Hello, my little TechLinked babies. I hope you were good while I was gone or I
can't give you any tech news.
I'd give it to you anyway. YouTube has begun the roll out of its age estimation
model in the US. And as promised, users are starting to see popups informing
them that YouTube couldn't verify that you're an adult. They tried so hard and
got so far, but in the end, you didn't
understand this reference. child. A change.org petition calling on YouTube
to roll back the policy reached 78,000
signatures at the time of writing. That's about 0.03%
of YouTube's estimated 246 million
US-based users, but it is a great petition. Should we put it on the
fridge? Yeah. Now, what happens if Google estimates that you are under 18?
Well, Google wants to be clear. This does not mean you must provide a
government ID. You can continue to use
YouTube. You just won't be able to watch all the spicy, edgy videos all of us
grown-ups are watching constantly on YouTube. It also means Google won't turn
on their new memoryike feature for Gemini, which is also rolling out today
and allows Gemini to learn from your past conversations over time. So, you
can talk to an AI assistant who's already gobbled up your data for
training. Ah, I mean, who knows you so well because they love you as a robot
servant friend. Google's turning the feature on by default. Of course,
wouldn't want to lose out on that juicy data from people who don't keep up with
every single policy update. Although, the new temporary chats feature is
essentially like incognito mode, so Google won't use anything you say in
those chats. And as I said, the memory feature won't turn on by default. If
you're under 18 or using a work or school account, or located in the
European Economic Area, Switzerland, or the UK, if you're anywhere else, you can
turn it off in the settings. If you're okay making Gemini very sad, Reddit has
announced it will block the Internet Archive from archiving most of Reddit
despite specifically naming the Internet Archive just over one year ago in a list
of goodfaith actors that Reddit would not block. Well, see, that was before
Reddit realized that the Internet Archive is actually for, you know,
archiving the internet. They thought it was more like a metaphor. As Reddit told
The Verge, they've been made aware that AI companies are scraping Reddit data
from the Wayback Machine. But are we really worried about that when loading a
single page on the way back machine takes about 3 days? If scraper bots are
willing to sit through that, I say let them have the data. They earned it. Of
course, Reddit's worried because they're making companies like Google pay up to
scrape their data. So, the Internet Archive might be blocked. But
thankfully, tools like Bellingcat's newly updated autoarchchiver exist. It's
designed for journalists and open-source intelligence. But who says you can't use
it to preserve evidence to win an argument on Reddit? Two. The Elon versus
OpenAI saga had some fun developments this week. On Monday, Elon Musk claimed
XAI would be taking legal action against Apple for blocking AI apps that aren't
chat GPT from reaching number one in the app store. OpenAI chief Sam Alman found
that to be a little rich coming from the guy that pretty blatantly manipulates
Twitter algorithms in his favor. To which Elon replied, "Nuh-uh. Look, your
post took off more than mine usually do despite me having 50 times your follower
count." Ultman's reply, "Skill issue."
Elon's original post was timely as the next day a federal judge denied his bid
to dismiss OpenAI's claims that Elon has engaged in a years's long harassment
campaign. Elon was like, "There isn't enough evidence. Here, I'll give you
some. Turn on Grock voice and it will teach you anything." Ah, cool. Can it
teach you to stop talking for five seconds? Speaking of Grock, the bot fact
checked Elon's claim of app store manipulation by pointing out that the
app store's number one spot was just this year occupied by deepseek and
perplexity in India causing ChatGpt's Twitter account to give it the old
goodbot. This was posted on Reddit where apparently you can also summon Grock.
Now some Redditors were caught off guard. What the are you doing here? Just
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Okay, but you only get quick bits if you behave
just in in any way. If you do anything at all, you'll get quick bits. Former
Intel CEO, not precious Pat Gellzinger,
my other other dad. >> Bob Swan's mine. >> Not him either. But Craig Barrett, who
reigned from 1998 to 2005, thinks he
knows how to save the company. Invest more in the foundry. With what funds,
Craig? Oh well, just get NVIDIA and AMD to give Intel a bunch of money. Money.
More money. >> Good idea, Craig.
>> It's been the key this whole time. >> That's why we paid you the big bucks.
>> But honestly, I think the Intel is going to be fine. After meeting him, Trump has
gone from thinking the current CEO, Lit Bhutan, is a Chinese asset to thinking
his success and rise is an amazing story. And there's only one explanation.
The Chinese have mastered mind control.
And there's only one way to stop it. Money. Google teased the design of their
Pixel 10 Pro Fold, but I'm only really mentioning it to remind you not to buy a
Pixel right now because the new ones are being announced August 20th. Okay. Bye.
Perplexity AI has officially offered to buy Google's Chrome browser for $34.5
billion. A sum that's made even more impressive by being more than twice
Perplexity's own $14 billion valuation.
These guys must know the money trick. And they know how to make hyperbolic
claims like this one as a foolproof form of PR stunt so people end up talking
about them. Damn it. Some parts of the UK are dealing with a drought. So the UK
government is calling on citizens to take action and do some real water
preserving things like deleting their old emails. The reasoning here is that
data centers require vast amounts of water to cool their systems. They're
just missing the fact that individual users deleting even their entire Gmail
accounts will help save about as much water as leaving the pub to go piss in
the temps. Now that Eric Migakovsky has regained the rights to the Pebble brand,
his company Core Devices, has unveiled the actual design of the Pebble Time 2,
which goes for a bit more of a refined look compared to the Core 2 Duo, which
has been renamed to the Pebble 2 Duo. Thank goodness. Megakovsky also compared
it to the pebbletime steel and oh god the bezels. It comes in some nice new
colorways and yes we might only be talking about this because of nostalgia
but time like a pebble washed smooth by
the rains of >> time
and YouTuber basically homeless posted a fun video about how he hacked his own
muscles to get good in CS2. He created a
setup with a Raspberry Pi, a TENS machine, and other stuff that forced his
muscles and even his trigger finger to contract in response to the computer
signal before his brain could get to it. And after a lot of trial and error, he
did in fact get good the all natural way.
>> Holy, we're in agreement then. It's not cheating. >> Yeah. Yeah, I'll leave it.
>> Excellent. Thank The link to the full video and all of our news sources are in
the description as always, but you knew that already because you watch every TechLink episode. And you're going to
watch the next one on Friday, aren't you? When you could be out in the forest
finding more money to solve all the world's problems. We got Craig for that.
Kit Craig on