Twitter has officially begun rebranding itself to Elon Musk's favorite letter, X.
The platform is not a Twitter anymore. It's an X Twitter.
If you're not a fan of puns, you're about to have a bad couple days on the internet.
I'm Riley Murdock, this is TechLinked, and this is the letter X in the monotype special
alphabets for font, which also looks similar to a standard character added to Unicode in 2001,
which is why Elon could tweet the new logo of his massive social media company as
literal text. To be fair, Elon has said that they will change the logo to something a bit more
permanent, but it was still kind of sad for me to read this thread by Martin Grasser,
telling the story of how he and two other designers created Twitter's iconic bird logo
before I caught myself being sentimental about marketing for a tech giant and hit the X on the
tab after I found the right one. The rebrand comes soon after Musk handed the CEO reigns to
Lindo Yaccarino, who apparently shares Elon's passion for building X into the Everything app,
capable of serving all four fundamental human needs, audio, video, messaging, and banking,
with a little sprinkle of AI to make things feel extra dystopian.
The new X.com is Elon's latest adventure in trying to brand literally everything he's involved in
with an X in some way, including PayPal. There's a whole story there, but this time,
it's not just the platform. Tweets will now be called X's. I X'd an X this morning,
but no one X'd back at me. Didn't even get any sub X's. Re X? If you're looking to X it,
the platform, I'm sorry, the Twitter alternative landscape isn't looking super compelling.
Threads just got an update with new features, but Meta won't say what they are. Although TikTok
just added text posts. And to be frank, the CCP having all my data has never seemed less problematic.
When Google's new extension API for Chrome made it more difficult for ad blocking extensions
to function, Mozilla managed to implement a workaround keeping ad blockers working.
Fortunately for Google, a new proposal by four of the company's engineers promises to find a
completely new way to have the internet be full of nice, orderly, auto-playing videos that follow
you down the page as you scroll. Where are you going? There's nothing down there. What are you
looking for the FAQs? Lewis Rossman called the proposal, known as the web environment integrity
explainer, one of the scariest things he's ever heard in his life, and he's talked to Linus off
camera. Google's engineers propose that websites ask for tokens from users' machines, which have
been verified by attesters, controlled by, yep, Google. This would most likely break most ad
blockers and with Google controlling which websites and browsers are seen as trustworthy,
could put nails in the coffin of the open web, which is why many critics on GitHub are calling
the scheme DRM for websites. Look, it's okay. This internet just turned into network television,
but we can probably start a different web, free of government and corporate control.
You mean the dark web? A different one than that. Apple has begun sending out developer kits for the
Vision Pro Mixed Reality headset and, oh, I thought Tim Cook was going to send assassins for not
saying spatial computing instead of mixed reality. The kits are supposed to be kept super secret
and not reviewed by anyone in a YouTube video, so do not listen to Marquez here. Think of your
waifu and chibi figurines. What will they do when the assassins come? Some developers will
use the kits to optimize their apps for virtual, I mean, for spatial computing, but according to
Markham's Girmatron at Bloomberg, Netflix and many other high-profile developers will not be
optimizing their apps for the rather small Vision Pro user base, if when it exists. After all,
recent reports say Apple only expects to ship 150,000 units in 2024 about 500 times smaller
than the market for Apple's other devices. Sure, Netflix has an incentive to optimize a Vision
Pro app so users don't just watch Apple TV Plus instead, but I don't know, maybe Netflix knows
that Apple's star-studded, well-reviewed shows automatically look way better than
Hot Love on the Beach Island 20-day fiancee Battle Royale. They got season two somehow.
Bits taste good every time, with or without milk.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's other startup trying to fundamentally change human life on the planet as
we know it, Worldcoin, has launched its global rollout after already scanning the eyeballs of
two million users with its creepy orb thing, which is actually not that scary according to this
crypto reporter. But don't worry, in return, the human receives some Worldcoin cryptocurrency,
which actually shot up in value following today's news, and more importantly, a world ID,
which can theoretically be used to prove said humans aren't robots. Which I guess will be more
necessary than ever thanks to OpenAI unleashing their chatbot into the world. He may have let
the bull into the China shop, but he came prepared with lots. He's got lots of tape.
A leaked hands-on video of Sony's upcoming Project Q PlayStation streaming handheld
has revealed that the device runs some version of Android, or at least this one does,
igniting the hopes of many tinkers who no doubt dream of circumventing Sony's restrictions.
I mean, it's supposed to only be able to stream PlayStation 5 games on a local network, which
seems kind of ridiculous until you see the picture with the screen taken off and realize,
I mean, you can't do anything else because there's nothing in there. That's all they
could manage. It looks like one half of the weirdest waffle iron ever. I want to cook a waffle
in there. ASUS has announced plans to begin mass production of its RTX 4070 graphics card
without an extra power connector that it revealed back in Computex as soon as this fall is when
they'll begin mass production. But the card requires a specific ASUS motherboard with an
additional connector slot next to the standard PCIe x16 slot, which is powered by a 16 pin
connector on the back of the motherboard. So, calling it connector less as many are doing
online isn't quite accurate. It rubs me the wrong way and frankly puts me in a bad mood,
even though it does come in a very nice minimalist white color. I might buy one to hang on my wall,
but not for gaming. In other GPU news, gaming handheld maker GPD has released a video
showing that the company's external GPU dock works with one of the company's main competing
products, the Steam Deck. What a quirky situation. What's even quirkier is that you have to open up
the deck and remove its M.2 SSD in order to use GPD's Oculink adapter and then leave the back off
and run Windows instead of SteamOS off of a micro SD card. Oh man, but you're gonna get a few more
frames on that thing. It's gonna be pretty good. And isn't that all worth it? And in case you missed
it, Neopets is entering a whole new era this week and they've got a new brand ambassador along for
the ride, music legend John Legend, who excitedly posted to his Instagram followers the big news
on the weekend. Like, wow, congrats to Neopets for landing a big celebrity for the job, but there's
also evidence of John's claim that the game has long been a favorite in his family's house.
Chrissy Teigen was tweeting about the game back in 2018. Back when tweets could just be tweets.
Exes? Come on! And you come on back on Wednesday for more tech news, delivered by me, a human verified
by the world coin world government. As long as they're still happy with me, we'll have to see.