Phew. Oh, we we did end up getting our scheduled shipment of Tech News, but it
was kind of close. Apparently, someone made a huge mistake, and now ships are
having trouble distributing crucial resources throughout the world or something. Anyway, brain off. Tech news
time. NVIDIA's DLSS5 reveal has been met with overwhelming backlash from gamers
and the gaming industry spawning memes calling the AI enhanced characters
yosified looks maxed freaks and game
developers referring to it as game design without art direction. As with
all AI generated content, there's legitimate concern about art becoming
homogenized, everything kind of becoming the same, an issue which has never
affected games before. Digital Foundry was the first to cover it. And while
they did mention in their video that people might not like the tech, they
ended up getting dragged for glazing the demo a bit too hard. At one point, they
said, "We've never seen elves look this realistic." As they toggle DLSS 5 on and
off, making an Oblivion Elf NPC morph
into simply different versions of Mickey Ror. Digital Foundaries follow-up video
is appropriately titled, "Why we should have waited with our coverage." NVIDIA
CEO Jensen Wong has told Tom's Hardware that critics of DLSS5 reducing the tech
to an AI slop filter are completely
wrong, saying it's not post-processing at the frame level, it's generative
control at the geometry level. But even
if those strange words do make sense,
saying DLSS5 can make game characters look like they were photoshopped by a
middle schooler using geometry. It's not
I don't know. It's not better. Now, to be fair, ray tracing and DLSS frame gen
were both mocked at launch, and now those enjoy generally neutral to
positive sentiment. So, we may want to entertain the admittedly outlandish idea
that the internet might be overreacting a bit to something. Despite the
intensity of the backlash and the tonedeafness of NVIDIA's response, there
were a handful of dissenting opinions from the gaming community with senior
character artist Georgian Ava Silkout stating that the online response is
extreme for what the tech actually is and that most critics don't grasp that
on a technical level, DLSS5 allegedly is
just enhancing lighting rather than generating images from prompts. I've
never seen lighting add makeup to
someone's face before, but there could be a special light I don't know about. I
PC Gamer also acknowledged that DLSS5
makes environments pretty. And NVIDIA's real mistake was in using overhyped
language and focusing on characters in their demos. But The Verge has what is
probably the most realistic take here. DLSS5 is to games what motion smoothing
is to TVs. something you'll turn off when visiting
your relatives for their own good. They don't It's not their fault they don't
have taste. AMD has responded to a growing scandal over laptops made by
Chinese company Chewy mislabeling their
CPUs, essentially catfishing customers.
The so-called silicon gate started when notebook check found that the Chewy
Corebook X reported its CPU as a Ryzen 5
7430U, but it was actually an older Ryzen 5
5500U. Honestly, understandable mistake. They
look similar. We're not even talking about a wrong sticker on the laptop
situation here. the BIOS, Windows settings, and even CPUZ were unable to
notice anything a miss despite what the actual die under the heat sink said.
When Chewy got caught a second time doing the same thing with its CoreBook
Plus model, they chose to do the reasonable thing and ensure this issue
was fixed by sending legal threats to Notebook Check for breaking the stories,
which to no one's surprise triggered a bit of a Stryisand effect. Tom's
Hardware also confirmed a performance deficit of up to 20% in specific
workloads while warning that other brands sharing the same ODM motherboard
might be compromised. The chip continues to hit the fan as Chewy's Hong Kong
distributor Hornington announced
just a funny name um announced a recall of the three affected products and
offered full refunds. Chewy themselves haven't really commented publicly on the
scandal and frankly it's unclear what anyone can do if they don't want their
arms ripped off.
Sort of works. But CPUZ released an update specifically to ensure this
trickery can be caught. And in their statement, AMD said they had no
knowledge of the matter uh beforehand and reserved the right to unleash their
legal team. the corporate equivalent of saying her sis, we don't know her like
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below. Lucky for you, shipping delays can't delay the Quickbits from entering
your bloodstream directly right now. What's happening? Uh, Intel dropped a
couple cool things this week. The Core Ultra 7270HX Plus and Core 9290HX Plus
are mobile versions of the Aerolake Refresh desktop chips that launched
recently. And a new driver will let integrated and discrete ARC GPUs
download pre-ompiled shaders via the cloud instead of doing it themselves,
cutting loading times by more than three times and by 37 times in God of War
Ragnarok, which is less of a benchmark and more of a cry for help. What was it
doing before? Mosilla is adding a free built-in VPN with a 50 gigabyte per
month data cap to Firefox 149, which
will be rolling out March 24th. Now, freeVPNs are usually sketchy, but
Mosilla's entire brand is built on privacy and trust. So, they have a bit
of a motivation not to harvest your data and ruin everything. Firefox is also
debuting a new mascot called Kit, which
Mozilla went out of their way to say is not a fox or a red panda. Stop calling
it that. While also explicitly stating that Kit has no mouth and it won't even
be able to scream either. Google's personal intelligence feature is now
available to all free Gemini users in the US, not just paid subscribers, who
can now allow Gemini to access all of their Google apps and personalize its
responses. And in a glorious exception to the general trend of AI things these
days, it's opt in. You don't it'll leave
you alone sort of. Google says Gemini
doesn't train directly on your inbox or photo library, but Gemini will
absolutely read them when you ask it to
and maybe when it just gets bored or something. You know, it's like Samsung confirmed to Bloomberg yesterday that
it's killing off the $2,900 Galaxy Z Trifold just 3 months after launch. The
company had apparently always positioned the doublefolding phone as a showcase of
its engineering rather than a mass market product. Why would you want to
mass market a product that shows off your engineering? Not for us. Selling it
in small batches directly through their website. Industry sources told South
Korean newspaper Dong A Ilbo that this
was because rising component costs left virtually no profit margin. The
small-scale nature of the releases led every batch to sell out in minutes with
resellers flipping them for nearly triple the price, which I mean is oddly
appropriate. It's a trifold, right? Yeah. Am I
After seeing this extreme customer demand for the phone, Samsung made the
only logical choice to stop selling it.
Wait, so I'm still And a student engineer has designed and built a 3D
printed shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, making 3D printed handguns
suddenly seem quaint and banal. Alisher
Kayv also included guidance and flight
control systems in the prototype using about $96 in parts. Because this kit is
not screwing around. His website describes how billiondoll state arsenals
are now in the reach of determined individuals using readily available
parts, tools, and skills. However you feel about a functional guided
projectile costing less than a nice dinner for two, one thing's for sure,
it'll probably keep someone in Washington up to night. And you'll be up
at night wondering what the tech news is if you don't come back on Friday for
more tech news. Either that or you'll be worrying about gas prices. But we don't
talk about that. We just talk about AI slop in games. An illthoughtout
operation crippling a global shipping bottleneck. won't affect that