The things life throws at you sometimes. Triumphs, betrayals, literal tons of tech news.
It can be a lot, but don't worry, cause I'm here to add more of that last one to the pile.
You're strong, you can take it. Microsoft has apparently had enough
of being called microslop and has officially banned the word
from the official co-pilot discord server.
Naturally, this went as well as you could probably expect
after the filter went live, users responded with the maturity of,
well discord users and flooded the chat with creative variants of the Microsoft name
like microslop with a zero or sloppy soft,
which was mine, it came in college. A day later, the constant turmoil eventually led
to the server's moderators disabling message history
and restricting posting altogether. What was Microsoft's strategy here?
Fixed co-pilots reputation by telling their most online users exactly which words
they aren't allowed to say, they didn't have loves that.
Maybe CEO Sacha Nadella was just grumpy that apparently no one had listened
to his blog post from December, urging us to move past the idea
of slop versus sophistication. He had a point, 10 years from now,
you're gonna feel pretty foolish when you're slurping happily from the trough
with all the other piggies. So stop calling it slop, investors can hear you.
The Mobile World Congress kicked off today in Barcelona featuring a surprise guest,
the new iPhone 17E just announced by Apple.
They almost never participate in big tech conferences. The entire court is speculating that it's simply a ruse
to impress the Duke's fair cousin. Muriel?
Apple has finally fixed the largest complaint budget buyers had with a 16E
by equipping the 17E with MagSafe. They also doubled the base storage to 256 gigabytes
while maintaining the 599 price point. They're so good to us.
Apple has also bumped the chip in the iPad Air
from an M3 to an M4 while keeping its $600 MSRP,
128 gigabytes of base storage and 12 gigabytes of RAM,
which is so exciting. You'll probably want to not pre-order it on March 4th
because it hit shelves on March 11th.
Don't do it, not even one. Don't even line up.
Apple's sudden appearance had the Android phones a little bit flustered, but Xiaomi still managed
to show off the Leica Lights phone 17 Ultra
blurring the line between phone and DSLR camera
by putting a big circle on the back. My brain is confused.
What is it? Motorola showed off the Razer Fold,
its first book-style foldable and intriguingly, an enterprise-focused partnership
with the GrapheneOS Foundation. You know, the privacy-focused Android fork
you can already install yourself, but now it will come in a suit,
maybe made of a single layer of carbon atoms.
You never know what these guys, but phones gotta connect somehow, so it's a good thing that Qualcomm
announced their next-gen modem, which supports native 5G over satellite.
And I'm just happy this wasn't a thing back in the year 2000, or Castaway starring Tom Hanks.
Would've been a terrible film. Over immediately. But if you thought MWC was just for, you know,
mobiles, you clearly underestimated just how much R&D money these companies
leave completely unsupervised. Xiaomi unveiled the Vision GT electric supercar concept,
which is gonna be in the Gran Turismo racing game.
You guys? I can't wait. Meanwhile, Lenovo brought enough concepts to Barcelona
to fill a whole separate convention center. First, they showed off a concept for the Legion Go Fold,
a foldable Windows gaming handheld, because the one thing missing
from your portable Steam library is a mechanical hinge, an inevitable repair bill.
Lenovo also showed off a Thinkbook modular AI PC concept,
the result of a framework laptop and an ASUS ZenBook Duo having a baby
in the worst way you can imagine. I didn't do it.
It's essentially a system of magnetic modular screens,
keyboards, accessories, and ports, so you can build the laptop you want,
then swap out anything on the fly, which is genuinely awesome.
I make jokes. It's awesome. It's such a great concept that I can't wait
to never be able to buy it, but it wouldn't be a tech event without at least one robot.
Lenovo explored the concept for a desktop AI workmate
that is literally a robot ARM with puppy dog eyes.
Look at his little face. He wants to help you optimize your spreadsheets.
And if that wasn't enough robotics for you, Honor unveiled its robot phone,
a futuristic device sporting a little motorized robotic gimbal ARM right on the back.
Not only does this 200 megapixel mechanical limb offer cinematic video stabilization
and autonomous subject tracking, but it physically nods, shakes his head,
and dances to music, which it did alongside Honor's actual robot
backed by a full dance crew. It's hard to be mad at the inevitable robot uprising
when it starts with a perfectly choreographed underground Berlin style dad session.
Still, I bet it couldn't go toe to toe with our sponsors.
I know that was a lot of tech news to take in just now, but I have wonderful news.
There's still five more quick bits and you gotta finish them all.
I know you can do it. There's gonna be a treat after.
Open wide. AMD is launching its Ryzen AI 400 Pro series desktop CPUs,
which confusingly are replacing the Ryzen 8000G
lineup, but we're far beyond any of these chip names making any sense at this point.
There are six new AIM-5 processors that pair Zen 5 CPU cores with Arduino 3.5 integrated graphics
and also an NPU, I guess.
These new chips are basically upgraded laptop CPUs meant for OEMs and business PCs.
At least with the new NPU, you won't get too hot and sweaty in the sheets
with co-pilot trying to work out naming conventions.
Put that robot ARM to good use. Spreadsheets. Seems like everyone just found out
about California's Digital Age Assurance Act passed in October 2025 mandating all operating systems,
including Linux and SteamOS to ask for your age during setup by January 1st, 2027.
The OS will send your age signal to apps so they know which content to flag as restricted,
but despite the non-compliance fines that can run up to $7,500,
age setup is completely self-reported. No photo ID upload required.
It's foolproof. So prepare for a shocking demographic shift
of Linux users magically born on January 1st, 1900,
which is exactly how old I feel when a youth mentions jester maxing or mogging.
YouTube is testing yet another AI feature for shorts.
All your favorite things in one story. This time, it's ad object,
which allows users to insert items into a scene and reimagine, which can generate video
from a single frame of a different short, whether it's yours or someone else's, do ours, do it.
Don't want your likeness to be used in fever dreams created by strangers, I do.
You can opt out, I won't, but that disables all regular remixing on your channel.
And if I can't remix other people's shorts, what is there even to post there?
Original content. Post something so I can post it. A new machine from Nobel Prize women chemist, Omar Yagi,
can pull up to 1,000 liters of drinkable water per day
straight out of your butt. So, straight out of desert air,
even in humidity as low as 20%, stop laughing Riley.
The shipping container size system uses special materials called metal organic frameworks,
basically ultra porous molecular sponges
that grab water vapor from the air and release it when heated by sunlight.
It can run off grid using just wind and solar energy,
meaning remote communities could literally generate water from thin air.
I guess the only question is, can we get an invite to the inaugural pool party?
Not you, you've been rude. This pool is dry.
And a developer named Victor Larios has recreated a 1994 era Linux desktop environment
that runs in your browser, complete with a recreation of the classic CDE interface
and Eximax text editor, and in true 90s fashion, Netscape Navigator.
The reports say it's about as stable as Linux. I mean, as stable as you'd expect
for something pretending to be three decades old. The open source project runs as a modern web app,
though reports say it's about as stable as you'd expect for something pretending to be three decades old.
You can also download it from GitHub and run it locally, if you want to.
Although, I'm not totally sure why you would, although you're a Linux user.
So it might make sense. Now we just needed to run Doom.
After all, 94 was the year the game was ported to Linux.
Fun fact, I knew that and you didn't. I also know you're gonna come back here on Wednesday
for more tech news because you're a fortuitous person.
You have what it takes to get hit with everything Life throws at ya and keeps standing, stand tall, player.
And you just might shoot the high score. What am I saying?
There's so many different ways to take this. We're gonna make it to championships.
Okay.