Did someone say tech news? Yeah.
I did. Just now. Are you paying attention?
You were right there. I still love you.
The US is tightening its export restrictions on advanced AI chips to China, as well as
a handful of other countries, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Vietnam.
Vietnam too? Full cry and out loud. Cut that.
Specifically, they're targeting NVIDIA's A800 and H800 GPUs, variants of the A100
and H100, that NVIDIA modified specifically for the Asian market to comply with the Biden
administration's restrictions on chip exports to China last October.
Which is wild, because this October is right now, making last October exactly a year ago.
So it took nearly an entire calendar year to close a loophole that obvious.
The Cayman Islands, though, they still got that one. Previously, consumer graphics cards were largely unaffected, but the new rules also
restrict sales of NVIDIA's RTX 4090, currently the most powerful gaming card available if
you don't count the Blue Eyes White Dragon. Technically, vendors can still apply for special licenses to sell these GPUs, but it's not
clear how likely the government is to grant them.
Companies will also be required to inform the US government before selling chips below
the restriction threshold in case somebody decides to, I don't know, buy a whole bunch
of slightly inferior chips, then then jury-rig them together into a monstrous, frank-a-chip
yearning for love and acceptance in a world that fears and misunderstands it.
Google Glass may be gone, but the glass holes are back.
That's right, with the release of the MetaQuest 3, grown adults with money, not me, have been
wearing their fancy new face computers into public, using the device's low-latency pastor
mode that allows them to navigate the surroundings without running into walls.
That's half the fun. While that's obviously fine if you're just taking your $500 skull accessory on a walk
through the park, it raises obvious privacy concerns when random tech bros are exploring
the wonder of AR by recording banal interactions with identifiable service workers and posting
it on the internet. Sorry, Stacey, who works on the Starbucks on 5th and 7th.
And that's a problem that will only get worse next year, with the coming release of Meta's
far more subtle Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, which early reviews have called a privacy nightmare.
The Smart Glasses have the obvious advantage that they don't make the wearer look like
a lost Martian tourist, but the more pressing disadvantage that they portend to future where
literally any douchebag in designer shades might be secretly recording you.
Who says they aren't already? Check your toilets.
Following a string of rumors, many anticipated that Apple would announce new iPads with refreshed
chips on Tuesday. Instead, they were not meant with iPads, but the third product to bear the name Apple Pencil.
No doubt as punishment for daring to try and get a glimpse behind Tim Apple's curtain.
But a glimpse of Apple's reasoning would be nice to help the new $80 pencil make sense.
It charges exclusively through a USB-C port hidden under a slider on its butt.
But it's much better than the first-gen Pencil's accident-waiting-to-appen design.
But it can still attach magnetically to the newest iPad pros and errors, just not to the
10th-gen base model iPad, thanks to Apple suddenly deciding the cameras go on the long
side now. And it's the cheapest Apple Pencil, but it's not compatible with the cheapest iPad in Apple's
current lineup, the 9th-gen. It also doesn't have pressure sensitivity, support for double-tap gestures, and you can't
even engrave it for Christ's sake, what if I want to send one to my mom that says I
love you, mom? Here's the third Apple Pencil. But none of that really matters for a big enough chunk of Apple fans who will just buy
the new one and ask us why it's not charging magnetically after.
As for actual iPad refreshers, those will probably arrive in the spring or summer, maybe, alongside
a folding iPad, which I will purchase immediately. I mean, the other ones fold if you try hard enough.
Just the one time. Can you say quick bits? No, you can't, because you're not hosting this video.
I am. I get to read them. And no one can stop me.
Not even the editor. He won't cut me off. I'm going to keep...
New York legislators have proposed a new bill that would require a criminal background
check to buy any 3D printer that could theoretically print all or part of a firearm, which unfortunately
is most of them. Some digest recommends the Creality Ender 3 v2 or the Prusa i3 MK3S Plus, both of which
are bed slinger style FDM printers, the cheapest, most common kind of 3D printer.
So if you're a New York resident with a felony conviction and a Warhammer addiction, this
could seriously cramp your style. I mean, unless you like the visits from hot policemen.
Put the printer down! AMD has released a new beta driver, which disables its Radeon Anti-Leg Plus technology
In all supported games, after the feature and its predecessor, Anti-Leg Non-Plus led
to a wave of player bands in CS2, Apex Legends, and Cod.
Unfortunately, AMD recommended using Anti-Leg to decrease latency caused by their fluid
motion frames after enabling that in all DX11 games.
It's like if your friend told you that the best way to get promoted at work was to find
the most powerful person and punch them in the face.
And all that did was make Linus angry. Qualcomm, in collaboration with Google, has announced development of the first ever masked
market RISK 5 Android SoC.
Google announced RISK 5 software support for Android OS late last year.
Now Qualcomm are developing a yet unnamed RISK 5 Snapdragon SoC for wearable devices
to act as the necessary hardware. If successful, this could present a serious competitive threat to ARM as RISK 5's open
source architecture means it can be both cheaper and more flexible to implement.
ARM is already suing Qualcomm over license fees and losing ground to RISK 5 in China
due to export restrictions, as if these companies needed anything else to make Thanksgiving
more awkward.
The IRS is advancing a pilot program that will allow residents in 13 states to electronically
file their tax returns directly with the IRS in 2024.
The pilot is a response to a long-standing issue going back to 2001, when the IRS partnered
with tax preparation companies to offer taxpayers with simple returns of free alternative for
filing their taxes. Those companies then made those free alternatives harder to find than a reason to get up in
the morning. Or a reason to go to bed at night. Why is it both?
When the IRS banned them from doing that, both H&R Block and Intuit, the makers of TurboTax,
left the agreement. Intuit has been lobbying against direct filing for over a decade, arguing that free alternatives
are already available. Which they are, you're just never going to find them, and I'm going to stay in bed
late. Slimbook and Fedora Project announced a new Linux optimized laptop, the Fedora Slimbook.
So named after Fedora Slim, a hardboiled private detective who was also the Marlboro
man. Yee-haw! The laptop comes with a 12th gen Intel Core i7-12700H processor, an RTX 3050 Ti graphics
card, up to 64GB of RAM, a 4TB NVMe SSD, and a 16-inch 3K 90Hz display.
The device comes loaded with software from Linux distribution Fedora, which is an absolutely
wild coincidence, and features the GNOME desktop environment.
Slimbook will be donating 3% of the revenue from the Fedora Slimbook to the GNOME Foundation,
which provides end-of-life care for elderly garden gnomes.
Rest in peace, Papa Smurf, you will be missed.
Nobody will know if you don't come back for more TechLinked on Friday, but I'll still
feel it in my heart.
First Papa Smurf and now this. Why would you do this, Jerry?