for Valentine's Day I got you some tech
news you could have at least got a card or something the European commission has
decided not to designate iMessage as a
core platform service under the digital markets act which means that Apple won't
be required to undergo increasing scrutiny and enact interoperability
between iMessage and other messaging services the EU also passed over making
similar designations for Microsoft's ad business their Edge Brown and Bing in
what is either a blessing or a deep deep
insult you still don't matter Bing and you never will your new friends they
don't care about you they just want your AI the decision that iMessage is not a
gatekeeper platform for the purpose of the law is a bit more surprising however
given that Apple has disclosed that there are 101 million iOS users in
Europe while Microsoft Edge has fewer than 300 million users in the entire
world and also the entire universe and the multi
person just doing better than Firefox though yikes at the same time Apple
appears to be purposefully restricting the functionality of web apps for EU
iPhone users in the past three consecutive beta versions of iOS 17.4
making these apps more inconvenient and clunky by eliminating the ability to
open them from the homepage as well as nixing notifications and long-term local
storage furthermore while Apple might tell Regulators that the App Store and
other services need to be locked down tight to keep users safe a pirated movie
app called Kimmy somehow managed to duck
Apple's thorough review process well enough that it was the eighth most
popular entertainment app on the app store before it was finally pulled on
Tuesday oh you think you're safe not from bootleg copies of Dune you're not
boom Timothy shalag I didn't want this open AI is currently testing giving
Chachi BT a level of long-term memory allowing it to remember details from
past conversations between if you're worried about a potentially
embarrassing confession you made to the bot the last time you talked don't be
the new feature is currently only available to a limited number of users
and or test subjects which is how the AI thinks of all this is a Triumph human
I'm testing something walk forward there's a fire there those users will
also have access to a memory management panel that will allow them to delete
past information shared with the bot a feature which sadly has not been rolled
out to any of your human friends or co-workers one day though it's not clear
exactly how chat BT will be forming these memories but it's likely
compressing and summarizing past conversations so that it can pull out at
least a few Salient details like a kindly but uninterested grandmother
where did you say you were going to school I thought you already got a
haircut I did last year it's important
to remember however that even when chat history is off llm chat Bots can be
collecting a surprising amount of information about their users you might be able to trust a company like Google
to mostly tell you what they're collecting and why such as in Gemini's
new privacy policy collection of conversations location feedback and
usage information can be turned off but even if you do that they still have to
keep it for 72 hours so but lower profile chat Bots like all those online
AI wuss can be an absolute privacy
nightmare the kind where you show up to class with no pants on and your teacher
knows your social security number and all your teeth fall out in that order
welcome to class citizen number
793 no Jensen Wong of NVIDIA and Sam
Alman of open AI the bad boys of AI development in the sense that one of
them wears a leather jacket and the other is only 38 nothing but a boy aired
some public beef this week which doesn't sound sanitary at all that's for sure
okay first Alman called out critics of his goal to raise $7 trillion for a new
AI chip development project for which he claims to already have plenty of
interested investors to all the haters calling his plan nothing but absurd
Showmanship meant to Captivate a cult-like audience and a mindboggling
concentration of limited resources onto a single project Altman
said you can grind to help secure our Collective future or you can write
substacks about why we're going to
fail I'm on the side of the robots I've
never intimidated anyone in my life well Jensen Wong indirectly added himself to
alman's list of detractors at the world government Summit in Dubai when he
answered a question from a UAE official by saying that due to likely future
advances in Computing AI infrastructure would actually cost significantly less
than the combined gdps of India in France instead Wong placed the global
cost of AI data centers at around $2 trillion by 2029 he likewise argued that
every country in the world should independently control its own AI
infrastructure what he called Sovereign AI which is not frightening at all
meanwhile Jensen's little startup NVIDIA has launched a tech demo for a
personalized chatbot that runs locally on a user's PC and can answer questions
about your local files this of course is part of NVIDIA's master plan where a
significant fraction of the population inevitably decides to date their own
computers and needs to buy more and more powerful graphics cards to upgrade their
spouse I just want a wife with raid tracing I don't think it's going to work
you're just stuck on rasterization now it's time for quick bits brought to you
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not many people know this but the most important part about quick bits is the
ability to tell the quick apart from the bid the feverish hype surrounding
Apple's Vision Pro has been tempered thanks to a wave of early adopters
tearfully announcing that they're returning their $3500 headsets before
the 14-day return period ends citing issues with weight comfort and
compatibility I just don't think we're meant for each other where's the r
tracing Parker or Tani of VOX media tweeted that he couldn't even believe
what was happening as he took a photo of his headset placed back upon the
Spotless white oak table from whence it came the drama of it all no doubt seems
a bit strange to some tech enthusiasts who've been playing with similar
headsets for a decade and who may or may not agree with Mark Zuckerberg who after
after trying the Vision Pro posted a casual couch video calling his company's
499 Quest 3 the better product period
and otherwise absolutely ripping the Vision Pro a new one for being a
terrible value I could have never foreseen Zuck coming off as relatable
but here we are speaking of Apple researchers from the company published a
paper on a new AI tool called key framer that can animate static images when
given text prompts using the tool you can make a planet spin or make stars
twinkle in an image oh that's nice apparently the researchers see a use
case for graphics professionals who can use the tool to test out animation ideas
before spending hours making them conventionally personally I see a use
case where my years of effort trying to never do anything embarrassing and GIF
in front of a camera can be undone by an apple Enthusiast with a dream thankfully
this is not available to the public yet it's long been the case that Windows 11
isn't officially supported on many older PCS but changes to the upcoming 24 H2
preview build will prevent the OS from even booting on PCS manufactured prior
to the late 2000s specifically the build Microsoft is currently testing requires
an instruction called popcnt or population count thank
goodness which counts the number of bits in a machine word which is what AIS use
to talk to each other that particular instruction was only implemented in AMD
and Intel processors starting in 2007 and 2008 respectively meaning that
absolute potatoes from 2006 and prior
will no longer just run Windows 11 poorly they won't run it at all oh you
know until somebody finds a workaround which they probably will I don't know
why they would I love me a baked potato and Windows 10 is better still so I just
fix the settings panel in Windows 11 and then we can talk SpaceX will be
performing controlled descents of about a 100 old Starling satellites due to an
issue that could cause them to fail and lead to uncontrolled descents which are
worse the affected satellites will have their orbits slowly lower over about 6
months to try and avoid any collisions in further space safety news SpaceX also
postponed the launch of a private moonlander after they detected the
Lander's liquid methane fuel temperatures were improper they showed
up to work in sweat penss hopefully the temperature they detected wasn't around
310° Kelvin because that's human body
temperature it would be really embarrassing if some scientist delayed a
space flight with a poorly timed fart
Jacob warned us there was a fart joke and burglar responsible for a string of
at least nine thefts in Minnesota are reportedly using Wi-Fi Jammers to shut
down internet enabled home security systems according to security expert
Mark lanterman the thieves probably aren't blocking the signal but rather
temporarily overloading the network allowing them to waltz inside and peruse
whatever valuables and Underpants happen to be lying around my house would be a
gold mine jewelry underwear jewelry
those two things only time to make some tea open the pantry underwear while
commercial Jammers of this kind are pretty much universally illegal in the
United States they're also available for around 40 bucks online so most experts
advise using the kind of hardwired cameras and alarms that won't turn off
if your cat knocks over the modem while they're tripping over all the underwear
yes my cat wears underwear and you better fetch your cat on Friday so you
can sit them on your lap and watch the next episode of TechLink as a family
that's important your cat needs to know about this stuff