it's February 21st 2025 and we got Tech news but we won't have any on Monday
February 24th I'll have the day off but I probably won't be able to relax as
I'll be too excited to return on Wednesday I love Tech news more than my
family and I hope they never find out NVIDIA's launch of the RTX 50 Series has
had another wrench thrown in its gears after Tech PowerUp and others discovered
that some 509s have fewer Ro or raster
operations pipeline units than they should leading to lower performance than
so-called normal 90s is it okay to say
that the issue was first spotted on a Zotac model by Tech PowerUp Forum user
Wy gamer but reports soon emerged of
similar Roop shortages on an MSI RTX
590d the China exclusive version as well
as a manly 90 but what does that even
mean in 2025 you know it's the brand
leaker Mega siiz GPU claims what we're seeing is a small defective batch of GB
202 chips which power the 590 making it
into the supply which has reportedly LED NVIDIA to initiate investigation that
could potentially delay the launch of the RTX 5070 ruining AMD's plans to
reactively price its upcoming RX 970
series or more likely follow its historical pattern of pricing things
horribly for no reason not that any of this really matters this week's RTX 570
TI launch had the same stock issues as the 80 and 590 despite both NVIDIA and
new EG Reviving their covid era direct
buying GPU programs so even if you get
your hands on a new card it might be borked hey have you heard about reading
books I think that's like the third time
I've made that joke in recent memory apple is axing its Advanced Data
protection feature for us in the UK after the government there issued a
pretty wild order demanding Apple provide a back door through the features
endtoend encryption doing so would expose the data of users not only in the
UK but anywhere in the world to the UK
government but they were like ah we don't care let us in knock knock new
Apple users in the UK will no longer be offered ADP encryption and existing UK
users will be required to disable it sometime soon making so the government
can access their data no problem although they need a warrant to do so
amazingly some are characterizing this as Apple defying the government by not
giving them the back door they wanted but as epic gam CEO Tim Sweeney points
out apples simply opening the front door
instead which at least is a polite gesture I'm sure the British will
appreciate open aai is now rolling out its computer using agent operator for
200 bucks a month chaty GPT Pro subscribers in most countries where chat
GPT is available including Canada who just won a hockey game against the US
which means we can keep being a country according to chat GPT agents are all the
AI rage right now Humane might be dunzo but rabbit just showed their Android
agent controlling a tablet which of course they used to generate a revenue
plan from a business idea and share it with contacts the most important use
case for AI bothering your friends with your Ponzi
scheme ideas but what about physical agents robotics company figure just
demoed their Bots running Helix their new generalist action model which
allowed them to follow instructions given by their Californian dad to put
away groceries even passing items to each other while sharing very slow but
knowing looks that seem to say I'm dad's
favorite no I am you this action model is similar to Google's art T2 which
combines multiple perception and language models so robots can do stuff
but Microsoft's new magma is a single
multimodal model that can do all of that
not that we could verify it it's all closed Source but deep seek has
announced it will do one better than just being open weights and will be
fully open sourcing five of their repos starting next week so instead of the CCP
controlling what deep seek models say you do you can be China you can also
check out our sponsor Microcenter your source for PC parts and support at
prices that'll make you go wow those are pretty good even better
February is build your own month with amazing deals on CPU bundles cases
coolers RAM and more Microcenter also got a new GPU tradein program bring in
your working GPU purchased at Micro Center and get same day value for your
graphics card and for any other old or out-of-date Tech Micro Center can help
you recycle it or donate it to charity but Riley I live in Santa Clara you say
buddy that's perfect their new location there is opening soon don't forget to
sign up for a free 128 gig flash drive when the store opens and check out micro
centers build your own month at the links in the description if tech news is
my family quick bits are the Legos on the floor after my son destroyed the set
I spent an hour building for him stepping on them hurts on multiple
levels YouTube will soon launch a cheaper version of premium in the US
called premium light which would remove ads on all content except music videos
according to Bloomberg who described YouTube as a vast library of podcasts
and how-to clips and if those are the other options I guess we post music
videos premium light has reportedly been in testing in other countries but soon
users in the US will be able to see if they like tariffs on their music videos
I don't think that's a proper analogy but okay HP instituted a policy that
added a 15minute wait time to the
company's support calls according to the register as a way to quote encourage
more digital adoption by nudging customers to go online to selfsolve
while there certainly is a place for tough love I'm not sure making people
wait even longer on the phone with support staff is the way to do it and HP
seemed to agree as they rescinded the policy after widespread reporting on how
dumb it was although we don't know what the hold music was if they're playing
bangers I might be okay with it your computer's busted but hey Time To Get
Funky meta has said that even if they did torrent 82 tabt of pirated books
it's no big deal if you don't seed them as seen in a filing from the social
media giant this week you see it's not the training AI on unlicensed pirated
content that's the issue it's performing the common courtesy of helping other do
the same thing like come on that's illegal this whole thing has got real I
did not inhale uh Vibes yes I put the
ebooks in my mouth but earlier this week
Microsoft announced Muse an AI game
generator that was trained on and could
only recreate low resolution slop versions of the gameplay from Ninja
theories failed MOA bleeding edge which
is I think something all of us were asking for Xbox Phil Spencer suggested
Muse could help with game preservation
by emulating any game based on gameplay
footage a suggestion AI researcher and
game designer Dr Michael cook called idiotic because that's kind of like
preserving the Mona Lisa by having your toddler draw it from memory I mean the
spirit is there and Google released an AI tool called co- scientist this week
which can generate hypotheses for researchers to investigate the BBC
claimed in an article that this tool had cracked a super bug problem in two days
that took scientists years that sounds amazing but as another article from New
Scientist and excellent science YouTuber Angela Kier points out what actually
happened is the co-senior
the suggestion was based on a previous paper the team had published in 2023 and
I don't know if you could call providing a list of possible solutions cracking
the problem but hey I'm not a scientist
but if you come back on Wednesday for more Tech news remember no Tech link on
Monday then I think that makes you a
scientist right maybe I I don't actually know what
they do