My mama used to feed me the tech news every morning with a
spoon. But then Techling came into my
life. Well, it was never the same. NVIDIA has announced the RTX 5060
desktop family, which the company is heartlessly splitting up to launch
separately. Mama. Mama. No. There's no
Founders Edition cards, but OEM versions of the RTX 5060 Ti are out now with
MSRPs of $430 USD for the 16 gig version
and $380 for the 8 gig version with the
vanilla non Ti $300 RTX 5060 coming in
May alongside 5060 laptops. Now,
reviewers could have emphasized that these cards offer about a 20%
performance uplift along with more features compared to their predecessors
at an arguably inoffensive price and left it at that. But no, NVIDIA had to
go and claim the 5060 Ti is 50 times
faster than the GTX 1060. So, reviewers
had no choice but to talk instead about NVIDIA's ridiculous marketing. Again,
why' you make us do it? NVIDIA says the 5060 family embodies the three pillars
of modern gaming performance, image
quality, frame rate, and latency. But
they forgot about the fourth pillar, gas lighting. If you can find a 16 GB 5060
Ti in stock for near MSRP, it's not the
worst option, but it's also a great time
to consider rehoming a used card instead. It will appreciate and love you
more. It might have a smell to it. We got to give NVIDIA credit where it's
due, though. They did just release a new GPU driver that appears to fix many of
the recurring glitches that have plagued RTX 40 and 50 series cards lately. After
first releasing the drivers that caused all those glitches, hey, maybe don't
download the new one just yet. Wait for an eager Redditor to do the
troubleshooting for you and post the all clear. NVIDIA's got some troubleshooting
of their own to do, though. According to a filing the company made to the SEC,
which revealed to the public the US government's new export license
requirement for AI chips, NVIDIA estimates they could be out $5.5 billion
thanks to the new policy. While in a similar filing, AMD reckons they're
looking at a financial hit of 800 million. That's because according to
industry analysts, the export license requirement is effectively a sales ban
preventing chip companies from squeezing any profit out of all these chips they
made. They're just going to sit on shelves in the warehouse now for god
knows how long. It could go bad.
The license requirement obviously represents the US trying to hurt China's
AI development. But China might not need American chips soon if Huawei's claim
about their new cloud matrix systems are true. They reportedly match or exceed
the performance of NVIDIA's NVL72 systems, but require more power to do
so. Oh no. What's the CCP to do? Funnel
their national energy resources to develop super intelligent AI before
America does. Yeah. Yeah. Probably that.
Yeah, probably. They got dams. Speaking of AI, Open AI's developing a social
network because the world can get worse. According to company sources who spoke
with the Verge, the prototype platform is reportedly designed to facilitate
sharing images generated by ChatGB2. This is real. Uh providing a safe space
for users tired of posting that on other social platforms and getting flamed for
being cringe. You know, they asked Grock about this and it confirmed they're
being treated unfairly. There might be something to this report. Sam Alman
tweeted, "Okay, fine. Maybe we'll do a social app." In February, in response to
Meta developing a standalone AI app to compete with Chat GBT, Sam went on to
tweet, "lol if Facebook tries to come at us, we just uno reverse them. It would
be so funny crying, laughing emoji." Which is ironic because it would be even
funnier to see Sam Alman display a human emotion other than anxious
self-importance.
He looks like that. Hey, if Elon Musk can buy his social media company with
his AI company, then OpenAI can build a
new social network. Why not? In terms of official announcements though, OpenAI
launched yet more models 03 and 04 mini.
They're reasoning models, but they can now reason directly with images for the
first time in what OpenAI calls a converging of their O and GPT series
models. And it's about time because there are too many damn models. And not
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at the link in the video description. Back to you,
Riley. I think about my mama's tech news sometimes. Well, she could, bless her
heart, could never quite get the quick bits right. The US Department of
Homeland Security pulled funding for the common vulnerabilities and exposures or
CBE database yesterday, shocking the global cyber security industry. who
depends on the database for identification of vulnerabilities. Thankfully, another
government entity, the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency or
HISHA, stepped in this morning to say, "Chill, everyone, chill. We'll fund it."
However, it's understandable that CVE board members moved to establish the CVE
Foundation, a nonprofit that could keep the database alive if Uncle Sam randomly
and drastically changes his mind, a normal and regular thing that occurs all
the time. Now, in other cyber security dystopia news, Doge pressured an entire
Pentagon division focused on digital defense into resigning. Just a typical
Wednesday with the big man. Speaking of hacking, the internet's very own hive of
scum and villain 4chan was taken down yesterday in what's being described as a
pretty comprehensive own and is still largely unavailable at the time of
writing is what we're hearing from other people. Anyway, members of Soy Jack, a
rival image board that split off from 4chan some time ago, took responsibility
for the hack, claiming to have leaked website code and emails between mods.
Let this be a lesson. Meme war is hell
and there are no soy boys in foxholes. Oh my god, a bomb. Speaking of websites
being down, Zoom was down for a while today. Oh, I haven't heard that since the pandemic. Zoom granting remote
workers a reprieve from attending web meetings. It's back up now, but I
imagine those few precious hours were glorious. In other completely unrelated
news, because I didn't know where else to put it, Google's giving Android phones their own version of iOS 18's
inactivity reboot, which will force devices to restart after 3 days of
inactivity, which should help prevent unauthorized access and Tik Toks jumping
on the community notes train calling their version footnotes, so they're
easier for Tik Tok users to ignore won't help at all. And ASUS has posted a
confusing reveal of something called the ROG XG Mobile. The announcement video
made it sort of look like a mini PC, but then they pop open the kickstand and
we're back to square one. What is it? Some viewers didn't really know what to
say, writing, what is this? Can I connect monitor? It also looked kind of
dirty, like they forgot to wipe the fingerprints off before you realized,
oh, that's a semi-transparent cover showing the electronics underneath. And
oh, this is an external GPU and Thunderbolt 5 doc. And the ROG XG Mobile
is mobile. If you put it in its stand,
then in another stand, then in a box, which goes in another box with a handle,
so you can carry it. Holy
cow. I mean, that thing's moving. You have to plug it in. It's about as mobile
as a Mac Mini, but at least I know what it is now. Yeah, mobile. Get a long
cable. We're all mobile. We'll get all tangled up like a rat king. And you know
what rat kings are, too. And if you don't know what a rat king is, come here
on Friday for more tech news. Cuz that's what my mama used to say all the time. I
There's no way.