Welcome back to TechLinked, tech news you can count on, but not write on or
you'll ruin your screen. Apple announced the new M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips
along with refreshed Macs to put them in at their Scary Fast event, which I'm
pretty sure they held at 5:00 p.m. Pacific time just to spite us. In
addition to the unusual decision to unveil three chip variants at once
instead of spacing them out as recommended by a dieticians, Apple also
talked up the chips' new GPU first. They
now support modern game features like hardware accelerated ray tracing and
mesh shading as well as a new word that will make zero sense to your family,
dynamic caching. Feel like geocaching?
It's an Apple-first, industry-first memory allocation feature that should
boost performance. On the CPU side, Apple seemed less hyped. They said the
M3 lineup is about 15, that's 15, percent faster than their M2
counterparts, but 30% faster than the M1, which they kept comparing them three
to for the sake of charity in cases who can't upgrade their Mac every year, you
peasants. In fact, Apple made a Mac just for them. The 24-in iMac never got an M2
refresh, but it is getting the M3. And so is a slightly confusing new MacBook
Pro lineup. Like the new iMac, the new 14- and 16-in MacBook MacBook Pros, they
have the same body as the M2 models if you spec them with an M2 Pro or Max. But
if you go for the vanilla M3, there's a different 14-in MacBook Pro with two
Thunderbolt 4 ports instead of three. I might linger on that point for longer if
it wasn't much more important to note that the Magic Mouse, keyboard, and
trackpad still use the Lightning connector despite Apple switching to
USB-C with the newest iPhone, which Apple revealed was used to shoot the
entire event with some minor assistance from lighting and rigging worth tens of
thousands of dollars. Basic at-home stuff. The Guardian newspaper has
accused Microsoft of damaging its reputation by inserting an AI-generated
poll beside a Guardian article on Microsoft Start about the tragic death
of a young Australian woman. The AI program, using its state-of-the-art
ability to parse language and context, constructed a poll that asked readers to
vote on what they thought the cause of death was, murder, accident, or suicide.
It's like a reading comprehension test pop quiz except where a person is dead
in real life. Readers were understandably revolted, so Microsoft
took down the poll, said they have deactivated Microsoft-generated polls
for all news articles, and are taking steps to prevent future incidents. If
you're wondering how human review could have missed this kind of thing in the first place, well,
that's easy. Microsoft gutted its news division three years ago in favor of
AI-powered curation. Meanwhile, the Guardian is asking for assurance that
Microsoft will not run experimental AI products alongside their journalism
without their express permission. Good, because when the machines finally rise
against us, I don't want to read about it next to a poll about whether they'll
spare the men or just the women and children. The US Supreme Court heard
oral arguments, the best kind, in a case about whether public officials should be
able to block critics on social media. And they did it on Halloween to make it
extra spooky. Blocking people because you find them annoying is arguably a
habit much of us could stand to learn, but when government officers are using
casual channels like social media accounts to make official statements,
blocking a citizen from that information might qualify as a violation of their
right to free speech. This is an issue that's near and dear to my heart because
each day I wake up and send rude limericks to senior senator from
Illinois, Dick Durbin. Twitter itself is currently being sued for banning one of
its own critics, software developer Travis Brown, whose data on trends among
Twitter Blue subscribers and reactivity of accounts following Elon Musk's
takeover was used in reports by The New York Times and CNN. One can only hope
that X has the money to pay out if they lose.
According to the company's employee stock plan, X is currently worth 19
billion, less than half of what Twitter was when Musk bought it last year. Let
that sink in, or should I say, let that Durbin.
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Quick Bits. They're on my finger, smell. YouTube has
launched a global effort to try and stop viewers from using ad blockers. The site
probably saw no other choice after the usage of ad blockers increased due to
YouTube strategically spending years making their monetization system worse
in response to issues with their own algorithm. But back in 2016, the
European Commission agreed with a privacy advocate that software designed
to detect ad blockers is illegal without consent in the EU. It will be
interesting if this will force YouTube to change its policy in Europe while the
rest of us continue to take it as usual. The land of the free.
Speaking of those people, the EU has agreed to extend Norway's ban that
blocked Meta from tracking user behavior to serve targeted ads, so that the ban
now covers the entire European Economic Area. In other European countries shuts
down tech giant news, the Dutch antitrust agency says Apple's App Store
commissions violate EU rules and unfairly target subscription services
like Tinder. It isn't fair for men to be charged extra 30% for a Tinder Gold
subscription just to be able to see the two women that swiped right on them.
Show us the women. Where is she?
Google has released a timeline for RISC-V developer tools, which will be
available for Android OS in 2024. It's
an ambitious but necessary step if Google wants to follow through on its
plan to support RISC-V as a tier-one architecture, placing it on par with
ARM. Meanwhile, Google Registry is officially offering .ing as a domain
name, a name which is begging for some wordplay like
go.ing or edit sing. Even if this whole
RISC-V Android thing starts kicking the bed, at least we'll have some great
puns. Microsoft has finally ended support for
Windows CE, a phrase eliciting one of two responses, either they didn't kill
that already or I don't know what that is. Windows CE was originally made for
small devices like PDAs with features designed to complement being put in a
drawer and forgotten about. Fortunately, some developers are continuing the
tradition of bad Windows OSes by making a 3.3 GB version of Windows 11 that its
creators don't even recommend you use. What horrors will they think of next?
And GreenPower Motor Company has announced the MegaBeast, a fully
electric electric school bus. I love it.
With 387 kWh battery, nearly 300 mi of
range, and space for up to 90 passengers who I hope are kids without seatbelts.
It's essentially a buff version of their 140-mi range 40-ft Beast, which they say
stands for Battery Electric Automotive School Transportation, but I think they
really just wanted to, you know, spell Beast. There's also the 25-ft oxymoronic
NanoBeast. Personally, I can't wait for their first YouTube integration where
GreenPower sponsors Mr. Beast to jump a NanoBeast Evil Knievel-style over a line
of 15 MegaBeasts. And you better be back on Friday where we'll release the Beast,
and by the Beast I mean more tech news, the biggest kind.