Hey, I want my news.
What's techin' so long?
I'm going home. NVIDIA's RTX 5090 and 5080 graphics cards are real
and they are spectacular. Specs for both cards were tweeted out
by venerable leaker Copight 7 Kimmy without even acknowledging how bonkers some of them are.
The 5090 apparently takes the 4090's 24 gigabytes of VRAM
and slides it up to 32 gigabytes. The largest amount of VRAM in a gaming GPU ever.
The RTX 5080 is being held back at the same 16 gigs though,
presumably to atone for the RTX 4070 Ti disguising itself
as an RTX 4080 at launch, the sins of the father.
Going back to the 5090, Copight says it'll need 600 watts
of power compared to the 4090's 450 watt requirement.
That would max out a 12V 2X6 connector.
So it's a good thing that new MSI power supply was recently spotted with two of them.
We're gonna call that whole connector melting thing a learning experience.
But even if there is still a melting risk, the 5090 also apparently has 33% more CUDA cores.
And isn't that worth it? According to a report from Bench Life,
the two GPUs are expected to debut at CES in January
for $40,000 and a breeding pair of goats.
Must be good goat. Reviews for laptops powered by Intel's new Core 200 series,
AKA Lunar Lake, hit the web this week. And unlike the launch of Qualcomm's
Snapdragon X series laptop chips, there is a consensus here.
Yeah, they're good. Lunar Lake battery life is generally on par
or better than the Snapdragon X series and the upgraded art graphics seem to trade blows
with AMD's mobile competitors. But to make the comparison even worse for Qualcomm,
Intel's new notebooks have full native x86 app support,
which wouldn't even have been a thing to mention this time last year. But now Intel gets a free win.
Because ARM's only fluent, best.
Versus native? I read I'm going home. Okay.
Which is great because Intel really needs wins right now.
The Foundry division quit developing their 20A node to focus on the more advanced 18A node,
which will show up for the first time in Intel's Clearwater Forest Xeon processors.
They better be good or someone's gonna buy you.
That's how it works. Following Qualcomm's advances,
ARM also apparently shot their shot, but Intel's staying strong.
She's independent. She don't need no fellow tech corporation.
And to prove how much they care, Intel took another look at that instability issue
in their 13th and 14th gen desktop processors and are releasing another microcode update
to fix what they now say is the real root cause.
And I'm happy to believe them until they find the next one. Turns out they were haunted.
Sorry. OpenAI is planning to restructure itself
so that the for-profit company would no longer be controlled by its non-profit board,
according to a Reuters report. The report also says the plan would see CEO Sam Altman
receiving equity for the first time, worth an estimated $150 billion,
which would pay for more than enough clone bodies.
He goes through them like that. He's like twink palpitating.
However, at a company all hands this week, Altman denied any plan to get him
a giant equity stake in the company. Although it's unclear what might qualify as a giant amount
to Sam already a billionaire, Altman.
His parents named him ambitiously. Actually, Sam is short for Sanbiciously.
Sanbiciously. Also this week, OpenAI's CTO, Mira Murati of face fame,
as well as the chief research officer and VP of research all left the company.
Seems related to the whole changing to for-profit thing,
but not to Sam Altman, who tweeted that leadership changes
are a natural part of companies. And while this one was abrupt,
they are not a normal company. And he's right. They have this whole convoluted non-profit controlling
a for-profit structure to protect humanity from AI. Oh right, they're getting rid of that
to become more normal.
Something Sam has strived for all his life. He may have been pleased to hear then
that while touring the globe, trying to gather $7 trillion to build dozens
of new chip making plants, the New York Times says that TSMC executives
dismissed Altman as a podcasting bro,
which is about as basic as it gets. Good job, Sam.
One day he won't be an Altman, he'll be a normal man.
Hey, isn't this where the quick bits usually are?
Yeah, we're about to happen right now. I don't see him anywhere.
Microsoft is once again trying to make fetch happen
with an adjusted version of its controversial recall feature.
It's back. It's that classic Microsoft wisdom. If you announce something enough times,
eventually the public will be too exhausted to get angry. The company says the feature will be opt in by default
and its locally stored files will be encrypted
and require reauthentication to access.
The new and improved recall will operate
inside a VBS enclave and will only operate
when BitLocker and device encryption is fully enabled.
But most importantly, it can also now be uninstalled.
Hallelujah, amen. When Zuck announced at MetaConnect
that Facebook and Instagram would start serving users AI generated content based on their interests,
he didn't mention that the content may also contain your face.
Any users that have onboarded to Meta's Imagine Me feature,
which allows the creation of AI selfies based on users' photos,
may see AI images of themselves in their feeds.
Ah! That's not the stopian at all. This is quite similar to the story we covered last week
about Snapchat, where the company was able to use AI generated images of users' faces
in ads that only the user sees. However, this story is scarier
because people actually use Instagram. Ooh, got him.
Apparently people use Snapchat. I don't know who. Researchers revealed they could hack
into millions of vehicles thanks to a bug in automaker Kia's website.
The vulnerability allowed them to gain access to backend dealer APIs.
That's a problem because Kia apparently gives their dealers the ability to assign control
of the internet-connected features of any car
to any customer account. With just a license plate number,
this bypass could unlock a vehicle's doors and start its engine.
Even worse, the vehicle could be remotely located and any installed 360-degree cameras could also be accessed.
Also the attack takes like 30 seconds. Oh! You know, I'm starting to think
that turning everything into a computer was a bad idea. Maybe we draw the line at plants.
Fuck, they hacked my ficus! A paraplegic man who relies on a $100,000 exoskeleton
was left unable to walk for two months after the manufacturer, Rewalk,
refused to fix a wiring issue with the watch he uses to control the device.
When the man, former jockey Michael Strait, contacted the company, they told him
they no longer work on devices older than five years.
Hope you had fun. Strait got his a decade ago.
So I guess instead of fixing his $20 watch battery,
he should just drop Porsche money on a whole new device and hope insurance will cover it.
Of course, Mr. Strait's story hit the local news and Rewalk mysteriously found their soldering kit
between the couch cushions and fixed his watch a few days later.
Thank goodness, that's lucky. And if you like your gaming mice equal parts modular,
ergonomic, and horror inducing, look no further than the Piot Design Statial Dot B.
An open source DIY mouse design that only looks like an alien parasite a little bit.
I rate it A for, ah!
The idea is instead of settling for a set mouse shape,
you 3D print and assemble dozens of adjustable parts
to create the mouse shape you want. As long as that shape is existential dread.
What are you scared? It's just a mouse. Just put your hand on it.
Merge with it. Gordinovsh! But don't join with us on Monday for more tech news
because it's what the government calls a statutory holiday
despite presenting no evidence that they exist in the wild which means they probably just made it up just like birds.
Okay. Whatever, man! Right, Wednesday, Wednesday.