It does occur to me occasionally that humanity has built machines that produce
with terrible confidence inane, tripe, and cod swallow.
One hesitates to call this progress, and yet forward we march.
Nintendo is raising the global prices of the Switch 2 starting September 1st.
Prices in the US and Canada will jump by 50 bucks, while Europeans can delight in the strength of
their currency, only seeing a 30 euro increase, which I think is pretty close to being 50 bucks.
Anyway, uh, haven't checked. 4835 Canadian. Okay, pretty close.
The Japanese, however, were hit the hardest, as every Switch configuration will cost more,
not just the Switch 2. Nintendo Switch Online is also going up in Japan and South Korea starting
July 1st. Nintendo blames the changes on market conditions, which is another way of saying the
AI boom has been hoovering up every memory chip on Earth and feeding them to chatbots that have
mostly helped people write LinkedIn posts. LinkedIn users are happy, though.
To be fair to Nintendo, though, Sony already hiked the PS5 price back in March,
so Nintendo's just following suit. Xbox also had some price hikes recently, but no one buys
those. Unsurprisingly, Nintendo expects sales to dip 17% compared to last year.
Well, at least it seems like they know what they're doing. And that's reassuring.
French prosecutors have escalated their probe into Elon Musk and the platform,
formerly known as Twitter, to a full criminal investigation. The probe kicked off in January
2025 over allegations of Musk using X for political manipulation, and it then ramped up when Grok
went mecha-Hitler and started generating deepfakes and CSAM at the end of last year. Very cool.
This prompted French officials to raid X's Paris offices in February and issue a summons for Musk
and former X CEO Linda Jacarino to appear in Paris on April 20th. Unsurprisingly,
both of them no-showed, but Musk did make sure to let everyone know what he thought of the summons,
tweeting that the prosecutors had intellectual disabilities, but not phrasing it like that at
all and definitely phrasing it in the way you know he would have said it.
The U.S. Justice Department is refusing to cooperate with the investigation, claiming the
French government is wrongfully regulating an American social media platform. Hey,
if the French want to regulate our companies, they need to come over here and do a regime change
like a normal country. Meta is rolling out an AI tool that scans your kids' bones.
Why are they scanning their bones in order to figure out their ages? It's not weird.
The company is reportedly launching this as a form of age verification that doesn't require ID
or facial scanning, instead using photos to extract things like height, posture, and bone structure.
The rollout is likely response to a preliminary EU finding that Meta is violating the digital
services act by failing to keep under-13s off of its platforms and also probably that
recent New Mexico ruling that found Meta liable for misleading users about child safety.
Critics have largely dismissed the whole bones-based broach as AI phrenology aimed at appeasing
regulators rather than actually keeping kids off the platform. Meta probably wants those kids
on the platform. Meta however claims that its goal is to limit the cases of children
circumventing facial scanning technology using sophisticated techniques like drawing on a fake
mustache, which Wired reported was exactly how a 12-year-old convinced a facial scanning-based
age verification system that he was 15, an age at which many children famously grow mustaches.
I mean now if those kids want to get past age verification, they'll need at least
two other kids and a trench coat and maybe our sponsor. I confess I am awfully fond of the quick
bits and I shall endeavor not to be greedy. Why? Why?
TCL showed off a display panel with a refresh rate of just 0.01 hertz. That's one frame
every 100 seconds, as opposed to one hertz, which is one frame every second. LG only just
started rolling out those one-hertz panels, but TCL wanted to top the competition and move
100 times slower. The display uses 12 independent zones to swap between 120 hertz
and basically a static image. Yeah, and TCL estimates it could add over an hour of video
playback. It's the ideal display for watching paint dry in stunning 4K. The hacking group
Shiny Hunters has infiltrated the widely used Canvas learning portal for thousands of schools,
including prestigious organizations like Harvard, Columbia and Princeton. The group claims it
stole around 275 million records from Canvas' parent company Instructure, including names,
emails and student IDs. They've now given affected schools until May 12th to negotiate a
settlement before the data gets leaked. The silver lining for a lot of those kids that might get
their info leaked is that it happened during finals week. So now they have a few extra days
to try not to fail calculus too. It might be worth it. OpenAI launched GPT 5.5 Cyber,
a version of 5.5 with fewer guardrails for vetted defenders in its Trusted Access for Cyber
program. It handles bug hunting, malware reverse engineering and penetration testing.
It comes a month after Sam Altman criticized Anthropic for gating mythos, calling it
fear-based marketing. At this point, Altman and Amade are performing
anything you can do at each other across San Francisco. And everyone's watching.
Nobody show this to Lin-Manuel Miranda. I don't want to give him any ideas.
And a Verge reporter was run over by a YARBO lawnmower for science after researcher
Andreas Makris hijacked it from 6,000 miles away. These $5,000 robots ship with hard-coded
root passwords, allowing hackers to override safety stops and steal Wi-Fi credentials.
Now despite Makris reporting the flaw, YARBO initially called the back door
a deliberate design decision. They have now publicly said they are taking action.
By giving the 200 pound robot with spinning blades a password. Seems like a good idea.
And I have an even better idea. Why don't you come back here on Monday for more tech news?
And I will stop doing this accent. I'm so sorry. I apologize to all the UK. Love you.