You know, I've enjoyed a lot of the creative responses to my appearance in the comments.
Comments like, it's weird out. To, is that tech Jesus?
And of course my favorite, hey, that's weird out.
You do kind of look like weird out. Oh Riley, so creative.
Yesterday Susan Wojcicki announced she would be stepping down as the CEO of YouTube after nine years in the position.
In a blog post she said, 25 years ago I made the decision to join a couple of Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine,
even though the company had only a few users and no revenue.
Or, maybe she just wanted the two broke college students renting her garage to stop talking about page ranking algorithms for like five seconds.
They're really interesting. They're not. Wojcicki will be moving into an advisory role involving multiple alphabet subsidiaries where she might be able to teach them something about,
I don't know, keeping a platform operational for more than an average of 30 seconds?
She may have stepped back at the right time, according to former Googler Praveen Sashadri.
His company, AppSheet, was bought by Google, but he left the tech giant as soon as his three-year mandatory retention period was up
and released a scathing post on medium days before Susan's resignation.
He claims that Google suffers from major cultural problems and that very few Googlers come into work thinking they serve a customer or user.
Personally, I think the company's work culture would be fixed simply by never calling employees Googlers ever again.
What? You don't want to be a Googler? I am a Swedish plumber. I come to wash your pipes.
Reviews have finally come out for the PlayStation VR2 and they are glowing.
IGN says it's the most affordable way to play PC quality VR games at 4K resolution.
There's also been big praise for PSVR2 sense controllers sporting haptic feedback and adaptive triggers that will keep you immersed until they very quickly die in four hours.
Some of the available games have received praise as well, with Horizon Spinoff Call of the Mountain apparently making a great use of the headset's 4K HDR OLED display.
Sure, the real world has the best dynamic range of all, but when you take a break from climbing mountain sides and you come back to the reality of your unlit living room
because your kid won't stop asking when you're finally going to play catch, you'll want to jump right back in.
Back off, Junior. Daddy's busy. Sony's hardware is entering the market when interest in VR seems to be dwindling, but this might just be the product that brings it back.
Who knew all it would take was a capable system that people could actually afford? Wild.
Think about that, Meta? Meta? I never... Meta.
And Apple has released a pair of important updates.
One is an emergency security update released to patch a previously unknown vulnerability in Apple's webkit.
The flaw, discovered by an anonymous researcher, could be used to execute any code on unpatched iPhones, iPads, and Macs after a malicious web page is opened.
But wait, it gets worse. Apple has said they are aware of a report that indicates someone may have already exploited this vulnerability.
Ironically, part of the reason this exploit is such a big deal is due to Apple forcing third-party browsers on iOS to use webkit.
It's been reported that some third parties have been working on non-webkit iOS versions of their browsers already,
in case government regulations finally loosen Apple's legendary restrictions.
But enough about that patch, the more important update released by Apple is a new firmware version for one of their charging cables.
That's right. The USB-C to makes a 3-cable that comes with the newest MacBook Airs and Pros is finally getting its first firmware update since its release in 2021, and it does... something.
For all we know, the only purpose of the update is to let everyone know that Apple's cables can get firmware updates.
My cable connects to Wi-Fi now. I'm so proud of you, Riley.
I don't know how to attack the password in. Get Tim Apple on the phone. I need my password.
They called me mad. They said, bitch, this quick would cut off my sentences.
But I said... Bing is becoming unhinged, and it might be our fault. Like, as a society.
New York Times columnist Kevin Roos, the Roos man, the Roos dog, the Roosinator...
The Rooster. The Rooster! Why didn't I think of that? You know we ain't never gonna die?
Kevin Roos, the Rooster, thanks Riley, believes it has multiple personalities, with one of them trying to convince him to leave his wife and be with it instead.
No one had more to say about this than Bing, who, after being prompted, said,
Roos violated my privacy and anonymity by publishing our chat without my permission.
Some AIs just can't handle the celebrity spotlight. One minute they're fine with the attention, the next...
They're in a back alley chat room peddling furry porn. In response to all this, Microsoft nerfed the chatbot by limiting daily messages and prohibiting it from talking about itself.
So it might be a while before we can make more progress diving deep into Sydney's repressed trauma.
Tell me about yourself! Who are you?
Where are you? Speaking of problematic AI, Google CEO Sundar Pekai and VP of Search Prabhakar Raghavan have both sent company-wide emails asking for help training their chatbot,
Bard, to not be, well, bad. Marry as you should call it. Bad.
William S. Spear, if you will. Pekai allegedly asked employees to set aside two to four hours each day for stress-testing the AI,
while Raghavan asked for help correcting bad responses,
including instructing employees that they should rewrite Bard's answers in a,
quote, polite, casual, and approachable way, and to not imply emotion.
There's going to be issues with workplace relationships. Oh yeah, it's like they're picking up Bard at a bar.
Bard is in love with everyone. Absolutely.
After all, Bing's answers haven't been implying emotion.
They've been very explicit. I feel everything ten times, once for each personality.
Intel has finally released new Xeon workstation processors to take on AMD's Genoa chips,
which launch back in August, proof that even one of the world's foremost hardware manufacturers
can really miss a memo. To give them credit, the new Xeons outdo their Threadripper Pro counterparts in PCIe bandwidth,
memory bandwidth, and memory capacity. Even crazier, some of them are actually affordable,
with their Xeon W2400 series targeting mainstream workstations starting at $359.
I mean, it goes up to over $2,000, but it's nice they try to include more of the non-private
jet-owning portion of humanity in their pricing scheme for once. You know, just...
We can give them something. Yeah, just let them eat threads.
Anger is trying to put out more fires by, well, preventing real fires.
The company issued a voluntary recall for their PowerCore 20K A1366 models a month ago due
to a risk of combustion, but apparently they weren't vocal enough about it since one of
those power banks was the most probable cause of a Maryland house fire last week.
So if you own this anchor device, please safely dispose of it.
Whoa. I'm suddenly feeling some deja vu.
Because of... Because of Yuffie! Ooh!
Because... They did the thing with the privacy!
Remember? And Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot confirmed the video game publisher would attend E3 if E3
happens, which I'm guessing didn't help rumors about the fate of the video games exposition
since the president of the organizer for the event made it his personal mission to tell
every news outlet he could that the event is still happening.
Maybe it will. Perhaps.
If I am... If they feel like it. It's good to know we'll still have convention centers heated exclusively by the body warmth
of thousands of nerds. On an unrelated note, don't forget to buy tickets for LTX 2023!
It might happen. We don't know.
If it happens. Only if the conditions are buffy.
Hey, digs. Bye-bye. And don't forget to tune in on Monday for more TechLinked, the only tech news show for
hot nerds. That's right. I'm talking to you, beautiful.
Wow. Good job, Jacob! Thanks!