Tech news comes and tech news goes. I try to make it stay for a while, but that never works.
I can't, I can't control it. It doesn't listen.
The humane AI pin, the first in a coming wave
of small AI powered devices has launched.
And now everyone's upset. Tech reviewers are upset that the AI pin is expensive,
requiring a $700 purchase, plus a $24 a month T-Mobile 4G LTE subscription,
separate from your phone plan. It's incredibly slow to respond.
It doesn't actually do what it's supposed to half the time. It overheats regularly,
makes you look like a weirdo in public, and that's only scratching the surface.
But defenders of the AI pin are also upset because the tech reviewers just don't get
that it's not meant to replace your smartphone. You shouldn't compare the AI pin to a smartphone.
You should compare it to the first iPhone because both of them sucked at launch.
Listen, humane's head engineer Ken Kosienda
admits that the revolutionary AI device his company just launched is frustrating sometimes.
Occasionally, the AI simply won't listen and has to be sent to its room.
But that doesn't mean you should write the pin off. Why don't you watch humane's YouTube videos
where they try to explain what the fuck this thing is?
At the very least, it might humanize humane's CEO
and co-founder, former Apple designer Imran Choudhury.
See, he's not sad all the time. Okay, now's the part where I say,
to be fair, the AI pin is an attempt to create a new category of device
which always comes with growing pains. Humane has posted a roadmap of upcoming features
and to be honest, the idea of using just my voice for a bunch of things which currently require
grabbing my phone sounds great. But this ain't it, chief.
Now, to wait a couple weeks for the Rabbit R1 to launch so we can do this all over again.
Apple announced that iPhone owners and repair shops
will be able to fix their devices with used parts from other iPhones and not have to deal
with a shameful error message for installing a part that wasn't genuine.
Oh, I can't believe you've done this. Apple has specified that the used parts affected
by this update, including face ID and touch ID sensors,
screens, batteries and cameras, still have to be genuine Apple parts.
Third-party components will not work correctly. This is because of parts pairing.
Apple's practice of requiring an iPhone to validate whether a part is genuine,
which Apple hardware executive, John Turnes, convincingly called not evil.
Okay. To be clear, Apple's announcement is unquestionably
great news for repair heads. Just don't let Apple diehards know
that their devices have become more open. They don't seem to like that.
Here's a little something for everyone though. Mark Muadib, God Emperor German says that new Macs
will be coming out later this year powered by Apple's new M4 chips,
which will pack extra AI smarts and come in three flavors,
code named Donan, Brava and Hydra.
I'm assuming because Apple's running out of synonyms for Ultra.
The Apple M4 Mucho Grande. Haven't used that one.
If you use it, you owe me royalties. Like it or not, a bunch of other noteworthy AI news
occurred this week, starting with the launch of UDO, an AI music generator created by a team
of former Google DeepMinders. Together with the also very good Suno V3,
which launched a few weeks ago, we're basically having a Sora moment for AI music,
except these tools are actually available. Meaning it's easier than ever to make a 50s pop ballad
about how your friend soiled himself at work. It is a banger.
Or if you prefer a sad girl indie song about software license terms.
We couldn't do these things before. Other models released this week include Mixdral 8X22B,
which French startup, Mistral, dropped as a 281 Gigabyte torrent file,
and Gemini 1.5 Pro, which is now available to developers
through Google's Vertex AI platform. Open AI released a new version of GPT-4 Turbo,
but didn't initially describe what was different about it,
other than saying it's majorly improved. Sam Altman chimed in to clarify
that it's significantly smarter and more pleasant to use.
To be specific though, it's more good and less bad.
Open AI eventually did post benchmark results showing that it's kind of better at math.
I don't know, maybe the two researchers just fired by the for-profit non-profit
for allegedly leaking information, no more. We should ask them before they start their own company
and get billions from Microsoft. QuickBits aren't called QuickBits because they're fast.
They're made out of QuickLine, and if you touch them, they cause severe irritation.
My life is pain. Discord has shut down the servers
for Nintendo Switch emulators, Suyu and Sudachi, and completely disabled
the Discord accounts of their lead developers. The platform claims there was a court ordered injunction
for the takedown of materials on those servers, likely because both Suyu and Sudachi
started life as forks of Yuzu, the emulator Nintendo sued all the way to hell.
And that's not the only bad news for Suyu-enthus-Suyu-seists, all right.
According to someone claiming to be a Suyu developer,
the emulation project is dead, or rather, it's no longer a thing.
That's beautiful. I hope that's what my kids say about me and my funeral.
Intel has decided to discontinue boxed versions
of their 13th gen core K series CPUs,
something that may seem like a surprising move seeing that boxed 12th gen chips are still alive and well,
but it makes a bit more sense when you consider that all the discontinued SKUs are based on the same silicon
that's being used in the newer, better, 14th gen K series chips.
Essentially, the 12th gen chips are like your dog and 13th gen is a kid, okay?
Hear me out. I think Jacob wrote this one. A dog can't replace a kid, but a newer, better kid can.
Mm, not sure. You just get rid of the old one
and call the new one by the old one's name. No one knows the difference, everyone wins,
except the older kid. Instagram is taking a bold new step
in the fight against unsolicited dick pics
by introducing a feature that proactively scans images
sent as DMs for nudity and then blurs it.
Now this feature will be on by default for users under 18,
but it's also an option for grown adults who don't want every app to turn into a hookup app.
We have LinkedIn for that. The feature will also gently prompt users
to reconsider if they appear to be trying to send a nude image.
According to Meta, the feature isn't just to shield our poor innocent eyes from unexpected danglage,
but also to undermine blackmailers who use nudes
to encourage unsuspecting users to send them potential extortion material.
Beware, she might say boobs in bio,
but that is just her siren song, calling unwary sailors to dash themselves upon the rocks.
It's dangerous out there. Google has announced that they will be making several AI editing tools for Google Photos
available for free to all users, including Magic Editor, Magic Eraser,
Photo Unblur, and Portrait Light. The features were previously exclusive to Pixel users
and Google One subscribers, while free users had a limited number of uses every month.
The Magic Eraser feature will be particularly useful if you're looking to gradually delete yourself
from all of your loved ones' photos and gaslight them into believing you never existed.
It's at least one use case. And Microsoft has apparently been pushing
full-screen pop-up ads to Windows 10 users,
encouraging them to switch to Windows 11, despite the fact that many of their computers
aren't even eligible to run Windows 11, a fact that the ad itself acknowledges.
Windows 10, you can't get it, but pretty nice, huh?
Official Windows 10 support will soon be ending, of course, and continued security updates for the next year
will cost $61 per device. The upgrade to Windows 11 is free.
You just need to buy a whole new computer, but you don't need anything to come back on Monday
for more tech news. If the internet gets shut off, just, you know, sit in front of your monitor
and imagine what the tech news would be like.