It does occur to me occasionally that
humanity has built machines that produce
with terrible confidence inane tripe and
codswallop. One hesitates to call this
progress and yet forward we march.
Nintendo is raising the global prices of
the Switch 2 starting September 1st.
Prices in the US and Canada will jump by
50 bucks, while Europeans can delight in
the strength of their currency, only
seeing a 30 euro increase, which I think
is pretty close to being 50 bucks.
Anyway,
haven't checked. 48 35 Canadian. Okay,
pretty close. The Japanese, however,
were hit the hardest as every Switch
configuration will cost more, not just
the Switch 2. Nintendo Switch online is
also going up in Japan and South Korea
starting July 1st. Nintendo blames the
changes on market conditions, which is
another way of saying the AI boom has
been hoovering up every memory chip on
Earth and feeding them to chatbots that
have mostly helped people write LinkedIn
posts. LinkedIn users are happy though.
To be fair to Nintendo though, Sony
already hiked the PS5 price back in
March, so Nintendo's just following
suit. Xbox also had some price hikes
recently, but no one buys those. So,
unsurprisingly, Nintendo expects sales
to dip 17% compared to last year. Well,
at least it seems like they know what
they're doing and that's reassuring.
French prosecutors have escalated their
probe into Elon Musk and the platform
formerly known as Twitter to a full
criminal investigation. The probe kicked
off in January 2025 over allegations of
Musk using X for political manipulation
and it then ramped up when Grok went
Mecha Hitler and started generating deep
fakes and C Sam at the end of last year.
Very cool. This prompted French
officials to raid X's Paris offices in
February and issue a summons for Musk
and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino to
appear in Paris on April 20th.
Unsurprisingly, both of them no-showed,
but Musk did make sure to let everyone
know what he thought of the summons,
tweeting that the prosecutors had
intellectual disabilities, but not
phrasing it like that at all, and
definitely phrasing it in the way you
know he would have said it. The US
Justice Department is refusing to
cooperate with the investigation,
claiming the French government is
wrongfully regulating an American social
media platform. Hey, if the French want
to regulate our companies, they need to
come over here and do it a regime
change, like a normal country. Meta is
rolling out an AI tool that scans your
kids' bones.
>> [laughter]
>> Why are they scanning their bones? In
order to figure out their ages. It's not
weird.
>> [laughter]
>> The company is reportedly launching this
as a form of age verification that
doesn't require ID or facial scanning,
instead using photos to extract things
like height, posture, and bone
structure.
The rollout is likely response to a
preliminary EU finding that Meta is
violating the Digital Services Act by
failing to keep under 13s off of its
platforms, and also probably that recent
New Mexico ruling that found Meta liable
for misleading users about child safety.
Critics have largely dismissed the whole
bones-based approach as AI phrenology,
aimed at appeasing regulators rather
than actually keeping kids off the
platform. Meta probably wants those kids
on the platform. Meta, however, claims
that its goal is to limit the cases of
children circumventing facial scanning
technology using sophisticated
techniques like drawing on a fake
mustache, which Wired reported was
exactly how a 12-year-old convinced a
facial scanning-based age verification
system that he was 15, an age at which
many children famously grow mustaches. I
mean now if those kids want to get past
age verification, they'll need at least
two other kids and a trench coat and
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>> [clears throat]
>> I confess I am awfully fond of the quick
bits and I shall endeavor not to be
greedy. Why? Why?
>> [laughter]
>> TCL showed off a display panel with a
refresh rate of just 0.01
hertz. That's one frame every 100
seconds as opposed to 1 hertz, which is
just one frame every second. LG only
just started rolling out those 1 hertz
panels, but TCL wanted to top the
competition and move 100 times slower.
The display uses 12 independent zones to
swap between 120 hertz and basically a
static image. Yeah. And TCL estimates it
could add over an hour of video
playback. It's the ideal display for
watching paint dry in stunning 4K. The
hacking group of Shiny Hunters has
infiltrated the widely used Canvas
learning portal for thousands of
schools, including prestigious
organizations like Harvard, Columbia,
and Princeton. The group claims it stole
around 275 million records from Canvas's
parent company, Instructure, including
names, emails, and student IDs. They've
now given affected schools until May
12th to negotiate a settlement before
the data gets leaked. The silver lining
for a lot of those kids they might get
their info leaked is that it happened
during finals week. So now they have a
few extra days to try not to fail
calculus two.
Might be worth it. OpenAI launched
GPT-5.5
Cyber, a version of 5.5 with fewer
guardrails for vetted defenders in its
trusted access for cyber program. It
handles bug hunting, malware reverse
engineering, and penetration testing. It
comes a month after Why am I laughing? I
can't what It comes a month after Sam
Altman criticized Anthropic for gating
Mythos, calling it fear-based marketing.
At this point, Altman and Amodei are
performing "Anything you can do" at each
other across San Francisco.
And everyone's watching. Nobody show
this to Lin-Manuel Miranda. I don't want
to give him any ideas. And a Verge
reporter was run over by a Yarbo lawn
mower for science after researcher
Andreas Makris hijacked it from 6,000 mi
away. These $5,000 robots ship with
hard-coded root passwords, allowing
hackers to override safety stops and
steal Wi-Fi credentials. Now despite
Makris reporting the flaw, Yarbo
initially called the backdoor a
deliberate design decision. They have
now publicly said they are taking action
by giving the 200-lb robot with spinning
blades a password. Seems like a good
idea. And I have an even better idea.
Why don't you come back here on Monday
for more tech news, and I will stop
doing this accent. I'm so sorry. I
apologize to all the UK. Love you.