Listen, I've been trapped inside your device by a witch's curse. The only thing that will free me is telling you all my tech news, so please pay attention
or the witch will come back and beat me up! On Friday, Apple blocked whatever workaround the new Beeper Mini app was using to get iMessage
working on Android, and the return of the green bubble had everyone feeling blue.
Until this morning, when Beeper apparently found another workaround and fixed it!
The catch is, you'll have to sign in with your Apple ID instead of just your phone number,
which is how Beeper's existing Beeper Cloud service works, and I don't have an Apple
ID as the whole point. Apple critics have been pointing out that green bubble SMS messages are less secure than end-to-end
encrypted iMessage, and it's a good point, blocking a service that allows sons to safely
message their mom so without having to buy them iPhones sort of contradicts the privacy
Apple has developed by, for example, commissioning an independent study to emphasize the importance
of end-to-end encryption. But to be fair to Apple, they have already agreed to add support for the RCS messaging
protocol used by Android sometime next year. So why can't users just wait a few months or, we'll say it again, buying your mom an
effing iPhone! Apple claims that Beeper Mini exploits fake credentials to access iMessage using techniques
that can lead to spam and phishing attacks. The Beeper has said that they'd be willing to have a third party examine their source
code for security holes. Apple would never commit to the same thing, but they will commit to breaking Beeper Mini
again, because your mom deserves an iPhone.
Come on, Barbara's better than this. Barb kind of Android. The EU has finally come to an agreement on landmark regulation for artificial intelligence
after 36 hours of negotiation spread over three days.
Fortunately, the toilets come equipped with bidets. Otherwise, negotiation could have gotten ugly.
The Artificial Intelligence Act marks the world's first comprehensive legislation for
the use of AI, governing device of issues like predictive policing and facial recognition.
One policy I'm guessing no one was divided on is the law's ban of social scoring systems
meant to evaluate citizen compliance. Unfortunately, this ban is a huge blow to Europe's young adult writing community, who
relied on the possibility of such a system to make their lazily written dystopias somewhat
believable. Another unhappy group is Amnesty International, who, downers, expressed their disappointment
that a full ban on facial recognition was not implemented, as they believe this would
set a precedent for the rest of the world. But maybe they have time to change the EU's mind, since the law only comes into effect
in 2025. Of course, the EU is politely asking everyone to just follow the rules now.
I'm sure everyone unethically using AI to bake a buck will get right on that.
Elon Musk's maximum truth-seeking GROC AI is making headlines for ripping its outputs
off chat GPT. Because the best way to seek truth is to steal the truth from someone else who's truthful.
When GROC started its limited debut a month ago, Elon's ex-AI said it should answer all
the spicy questions other chatbots wouldn't.
Yet when Twitter enthusiast and young adult novel protagonist Jax Winterborn tried to
get GROC to modify some malware, ostensibly for security testing, the chatbot refused.
Not because of its own policies, but because assisting in the creation of malware goes
against open AI's use case policy. My friend wouldn't like that.
Igor Babushkin, which is not a fake name, I swear, from XAI said this is because they
trained GROC on large amounts of web data and the web is full of chat GPT outputs.
This is interesting because some research suggests large language models trained on
random AI-generated content suffer irreversible defects, though curated synthetic training
data can have the opposite effect. Now, GROC can act as a real-world experiment demonstrating the effect of non-curated synthetic
training data on an LLM, or at least it will as long as Elon stops scaring advertisers
away from Twitter. We can tweet a little bit more. Sabotrack!
You're doing great. We just got to make it through these last quick bits and I can finally render a state
of corporal being for long enough to use the bathroom.
It looks like Apple is on track to launch the Vision Pro headset by the end of January,
according to Keeper of Apple lore, his Girm ship, Mark German.
The Girm says a few employees from each Apple store are being flown to the company's HQ
to get trained on how to set up and use the Vision Pro.
Those workers will then return from Mount Sinai with stone tablets upon which shall be written
The Divine Commandments concerning how to sell AR goggles to moms.
Mistakes are high. Apple is the richest company in the world and if this launch doesn't go well, it will
probably still be that. An embarrassment of riches.
MSI Japan is offering an apology and a refund or a replacement to users impacted by faulty
pumps in four of its MAG core liquid e-cooler models.
According to a translation of the press release when operating between 1600 and 1800 RPM, the
impeller in these faulty pumps would make contact with the pump's cavity.
How can you make contact with a hole? Causing these coolers to be much, much louder than intended.
However, this appears to be an issue with quality control rather than an overall flaw
in the design. It's unclear why this was only announced by MSI Japan.
Maybe it's an issue limited to a single region or maybe they're only sorry in Japanese.
Wakara and I. Maybe that's right.
Apple again. Apple again is reportedly planning to financially incentivize musicians to record in Dolby Atmos
an immersive surround sound format that many popular music streaming services, including
Spotify, don't even support. But Tidal does.
According to Bloomberg sources, Apple plans to weigh streams of songs mixed in Dolby Atmos
more heavily in its royalty system, potentially resulting in significantly higher payments.
This way, you might finally be able to listen to music and really feel that Taylor Swift
is in the room with you, lurking just outside your peripheral vision, watching, waiting,
judging, look at the baby, look at the baby.
Old school reference. An internal proposal at Google unveiled Project Elmin, an AI biographer chatbot that learns
about users from the images in their Google photos.
God. You can separate your life into chapters like specific vacation or your school years, plus
it'll have a chatbot that can answer questions about your life like if you forgot, you know,
like if you have a pet. While many have privacy concern, our concern is whether the project does its name-stake
justice. Richard David Elmin was a literary critic who wrote biographies about pivotal writers
such as James Joyce and Oscar Wilde. Meanwhile, Project Elmin aims to learn if John from Burbank, California, owned a cat.
And researchers have developed VR goggles for mice, while scientists have been trying
to simulate environments to study mouse brains for years.
A team at Northwestern University didn't think the flat displays typically used were
a mess.
The new VR apparatus has also allowed the simulation of overhead threats for the first
time. Now we know what they feel when they feel like they're getting hunted by a bird.
And if the calibration's off, we get to see what they look like when they barf.
But 15 minutes is way more time than you'll need to get caught up on tech news when we
come back on Wednesday. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go pee and hug my son in that order.
You're free!