It's February 21st, 2025, and we got tech news, but we won't have any on Monday, February 24th.
I'll have the day off, but I probably won't be able to relax,
as I'll be too excited to return on Wednesday. I love tech news more than my family, and I hope they never find out.
NVIDIA's launch of the RTX 50 series has had another wrench thrown in its gears
after tech power-up and others discovered that some 5090s
have fewer ROP or raster operations pipeline units than they should,
leading to lower performance than so-called normal 5090s.
Is it okay to say that? The issue was first spotted on a Zotac model by tech power-up forum user WuxiGamer,
but reports soon emerged of similar ROP shortages on an MSI RTX 5090D,
the China exclusive version, as well as a Manly 5090.
But what does that even mean in 2025, you know?
It's the brand. Leaker Megasize GPU claims what we're seeing is a small defective batch of GB202 chips,
which power the 5090, making it into the supply,
which has reportedly led NVIDIA to initiate investigation
that could potentially delay the launch of the RTX 5070,
ruining AMD's plans to reactively price its upcoming RX 9070 series,
or more likely, follow its historical pattern of pricing things horribly for no reason.
Not that any of this really matters. This week's RTX 5070 Ti launch had the same stock issues as the 5080 and 5090,
despite both NVIDIA and New Egg reviving their COVID-era direct buying GPU programs.
So even if you get your hands on a new card, it might be borked.
Hey, have you heard about reading books? I think that's like the third time of me that joke in recent memory.
Apple is axing its advanced data protection feature for users in the UK.
After the government there issued a pretty wild order,
demanding Apple provide a backdoor through the feature's end-to-end encryption.
Doing so would expose the data of users not only in the UK,
but anywhere in the world to the UK government.
But they were like, ah, we don't care, let us in, knock knock.
New Apple users in the UK will no longer be offered ADP encryption,
and existing UK users will be required to disable it sometime soon,
making it so the government can access their data no problem,
although they'd need a warrant to do so. Amazingly, some are characterizing this as Apple defying the government
by not giving them the backdoor they wanted.
But as Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney points out,
Apple's simply opening the front door instead,
which at least is a polite gesture I'm sure the British will appreciate.
OpenAI is now rolling out its computer using agent operator for 200 bucks a month
chat GPT Pro subscribers in most countries where chat GPT is available,
including Canada, who just won a hockey game against the US,
which means we can keep being a country according to chat GPT.
Agents are all the AI rage right now. Humane might be dunzo,
but Rabbit just showed their Android agent controlling a tablet,
which of course they used to generate a revenue plan
from a business idea and share it with contacts. The most important use case for AI,
bothering your friends with your Ponzi scheme ideas.
But what about physical agents? Robotics company Figure just demoed their bots running Helix,
their new generalist action model, which allowed them to follow instructions given by their Californian dad
to put away groceries, even passing items to each other while sharing very slow,
but knowing looks that seem to say, I'm dad's favorite.
No, I am, you b**ch. This action model is similar to Google's RT2,
which combines multiple perception and language models so robots can do stuff.
But Microsoft's new magma is a single multimodal model that can do all of that.
Not that we could verify it, it's all closed source, but Deepseek has announced it will do one better than just being open weights
and will be fully open sourcing five of their repos starting next week.
So instead of the CCP controlling what Deepseek models say,
you do, you can be China. If tech news is my family,
quick bits are the Legos on the floor after my son destroyed the set
I spent an hour building for him. Stepping on them hurts on multiple levels.
YouTube will soon launch a cheaper version of premium in the U.S.
called Premium Light, which would remove ads on all content except music videos,
according to Bloomberg, who described YouTube as a vast library of podcasts and how-to clips.
And if those are the other options, I guess we post music videos?
Premium Light has reportedly been in testing in other countries,
but soon users in the U.S. will be able to see if they like tariffs on their music videos.
I don't think that's a proper analogy, but okay.
HP instituted a policy that added a 15-minute wait time to the company's support calls,
according to the register, as a way to, quote, encourage more digital adoption by nudging customers to go online to self-solve.
While there certainly is a place for tough love, I'm not sure making people wait even longer on the phone
with support staff is the way to do it. And HP seemed to agree,
as they rescinded the policy after widespread reporting on how dumb it was.
Although we don't know what the whole music was. If they're playing bangers, I might be okay with it.
Your computer's busted, but hey, time to get funky.
Meta has said that even if they did torrent 82 terabytes of pirated books,
it's no big deal if you don't seed them, as seen in a filing from the social media giant this week.
You see, it's not the training AI on unlicensed pirated content, that's the issue.
It's performing the common courtesy of helping others do the same thing.
Like, come on, that's illegal. This whole thing has got real, I did not inhale, vibes.
Yes, I put the ebooks in my mouth, but...
Earlier this week, Microsoft announced Muse, an AI game generator that was trained on and could only recreate
low-resolution slot versions of the gameplay
from Ninja Theory's failed MOBA, Bleeding Edge.
Which is, I think, something all of us were asking for. Ex-boss Phil Spencer suggested Muse could help with game preservation
by emulating any game based on gameplay footage.
A suggestion AI researcher and game designer Dr. Michael Cook called
Idiotic. Because that's kind of like preserving the Mona Lisa
by having your toddler draw it from memory. I mean, the spirit is there.
And Google released an AI tool called Coscientist this week,
which can generate hypotheses for researchers to investigate.
The BBC claimed in an article that this tool had cracked a super bug problem in two days that took scientists years.
That sounds amazing, but as another article from New Scientist
and excellent science YouTuber Angela Collier points out,
what actually happened is the Coscientist AI suggested
a number of hypotheses to explain a problem. And the top suggestion matched unpublished research the scientists
had been working on for years. But the AI didn't provide a novel solution to the problem,
the suggestion was based on a previous paper the team had published in 2023.
And I don't know if you could call providing a list of possible solutions
cracking the problem. But hey, I'm not a scientist.
But if you come back on Wednesday for more tech news, remember no TechLinked on Monday,
then I think that makes you a scientist, right?
Maybe I don't actually know what they do.