I've been working on the funniest tech news intro ever.
It's not ready. You're not. It's too soon. You're not ready for it yet. Tech news first. Maybe later. Be good.
Microsoft has heard Windows users loudly saying they don't want an agentic OS,
but that's clearly because you just don't get it. You're confused. It's OK.
Let them explain in their support article, which describes how secure AI agent workspaces will give agents
access to shared folders and allow them to work in the background for you,
completing tasks while you do other weird human things.
But despite Microsoft's helpful explanation, enthusiasts don't seem to be swayed.
No one was using agentic Windows. And so one intrepid writer from the Verge took one for the team
and spent a week trying to interact with co-pilot the way Microsoft wants us to
and found that co-pilot made his computer feel incompetent.
Projecting. It had a crisis of confidence, but apparently it's competent enough to install malware.
As Microsoft's own article states, these kinds of agents would still be vulnerable to malicious prompts
that may be embedded in emails, documents or web pages.
For some reason, Microsoft seems hellbent on making Windows worse instead of better.
Like why not do what this programmer did and turn the OpenGL 3D
May screensaver from Windows 95 into a playable game demo thing?
What the? Wait, James, it's your shirt. He already did that, but there are so many more screensavers.
Do the pipes one next. We have a shirt for that too. I didn't even know you were this...
I'll take you to the store. Epic Games and Unity are joining forces to let Unity developers
publish their games directly inside Fortnite through its island discovery system.
And in doing so, tap into its creator economy payouts,
giving small dev teams instant access to one of the biggest audiences in gaming.
The plan goes along perfectly with Tim Sweeney's vision of Fortnite
as an open metaverse where people can not just play
but live their entire lives as Homer Simpson half a tar
who communicates entirely through K-pop inspired emotes.
Do one. I don't know.
The agreement will also see Unity support games made with Unreal Engine
on their recently announced Commerce dashboard, which lets creators manage pricing, payments,
promotions and digital catalogs on multiple platforms.
We're talking about a fairly deep collaboration between two of the most popular game engines here.
Maybe Timothy Sweetner is right. This already is his metaverse and we're just living in it.
Zucks right over there. Zucks in high. That's meta, meta.
Yeah, that's that's so meta. Pebble, the once discontinued fan favorite smartwatch,
seemed like it was flying high after being revived.
But now it's hit some turbulence. The community finds itself torn between core devices,
which now builds new Pebble hardware under original founder,
Eric Migogovsky and Rebel,
the Solaris that they're called the Rebel, the nonprofit that has maintained the Pebble App Store
and cloud services since the original company shut down. Just weeks ago, both sides announced a deal.
Core would build a new App Store front end. Rebel would continue running the back end.
And together, they'd support all Pebble users new and old and dead,
probably such an old device. But talks broke down over who ultimately controls
the App Store data, which consists of roughly 13,000 apps
and watch faces that Rebel has maintained since the servers were shut down in 2018.
Rebel says core demanded unrestricted access, which they fear could allow core to build a closed proprietary store
and leave Rebel behind. And they also accused core of scraping their publicly available data
in violation of the agreement. Core counters that the data shouldn't belong to anyone.
What they want is an open public archive to keep Pebble accessible.
And that the scraping Rebels referring to was just Eric
using a simple web tool to browse watch faces. Eric does that all the time.
He doesn't scrape. He's not a scraper. Both sides claim they're protecting Pebble's future,
which looks increasingly uncertain as long as mom and dad keep fighting.
Please stop. But hey, at least the watches still tell the time.
Right? Got another call home from school.
The quick bits are in trouble again. They just cannot sit still and listen.
Too much sugar. Cloudflare had a major outage yesterday that knocked out big services like chat, APT and X for thousands of users.
The outage came after a change in permissions caused too many entries
to be added to a file connected to Cloudflare's bot management system,
causing it to buckle under the load and crash out harder than a real housewife.
Cloudflare says they fix the issue and stressed that there was no sign of a cyber attack.
However, this was the third major internet outage in a month.
And people are starting to wonder what can be done to prevent these crashes and what backups we have in place for when they do happen.
Like how I always keep an extra new toothbrush in the house,
just in case the data center powering my normal one goes down.
AMD is officially launching its next AI powered upscaling tech,
FSR Redstone on December 10th. In a tweet, AMD exec Jack Quinn declared that where darkness ends, Redstone begins.
Do-do-do-do-do-do. Oh, no, no. Before showing off a pretty bland, seemingly Marvel Studios title card inspired video.
At the moment, not much is known about FSR Redstone, but words like Neural Radiance Cashing and Ray Regeneration.
I've been thrown around and those sound hella fancy.
I guess AMD is hoping it's fancy enough to justify the reported desire
to increase GPU prices according to a post on China's board channels
with memory prices increasing, a price hike on AMD's GPUs is imminent.
Obviously, I'll tell you AMD.
Tobin McGuire, Andrew Garfield, Tom Holland together on screen.
This is not disappointed. Again, disappointed.
Google just launched Gemini 3, which it's calling its smartest AI model yet.
You would hope if Google's benchmarks are to be believed, Gemini 3 might actually be a new era of intelligence,
considering it's apparently significantly better at understanding text,
images, audio and a lot of other stuff than some of its competitors.
Can you understand my wife? The new Gemini is built into both the Gemini app and Google search from day one.
But being that it's a Gemini,
is it ever really going to get away from the stereotypes
that it's indecisive, impulsive, unreliable and nosy?
Russia is now cutting mobile internet for travelers
entering the country for up to 24 hours, claiming it stops Ukrainian drones
from using SIM cards for navigation. The system has caused chaos in border regions where roaming happens accidentally.
This happens to me all the time. Oh, man. Phones that reconnect after being on foreign networks
get automatically quarantined until users prove using captchas
or by dialing a call center that they're a human, not a quadcopter.
Oh, it's every day. I keep telling people, not a quadcopter.
Riley keeps buzzing in my ear. And TikTok is rolling out a new AI-generated content slider
in its managed topic settings. So you can choose to see more or less slop in your for you feed.
TikTok is also working on invisible watermarking to make AI videos easier to spot, but they're invisible.
The watermarks that only TikTok can read will help them identify AI content, even if it's edited or re-uploaded.
The platform announced that these features will be rolling out in the coming weeks.
What do you think the person who slides their AI content slider to only AI is like?
I bet they're a Gemini. And I bet you'll be back on Friday for more tech news.
I've got to go. I wanted to keep working on my funny intro a bit,
but now I've got a parent-teacher conference about the quick bits to go to.
They're not even my frickin' kids!