Apple's game porting toolkit, announced at WWDC, looks like it's a way bigger deal
than Apple made it sound, and may shake the very foundation upon which the Temple of Gaben
is built. I'm Jacob Rush, this is TechLinked, and you're about to be a Mac gamer. It's happening.
Just accept it.
Turns out, in addition to making it easier to port Windows games to macOS, the game porting
toolkit, or GBT, weird coincidence, can be used right now to run Windows games at playable
frame rates and quality settings similar to the Steam Deck's Proton compatibility layer,
as shown by Redditors. This is huge for pressuring my Mac-using friends, imagine me having friends,
into playing games with me, a person who definitely doesn't have friends.
The kit uses source code from Crossover, a wine-based open-source solution for running
Windows games on macOS, first published in 2007. According to a statement from Code Weavers,
they are pleased to see Apple recognizing the power of wine as a tool, 16 years after the fact.
That's an oversight that's apparently old enough to drive. Apparently, the new toolkit
will quickly convert Windows games to run on macOS, translating Intel-based x86 instructions
and Windows APIs to the corresponding Apple Silicon instructions and macOS APIs. Developers
will also be able to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it
runs before fully porting a game. Some individual users have already tried running major titles
on their own, such as Diablo 4 and Cyberpunk 2077, which managed to run on an M1 MacBook Pro,
although it ran at 14 FPS and was more than a little buggy, not buggier than when it was
first released on the PlayStation 4, boom, roasted.
Twitch updated its terms of service with restricted new rules on sponsorships and
multi-streaming on Tuesday in the platform's latest attempt to trim down its user base.
There's just too many streamers. I can't throw enough kids' birthdays to deal with all these
streamers. Twitch's new guidelines stated that sponsored videos, banners, and audio ads that
are burned in would be prohibited, and a previous policy banning Twitch partners and affiliates
from simultaneous live streaming on Twitch-like platforms, also known as simulcasting, will now
apply to everyone without advance written permission from Twitch. It's like getting a permission
slip from your mom, except instead of a child taking a field trip to the aquarium, you're an
adult operating a small business. Twitch also limited the size of advertiser logos to a maximum
of 3% of the screen, like a sponsored game of Where's Walmart? and a completely prohibited
promotion of a bunch of products ranging from bait pens to mail enhancement products.
No doubt frustrating many unenhanced viewers. Streamers, of course, took this in stride,
by which I mean they were furious and threatened to boycott. Confronted by thousands of angry
Let's players and reaction streamers and Let's not players, you know, the kind of people who
yell for a living. Twitch attempted a swift backtrack, first apologizing for the overly broad
changes, then right before we started filming, rewrote the guidelines, forcing us to rewrite the
story and film it again. Come on, Twitch, what won't you screw up? So, the new, just updated,
branded content guidelines doesn't restrict burn denads at all, although changes to the
prohibited types of branded products and the ban on multi-streaming still stands. So in the eyes of
Twitch, if you live stream in three places at once, you're still a two time and hoe. Unfortunately,
for streamers looking to jump ship, Twitch's partnership program actually charges a $25
fee for anyone looking to leave, just like me on a first date. And thousands of Reddit communities
are planning to go dark June 12th in protest of Reddit's proposed API costs, which will likely
spell the end of multiple popular third-party apps such as Apollo, Sync, Relay, and Narwhal.
The list of protesting subreddits is extensive, and at least 37 different communities have over
five million subscribers each. Reddit's actions have been so egregious, it's brought together
the forces of r slash anti-work, r slash cryptocurrency, and r slash wolves with watermelons.
One subreddit, however, is planning to cross the picket line, r slash UFOs, which were negged on
the walkout after users protested that they may miss an important revelation in the U.S.
government's ongoing public investigation into UFOs. What if on June 12th the aliens
evade and were all caught in their pants down because Reddit user u slash the truth is out
there at 69 failed to man his post? He wasn't narrow to running fast enough. What are we
going to do? The blackout will last at least 48 hours, but some of the subreddits may not come
back at all as their moderators refuse to use Reddit's clunky first-party moderation tools.
While it's easy to hate on Reddit moderators as a population composed of power-tripping
busybodies and actual 14-year-olds, Reddit offloads a ton of potentially expensive labor
onto its volunteer moderators. The mods do a lot to make Reddit what it is, both for better and
for worse. While the change to API prices was likely motivated by AI developers using Reddit
as a free training data bucket, pricing out third-party apps isn't necessarily a drawback in
Reddit size. I mean, that's capitalism. The platform has increasingly pushed users towards
its first-party app, though less through making it the app of pleasant and convenient experience,
and more through making its mobile website like trying to read a book with both your hands
duct-taped to your face. That's why audio books.
Grab onto your friggin' butts, you guys, because here comes five full quick bits!
The biggest WWDC announcement has finally been revealed. It wasn't the Vision Pro,
the Mac Pro, or even the Mac Gaming Revolution. It's that iPadOS 17 will support external webcams,
other cameras, and any microphone over USB-C, continuing Apple's long, slow journey of maybe,
eventually, justifying that, what's a computer ad by actually making the iPad into a sort of
computer? PC users, however, are still waiting for an apology. Bing users have noticed that entering
a search for Chrome actually prompts Bing to look for news articles about Bing features instead.
Apparently, someone at Microsoft genuinely thought they could serve a full-page Bing ad to
Chrome Enthusiasts and blame it on their state-of-the-art AI. Whoa, it's going rogue.
Wouldn't you know it? The error stopped happening minutes after the story broke and
Microsoft was reached for comment. Man, that Sydney sure learns fast.
Instagram is allegedly testing an AI chatbot according to a leaked screenshot. The AI will
answer questions and give advice that you definitely shouldn't take, it's going to be bad,
but more uniquely. The screenshot says you can chat with 30 AI personalities and find which
one you like best. Apparently, the people at Meta looked at chat you between Bing and thought,
you know what would make a thing more stable? More split personalities.
30 of them? Yeah, 30. They deleted 20 last time. The Bing, presumably, the most popular personality
will then be uploaded to Mark Zuckerberg, who has none. I mean, it's not that they gave him legs.
That's true, they finally did. They spent all that time greasing him with Sun's screen.
Have you seen that picture? Well, that's actually his motor oil.
The FBI is warning that scammers are increasingly using public photos and videos to create deep
faked sex tapes as a tool for extortion. Sex-stortion, if you will. Personally, I won't.
This is an evolution of an already common practice of catfishing unsuspecting people
into sharing sexual videos and images of themselves for blackmail purposes.
This is why I don't have friends. Because you kept extorting them for news?
No, no. So I never get extorted. I always come out on top. I'm always on top.
Even more people are potentially vulnerable to this new scam,
as most of us have pictures and videos of ourselves hosting a thrice weekly news show.
It's a common problem. And a Redditor has created anime-inspired QR codes that actually work using stable diffusion.
According to their website, they were able to train a model of ControlNet,
which is stable diffusion's neural network, to generate QR codes resembling
traditional Chinese patterns and Japanese Ukiyo-e art styles.
More importantly, they made codes that look like waifus.
Truly, this is an age of wonders. Now, lonely internet dwellers can fall in love with URLs.
I mean, I've already made a shrine to the YouTube channel in my closet and image your channel. Please answer my emails.
And you'll fall in love with Friday's episode when you come back for more tech-linked.
But don't get like weird and drawn anime Riley Husbando. Or honestly do, we could use the engagement.
Or you could draw me.