic tac like yeah oh hello yes
yeah i love it you know like that kind of thing well we
would we joked about it soon the phone with no ports and nobod
they're here then not just one two of them so the only seam is a microphone
hole in the bottom and it relies completely on wireless charging now
chinese phone makers have actually been responsible for a lot of innovation in
phones recently including oh i wish i had that
that uh next that has the two screens one on the back but i was not asking for
this kind of change not like this
valve will be making an appearance at the game developers conference in march
to present a talk entitled brain computer interfaces
one possible future for how we play how we play
half-life for how we play half-life 3 is that what
you meant valve whether it's meant to control gordon freeman or not the idea
of playing video games with your mind is certainly intriguing especially if
there's a gravity gun involved smart watches are pretty blah these days but
google might be looking to kickstart the industry again code names for what are
allegedly pixel branded watches called salmon
and madaka have leaked with the rumor mill
indicating we might see these devices this fall internet access for the island
nation of tonga was completely wiped out this past weekend when an undersea fiber
cable was damaged by cthulhu excuse me a ship's anchor a satellite dish was
hastily set up in the capital and residents could line up to use it for 20
minutes at a time is the entire world a south park episode now
is this where we're at i mean can you imag can you imagine
spending a good 30 seconds composing an unimaginably tasty tweet only to have
your entire country's internet cut off
and then someone else kicks you off the computer and they need the spot but you
haven't pressed send yet i don't want to think about it and take this last item
with a hefty dose of salt but a reddit post with what are supposedly specs for
the next gen series of xbox consoles was posted yes my friends on reddit earlier
this week before being removed screenshots were captured before that
happened though thanks reddit showing a spec list that included 12 teraflop
Radeon navi gpus and ray tracing support
that does seem a little far-fetched but come 2020 and microsoft's announcement
of the rtx box you guys will say
hey those techlink guys they're pretty in the know they
they they got it yeah and you know what else i've got
some bad news because that's it
for the tech news today unless you haven't watched the lan show
in which case you could go do that now there it's not really tech news anymore
people were worried when that TechLinked was going to kind of kill the wan
show the WAN Show's just like an hour of now
that's yeah it's not dead it's just stupid
yes subscribe i got their attention