Do you suffer from intense cravings for knowledge of tech-related events?
Do you frequently wake up screaming, the latest driver borks the BIOS?
Ask your doctor if tech news is right for you, or just keep watching and ask him later.
Reviews for Intel's AeroLake refresh CPUs are out,
and they make me want to yell Intel's so back,
even if ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger's not.
Because the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Ultra 5 250K
could politely be called flagship killers, beating their own predecessors and performing nearly as well as AMD's top chips in gaming.
But at a much lower price, 300 and 200 US dollars,
respectfully and respectively. And they do even better in multi-core productivity-focused stuff.
This is like Intel's MacBook Neo moment. Almost.
What would get them over the line is allowing desktop sockets to support multiple CPU generations,
something Vice President Robert Halleck said he could see Intel doing in the future.
But that's not now. So you're telling me there's a chance.
Intel got another small win today. Brand new, jack-of-all-trades master of none video game Crimson Desert
will support ArcGPUs after blocking ArcGPU owners from even getting past the title screen of the game.
Today's update lets users finally run the game, but poorly, since the devs ignored Intel's many offers to help with optimization.
But they say they're working on it now, which is a big improvement over telling Arc owners to just get a refund.
You bitch. Scrub, who buys Arc?
Microsoft has released an emergency patch to fix issues stemming from their March,
patch Tuesday update. Have we been living in the same week for the last few months?
The original update broke Microsoft account sign-ins in a bunch of Microsoft apps.
When trying to log in, users were met with a, you'll need the internet for this chief notification,
even when their devices were clearly online. Or were they?
They're so online, it's like unhealthy. Microsoft's initial suggestion is to try restarting your PC,
as dictated by the tech scriptures. Just make sure you stay connected while you do it,
because restarting without the internet could make things worse.
Best go download the KB5085516 patch officially,
if you have been affected, and hope that Microsoft is getting as annoyed by all this instability as you are.
VP Scott Hanselman publicly said he hates mandatory Microsoft account requirements
during Windows 11 setup, and might do something about it. Key word, might.
So you're telling me there's a chance. Windows chief Pavan Davaluri announced in a blog post that they're rolling back
co-pilot integrations from snipping tool photos, widgets, and notepad,
promising to only put AI where it's genuinely useful.
Hope you're fun. Davaluri shared the sentiment of not wanting to be slop.
And that's great, because we are in a time that requires awarding points for doing the bare minimum.
Between fixing what they broke, enforcing accounts nobody wanted, and removing AI absolutely no one not a soul asked for,
is Microsoft listening? Someone checking on them, and sure they haven't been hacked.
The White House just released a national AI legislative framework covering
everything from child protections to intellectual property, not property of intellectual children, their mind.
Central to the plan is preempting state AI laws, arguing that a patchwork of conflicting state laws could undermine American innovation.
That should be fine. Pretty sure the U.S. has historically been totally chill about states' rights.
Not really an issue. The framework also codifies Trump's rate payer protection pledge,
requiring tech firms to pay for the electricity their data centers consume,
so regular people aren't stuck with the bill. Which sounds good.
But ProPublica released an investigation Friday that found Doge officials have been installed inside America's nuclear regulator,
the NRC, to fast track reactor approvals for AI companies,
with one telling staff to assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do.
Also totally fine, it's not like hastily constructed cooling and containment facilities
for nuclear plants have caused that many issues before. A couple times, Mac.
They're not irrevocable. Critics have called out the framework for being too industry friendly,
with Bloomberg calling it a blueprint for AI companies to carry on with business as usual,
and they're owned by a billionaire. Meanwhile, Stralia just took the opposite approach,
telling data center operators to generate their own energy, pay for infrastructure, and invest in local jobs,
or their proposals won't even be considered. Which is, of course, translated from the original Australian,
Oi, that will be stole my vegetable! A beautiful language.
Beautiful people. One proposal the regulators haven't considered is that,
I'm a sponsor! Whether your doctor says they're right for you or not,
you should definitely watch the quick bits.
Doctors. They're just googling everything anyway. I can do that.
Samsung's Galaxy S26 is getting Apple AirDrop support this week
via a Quick Share update. It takes advantage of the same workaround that Google developed back in November,
which allowed iPhones and Pixel 10 series phones to send files to each other
via AirDrop and Quick Share, respectively. While Tim Cook slammed his hands on the other side of the glass and screamed,
You will burn! Android users will be expected to enable it manually in settings,
and have a device with Play Services 26.11 or higher.
So, you still get a whiff of that Apple elitist experience.
Graphino S, the privacy-focused Android fork, announced on Friday that they will never require the collection of personal information,
age verification laws, or no. In the tweet equivalent of that,
do you hear the people sing song from Les Mis? This comes not long after Graphino S announced a long-term partnership with Motorola,
who I'm guessing will want to comply with laws?
Big Daddy Motorola has yet to comment. But I expect they might go all Jean Valjean on Graphine.
Justals! They're French, right?
Hacking Group's shiny hunters have claimed responsibility for a data breach
at Crunchyroll, Sony's anime streaming platform. The hackers reportedly made off with 100 gigabytes of user data,
including credit card details and email addresses. Wait, they had all that anime sitting there,
and all they took was boring credit card numbers? What a bunch of rubes!
The hackers reportedly got in through Tellus Digital, Crunchyroll's outsourcing partner,
which shiny hunters breached earlier this month, stealing 700 terabytes of internal data.
Come on, shiny hunters! First, Panera Bread, then Tellus?
Now, anime is nothing sacred to you.
At Northwestern University, researchers have developed AI-evolved,
legged metamachine straight out of Metal Gear Solid Revengeance.
Rather than creating a specialized machine, or manually configuring the best all-terrain design,
the researchers decided to let the machine configure itself. These modular robots snap together in various legged configurations
and adapt their movements to different terrain in real time.
You can even chop one in half, and it'll continue to drag itself by its remaining limbs
in a charming display of resilience that a few years from now probably won't seem
like an ill-thought-out ability to give a robot. Researchers say these bots can hit the ground running
in unstructured outdoor environments, which is great because soon that's where we'll all be living!
Hey, they can't find us among the trees! And stopping prescriptions suddenly can be dangerous,
so make sure you come back here on Wednesday for your next scheduled dose of tech news.
Side effects may include irrational fear of Microsoft Update spontaneous, ranting about Apple, and recurring dreams
in which Peter Thiel breastfeeds you. Wait, what? I thought that was normal.