Tech news, I love tech news. I mean, you start talking about connector tables,
CPUs, software updates. Is it getting hot in here? Do you mind? I might need
the room. Intel's next-gen GPUs, code-named Battlemage, will launch this
fall, according to industry sources who spoke to German tech outlet ComputerBase
at Embedded World 2024. These mysterious
beings reportedly indicated that Intel wants Battlemage graphics cards to
arrive before Black Friday, aka November 29th, aka the OG Prime Day. If this is
true, it means Battlemage could go head-to-head with NVIDIA's Blackwell
gaming GPUs, which are set for a launch in Q4, according to equally mysterious
board partners. Although the RTX 5090 is
rumored to launch first, and if Intel follows their Alchemist launch playbook,
they'll lead with an upper to mid-tier card. So, it might be more like going
head to sternum, which I have seen work well. Linus be Luke.
Right now though, Intel is taking on NVIDIA in the AI chip space. Team Blue
just announced their Gaudi 3 accelerator, which they say can beat
NVIDIA's H100 every sometimes running
certain models. But hey, at least that's better than the new ARM-based Axion data
center chip that Google just announced. That thing won't run AI language models
at all, because it's a CPU, not an AI accelerator. Well, that's all for me.
John? After years of inaction, a bipartisan pair of legislators has
released a discussion draft for new federal data privacy legislation titled
the American Privacy Rights Act. How appropriate. The
Never again, guys. The act would create a national standard
for data privacy that preempts the current state-by-state patchwork of
privacy legislation. It would also limit what kinds of information companies can
collect and create a set of consumer data rights similar to the EU's General
Data Protection Regulation GDPR. Many businesses actually like the idea
of a national privacy standard, primarily because that would reduce the
difficulty and cost of compliance. However, this also means that the bill
is likely to receive opposition from both states that currently have much
higher and states that have much lower consumer protections, which is what
scuttled Congress' last attempt at fixing this mess. Look, you can't just
stick California and Texas in the same room and expect them to get along.
They're like cobras and mongooses, mortal enemies. But there's a lot of
reasons to think that regulations like this can help. The EU's GDPR has forced
companies to make significant changes to how they handle data, and their new
antitrust rules making it easier to switch browsers on most devices seem to
have resulted in small browsers making significant gains in terms of market
share in the region. What? Competition? Without new
legislation though, most of the pushback against American companies that mistreat
their customers is coming extremely gradually through regulatory bodies.
Today, the FCC rolled out its new broadband consumer labels, which are
standardized across different ISPs and must clearly list every single fee, cap,
and charge associated with the plan, and must be clearly displayed for all
customers at sign-up. The labels are also explicitly based on nutrition
labels, like you'd find on the back of a box of cornflakes, which makes me wonder
how many calories are in a wireless router. Are they higher in protein or
carbs? And what is the latency of my next bowel movement? Several major AI
image generators are struggling to depict interracial relationships,
especially Asian men in relationships with white women. Mia Sato of The Verge
first reported this issue a few weeks ago with Instagram's AI, which would
consistently produce pictures of two people of the same race when asked to
create mixed-race couples. Strangely, while it was basically impossible to
coax it into creating an image of an Asian man and a white woman, it was far
easier to get it to create images of a white man with an Asian woman or a black
man with a white woman. Even then, it struggled with prompts
like black man and white girlfriend, but not with white woman and black
boyfriend. Several other news outlets jumped on the idea and replicated these
results. Shortly after, Meta seems to have blocked prompts with keywords like
Asian man, though this was mysteriously reversed after Mia Sato asked them about
it. But it also turns out that this isn't an issue exclusive to Meta.
OpenAI's DALL-E 3 almost managed to create a mixed Asian-white couple by
somehow creating the most Asian-looking white women known to man, or men? When
prompted with Asian man with white wife, Midjourney also produced a lot of oddly
Caucasian-Asian women, as well as inexplicably a black man and a white
woman in what appears to be traditional Chinese clothing. Verge writers were
eventually able to get Midjourney to create an image of an Asian man and a
white woman, but this only worked when the prompt was clearly platonic and
mentioned academia. This is amazing. Google's Gemini wasn't able to produce
interracial couples of any kind in any time, Viking or whatever, of course,
because Google shut down its ability to generate images of people after the
racially diverse Nazis incident back in February. The feature was supposed to
return in March, so we can assume Google's still trying to get it to stop
generating images of Schindler's List as cast by the Lin-Manuel Miranda. I bet
the rap solos are going to be awesome in that. Schindler's Hermanos. Now it's
time for Quick Bits, brought to you by Paperlike. They make screen protectors
that not only protect your iPad, but also make it feel better to write and
draw on it. The Paperlike 2.1 is manufactured in Switzerland and is
designed to help you write and draw on your iPad just like how you would on
paper. It uses their exclusive microbead technology called Nanodots TM to emulate
the stroke resistance of paper without sacrificing screen clarity. Check out
Paperlike at the link below. A quick bit is only really a quick bit if it comes
from the quick uh region of France, otherwise it's really technically
sparkling tech news. On Monday, we talked about how version 24H2 of Windows
11 is blocking third-party modifying apps that alter the OS's UI. But it
turns out that these changes actually go much, much further. A sizable list of
apps, drivers, and hardware IDs can trigger an update hold on Windows 11
version 24H2, including two Intel drivers, a Realtek wireless USB 2.0
adapter driver, an AMD Radeon software executable, and an iCloud services
executable. While Microsoft often blocks older software that is likely to cause
instability, several of these newly blocked apps and executables were
released relatively recently. This is likely because Microsoft is making some
pretty extensive changes in the new version, mostly related to the AI
features it wants to mix into the OS like mint through chocolate, in the
sense that a lot of us do not want it there. And don't come at me, mint
lovers. It's like the cilantro of OS. Yes. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Cilantro's great.
It's great for you. I'm a mutant. TikTok is working on a new
app called TikTok Notes, and you guessed
it, it has nothing to do with notes or note-taking. It's a photo posting app.
This isn't the first we've heard about this. Last month, a leak suggested
TikTok was working on an Instagram competitor called TikTok Photos, a name
that apparently made too much sense to everybody. Even more offensive, no one
at TikTok, not a single person, named the photo app PicTok. If they want to do
so now, they have to pay Jacob Rush $7 million, and I get royalty rights for
saying it first on camera. Automatic, the parent company of WordPress, has
acquired Beeper, the message company that You remember these guys? They spent
the last several months getting their iMessage bridging service repeatedly blocked by Apple. That being said,
Beeper will apparently operate as a mostly independent subsidiary. Automatic
does however plan to eventually merge with Beeper with its other messaging
service text.com. Beeper had only around 115,000 users
prior to acquisition, but they've also got a waitlist of over 450,000.
An entire Oakland's worth of people. Luckily for them, Beeper's new Android
app is also leaving beta, though there's no word on when or if iMessage bridging
will return, for Timothy Cook of Apple guards his blue bubbles most jealously.
Texas Education Department will be introducing an AI-powered grader called
Auto Scoring Engine, or ASE, for written questions on standardized tests. The
only subjects excluded from computer grading appear to be Spanish
assessments. So, get ready to find out what a robot thinks of your essay on
George Orwell's 1984 essay. A S S A?
While the ASE is intended to replace human graders, which would save the
state an estimated 15 to 20 million dollars per year, around 25% of the
tests will be sent for further human review as a measure of quality control.
Texas has clarified that the AI powering the ASE is not ChatGPT, but an AI model
purpose-built for grading. Regardless, this move brings us one step closer to
the future dystopia where all schooling, both homework and grading, is completely
AI-generated. Let the robots handle it. Leave me out of it. And according to
Cloudflare, Monday's solar eclipse managed to depress US internet traffic
by 8%, though that's less impressive when you consider that nearly 100% of
what I see on the internet depresses me on a daily basis. For example, I learned
from the internet that Google searches for eyes hurt spiked during the eclipse
in both the United States and Canada. Nothing makes me lose faith in humanity
more than people being confused as to why they have eyeball pain after they
optically raw-dogged the sun. The first thing you learn about the sun is don't
look at it. But it won't be a pain for you to come back on Friday for more tech
news. The best part is you can stare at us for as long as you like,
but maybe don't for too long. Don't Don't Don't Don't make it weird.
We like the watch time, but there's a lot You will go blind.