You know what? I want to cover some old tech news. Like it's like it's 1998 and
Internet Explorer just overtook Net Vista and there were only 151 Pokemon.
Good stuff. But counterpoint Quaxley
H. Okay, the magic's still there.
Electronic Arts, the makers of your favorite full-priced annual sports game
roster update, announced today that it has been acquired for $55 billion.
The consortium buying EA includes Saudi Arabia's public investment fund along
with Infinity Partners, which was founded by Donald Trump's son-in-law,
Jared Kushner. Not the kind of Kush typically associated with gamers.
The enormous deal makes EA the biggest leveraged buyout ever. And we'll see the
company's shareholders get $210 per share. Right now, we don't know how this
buyout will impact EA's games. We'll have to wait to find out if this is part
of Saudi Arabia's attempt to resuscitate their public image or if EA's video
games will start to show signs of Saudi government influence. Perhaps a next-gen
Sims title featuring forced labor and executions, or a Battlefield 6 DLC game
mode featuring journalist assassinations. EA already just blew up
our beloved Zack Efron, so really nothing's off the table. Qualcomm
Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme
chips have been benchmarked by a number of tech outlets since their unveiling
last week, with most of those outlets running headlines like this shows
promise. And hey, not bad. Now, normally
that kind of measured cautious enthusiasm really gets me going. But
it's important to note that the only results being shared are from specific
synthetic benchmarks that Qualcomm pre-installed on the demo laptops.
Although they did let the journalists press the start button for which they
received a sticker that said, "I helped." Now, some of you may remember
Qualcomm had a similar setup while promoting the first gen Snapdragon X
series. The pre-launch hype for those chips reached a fever pitch. Reviewers
and certain tech news related individuals were foaming at the mouth
for what we all thought and hoped would be Windows answer to Apple silicon
power, efficiency, and compatibility on the ARM architecture. And then the
actual chips launched, and their performance turned out to be just okay.
They were interesting and innovative and definitely pretty cool, but compatibility issues remained and the
gaming experience didn't live up to the hype. So, forgive me if I feel the need
to use a bit more than a pinch of salt in this particular entree, even if I do
love to see it on the menu. Open AAI is adding a couple long- aaited features to
ChatGpt. Parental controls and the ability to buy stuff directly from the
chatbot. Two things that actually go together quite well. After a lawsuit
from the parents of a teen who took his own life, the parental controls OpenAI
promised are finally here allowing parents to link to their teenagers
accounts if the teen opts in and if the
teen doesn't ever disconnect their account, which they can do at any time,
although the parents will be notified. And right there is a perfect
illustration of how in the internet age we, you know, we're we're just trying to
trying to figure uh we don't know what the doing. Um, this is parental
controls for the good kids that need it the least, but it's something. If the
accounts stay linked though, parents can customize their teens experience by
setting time limits, turning off voice mode and image generation, and hopefully
disabling that other new feature, instant checkout. It'll let ChatGpt
suggest products that users can buy without ever leaving the app. It's built
on an open agent commerce protocol developed with Stripe and will only work
with Etsy listings for now. Although the plan is to add support for over a
million Shopify merchants soon, which is exciting news for the dieards who
couldn't ignore that something real was
missing in their relationship with their AI boyfriend or girlfriend, the ability
to engage in commerce. or at least have a conversation about our sponsor,
Proton, the email provider that's not linked to big tech, so they don't want
your personal data. Oh, you live in Xplays with Y other people and/or
animals. They could literally not care less. Although, they are happy for you.
See, Proton uses endtoend zero access encryption, so only you can read your
emails. I thought that's how it's supposed to work. Plus, they use advanced fishing protection, tracker
blocking, and they even monitor the dark web to see if your email shows up
because that's not allowed. And if you're super serious about privacy,
Proton lets you use unlimited email aliases. Plus, you can connect to it
through the tour network for another layer of anonymity. Wow, I wish Proton
could also replace apps like Google Docs and my VPN and password manager, too.
That would be Guess what? They can. So, yeah, I guess you've got to go create an
account for free. Try it for a few months and see how it feels to stick it
to big tech now. Uh, using our links in the description. Proton Reggie Allei is
the fastest Pokemon with a base speed stat of 200, but that legends,
it's got nothing on these quick bits.
NVIDIA's RTX50 Super series of cards are
rumored to be arriving in the first half of 2026. Bench Life reports that
although the cards were expected to be announced at January CES 2026, the cards
should actually be revealed between March and May this coming year. Bench
life suggests that the RTX 5070, 5070 Ti, and 5080 will all get super
variants, which will see all three cards memory capacity expanded. It's very
thoughtful of NVIDIA to delay these cards so we have more time to process
the damage they'll do to our collective bank accounts. Stop buying NVIDIA.
They're going to they're going to sell out. It's just a fact. Asus is working
to address stuttering and performance issues with several of its ROG gaming
laptops. Apparently, the issue impacts ROG laptops all the way back to the 2021
models. But this bug was only recently brought to light by Zeke on GitHub,
whose work was highlighted on our September 19th WAN Show. Our I mean
maybe >> ASUS has released beta BIOS updates for
a number of the affected laptops. And in a community update, the company says to
expect more finalized work in early October. It's good of ASUS for finally
getting on this long-standing issue after being called out on a popular tech
podcast. Now, that's the kind of quick customer service we love to see. All
right. Apple has made its own chat GBT- like chatbot app, but it exists only to
test their new Siri AI revamp. Ultimate
knower of Apple secrets, the Imperious Germinator Mark German reports that the
new app camedas is being used internally by Apple staff
to test out the company's current AI models. However, the app is not planned
to be released alongside the long- awaited upgraded Siri, which could start
rolling out as early as this coming March. Now, early is doing a lot of work
in that sentence. Honestly, though, Apple take all the time you need to make
this good. Nobody needs a slightly better Siri. It's too late for that.
Microsoft doesn't seem to like your energy when you're working with its
Office products. So inspired by AIdriven
Vibe coding, they're introducing Vibe
working, aka not working. Using Microsoft's new
office agent in Copilot Chat, you can type in prompts to create AI generated
PowerPoint presentations and Word documents with Excel support coming
soon. Probably not going to win any Excel championships with this, but hey,
you can also use the incredibly similarly named agent mode in Word or
Excel to create AI generated spreadsheets and documents right in the
app. Ultimately, what is better for your work vibes than just letting AI do a
worse job of your tasks for you? Your work doesn't make sense. Who cares?
You're vibing. And what do you do for work? We vibe.
and beloved streamer Skyrim Grandma, also known as Shirley Curry, has
announced her retirement from uploading Elder Scrolls videos. In her goodbye
video, the soon-to-be 90-year-old told her viewers that after about 15 years of
streaming, she is tired and not having fun anymore. But don't worry, Curry says
she'll still be posting vlog every so often, and she even left information to
stay in contact with her. Nice to see her retire like this instead of because
of an arrow to the knee.
Plus, there are always rumors that The Elder Scrolls 6 could be right around
the corner. So, one day we might see Skyrim Grandma ride again, but I know
Techlink will definitely ride again on Wednesday. So, come back on that day.
For now, go like and subscribe and I will go catch up on literal decades
worth of new Pokemon. What the hell is a Blilon?
Blesson.