Twitter has officially begun rebranding itself to Elon Musk's favorite letter X.
The platform is not a Twitter anymore. It's an X Twitter. If you're not a fan
of puns, you're about to have a bad couple days in the internet. I'm Riley
Murdoch. This is TechLinked and this is the letter X in the Monotype special
alphabets for font, which also looks similar to a standard character added to
Unicode in 2001, which is why Elon could
tweet the new logo of his massive social media company as literal text. To be
fair, Elon has said that they will change the logo to something a bit more
permanent, but it was still kind of sad for me to read this thread by Martin
Grasshopper telling the story of how he and two other designers created
Twitter's iconic bird logo before I caught myself being sentimental about
marketing for a tech giant and hit the X on the tab after I found the right one.
The rebrand comes soon after Musk handed the CEO reins to Linda Yaccarino, who
apparently shares Elon's passion for building X into the everything app
capable of serving all four fundamental human needs: audio, video, messaging,
and banking with a little sprinkle of AI to make things feel extra dystopian. The
new x.com is Elon's latest adventure in trying to brand literally everything
he's involved in with an X in some way, including PayPal. There's a whole story
there, but this time it's not just the platform. Tweets will now be called X's.
I X'd an X this morning, but no one X'd back at me. Didn't even get any sub X's.
Re-X? If you're looking to exit the
platform, I'm sorry, the Twitter alternative landscape isn't looking
super compelling. Threads just got an update with new features, but Meta won't
say what they are, although TikTok just added text posts. And to be frank, the
CCP having all my data has never seemed less problematic. When Google's new
extension API for Chrome made it more difficult for ad blocking extensions to
function, Mozilla managed to implement a workaround keeping ad blockers working.
Fortunately for Google, a new proposal by four of the company's engineers
promises to find a completely new way to have the internet be full of nice,
orderly, auto-playing videos that follow you down the page as you scroll. Where
you going? THERE'S NOTHING DOWN THERE. What are you looking for? The FAQs?
Louis Rossmann called the proposal, known as the web environment integrity
explainer, one of the scariest things he's ever heard in his life, and he's
talked to Linus off camera. Google's engineers proposed that websites ask for
tokens from users' machines, which have been verified by attesters controlled by
yep, Google. This would most likely break
most ad blockers, and with Google controlling which websites and browsers
are seen as trustworthy, could put nails in the coffin of the open web, which is
why many critics on GitHub are calling the scheme DRM for websites. Look, it's
okay. This internet just turned into network television, but we can probably
start a different web free of government and corporate control. You mean the dark
web? A different one than that. Apple has begun sending out developer kits for
the Vision Pro mixed reality headset and
Oh. I thought Tim Cook was going to send assassins for not saying spatial
computing instead OF MIXED REALITY. THE KITS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE kept super
secret and not reviewed by anyone in a YouTube video, so do not listen to
Marques here. Think of your waifu and chibi figurines. What will they do when
the assassins come? Some developers will use the kits to optimize their apps for
virtual re- I mean, for spatial computing, but according to Mark Gurman
at Bloomberg, Netflix and many other high-profile
developers will not be optimizing their apps for the rather small Vision Pro
user base if when it exists. After all,
recent reports say Apple only expects to ship 150,000 units in 2024, about 500
times smaller than the market for Apple's other devices. Sure, Netflix has
an incentive to optimize a Vision Pro app so users don't just watch Apple TV
Plus instead, but I don't know. Maybe Netflix knows that Apple's star-studded,
well-reviewed shows automatically look way better than Hot Love on the Beach
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Mhm. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's other startup
trying to fundamentally change human life on the planet as we know it,
Worldcoin, has launched its global rollout after already scanning the
eyeballs of 2 million users with its creepy orb thing, which is actually not
that scary according to this crypto reporter. But don't worry, in return,
the human receives some Worldcoin cryptocurrency, which actually shot up
in value following today's news, and more importantly, a world ID, which can
theoretically be used to prove said humans aren't robots, which I guess will
be more necessary than ever thanks to OpenAI unleashing their chatbot into the
world. He may have let the bull into the China shop, but he came prepared with
lots. He's got lots of tape. A leaked hands-on video of Sony's upcoming
Project Q PlayStation streaming handheld has revealed that the device runs some
version of Android, or at least this one does, igniting the hopes of many
tinkerers who no doubt dream of circumventing Sony's restrictions. I
mean, it's supposed to only be able to stream PlayStation 5 games on a local
network, which seems kind of ridiculous until you see the picture with the
screen taken off and realize I mean, you can't do anything else because the gears
there's nothing in there. That's That's all they could manage. It looks like one
and a half of the weirdest waffle iron ever. I want to cook a waffle in there.
ASUS has announced plans to begin mass production of its RTX 4070 graphics card
without an extra power connector that it revealed back at Computex as soon as
this fall is when they'll begin mass production. But the card requires a
specific ASUS motherboard with an additional connector slot next to the
standard PCIe x16 slot, which is powered
by a 16-pin connector on the back of the motherboard. So, calling it
connector-less as many are doing online isn't quite accurate. You know, rubs me
the wrong way and frankly puts me in a bad mood, even though it does come in a
very nice minimalist white color. I might buy one to hang on my wall, but
not for gaming. In other GPU news, gaming handheld maker GPD has released a
video showing that the company's external GPU dock works with one of the
company's main competing products, the Steam Deck.
What a quirky situation. What's even quirkier is that you have to open up the
Deck and remove its m.2 SSD in order to use GPD's OcuLink adapter, and then
leave the back off and run Windows instead of SteamOS off of a microSD
card. Oh man. But you're going to you're going to get
a few more frames on that thing. It's going to be pretty And isn't that all
worth it? And in case you missed it, Neopets is entering a whole new era this
week, and they've got a new brand ambassador along for the ride, music
legend John Legend, who excitedly posted
to his Instagram followers the big news on the weekend. Like, wow, congrats to
Neopets for landing a big celebrity for the job, but there's also evidence of
John's claim that the game has long been a favorite in his family's house.
Chrissy Teigen was tweeting about the game back in 2018.
Back when tweets could just be tweets.
X's? Come on. And you come on back on
Wednesday for more tech news delivered by me, a human verified by the Worldcoin
world government, as long as they're still happy with me.
We'll have to see.