WEBVTT

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Due to the nature of entropy, time can only move forward, never backwards,

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which is why we can only tell you what happened yesterday and not what will happen tomorrow.

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For now, maybe stay tuned.

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Microsoft has suddenly and unexpectedly announced that it will be ending support for the Windows

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subsystem for Android, which allows Android apps to be downloaded and run on Windows 11.

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The company announced the deprecation yesterday, and the feature can no longer be installed as of

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today. Those who currently have Android app support will have another year before support ends entirely

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and the apps gradually break and cease to function. The feature was first announced in 2021 and

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debuted a year later, but it lacked access to the Google Play Store, instead relying on the

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Amazon App Store, which is what your mom means when she says that we have the Google Play Store

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at home. It's also why, apparently, nobody used this feature.

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It might not be obvious why somebody would want to download Pokemon Go to their desktop,

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but the idea was probably to increase the amount of apps that can be reasonably run on

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Windows-powered touchscreens, while also providing an answer to Chrome OS' Android support and

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macOS' iOS app support. While Microsoft didn't say why they're ditching Android app support now,

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it's unlikely that anyone will really lose sleep over it, as, apparently, no one really cared

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about using Android apps on Windows in the first place. Following sustained criticism of its

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at-best half-assed attempt to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act, Apple has done some

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soul-searching and responded with a few gentle tweaks to its current compliance plan. Specifically,

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Apple simplified the process for developers to accept its awful new business terms and added

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a one-time termination option if devs want to revert back to the previous, less awful terms.

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But still kind of awful. You didn't like it in there, did you?

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The company will also no longer require a letter of credit from makers of rival

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app marketplaces, so long as they have an established app business in the EU and a developer

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account in good standing that is at least two years old. One party you'd expect to respond

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positively to these changes is Epic Games, best known for multiple antitrust lawsuits against

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Apple and Google and also some video games. But it turns out that only a month after reinstating

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Epic Games developer account, Apple has once again terminated it, calling the gaming company

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verifiably untrustworthy given its past behavior, though it's unclear what in the past month

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made them change their minds about changing their minds. While Google has seemed to be

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responding in good faith to the EU's new rules, Epic Games is also accusing them of half-assed

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compliance following a Google blog post that basically goes over how they already are in

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compliance with the new rules, despite charging up to 27% on web transactions that they aren't

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even involved in processing. Hopefully for Apple and Google, these quarter-buttacked changes

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will be enough when the compliance deadline comes, which is March 7th, otherwise known as

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Tomorrow. And if there's one thing the EU is known for, it's putting their entire ass

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into everything they do. EU is most of a continent. It's got a pretty big ass.

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According to Anthropic, the other giant AI tech company, its next-gen Claude III

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Opus model matches and even occasionally surpasses OpenAI's GPT-4 on several AI benchmarks for

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reasoning, math, coding, multilingual understanding, and vision.

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Claude III's lightweight and ultra-lightweight variants, Sonnet and Haiku, fell short on some

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benchmarks but still showed a distinct improvement over GPT-3.5. One of Anthropic's prompt engineers,

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Alex Albert, even shared a cute anecdote where Claude III Opus seemed to show meta-awareness

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that it was under evaluation. The test involved asking Opus to find a needle in a haystack by

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answering a question using a small piece of information buried in a large collection of

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documents equivalent to around 200,000 tokens in size. After being asked about pizza toppings,

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Claude responded with the correct phrase from the documents, then noted that the sentence

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seemed out of place in the rest of the material, saying, quote, I suspect this pizza topping

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fact, quotes, may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention.

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It's kind of amazing to see a robot that seems capable of determining the intent of a test,

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especially when I still can't even tell when people are hitting on me.

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A quick bit is defined as a class of subatomic particles that form the building blocks

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of tech news. And that's just science.

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Tesla's German Gigafactory was forced to pause production yesterday after an electricity

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pylon close to the facility was set on fire by environment activists who identified themselves

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as the volcano group. I'm guessing they're pyromaniacs who also want to help the planet.

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Unfortunately, the arson attack also knocked out power to thousands of residents nearby,

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not including the 100 or so environmentalists camping in the surrounding forest to try and

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prevent Tesla from chopping it down. One group called Robin Wood told the BBC it had nothing to

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do with the fire. And this is why LMG hasn't expanded to Germany. There are scores of angry

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Germans hiding in the woods and they all hate each other. New European safety rules will require

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car manufacturers to bring back physical controls. As of January 2026, turn signals,

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windshield wiper controls, the car horn, you know, hazard warning lights and any built-in

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SOS features need to have tangible controls for cars to earn a five-star safety rating.

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So drivers don't have to take their eyes off the road to fiddle with a touchscreen,

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which who thought of this in the first place? Even more upsetting, Europe will require car makers

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to stop giving drivers complimentary sleep masks and Xanax prescriptions. What are they supposed to

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do? Reality's hard. Oregon has passed a right to repair bill so competent, Apple won't stop

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bitching about it. Senate Bill 1596 requires manufacturers to make any documentation, tool,

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part or other device they provide to authorized service providers available to device owners

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and independent repair shops. While Apple is mostly in favor of the bill, mostly dead.

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The company claims the wording may force them to allow third-party biometric sensors

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to work in their devices that could lead to unauthorized access of users' personal data.

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And that does sound scary. But Apple also expects me to trust some guy just because he has a blue

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shirt on and I feel like that might undercut their point. In fact, I trust them until I

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notice their shirt's blue. Wait a second, where am I? I went shopping for groceries.

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Google says that it's adjusting its search ranking system to downgrade the position of

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content that exists primarily to summarize other content, a category that includes SEO spam,

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but also an absolute avalanche of machine-generated content. Google, of course, has been in a

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never-ending arms race against spam and low-quality content since the dawn of time,

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by which I mean 1998. However, Google now seems to be tacitly acknowledging growing criticism

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that its search results are getting worse in no small part due to the increasing availability

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and cheapness of relatively high-quality AI tools. In particular, Google says it will target

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large content mills and reputation abuse, which is where otherwise respectable sites allow

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themselves to be used to raise the profile of certain kinds of spam, like a fine dining restaurant

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that also sells TVs that fell off the back of a truck, if you want it.

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It's got 56 channels. And Linux, that's an operating system, has hit an all-time high

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market share of 4.03% of worldwide desktop OSes, according to research firm StatCounter.

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That's a respectable bump up from the 1.58% of desktops and laptops that ran Linux five years ago

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in February 2019. While by the numbers, the open-source OS is still small potatoes,

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Windows' dominant market share has been falling for the past decade, and even macOS seems to have

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more or less plateaued at around 20%. The trend lines are looking good for Linux long-term,

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so we wish a happy 4% day and a godspeed to the Linux lovers, dorkiest of the nerds.

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I'm sorry for not calling it GNU Linux.

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And if you're dorky enough, come back on Friday for more tech news. We're going to make

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so many references to subroutines and logic gates and stuff, it's going to be awesome.

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Speaking of hitting, now it's time for quid-