Sometimes tech news is good. Sometimes it's bad, but I can only share it with
you and that makes me glad. I love you, James.
China has decided to block the use of Intel and AMD chips from government PCs
and servers in a brilliant master class on how to use the Uno reverse card.
While we are just finding out about this, China's new computer guidelines
came into effect on December 26th of last year. Honestly, it was nice of them
to let American CPU manufacturers enjoy Christmas before breaking everyone's
hearts. The government has an approved list of only 18 processors and only one
of them uses the x86 architecture, a chip made by Chinese company with a
normal length name, Shanghai Zhaoxin Integrated Circuit Company Limited.
Every other chip on China's list of the coolest CPUs uses either ARM cores or
RISC-V architecture. In addition to hardware, they are sidelining Microsoft
Windows and any foreign-made database software. This makes sense since just
last year China unveiled its first homegrown open-source desktop operating
system. That was really just the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution with a
Windows-esque coat of paint. And can you really blame China for this move? I
mean, the US is doing the same thing to China. Looking at all the stuff that
they left in your house just hurts too much. Oh, you forgot your scarf. Um, can I see
you again? The EU is investigating Apple, Meta, and Google for
non-compliance with the Digital Markets Act. Noticeably absent from the list is
Microsoft. In fact, The Verge's Tom Warren claimed on Twitter that Microsoft
is the only big tech company that the EU isn't investigating for DMA
non-compliance. I mean, the European Commission even launched investigatory
steps for Amazon's ranking practices. I guess Microsoft hasn't done anything
wrong since the DMA took effect in May of last year. Except that they have.
They have. Everyone except for the EU knows that Microsoft has been challenging your mom for the award for
best guilt trips for the sometime now. In October, the company decided to
expand on their deluge of banners and stopgaps when users dare to install
Chrome using the Edge browser by adding a poll to ask, "What did we do wrong?"
Like an overbearing ex. Two months after that, Edge users that set their default
search engine to Google found their browser would get blocked by a pop-up
asking them to switch to Bing. Just this month, Microsoft confirmed that they are
rolling out one-time pop-up ads in Windows 10 and 11 to convince Chrome
users to also use Bing as a search engine. Why not both, you know? Maybe
Microsoft doesn't do these things in Europe, giving the continent something else to make fun of North America for
when they drink their wine and olive oil. Fancy cheeses. Dipping things in
olive oil. OpenAI has apparently gone to Hollywood to take meetings with
directors and film studios, according to reports from Bloomberg. Apparently, COO
Brad Lightcap and some colleagues are giving demonstrations of their AI video
generator Sora in the hopes that filmmakers will integrate it into their
work. And indeed, they also just published a bunch of little shorts made
by filmmakers that are tea, but they're not real.
But they are real. Best consumed with drugs. Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
used this as an excuse to attend parties during Oscar weekend like the total
chatty he is. While Sora isn't available to the public, OpenAI has reportedly
granted access to a few big-name actors and directors. Probably just Altman's
drinking buddies, no one else. This is not the first time Sora has affected the
industry. About a month ago, filmmaker Tyler Perry, best known by his drag name
Madea, announced he put an $800 million
expansion to his Atlanta studio on hold
because of AI like Sora. Apparently, he believes he may not need to do
on-location shooting anymore. If he wants to shoot a living room in the mountains, he can sit in an office and
do this with a computer. Perry actually used AI-powered de-aging techniques on
two of his films. And that brings up a good point. Actors and writers have gone
on strike over AI. But now the technology is affecting makeup artists,
contractors who build sets and studios, and even location scouts. All of these
jobs are in jeopardy because one guy saw a fake video of a woman walking in
Tokyo. I didn't know there were any women in Tokyo. He's like, "Wow, she's
pretty hot." Is that a city? She's convincingly hot. Now it's time for the
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to get 15% off your first purchase at checkout. I wasn't always the quick bits
man. I used to tell longer news stories, like just a few months ago in this
episode. Oh, I remember that. NVIDIA's AI dominance is being challenged by
basically every other company. The United Acceleration Foundation formed
last year by Intel, Google, ARM, Qualcomm, Samsung, and others is gunning
for NVIDIA's CUDA. The group has been working on an open-source software suite
that they say will reach a mature state in the second half of this year.
However, there's no final release target yet, so I guess NVIDIA is free to count
their trillions until then. But we'll get you. The leather jacket is
to save your skin when you Scrooge McDuck into a pile of gold. These gold
coins are hard. Google has apparently begun testing AI-generated summaries of
search results on a small subset of queries by users who did not opt into
its Search Generative Experience in order to see how the general public will
respond to the new feature. These AI summaries come with a warning label
explaining that the feature is experimental, possibly because they seem
to have a bad habit of redirecting users
toward spam and scam websites ranging from low-quality to actively malicious.
Unlike regular Google. No Maybe the real experiment is to
find what percentage of users will gladly type their social security number
into a CAPTCHA. In worse Google news, the company was ordered by federal
investigators to hand over the personal information of YouTube users who watched
certain videos. Links to the videos in questions were sent by undercover agents
to a suspected cryptocurrency laundered. So naturally, the feds wanted Google to
hand over names, addresses, telephone number, and user activity, and IP
addresses of anyone who watched those videos. Videos that have been watched
more than 30,000 times. While that sounds bad, it could have been a lot
worse. The FBI could have Rick rolled the suspect, and that's embarrassing in
2024. Even worse, you guys are now on a list. I'm sorry. Microsoft has big plans
to make life better for Windows 11 and Xbox gamers. At the Game Developers
Conference last week, the company unveiled DirectSR, a tool that makes it
a lot easier for devs to add support for multiple upscalers like NVIDIA's DLSS
and AMD's FSR and/or Intel's XeSS. I
mean, XS. XeSS. Cesspool. Microsoft also just filed a
patent for a technique that would improve ray tracing performance on AMD
GPUs, including the ones in Xbox consoles and desktop Radeon graphics
cards. See, NVIDIA, you don't have to choose between AI-powered world
domination and throwing your gaming customers a bone. You can do both. Piles
of bones, like the future in Terminator 2. And EVGA is in hot water after an
unannounced pin layout change fried a customer's hard drives. A Redditor RMA'd
their power supply and was clearly told not to send back their modular cables.
When they hooked the new PSU to the original EVGA cables, it killed their
SATA hard drives. Turns out the pin layout of the power supply model had
been changed, making them incompatible with the cables from the old unit, but
no one at EVGA told the customer. Got you. Now EVGA is refusing to cover the
damage. That's not like you. Even better, this may not be a new issue. It
is like you. After Louis Rossmann posted a video on the subject, the YouTube
account for a PC building company commented that they reported that this
issue to EVGA two years ago. So that's
why EVGA broke up with NVIDIA. They wanted to cook different parts of their
customers' PCs. Friday is the spice of life. You're all
going to burn. And do you still come back to see what we cook up for you on
Wednesday? It's a block party. You like gumbo? Because there won't be gumbo.
It'll be more tech news. That's all. It's the only thing. What is a gumbo?
A toy.