Einstein once said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over
and over expecting different results. Congratulations, you're back for more
tech news. YouTube has finally given users a way to kill shorts. The new
setting lets you crank the existing daily shorts watch time limit down to
zero minutes, which effectively pauses the feed before it starts. It's rolling
out now to both iPhone and Android users. Unfortunately, it's only on
mobile, so all you boomers watching shorts on desktop will continue to have
your brains cooked sous vide style by the never-ending dopamine machine.
Public sentiment has been generally pretty positive, which makes sense given
that a December study showed that more than half of shorts recommendations
served to new users were AI slop or brain rot content. Still, with shorts
averaging 200 billion daily views, oh,
this next generation, hamstringing it like this has got to be a tough call for
YouTube. You might think we're being hypocritical since TechLinked also has
posted shorts, but those were all accidents. The YouTube interface is
confusing now and our fingers slipped. Our phones are so slippery, okay? They
just whew. The European Union just unveiled its
long-awaited age verification app with European Commission President Ursula von
der Leyen triumphantly declaring that online platforms would have no more
excuses not to verify kids' ages because
the app met the highest privacy standards. Within hours, security
researchers reported they could break into the app in under 2 minutes. Of
course. Security consultant Paul Moore led the charge detailing that the
encrypted PIN isn't cryptographically tied to the identity vault. The rate
limiting is just a counter in a config file you can reset to zero and biometric
authentication is a single boolean flag you can flip off. The entire
demonstration was so short he was able to fit it into a single tweet. Telegram
CEO Pavel Durov piled on calling the app hackable by design. The EU has since
confirmed a new version is being rolled out to patch the flaws. Adobe's
domination over the creative app industry looks a little weaker this week
after some major competitors made their apps much cheaper and in some cases
totally free. As The Verge reports, Canva just made Cavalry, its
professional motion graphics app, completely free following the same move
it made with the Affinity Suite last year. And Maxon relaunched Autograph, a
previously dead After Effects competitor, also free for individual
artists. So, if you want to do what After Effects does,
now you have two more options than you did on Monday. But, the real gut punch
came from Blackmagic Design, which unveiled DaVinci Resolve 21 at NAB this
week. The video editor already had Premiere Pro cornered on price, but the
new update adds a full photo editing page that lets you organize raw files,
import your existing Lightroom catalogs, and adds the ability to tether your
camera for live capture. Adobe charges 10 bucks a month for just Lightroom, and
now that's looking like a hard sell, kind of like holding onto your phone
without our sponsor. Oh, snap! Every MagSafe battery pack on the market has
the same problem. You slap it on your phone and your standard MagSafe mount is
gone. Congratulations, your phone is charging and it's the slipperiest thing
in the universe. Great design, everyone. I definitely wanted to drop my phone
into the toilet of a bus station in Memphis. Thankfully, Ohsnap has you
covered with a Snap Pack, which has MagSafe on both sides. What? It charges
your phone from the bottom and your accessories stack right on top. That's
right. It's a mag so nice, they safed it twice. And with 15-W Qi2 fast charging
and 5,000 mAh of capacity, you can get an iPhone 17 up to 85%. It's not 100,
but it's in a space-grade aluminum package that's about the same thickness
as your iPhone. It's beautiful. Check out Ohsnap's Snap Pack today using our
link in the description. Einstein's E = MC squared tells us energy equals mass
times the speed of light squared. Apply it here and we find that these quick
bits contain the energy of a small sun. Don't look directly at them. NVIDIA is
reportedly bringing back the RTX 3060 12 GB this June because the RTX 5050 9 GB
has been delayed with no clear launch window. According to the leaker
Megasized GPU, the 3060 is two
generations old but it still has 12 GB of VRAM, more than the newer card was
ever going to offer. NVIDIA apparently looked at its GPU lineup and said,
"Actually, 2021 was fine." And if you lived it, you know it wasn't. Microsoft
is giving away $2 million with a $1 cash
prize and three Mercedes-Benzes, Benzai,
to anyone willing to set Edge as their default browser and do one Bing search
as part of a part of a I haven't seen this. This is hilarious.
As part of a new sweepstakes running until May 21st. Geez, you guys. Years of
aggressive pop-ups and dark patterns failed to move the needle. So,
apparently, the plan now is just straight-up bribery. Meta is jacking up
the price of the Quest 3 by 100 bucks and the Quest 3S by 50 bucks. And
they're pinning it on the global RAM shortage. Sure, that checks out. It's
definitely the memory crisis and not the $70 they torched on the metaverse before
pivoting to becoming a sunglasses company. You smart sunglasses. Next
quarter, we'll blame the price of the Quest 4 on Mercury being in retrograde.
Europol emailed 75,000 people this week as part of Operation Power Off, a
crackdown on DDoS for hire services. Four arrests were made, 53 domains taken
down, and the remaining users received warning letters which loosely translated
to "We know where you live." To drive the message home, Europol also dropped an
Iron Maiden-style music video following Melvin, a chip-addicted Skeletor-playing
kid who just wanted to DDoS someone for killing his vibe. Poor Melvin, that poor
grotesque little guy. And a new study found that sperm whales language has
vowels, and they work almost identically to ours, despite the two species
diverging 90 million years ago. I swear I still have memories from the womb the
whale womb. Two vowel types have been identified so
far, each used in distinct structured ways across different whales and
contexts. So, yeah, vowels have apparently evolved completely
independently twice, which is either the most humbling discovery in linguistics
or a real bad sign for whoever's next. Just like it'll be a real bad time for
you if you don't come back on Monday for more tech news. That's all for today.
I'm going to stick my tongue out at a photographer and accidentally create the
most reproduced image of the 20th century. Bye.