Due to the nature of entropy, time can only move forward, never backwards,
which is why we can only tell you what happened yesterday and not what will happen tomorrow.
For now, maybe stay tuned.
Microsoft has suddenly and unexpectedly announced that it will be ending support for the Windows
subsystem for Android, which allows Android apps to be downloaded and run on Windows 11.
The company announced the deprecation yesterday, and the feature can no longer be installed as of
today. Those who currently have Android app support will have another year before support ends entirely
and the apps gradually break and cease to function. The feature was first announced in 2021 and
debuted a year later, but it lacked access to the Google Play Store, instead relying on the
Amazon App Store, which is what your mom means when she says that we have the Google Play Store
at home. It's also why, apparently, nobody used this feature.
It might not be obvious why somebody would want to download Pokemon Go to their desktop,
but the idea was probably to increase the amount of apps that can be reasonably run on
Windows-powered touchscreens, while also providing an answer to Chrome OS' Android support and
macOS' iOS app support. While Microsoft didn't say why they're ditching Android app support now,
it's unlikely that anyone will really lose sleep over it, as, apparently, no one really cared
about using Android apps on Windows in the first place. Following sustained criticism of its
at-best half-assed attempt to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act, Apple has done some
soul-searching and responded with a few gentle tweaks to its current compliance plan. Specifically,
Apple simplified the process for developers to accept its awful new business terms and added
a one-time termination option if devs want to revert back to the previous, less awful terms.
But still kind of awful. You didn't like it in there, did you?
The company will also no longer require a letter of credit from makers of rival
app marketplaces, so long as they have an established app business in the EU and a developer
account in good standing that is at least two years old. One party you'd expect to respond
positively to these changes is Epic Games, best known for multiple antitrust lawsuits against
Apple and Google and also some video games. But it turns out that only a month after reinstating
Epic Games developer account, Apple has once again terminated it, calling the gaming company
verifiably untrustworthy given its past behavior, though it's unclear what in the past month
made them change their minds about changing their minds. While Google has seemed to be
responding in good faith to the EU's new rules, Epic Games is also accusing them of half-assed
compliance following a Google blog post that basically goes over how they already are in
compliance with the new rules, despite charging up to 27% on web transactions that they aren't
even involved in processing. Hopefully for Apple and Google, these quarter-buttacked changes
will be enough when the compliance deadline comes, which is March 7th, otherwise known as
Tomorrow. And if there's one thing the EU is known for, it's putting their entire ass
into everything they do. EU is most of a continent. It's got a pretty big ass.
According to Anthropic, the other giant AI tech company, its next-gen Claude III
Opus model matches and even occasionally surpasses OpenAI's GPT-4 on several AI benchmarks for
reasoning, math, coding, multilingual understanding, and vision.
Claude III's lightweight and ultra-lightweight variants, Sonnet and Haiku, fell short on some
benchmarks but still showed a distinct improvement over GPT-3.5. One of Anthropic's prompt engineers,
Alex Albert, even shared a cute anecdote where Claude III Opus seemed to show meta-awareness
that it was under evaluation. The test involved asking Opus to find a needle in a haystack by
answering a question using a small piece of information buried in a large collection of
documents equivalent to around 200,000 tokens in size. After being asked about pizza toppings,
Claude responded with the correct phrase from the documents, then noted that the sentence
seemed out of place in the rest of the material, saying, quote, I suspect this pizza topping
fact, quotes, may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention.
It's kind of amazing to see a robot that seems capable of determining the intent of a test,
especially when I still can't even tell when people are hitting on me.
A quick bit is defined as a class of subatomic particles that form the building blocks
of tech news. And that's just science.
Tesla's German Gigafactory was forced to pause production yesterday after an electricity
pylon close to the facility was set on fire by environment activists who identified themselves
as the volcano group. I'm guessing they're pyromaniacs who also want to help the planet.
Unfortunately, the arson attack also knocked out power to thousands of residents nearby,
not including the 100 or so environmentalists camping in the surrounding forest to try and
prevent Tesla from chopping it down. One group called Robin Wood told the BBC it had nothing to
do with the fire. And this is why LMG hasn't expanded to Germany. There are scores of angry
Germans hiding in the woods and they all hate each other. New European safety rules will require
car manufacturers to bring back physical controls. As of January 2026, turn signals,
windshield wiper controls, the car horn, you know, hazard warning lights and any built-in
SOS features need to have tangible controls for cars to earn a five-star safety rating.
So drivers don't have to take their eyes off the road to fiddle with a touchscreen,
which who thought of this in the first place? Even more upsetting, Europe will require car makers
to stop giving drivers complimentary sleep masks and Xanax prescriptions. What are they supposed to
do? Reality's hard. Oregon has passed a right to repair bill so competent, Apple won't stop
bitching about it. Senate Bill 1596 requires manufacturers to make any documentation, tool,
part or other device they provide to authorized service providers available to device owners
and independent repair shops. While Apple is mostly in favor of the bill, mostly dead.
The company claims the wording may force them to allow third-party biometric sensors
to work in their devices that could lead to unauthorized access of users' personal data.
And that does sound scary. But Apple also expects me to trust some guy just because he has a blue
shirt on and I feel like that might undercut their point. In fact, I trust them until I
notice their shirt's blue. Wait a second, where am I? I went shopping for groceries.
Google says that it's adjusting its search ranking system to downgrade the position of
content that exists primarily to summarize other content, a category that includes SEO spam,
but also an absolute avalanche of machine-generated content. Google, of course, has been in a
never-ending arms race against spam and low-quality content since the dawn of time,
by which I mean 1998. However, Google now seems to be tacitly acknowledging growing criticism
that its search results are getting worse in no small part due to the increasing availability
and cheapness of relatively high-quality AI tools. In particular, Google says it will target
large content mills and reputation abuse, which is where otherwise respectable sites allow
themselves to be used to raise the profile of certain kinds of spam, like a fine dining restaurant
that also sells TVs that fell off the back of a truck, if you want it.
It's got 56 channels. And Linux, that's an operating system, has hit an all-time high
market share of 4.03% of worldwide desktop OSes, according to research firm StatCounter.
That's a respectable bump up from the 1.58% of desktops and laptops that ran Linux five years ago
in February 2019. While by the numbers, the open-source OS is still small potatoes,
Windows' dominant market share has been falling for the past decade, and even macOS seems to have
more or less plateaued at around 20%. The trend lines are looking good for Linux long-term,
so we wish a happy 4% day and a godspeed to the Linux lovers, dorkiest of the nerds.
I'm sorry for not calling it GNU Linux.
And if you're dorky enough, come back on Friday for more tech news. We're going to make
so many references to subroutines and logic gates and stuff, it's going to be awesome.
Speaking of hitting, now it's time for quid-