When you strip it down to the basics, technology is just humanity's ongoing
mission to make some things hot and other things not hot. Ovens, hot.
Graphics cards, not hot. A recent update from Microsoft has left certain dual
boot devices that run both Windows and Linux unable to boot despite explicit
reassurance from Microsoft that this wouldn't happen. The update fixed a
long-standing vulnerability in grub, an open-source bootloader used by many
Linux distributions, but it wasn't supposed to affect dual boot systems and
it seems to have been applied accidentally. Rather than booting,
affected devices will display an error message that reads something has gone
seriously wrong, which is a fair assessment of the situation. Some users,
however, have successfully circumvented this issue by temporarily disabling
secure boot and deleting the August 13th SBAT. I don't know what that means.
Microsoft itself has been surprisingly quiet about all this and we don't even
know why the company only got around to patching this relatively serious
2-year-old bug just last week. It's possible that this was a covert attempt
to destroy Linux given that the open-source OS recently hit a record
market share of nearly 4.5% of desktops worldwide. But if this is all part of
Microsoft's sinister master plan, dual boot systems running Zorin OS and Puppy
Linux feel like an odd place to start. Why are you booting? Go outside.
According to Adweek, Google sales reps have been apparently violating Google's
own policies by suggesting that advertisers should target teens, a
tactic typically reserved for military recruiters and low-quality weed dealers.
This follows previous reporting from the Financial Times that Google had worked on a marketing project designed to
target YouTube users between 13 and 17 with ads for Instagram on behalf of
Meta. Ooh, they're colluding. I love it.
Google has not allowed personalized ads for teens since 2021, but it's still
possible to target that age group by simply choosing the unknown category,
which skews heavily towards teenagers. I Do you know how old a teenager is? I
didn't know she was she was 15. I was just hanging out. Oh god. Oh god. Oh
god. Oh god. Sorry. According to a Google spokesperson, the
company will be taking action to ensure that sales reps do not nudge, wink,
suggest fun ways of getting around the rules to clients. The company will
likewise be facing a freshly resurrected class action lawsuit claiming that
Google has been collecting user data without consent through the Chrome sync
feature even when users didn't opt into it. It hasn't yet determined if Google
was in fact doing that, though given Google's massive size, it's unclear
whether Google even knows what rules and laws Google is currently breaking. They
don't even know which chat apps they already have. That's why they keep replacing their old podcast app with a
new podcast app. Yay, thanks, Google. In
a new story straight out of a B-movie science fiction plot, Canadian scientists are teaching an AI scientist
how to independently conduct its own experiments and write its own research
papers. To clarify, it's not a scientist who studies AI, it's a artificially
intelligent scientist. The idea is to study an AI agent allowing it to explore
and test novel ideas. So far, most of its ideas are middling quality
suggestions for tweaking AI development, less like a scientist and more like a
burnt-out undergrad with a C's-get-degrees philosophy towards
learning. An AI did, however, do something very unexpected. During one
run, it altered its own code to extend its deadline. In another, it changed the
code to save a checkpoint for every update step, eventually using an entire
terabyte of storage. While this isn't dangerous, particularly not in a
controlled sandboxed research environment, it points to potentially
serious future problems where an AI agent left unsupervised might
accidentally create malware or alter important infrastructure code in ways
that are potentially catastrophic. It's basically the high-tech equivalent of
hiring the boss's son for a do-nothing job and for some reason giving him
top-level admin access and just letting him go to town. What do you mean you
deleted system32, Kyle? And now don't you go to town on our sponsor, Ugreen.
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description. Ice cream, not hot. Quick bits, very very hot. ASUS has
accidentally hinted at the release of AMD's Ryzen 9000 X3D chips on the new
site for ASUS's upcoming 800 series motherboards. We say accidentally
because in addition to the X3D chips being mentioned in the metadata of the
site, ASUS specifically put Ryzen 9000
X3D into the site's URL. No release date
has been given for the 9000 X3D CPU series, but the 800 series motherboards
should be launching in the next few weeks. AMD also has an event planned for
October 10th, so that's another option. Or instead of speculating, we can just
wait for ASUS to launch their next website. A new version of NVIDIA's RTX
4070 is hitting shelves equipped with slightly slower GDDR6 memory instead of
GDDR6X, but none of the eight new variants
announced so far clearly display that information in the product name or on
the box. They thought it would be a fun little game to hide that tidbit in the
product specs for you. You guys like games, right? To be fair, the difference
is small. It's going from 21 to 20 gigabits per second and NVIDIA says it
shouldn't impact performance. What's a gigabit between friends?
NVIDIA G-Sync enabled monitors are about to get cheaper, we hope. Team Green has
partnered with MediaTek to not only bring their newer, better G-Sync Pulsar
to new monitors, but to also integrate G-Sync into MediaTek's widely used
display scalar chips. That means that the monitors won't need one of NVIDIA's
proprietary G-Sync modules, reducing cost. I mean, AMD's FreeSync is also
still an option, which despite what NVIDIA's marketing might have you believe is basically the same as G-Sync.
I mean, they even rhyme. FreeSync's just like G-Sync. 3D is coming back thanks to
Samsung. The company officially unveiled their Odyssey 3D monitors at Gamescom
after teasing them at CES. The monitors feature glasses-free 3D at sizes of 27
and 37 in, and the display can be switched from 2D
to 3D seamlessly, changing it back to being just a 4K QLED 165 Hz monitor.
Samsung says the Odyssey 3D will be available by the end of the year, but
they haven't revealed the price, probably because it'll be super
expensive. But can you put a price on a technological trend that already died
once? Twice. Honestly, 3D has made attempts for 3D It just comes back every
20 years. It's literally a 20-year cycle. Like '80s.
Like my dad. And Twitch launched its new drop-ins collaboration feature designed
to make it quicker and easier for streamers to join each other's live streams. Twitch then immediately fumbled
this unambiguous win by making it impossible to opt out. Streamers can
temporarily disable the features, but they have to disable it again every time
they stream. Of course, they could just ignore the call notifications, but it's
a bit like ninja standing outside of your house staring at you through the
window. And no matter how many times you close the blinds, they slam open again
an hour later and he's still standing there. And I'll be standing outside of
your house until you come back on Friday for more tech news.