Tech stuff happens, so we're here doing a video about it. It's like a company fires off an email, and now I have to work.
I have breaks, you know. See, how does this make sense? This is Raja Kaduri, chief architect of Intel's discreet graphics cards,
is leaving the company because, if his previous post as head of AMD's
Radeon GPUs is any indication, launching new products that failed to live up to the hype
is kind of his MO. Hey, that's not nice.
Okay, seriously, we needed Intel Arc GPUs, but they still need some work,
and he's moving on, so we can joke, right? Okay, we can be friends.
We can be friends, make jokes.
Anyways, Raja's off to form his own gaming startup, focused on...
What else? AI. It'll apparently focus on creating generative AI tools for movies, games, and other media
that are compatible with basically any processor, not just chips from NVIDIA.
It's only fair that Kaduri is taking the risk of going independent now,
having worked directly for Apple, AMD, and Intel.
I mean, how old is he? 55? Yeah, that's prime midlife crisis territory.
Again, this is not... He seems nice. I'm not trying to...
It's just middle-aged man. Something happens up here, okay?
So, to Mr. Kaduri's credit, under his leadership while Intel's
Arc graphics cards suffered delays and initially lagged behind the competition
in terms of performance, that gap has started closing significantly
as Intel releases improved drivers. It was the first time that a major player entered the dedicated graphics market in years,
making it a qualified success for Intel, which has otherwise had a pretty rough year.
Not rough as in sandpaper, rough as in getting dragged along the highway
with your ankle caught in a tow rope. Okay, I didn't write that one. That was...
She did. The Windows 11 snipping tool and Windows 10 snipping sketch
have a bug where it may be possible to recover and view the original screenshot
after it has been cropped or censored. Now, if that sounds familiar, it might be because basically the same issue
was patched on the Google Pixel earlier this week. Despite the fact that Microsoft and Google built these tools entirely separately,
they appear to have made the exact same error.
When the newly cropped image saves, it saves over the original image,
but that new image is smaller than the original image. And much like a large man in a tiny thong, it doesn't cover everything.
What this means is that if you had something in a picture that you didn't want people to see,
like say photo ID or important documents or genitalia,
that information may be recoverable. And by that information, I mean quite possibly an uncensored photo
of your social insurance number and or penis. What if it's my social insurance number written along with me?
What if that's where I keep it? Even worse, given the widespread use of a screenshot editor on literally the world's
most popular OS, it may be possible to unredact sensitive information released
by reporters, whistleblowers, and government agencies.
So, Julie and Assange might still be locked up, but I think we're about to learn some stuff.
Is he locked up? Oh, he is in prison. Yes. Fantastic. I mean, that's not fantastic, but okay.
And Google is opening early access to its AI chatbot,
Bard, and the reviews are in. It's just okay.
I mean, it's a chatbot. There's been like a million of these things at this point, and I'm starting to get their names confused
like a forgetful uncle who never calls. For a long time, Google was the big dog in the AI space,
but tech personalities like Marques Brownlee and Luke LaFrenier
have given this experimental version of Bard a resounding.
If anything, Bard feels extremely cautious compared to everything else we've seen in
recent months, perhaps understandably so given past hiccups.
Bard's page is covered in disclaimers and caveats,
warning users that its output may not be fully trustworthy,
and the waitlist is currently restricted to users 18 and older.
Just in case you might want to get into some saucy search engine roleplay.
A lot of people do that. One interesting addition to the AI chatbot formula is that Google has included an option
to look at alternative drafts of Bard's responses,
allowing users to contrast and compare. Unlike Bing, it doesn't always cite its sources,
which led to it answering a question from a Tom's hardware writer
with information taken word for word from a Tom's hardware article.
When the writer then asked if Bard had just committed plagiarism,
the AI fully agreed. You got me.
Guilty as charged. They're still working on me, so even if the best thing we can say about Bard right now
is that it's just as eloquent as Microsoft's new Bing,
it's also never threatened anyone, accused them of murder,
or tried to convince them to leave their spouse.
Yet, give it time. They call me the quick-bit kid, and I'm the quickest bit in the west.
No one's really checked as though so. Adobe has launched the beta of Firefly, a set of generative AI tools
which Adobe says have been trained without stealing the copyrighted work of artists,
only the freshest, locally sourced, organic stock photos.
Adobe will automatically tag content developed with Firefly as AI-assisted
and is developing a do-not-train metadata tag
for artists who don't want their work used to train AI art systems.
It's like one of those do-not-disturb signs that stop hotel maids from stealing guests' underpants
and then combining them into a massive underwear database, then procedurally generating remarkably similar underpants
without proper attribution. It's a real problem in the hotel industry.
Step four, profit. At some point.
DPReview, one of the world's best resources on cameras,
is being shut down because they're owned by Amazon,
a company that infamously does not care about the quality of consumer reviews.
DPReview has been providing detailed, comprehensive reviews on cameras
for the past 25 years, serving the enthusiast community with invaluable information,
something that didn't change when they were subsumed by Amazon's amorphous mass in 2007.
No lunch breaks.
Get in the happy box. But Amazon needs to make cuts,
and clearly the best place to start is a successful enthusiast resource
with a powerful brand and hundreds of thousands of fans.
Don't even, don't really need that. Valve suddenly announced this morning that Counter-Strike 2
will arrive this summer as a free update to CSGO,
complete with overhauled visuals, volumetric smoke grenades,
and what Valve calls sub-tick update architecture,
meaning that the speed of players' actions won't rely on their tick rate.
We'll have to wait to hear about more features, which will be announced closer to launch,
but since the sequel took 23 years to come out a few months, it's not bad.
What is too bad is EA delisting Battlefield 1943
and both bad companies from digital stores in advance of their online services shutting down in December.
Sure, we could change the game so that you can buy it
and play the single player without requiring it to call our servers first,
but honestly, we're kind of warming up to the whole piracy thing,
is probably what they're thinking. I have to imagine. That's the only thing that makes sense.
They want you to steal it. Hackers have stolen one and a half million dollars
worth of digital dash from cryptocurrency ATMs
due to an unusual zero-day vulnerability. The terminals allowed customers to exchange various cryptocurrencies.
That part makes sense. Or they could also, for some unclear reason, upload videos to the ATM.
It's just for Rick Rowling. The hacker used this system to upload and execute a malicious program
which then drained several hot wallets, which are like regular wallets,
except they're connected to the internet and they're incredibly sexy.
What's a cold wallet then? It's where you put your bitcoin in a USB drive
and hide it under your mattress. That's actually just not a joke. That's just what it is.
And scientists have found a key compound for the formation of organic life in samples taken from an asteroid.
The compound in question is uracil, one of the four nucleobases that form RNA
and not actually medication for people within continents.
That's where I thought it was. This is the strongest evidence yet discovered of a theory known as panspermia,
which means exactly what it sounds like.
While most scientists believe life on Earth arose from a warm mixture of organic compounds
that started getting uppity one day, it's possible that those compounds originated somewhere other than Earth
and traveled here on meteorites. It's also possible that the sample may have been contaminated somehow
or altered by its passage through the atmosphere, but let me dream my possibly extraterrestrial dreams, okay?
I want to believe. I always thought I was different.
And you don't have to dream about getting more tech news if you just show up on Friday when we post another episode.
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