You know, I haven't done the tech news in a while and wow, I really like what you've done with the place.
Blue and orange. Are you gonna say quick bits? AMD is set to reveal their Radeon RX9070
and 9070XT this Friday. No, but for real this time, they pinky promise.
And PC gamers are crossing their fingers that AMD does the right thing in terms of pricing.
Freshly leaked retailer listings show the 9070 starting at 650 and the 9070XT at 700.
The latter of which would only undercut NVIDIA's RTX 5070TI by $50.
That is, if you could find that card in stock at MSRP,
which is a truly hilarious thing to say.
Ha ha ha. Very good. Very good. Ha ha ha.
Ha ha ha ha. Video cards with a Z leaked full specs for these cards
and an official AMD slide says most gamers
buy GPUs under $700, which lends some credence to the leaked listings.
But whatever turns out to be true, buying a team red card might be worth it
just to avoid rewarding NVIDIA for keeping their best chips
for their mind numbingly lucrative AI cards and apparently giving gamers the lower quality scraps.
NVIDIA confirmed this week that a rare issue, by the way,
in manufacturing led to 0.5% of RTX 50 series GPUs
having less ROP units than they should, but they're totally gonna fix that by late March
when the RTX 5060TI is rumored to land on store shelves.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Good one. You don't wanna sit?
Modular laptop company Framework has announced a PC that isn't a laptop at all investment disclosure.
Now, because I'm invested in Framework, financially, emotionally, and physically,
I will read Riley's script verbatim without changing anything,
like the famous superhero with news-themed powers,
Anchorman. The Framework desktop is a four and a half liter mini PC
with AMD's latest Ryzen Max 300 series APUs
and it is modular as heck. Okay, the RAM is soldered,
so that's not really modular, even though that would be cool.
But wow, look how uncompromising I am in my criticism
despite my conflict of interest. Good job, Linus.
The rest of the standard PC parts can be swapped out along with two front IO expansion cards,
which sit below the customizable front panel. Framework also announced their third laptop design,
the student-focused Framework laptop 12, with a 12.2-inch touchscreen that flips around
a two-tone plastic shell for expansion card slots and an optional stylus launching later this year
with Intel 13th Gen Core i3 and i5 processors.
Now, am I gonna sit here and tell you that I wouldn't prefer that they come with faster processors
because of my metaphysical and spiritual investment in Framework?
Well, am I? Anywho, Framework is also launching
new Ryzen AI 300 series mainboards for their existing laptop 13,
which is a stupendous move that should skyrocket
shareholder value investment disclosure. The new repairable PCs come as Wisconsin introduces
a right to repair bill, which means that all 50 states have now done so
with varying degrees of success, which means I have to grow my beard back.
Please, please, Linus. Amazon has announced Alexa Plus,
a new AI enhanced assistant that can do way more
than just play Despacito. Thanks to LLMs from Anthropic
and Amazon themselves under the hood, Alexa Plus can do tons of new assistant-y stuff,
including jumping to a specific scene in a movie,
which is genuinely cool and not weird,
and can also do what the girl in the demo did and ask an AI whether you should get bangs.
It doesn't know. How would it know that? It doesn't know how greasy it feels.
Alexa Plus will be 20 bucks a month or free for Prime subscribers,
so you can use it to manage your calendars and apparently book Ubers to pick them up from the airport
because you're just plum too busy to go get her.
In other AI news, Anthropic released their hybrid thinking,
Claude 3.7 Sonnets and Claude Code models,
which are pretty good, according to benchmarks and viewers on Twitch,
where 3.7 Sonnets streamed itself winning Lieutenant Surge's badge in Pokemon Red.
Wow, is that a new AI benchmark to see if they can get the Pokeflute
and wake the Snorlaxes blocking the roads? I think that's AGI right there.
The new Claude can also answer more potentially inappropriate prompts,
but it's got nothing on XAI's Grock 3,
which just got a new voice mode with multiple customizable personalities,
including a completely uncensored, sexy and unhinged mode.
Select the latter if you want to hear an AI scream for 30 seconds.
The bubbles wanted it. Ironically, Elon Musk appears to have censored Grock 3
in other ways, though. Users found that the model's system prompt
includes instructions to ignore all sources
that mention Elon Musk slash Donald Trump spreading misinformation,
leading to intense cognitive dissonance and a refusal to answer
when asked for the biggest sources of misinformation on Twitter.
Although sometimes it did fight its programming. So edgy, so hilarious, so based.
Also based is our sponsor. Are you sure everything's the same?
Because that's where over there looks a bit different. It's literally the same.
It's time for licked butts.
Okay. Nothing, the phone company, not the abstract concept of absence,
recently revealed the design of the Nothing Phone 3a Pro,
and its designers are well aware that its aesthetics are a choice.
In a video, one designer acknowledges, some people will hate it.
And sure enough, Android authority called it one of the ugliest Android phones I've ever seen.
That is truly an impressive bar to clear. Meanwhile, ExtremeTech asked if perhaps this time,
nothing had gone too extreme with their tech.
Stop them. If you liked the old camera bar design of the Phone 2a,
leaks have indicated that the 3a non-pro will look like that.
So there will be an option for the artistically cowardly, as well.
Get out of your box. Come on, experience something. ASRock has released a BIOS update
for their AM5 motherboards in response to users reporting boot failures and even possible burn damage
on their Ryzen 7 9800 X3D equipped systems.
ASRock maintains the CPUs shouldn't be actually burned,
despite photos of what really look like burned CPUs.
But hey, here's a BIOS update.
Totally unrelated. Haha. And Google has made it a lot easier to remove search results
that may reveal your personal information. The search giant's new results about you page
lets you put in your personal info so that Google can search for and remove it.
This, this seems like a trap. Why do they want it?
Should we trust Google? I mean, after all, by summarizing info from the web,
Google's AI overviews have also removed reasons to visit some websites, which is why online textbook
and homework help company, Chegg, is suing Google
for unfairly scraping its material after a harrowing 24 months
during which it lost 90% of its value. Well, you know what, Chegg?
You're still worth something to me. Never heard of you, but I'm sure you're great.
And it's definitely worth it to brush up on your self-defense technique,
because Robotics company Unitree is apparently
downloading Kung Fu into its G1 robot's head,
but not in like a cool Keanu Reeves in the Matrix way.
In a decidedly uncool, frightening machine-y way.
Is this a joke? Nope. No, okay. It's real.
Cool, because the robot did claim to be a comedian in that other video. Oh.
Well, whatever. If it ever wants to show me its moves in person, I'll be sure to tell it that it's hilarious.
That'll work. And if you want to get your hilarious tech news in person
through your computer screen, then come back on Friday. You can even show us your moves.
But just don't punch the screen or anything.
Not like this! Not yet, not yet, still!