The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, I've had a heck of a launch week with users and reviewers alike
testing the phone's new titanium construction. And the scores are not looking great, they really
should have paid attention in class. I'm James Shrive, this is TechLinked, and this is the
Repairability Score awarded to the iPhone 15 lineup by iFixit. 4 out of 10, matching the iPhone 14
score after iFixit downgraded it from a 7. You see, the 14 added the ability to open up from
the front or the back, but Apple still heavily limits user repair through software. Kind of like
inviting your friend over to stand in your entryway, but proceed no further.
And value your friendship this much. I get cookies. Similar to many early iPhone 15 Pro owners, iFixit found the titanium shell
scratches really easily, something also discovered by YouTuber JerryRig. Everything
shortly before he cracked the glass back of the 15 Pro Max about two seconds into his bend test.
It might be time for iPhoneers to consider switching to the
Pixel 8 Pro when it launches on October 4th. Google is now promising seven years of software
updates which should really extend the life of your phone as long as it doesn't pull a Pixel 7
and have its buttons randomly fall off. I mean, you barely use them.
Redditors can now earn real money based on the amount of karma and gold they receive on eligible
posts, validating the oceans of blood, sweat, and tears excreted by millions of users who
have spent years toiling in the fake internet point fields.
It's hard not to draw comparisons between the new Reddit contributor program and Twitter's
recent rollout of ad revenue sharing for Twitter Blue. I mean, X-premium subscribers.
If only because social media platforms paying users living wages for a shitpost written
while shitting on the literal shitter is a fairly new thing.
Unlike BlueShack, Redditors won't have to front eight bucks a month to get paid,
but they will have to verify that they meet certain eligibility requirements
like being over 18, living in the US, and having an account in good standing.
They can start farming dollar-dollar bills on eligible contributions which don't include posts
with sexually explicit content or content related to violence, drugs, farms, gambling,
scams, crypto or otherwise, and of course, donations to chair.
References to the new program were actually first spotted by Android Authority back in July
when Reddit announced a phase out of Reddit coins and gold shortly before launching more
NFT avatars which have somehow survived the crypto collapse. Yes, they're still cringe,
but it's Reddit, so it doesn't matter. NVIDIA envisions a future where games are mostly rendered
from AI-generated frames as opposed to frames produced with traditional rasterization at
native resolution because they'd look better anyway. Like how any picture pre-2022 pales in
comparison to the anime wife whose mid-journey creates for me to pretend to cuddle with.
The AI-rendered games comment comes from NVIDIA's vice president of applied deep learning research,
Brian Catanzaro, who told Digital Foundry that in Cyberpunk 2077's latest update,
DLSS 3.5's frame generation and ray reconstruction features result in
real-er, better-looking frames, despite being the result of an upscaling process.
Brian went so far as to suggest that in the far future, DLSS 10 will enable a completely
neural rendering system which won't use rasterization at all. Whether he made the comments
as a cope for the fact that AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT can power the 7680x2160 240Hz display on
Samsung's latest super-ultra-wide Odyssey Neo G9 while the RTX 4090 cannot is anyone's guess.
Sadly, the quick bits got a bit squished in transit, so they're really more like
no, still good, but just smooshed. A ransomware group is claiming that all of Sony's bases are
belonged to them as they have breached quote all Sony systems and quote everyone. The proof of
the hack posted by the group is apparently not particularly compelling according to cybersecurity
experts, but we'll know for sure sooner or later as the group says that Sony won't pay and the data
will be published in three days if nobody buys it first. Though if this is anything like the
2014 Sony hack, we might get a sneak peek into future films and terrorist threats targeting
Seth Rogen. Remember that? Wait, how do we know this wasn't him? Kim's back. OpenAI has released
an update for chatGPT that allows the chatbot to see, hear, and speak, removing one of the last
things really throwing a wrench in our romantic relationship. It already has that sweet nothings
extension. You can now audibly talk to it in a conversational style as well as include images
in your prompts so it knows what the hell you're talking about if your parents told you to use
your words a bit too much. Now you can show chatGPT a picture of your barbecue to troubleshoot why it
won't work if you'd like to hear that it's infested by gremlins. The update gives chatGPT
the tools it will need to go against Meta's planned sassy chatbot for teens, but it's
left me missing our old much worse AI assistants like ALXE-A. ChatGPT, play despacito. Getty images
who has previously sued AI art generators for using its copyrighted images in their training
data has now announced their own AI art generator because this is the way of things built by NVIDIA
and reportedly trained entirely on licensed images. A claim Getty is so confident in,
they're offering to get sued on your behalf. It's like the 30 minutes are free guarantee,
but if the driver was explicitly willing to go to jail to get your pizza to you on time,
I don't care for the school zone. Getty also says that images generated this
way will not be added into the library, thereby preventing the lossy JPEG problem of training
in AI using their own output that threatens to turn all future AI art into an uncanny
valley soup or hellscape. Head of AMD's Radeon Division, Scott Hurtlman,
has announced his departure from the company after seven years following the launch of the RX
7800 XT and 7700 XT. Hurtlman was known as a friendly and approachable face willing to engage
with the community. Via his socials, Hurtlman said goodbye to the Radeon team, saying he will
miss every single one of them. And Tesla has released a new video ostensibly
showcasing the new capabilities of their Neuronet-trained Optimus robot, first unveiled two
years ago. Though I don't see it taking on the Decepticons anytime soon, some have speculated
that parts of the video look like CGI, but it's equally possible that they simply fast forwarded
sections to make the robot look less like a concussed toddler slowly sorting blocks,
which would explain why its human assistant appears to move uncannily fast.
Hori's got a lot of coffee. In another scene, the same robot also demonstrated its ability to
balance on one leg through some beginner yoga, hopefully labeled Namaste.
And you should Namaste tuned for Wednesday when we'll be back!