WEBVTT

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Sometimes tech news is good. Sometimes it's bad, but I can only share it with

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you and that makes me glad. I love you, James.

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China has decided to block the use of Intel and AMD chips from government PCs

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and servers in a brilliant master class on how to use the Uno reverse card.

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While we are just finding out about this, China's new computer guidelines

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came into effect on December 26th of last year. Honestly, it was nice of them

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to let American CPU manufacturers enjoy Christmas before breaking everyone's

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hearts. The government has an approved list of only 18 processors and only one

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of them uses the x86 architecture, a chip made by Chinese company with a

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normal length name, Shanghai Zhaoxin Integrated Circuit Company Limited.

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Every other chip on China's list of the coolest CPUs uses either ARM cores or

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RISC-V architecture. In addition to hardware, they are sidelining Microsoft

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Windows and any foreign-made database software. This makes sense since just

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last year China unveiled its first homegrown open-source desktop operating

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system. That was really just the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution with a

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Windows-esque coat of paint. And can you really blame China for this move? I

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mean, the US is doing the same thing to China. Looking at all the stuff that

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they left in your house just hurts too much. Oh, you forgot your scarf. Um, can I see

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you again? The EU is investigating Apple, Meta, and Google for

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non-compliance with the Digital Markets Act. Noticeably absent from the list is

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Microsoft. In fact, The Verge's Tom Warren claimed on Twitter that Microsoft

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is the only big tech company that the EU isn't investigating for DMA

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non-compliance. I mean, the European Commission even launched investigatory

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steps for Amazon's ranking practices. I guess Microsoft hasn't done anything

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wrong since the DMA took effect in May of last year. Except that they have.

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They have. Everyone except for the EU knows that Microsoft has been challenging your mom for the award for

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best guilt trips for the sometime now. In October, the company decided to

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expand on their deluge of banners and stopgaps when users dare to install

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Chrome using the Edge browser by adding a poll to ask, "What did we do wrong?"

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Like an overbearing ex. Two months after that, Edge users that set their default

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search engine to Google found their browser would get blocked by a pop-up

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asking them to switch to Bing. Just this month, Microsoft confirmed that they are

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rolling out one-time pop-up ads in Windows 10 and 11 to convince Chrome

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users to also use Bing as a search engine. Why not both, you know? Maybe

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Microsoft doesn't do these things in Europe, giving the continent something else to make fun of North America for

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when they drink their wine and olive oil. Fancy cheeses. Dipping things in

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olive oil. OpenAI has apparently gone to Hollywood to take meetings with

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directors and film studios, according to reports from Bloomberg. Apparently, COO

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Brad Lightcap and some colleagues are giving demonstrations of their AI video

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generator Sora in the hopes that filmmakers will integrate it into their

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work. And indeed, they also just published a bunch of little shorts made

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by filmmakers that are tea, but they're not real.

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But they are real. Best consumed with drugs. Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

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used this as an excuse to attend parties during Oscar weekend like the total

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chatty he is. While Sora isn't available to the public, OpenAI has reportedly

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granted access to a few big-name actors and directors. Probably just Altman's

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drinking buddies, no one else. This is not the first time Sora has affected the

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industry. About a month ago, filmmaker Tyler Perry, best known by his drag name

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Madea, announced he put an $800 million

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expansion to his Atlanta studio on hold

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because of AI like Sora. Apparently, he believes he may not need to do

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on-location shooting anymore. If he wants to shoot a living room in the mountains, he can sit in an office and

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do this with a computer. Perry actually used AI-powered de-aging techniques on

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two of his films. And that brings up a good point. Actors and writers have gone

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on strike over AI. But now the technology is affecting makeup artists,

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contractors who build sets and studios, and even location scouts. All of these

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jobs are in jeopardy because one guy saw a fake video of a woman walking in

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Tokyo. I didn't know there were any women in Tokyo. He's like, "Wow, she's

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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

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man. I used to tell longer news stories, like just a few months ago in this

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episode. Oh, I remember that. NVIDIA's AI dominance is being challenged by

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basically every other company. The United Acceleration Foundation formed

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last year by Intel, Google, ARM, Qualcomm, Samsung, and others is gunning

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for NVIDIA's CUDA. The group has been working on an open-source software suite

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that they say will reach a mature state in the second half of this year.

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However, there's no final release target yet, so I guess NVIDIA is free to count

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their trillions until then. But we'll get you. The leather jacket is

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to save your skin when you Scrooge McDuck into a pile of gold. These gold

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coins are hard. Google has apparently begun testing AI-generated summaries of

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search results on a small subset of queries by users who did not opt into

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its Search Generative Experience in order to see how the general public will

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respond to the new feature. These AI summaries come with a warning label

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explaining that the feature is experimental, possibly because they seem

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to have a bad habit of redirecting users

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toward spam and scam websites ranging from low-quality to actively malicious.

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Unlike regular Google. No Maybe the real experiment is to

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find what percentage of users will gladly type their social security number

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into a CAPTCHA. In worse Google news, the company was ordered by federal

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investigators to hand over the personal information of YouTube users who watched

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certain videos. Links to the videos in questions were sent by undercover agents

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to a suspected cryptocurrency laundered. So naturally, the feds wanted Google to

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hand over names, addresses, telephone number, and user activity, and IP

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addresses of anyone who watched those videos. Videos that have been watched

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more than 30,000 times. While that sounds bad, it could have been a lot

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worse. The FBI could have Rick rolled the suspect, and that's embarrassing in

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2024. Even worse, you guys are now on a list. I'm sorry. Microsoft has big plans

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to make life better for Windows 11 and Xbox gamers. At the Game Developers

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Conference last week, the company unveiled DirectSR, a tool that makes it

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a lot easier for devs to add support for multiple upscalers like NVIDIA's DLSS

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and AMD's FSR and/or Intel's XeSS. I

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mean, XS. XeSS. Cesspool. Microsoft also just filed a

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patent for a technique that would improve ray tracing performance on AMD

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GPUs, including the ones in Xbox consoles and desktop Radeon graphics

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cards. See, NVIDIA, you don't have to choose between AI-powered world

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domination and throwing your gaming customers a bone. You can do both. Piles

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of bones, like the future in Terminator 2. And EVGA is in hot water after an

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unannounced pin layout change fried a customer's hard drives. A Redditor RMA'd

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their power supply and was clearly told not to send back their modular cables.

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When they hooked the new PSU to the original EVGA cables, it killed their

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SATA hard drives. Turns out the pin layout of the power supply model had

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been changed, making them incompatible with the cables from the old unit, but

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no one at EVGA told the customer. Got you. Now EVGA is refusing to cover the

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damage. That's not like you. Even better, this may not be a new issue. It

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is like you. After Louis Rossmann posted a video on the subject, the YouTube

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account for a PC building company commented that they reported that this

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issue to EVGA two years ago. So that's

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why EVGA broke up with NVIDIA. They wanted to cook different parts of their

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customers' PCs. Friday is the spice of life. You're all

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going to burn. And do you still come back to see what we cook up for you on

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Wednesday? It's a block party. You like gumbo? Because there won't be gumbo.

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It'll be more tech news. That's all. It's the only thing. What is a gumbo?

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A toy.
