Hey, it's me, Weird Al, Jesus Lebowski, the illegitimate son of Richard Stallman, delivering
tech news for you to listen to while you think of people to compare me to in a YouTube comment.
Happy hunting. Internet rumors abound after a second, Boeing whistleblower has mysteriously died.
45-year-old Joshua Dean was one of many people to come forward in recent years following
two 737 MAX 8 crashes that killed a combined 346 people and a recent 737 MAX 9 that suffered
a blowout at the beginning of this year. Both things that shake my confidence in the practice of throwing metal tubes full of people
through the air. The reportedly healthy Dean suddenly passed away at the end of last month after spending
two weeks in a hospital fighting a bacterial infection which eventually developed into
pneumonia. Just a month before, 62-year-old Josh Mitch Barnett, another whistleblower, was found
dead just before he was to resume testimony against Boeing.
Nothing suspicious there. Dean was working for Boeing supplier Spirit Aero Systems as a quality auditor when he
was fired last year. He alleges that that was in retaliation for him raising safety concerns, something that
certainly sounds like the job of a quality auditor.
Mmm, where's that written down?
Prove it. It's not in the handbook. He wasn't the only whistleblower afraid of backlash from Boeing, however, Sam Salepor,
who as of reporting is still alive, said he feared physical violence during a U.S. Congressional
hearing last month. Salepor should maybe stick to single-story buildings for the time being, otherwise he
may accidentally throw himself through a window. Those accidental defenestrations, they get you every time.
Some of those Windows are so beautiful. In lighter news, Microsoft allegedly has a new in-house AI that they think can compete
with open AI's models. Aw, that's so cute that they think that.
The model, reportedly referred to internally as MAI-1, is being overseen by Google Deep
Mind co-founder Mustafa Suleiman and will have around 500 billion parameters.
That's about half of what GBT-4 has to put that in perspective.
Should you be excited? Well, apparently no one knows what the model will be used for.
But if Microsoft's looking for ideas, there's some interesting use cases that have made
headlines recently. An adjunct professor at Stanford teamed up with the CEO of a leadership development firm
to write a Wall Street Journal article about using AI to practice tough conversations.
An example they used was an associate preparing to fire an employee.
Thankfully, spending the weekend role-playing the exchange with chat GBT saved that associate
so much heartache. Thank God. Whew, that's a load off my mind.
Millions of teens are apparently using AI chatbots as friends they can talk to without
having to face every teen's worst fear.
Other teens. Make sense? Some adults are using AI to speak with dead relatives and deal with their grief.
Man, mental health resources certainly are in a state, aren't they?
The US government has announced they want to give someone a lot of money to research
digital twin technology for semiconductor manufacturing.
For those unaware, a digital twin is basically a one-to-one virtual simulation of a physical
system in the real world. America's Department of Commerce is offering $285 million in Chips Act funding to try and
convince someone else to create an institution dedicated to studying digital twin technology.
I mean, why do it yourself when you can pay someone? The hope is that the tech can accelerate semiconductor manufacturing by allowing companies to test
processors without actually, you know, making them. Lazy.
Just do it. You don't got the balls.
The tech is currently being used in the automotive industry to test different modes of production
without affecting, you know, their current manufacturing output.
For example, Mercedes-Benz used NVIDIA's Omniverse Enterprise software to simulate
one of its factories just to plan an upgrade for EV manufacturing.
Now, the US government seems really passionate about this tech because they said all the
buzzwords. The Department of Commerce's press release states that digital twins can exist in the
cloud and could leverage emerging technology like artificial intelligence.
Okay, this was fully written by a dude in a fleece vest named Chad.
There's no way it wasn't. He's wearing way fares. The factory will be conscious and it will be my friend.
Please stand for the stating of these quick bits.
Oh, right. I do those.
YouTube is rolling out a new experimental premium feature called Jump Ahead, which skips ahead
to the part of the video the algorithm thinks you're trying to find.
Typically, the moment that most other users skip to in the past, like the banger chorus
of a hit song or that one time on the WAN Show when Linus mistakenly claimed he used
to say the hard R a lot while Luke's entire life flashed before his eyes live on camera.
The front door of the building has never looked so enticing. Currently, the Jump Ahead feature is only available on the YouTube Android app and only
for select English language videos. So if you're an iPhone user or if you're watching this but you don't speak English,
you'll just have to wait. Lo siento.
Authors and audiobook listeners are divided as 40,000 AI-narrated titles have hit Audible
thanks to a new beta tool Amazon introduced last year.
While writers are grateful for the opportunity to save on professional voiceover fees, audible
subscribers are annoyed that there's no option to filter AI audiobooks out.
Human narrators, meanwhile, are feeling pessimistic about their future job security.
Personally, I'm worried about the quality of the narration on these self-published titles.
Not just anyone can narrate works like Chuck Tingles Pounded in the Butt by my book, Pounded
in the Butt by my own butt. Google is banning ads for apps and websites that generate, distribute, or promote synthetic
sexually explicit content. Which is fancy lawyer talk for deep fake pornography and news.
To be fair to Google, this kind of content was already implicitly prohibited as a form
of sexually explicit content. Like come on guys, it doesn't stop being smud just because a robot made it.
It just smells a bit more burnt. Yeah, and it doesn't make me feel as warm when I hug it.
However, Google apparently felt the need to make it explicit due to the sudden Ryzen
ads promoting these deep fake tools. Even some of these services pretending to be innocuous apps in order to sneak onto legitimate
app stores. Kind of like a shipping a dildo in a package shaped like a frying pan.
There are frying pan shaped dildos. There's a market.
They don't work as well. They're only for pansexuals. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a new type of memory that can
operate at temperatures as high as 600 degrees Celsius for more than 60 hours at less than
15 volts. Just imagining how many chrome tabs I could leave open is making me sweat.
But this memory wouldn't actually be used for RAM. It's non-volatile.
So it can store data without constant power. And it's not made of silicon.
But rather ferroelectric aluminum scandium nitride.
And it's a good thing we discovered silicon first because putting valley in front of the
other one would be a real mouthful. And the International Space Station is so dirty, it's bred new life.
A new NASA study collected samples of drug-resistant bacteria Ibugendensis, quote, from various
locations within the ISS, and found 13 distinct strains which have never been seen before on
Earth. The bacteria has apparently mutated to survive in the extreme environment, becoming even
more drug-resistant in the process and helping other microorganisms survive.
It got way stretchier. It can flame on.
It's become fantastic.
Perhaps we should make the astronauts clean up after themselves so humanity doesn't get
taken out by a space-bred superbug? Might I recommend sending their moms to the ISS to shame them?
Look at this room! It's a pigsty!
Is this how I raised you? You call this a space station?
And might I recommend that you come back on Wednesday for more tech news?
And clean behind your ears.