You're back again? You've been consuming
a lot of tech news lately. I think it's time to talk to someone. No, not me. I
don't count. I'm not real.
Qualcomm has announced a new series of laptop processors representing a quantum
leap forward in performance and power efficiency. So, the company has modified
their Snapdragon branding the only way any executives know how. Adding an X.
Cuz they're all teenagers in the 90s. But this isn't just a naming change.
Snapdragon X chips will be the first publicly available processors developed
by Nuvia, a company founded by a few key members of the Apple Silicon team and
acquired by Qualcomm in 2021. Like
Apple's M1 and M2, Qualcomm's upcoming laptop CPUs, which will be revealed at
the Snapdragon Summit later this month, won't simply feature modified
off-the-shelf ARM Cortex chips, but a fully custom architecture called Orion.
Building their own custom architecture is partly why Apple was able to achieve
the mind-blowing performance and efficiency boost they did with the M1,
which made the PC master race question everything they had ever known. Gabe
Newell is just a man? He can bleed just like us? All
that said, there's more than a handful of reasons to be skeptical that these
chips will be good. ARM is still suing Qualcomm over not paying the proper
royalties for Nuvia produced products, and Qualcomm's existing laptop
processors have a reputation for sucking almost as bad as the ARM version of
Windows. So, Snapdragon X chips already
have their work cut out for them. I mean,
do we even want Apple Silicon chips for PCs? Sounds dumb. Microsoft has gone deep on
AI, but they haven't quite figured out how to make any money off of it yet.
Probably because they've been scrolling past a lot of excellent advice from
former crypto bros on social media. Diamond hands. Create pictures of
diamond hands. GitHub Copilot, Microsoft's coding assistant, costs
users $10 a month, but reportedly lost
Microsoft over $20 per month per user,
with power users apparently costing Microsoft up to $80 a month in
electricity costs and other service fees. 1 and 1/2 million people have
already tried GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft's service is incredibly
popular among coders, which is terrible news for Microsoft. Even worse, this
isn't necessarily a problem that will disappear as users scale, because the
LLM that powers Copilot sucks up resources like a black hole doing a
kegstand. That's what we used to call Jimmy in college.
As of this past April, ChatGPT cost OpenAI an estimated $700,000 a day just
to run. That's probably why both Microsoft and Google will be charging an
additional $30 per month per user for the recently announced AI-powered
upgrades to their business software suites. AI made up 10 to 15% of Google's
energy consumption back in 2021, and researchers estimate that if generative
AI was added to every Google search, it would consume as much energy as the
entire country of Ireland. That's either a lot or not very much at all. I I don't
typically think of energy in units of Irelands. And crucially, neither do the
Irish. A California court has ruled that Facebook's ad targeting system is
discriminatory because it requires advertisers to choose demographic
characteristics like age and gender to determine which users will see their
ads. This is an amplified by Facebook's
lookalike audience tool, which attempts to match businesses with potential
customers that share similar traits to their current audience. To be clear,
this wasn't a dispute over ads featuring truck nuts and whiskey-flavored
toothpaste. Real product. Really? Yes. Why aren't I getting those
ads? Rather, an older woman found that she was being excluded from ads offering
favorable deals on life insurance targeted at younger men. If upheld, the
decision might require every ad-based platform on the internet to restructure
their ad targeting systems. So, Meta is likely to appeal the decision. Can't
have that. Also in California, the Delete Act passed into law, which means
that California data brokers must offer free, simple channels for users to
request that their information be deleted. And an expansive right to
repair bill was also recently signed into law, though it passed with Apple's
blessing, so take that with a grain of salt. You know what they say, an apple a
day keeps the regulators away, which must be why there's no apples in Europe.
Fun fact. Now, it's time for quick bits brought to you by lttstore.com.
Feels weird, but okay. They, we just
announced the stubby screwdriver last month, and it has the same great ratchet
as the full-sized LTT screwdriver. Its light back force makes it easy to drive
any screw, whether or not they signed the waiver. Old stubby here is 4 in in
length, so it's super pocketable and legal to carry on planes for
self-defense if things come to that. The strong magnet in the shaft ensures
the six included bits and your screws don't go anywhere except into the
handle's built-in bit storage and the proper screw holes, respectively. Did
you just call me a screw hole? What? Uh
Anyway, Mr. Stubby screwdriver son is durable and made with chemical-resistant
plastics, and you can get yours at the link below. Aw, quick bits, man.
I could listen to them forever up until we hit five. Adobe has announced major
updates to AI features across its creative suite, including three new
generative AI models: Firefly 2, Firefly
Design, and Firefly Vector. With 9 g of
protein. Adobe is also launching its first text-to-vector image generator,
and they teased a new AI upscaling tool, which can be used for both clips of old
movies and GIFs so compressed they're about to collapse into a supernova. Deep
fried. Another upcoming feature is fast fill, essentially generative fill for
video. And unlike many companies, we can trust that Adobe has the bravery to make
us pay through the nose for it all. T-Mobile has decided its price lock
guarantee is only for their newest, most
expensive plans, and is therefore forcibly switching subscribers with
cheaper grandfathered plans onto higher-cost ones. Hey, it's just
business. For the affected plans, customers will allegedly be alerted on
the 17th before being charged an extra $10 a month per line. Something T-Mobile
won't go out of their way to tell you is you can opt out of the change by calling
customer service and complaining a lot. It's the one simple trick that cell
phone providers hate. Intel has released two new driver updates for their Arc
GPUs this past week. The first increases performance by up to 119%
as long as you're playing one of the 20 listed games, with the big winner being
this year's hottest game, Deus Ex: Human
Revolution. It gets better every year.
And the main character's voice sounds even more I didn't ask for this. Even
more gaspy. I'm part robot, you know.
Fortunately, Intel's newest driver update increases Starfield performance
by 117% or 149%
depending on resolution. To celebrate, Intel quietly released an even more
budget graphics card, the A580. This
would be great news if it wasn't like $10 less than some models of the much
superior A750. I know you're trying to compete with NVIDIA, Intel, but that
doesn't mean you should emulate their pricing strategy. Okay, so let's take a
step back. Google has changed the default option for logging into personal
accounts. Instead of putting in your password, users will start seeing
prompts to create and use passkeys, which are digital credentials unlocked
by things like a fingerprint, a face scan, a PIN, basically anything that
doesn't give you the option of using strong password1! for
Passkeys are rolling out in more places across the tech universe, but you can
still use your password and opt out of seeing the new prompts every time you
log in if the risk of being hacked for you is part of the whole thrill. Oh, no,
don't hack me. Oh. That would be naughty. And a 22-year-old
Firefox bug has finally been fixed by a
23-year-old first-time Firefox coder,
who was horrified to find out that the annoying bug that caused tooltips to
hang around in the foreground even after command-tabbing away from the browser
was almost as old as they are. In fact, it's so old it actually predates the
name Firefox, going back to when the browser was just called Mozilla. The bug
likely lasted two decades because it was both tricky to reproduce and more
annoying than dangerous, just like me.
Got them. And the trick to getting more tech news is to come back on Friday for
another episode of TechLinked. That's the kind of little tips you won't learn
that stuff elsewhere, so come on back.