Sometimes tech news is good, sometimes it's bad,
but I can always share it with you, and that makes me glad.
I love you, James. China has decided to block the use of Intel and AMD chips
from government, PCs, and servers in a brilliant masterclass on how to use
the Uno reverse card. While we are just finding out about this,
China's new computer guidelines came into effect on December 26th of last year.
Honestly, it was nice of them to let American CPU manufacturers
enjoy Christmas before breaking everyone's hearts. The government has an approved list of only 18 processors,
and only one of them uses the x86 architecture, a chip made by a Chinese company with a normal length name,
Shanghai Xiaogen, integrated circuit company, limited.
Every other chip on China's list of the coolest CPUs uses either ARM cores or RISC-5 architecture.
In addition to hardware, they are sidelining Microsoft Windows and any foreign-made database software.
This makes sense, since just last year, China unveiled its first homegrown,
open-source desktop operating system. That was really just the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution
with a Windows-esque coat of paint. And can you really blame China for this move?
I mean, the US is doing the same thing to China, looking at all their stuff that they left in your house
just hurts too much. Oh, you forgot your scarf.
Can I see you again? The EU is investigating Apple, Meta, and Google
for non-compliance with the Digital Markets Act. Noticeably absent from the list is Microsoft.
In fact, the Verges Tom Warren claimed on Twitter that Microsoft is the only big tech company
that the EU isn't investigating for DMA non-compliance.
I mean, the European Commission even launched investigatory steps for Amazon's ranking practices.
I guess Microsoft hasn't done anything wrong since the DMA took effect in May of last year,
except that they have, they have.
Everyone except for the EU knows that Microsoft has been challenging your mom
for the award for best guilt trips for the sometime now.
In October, the company decided to expand on their deluge of banners and stopgaps
when users dared to install Chrome using the Edge browser
by adding a poll to ask, what did we do wrong? Like an overbearing X.
Two months after that, Edge users that set their default search engine to Google
found their browser would get blocked by a pop-up, asking them to switch to Bing.
Just this month, Microsoft confirmed that they were rolling out one-time pop-up ads
in Windows 10 and 11 to convince Chrome users to also use Bing as a search engine.
Why not both, you know? Maybe Microsoft doesn't do these things in Europe,
giving the continent something else to make fun of North America for when they drink their wine and olive oil.
Fancy cheeses. They're dipping things in the, no, no, no.
OpenAI has apparently gone to Hollywood to take meetings with directors and film studios
according to reports from Bloomberg. Apparently, COO Brad Lightcap and some colleagues
are giving demonstrations of their AI video generator, Sora, in the hopes that filmmakers
will integrate it into their work. And indeed, they also just published
a bunch of little shorts made by filmmakers, they're artsy, but they're not real, but they are real.
Best consumed with drugs. Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman,
used this as an excuse to attend parties during Oscar weekend like the total chat he is.
While Sora isn't available to the public, OpenAI has reportedly granted access
to a few big name actors and directors. Probably just Altman's drink buddies, no one else.
This is not the first time Sora has affected the industry. About a month ago, filmmaker Tyler Perry,
best known by his drag name, Madia, announced he put an $800 million expansion
to his Atlanta studio on hold because of AI like Sora.
Apparently, he believes he may not need to do on location shooting anymore.
If he wants to shoot a living room in the mountains, he can sit in an office and do this with a computer.
Perry actually used AI power de-aging techniques
on two of his films, and that brings up a good point. Actors and writers have gone on strike over AI,
but now the technology is affecting makeup artists, contractors who build sets and studios,
and even location scouts. All of these jobs are in jeopardy because one guy saw a fake video of a woman walking in Tokyo.
I didn't know there were any women in Tokyo. He's like, wow, she's pretty hot.
Is that a city? She's convincingly hot. I wasn't always the quick bits man.
I used to tell longer news stories, like just a few months ago in this episode.
Oh, I remember that. NVIDIA's AI dominance is being challenged
by basically every other company. The United Acceleration Foundation,
formed last year by Intel, Google, ARM, Qualcomm, Samsung, and others, is gunning for NVIDIA's CUDA.
The group has been working on an open-source software suite
that they say will reach a mature state in the second half of this year.
However, there's no final release target yet, so I guess NVIDIA is free to count their trillions
until then. But we'll get ya. The leather jacket is to save your skin
when you're Scrooge McDuck into a pile of gold. His gold coins are hard.
Google has apparently begun testing AI-generated summaries of search results on a small subset of queries
by users who did not opt into its search generative experience in order to see how the general public
will respond to the new feature. These AI summaries come with a warning label
explaining that the feature is experimental, possibly because they seem to have a bad habit
of redirecting users towards spam and scam websites,
ranging from low-quality to actively malicious.
Unlike regular Google. No, shit.
Maybe the real experiment is to find what percentage of users will gladly type their social security number
into a capture. In worst Google news, the company was ordered
by federal investigators to hand over the personal information of YouTube users who watched certain videos.
Links to the videos and questions were sent by undercover agents to a suspected cryptocurrency
launderer. So naturally, the feds wanted Google to hand over names,
addresses, telephone number, and user activity, and IP addresses of anyone who watched those videos.
Videos that have been watched more than 30,000 times. While that sounds bad, it could have been a lot worse.
The FBI could have re-rolled the suspect. And that's embarrassing in 2024.
Even worse, you guys are now on a list. Microsoft has big plans to make life better
for Windows 11 and Xbox gamers at the Game Developers Conference last week
of the company unveiled DirectSR, a tool that makes it a lot easier for devs
to add support for multiple upscalers like NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD's FSR,
and or Intel's SES. I mean, XS, SES pool.
Microsoft also just filed a patent for a technique that would improve ray tracing performance on AMD GPUs,
including the ones in Xbox consoles and desktop radio and graphics cards.
See NVIDIA? You don't have to choose between AI-powered world domination
and throwing your gaming customers a bone. You can do both.
Piles of bones, like the future in Terminator 2. And EVGAs in hot water,
after an unannounced pin layout change, fried a customer's hard drives.
A Redditor, RMA, their power supply, and was clearly told not to send back their modular cables.
When they hooked the new PSU to their original EVGA cables,
it killed their SATA hard drives. Turns out the pin layout of the power supply model
had been changed, making them incompatible with the cables from the old unit.
But no one at EVGA told the customer. Got ya.
Now EVGA is refusing to cover the damage. That's not like you. Even better, this may not be a new issue.
It is like you. After Lewis Rossman posted a video on the subject,
the YouTube account for a PC building company commented that they reported this issue to EVGA two years ago.
So that's why EVGA broke up with NVIDIA. They wanted to cook different parts,
their customer's PCs. It's varieties of spice and light.
You all gonna burn. And you should come back to see what we cook up
for you on Wednesday. It's a block party. Do you like gumbo?
Because it won't be gumbo, it'll be more tech news. That's all, it's the only thing.
What is a gumbo? A toy.