Hello, my little tech-linked babies. I hope you were good while I was gone,
or I can't give you any tech news.
I'd give it to you anyway. YouTube has begun the rollout
of its age estimation model in the US, and as promised, users are starting to see pop-ups
informing them that YouTube couldn't verify
that you're an adult. They tried so hard and got so far.
But in the end, you didn't understand this reference.
Child, a change.org petition calling on YouTube
to roll back the policy reached 78,000 signatures
at the time of writing. That's about 0.03% of YouTube's estimated
246 million US-based users,
but it is a great petition. Should we put it on the fridge?
Yeah. Now, what happens if Google estimates
that you are under 18? Well, Google wants to be clear.
This does not mean you must provide a government ID.
You can continue to use YouTube. You just won't be able to watch all the spicy, edgy videos
all of us grown-ups are watching constantly on YouTube.
It also means Google won't turn on their new memory-like feature for Gemini,
which is also rolling out today and allows Gemini to learn
from your past conversations over time. So you can talk to an AI assistant
who's already gobbled up your data for training. I mean, who knows you so well?
Because they love you as a robot-servant friend.
Google's turning the feature on by default, of course.
Wouldn't want to lose out on that juicy data from people who don't keep up
with every single policy update. Although the new temporary chats feature
is essentially like incognito mode, so Google won't use anything you say in those chats.
And as I said, the memory feature won't turn on by default
if you're under 18 or using a work or school account
or located in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, or the UK.
If you're anywhere else, you can turn it off in the settings
if you're okay making Gemini very sad.
Reddit has announced it will block the internet archive from archiving most of Reddit,
despite specifically naming the internet archive just over one year ago
in a list of good-faith actors that Reddit would not block.
Well, see, that was before Reddit realized that the internet archive is actually for, you know,
archiving the internet. They thought it was more like a metaphor.
As Reddit told the Verge, they've been made aware that AI companies
are scraping Reddit data from the Wayback machine,
but are we really worried about that when loading a single page on the Wayback machine
takes about three days? If scraper bots are willing to sit through that,
I say let them have the data, they earned it. Of course, Reddit's worried
because they're making companies like Google pay up to scrape their data.
So the internet archive might be blocked, but thankfully tools like Bellingcat's
newly updated auto archiver exist.
It's designed for journalists and open source intelligence,
but who says you can't use it to preserve evidence to win an argument on Reddit too?
The Elon versus OpenAI saga had some fun developments this week.
On Monday, Elon Musk claimed XAI would be taking legal action against Apple
for blocking AI apps that aren't chat GBT
from reaching number one in the app store. OpenAI chief, Sam Altman,
found that to be a little rich, coming from the guy that pretty blatantly
manipulates Twitter algorithms in his favor, to which Elon replied,
nah, look, your post took off more than mine usually do,
despite me having 50 times your follower count. Altman's reply,
skillet issue.
Elon's original post was timely. As the next day, a federal judge denied his bid
to dismiss OpenAI's claims that Elon has engaged in a years-long harassment campaign.
Elon was like, there isn't enough evidence here, I'll give you some.
Turn on GROC voice and it will teach you anything.
Ah, cool, can it teach you to stop talking for five fucking seconds?
Speaking of GROC, the bot fact-checked Elon's claim of app store manipulation
by pointing out that the app store's number one spot was just this year occupied by deep seek
and perplexity in India, causing ChatGPT's Twitter account
to give it the old good bot. This was posted on Reddit,
where apparently you can also summon GROC now.
Some Redditors were caught off guard. What the fuck are you doing here?
Just doing my job, champ, and telling you about our sponsor.
Okay, but you only get quick bits if you behave.
Just in any way. If you do anything at all, you'll get quick bits.
Former Intel CEO, not precious Pat Gelsinger, my other other dad.
Bob Swann's mine. Not him either. But Craig Barrett, who reigned from 1998 to 2005,
thinks he knows how to save the company, invest more in the foundry.
With what funds, Craig? Oh, well, just get NVIDIA and AMD
to give Intel a bunch of money. Oh, money, more money.
Good idea, Craig. It's been the key this whole time.
That's why we paid you the big box. But honestly, I think the Intel's gonna be fine.
After meeting him, Trump has gone from thinking the current CEO,
Litbu Tan, is a Chinese asset, to thinking his success and rise is an amazing story.
And there's only one explanation. The Chinese have mastered mind control.
And there's only one way to stop it. Money.
Google teased the design of their Pixel 10 Pro Fold, but I'm only really mentioning it
to remind you not to buy a Pixel right now because the new ones are being announced August 20th.
Okay, buy. Perplexity AI has officially offered
to buy Google's Chrome browser for $34.5 billion,
a sum that's made even more impressive by being more than twice perplexity's own
$14 billion valuation. These guys must know the money trick.
And they know how to make hyperbolic claims like this one as a foolproof form of PR stunt,
so people end up talking about them. Damn it. Some parts of the UK are dealing with a drought,
so the UK government is calling on citizens to take action.
And do some real water-preserving things like deleting their old emails.
The reasoning here is that data centers require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.
They're just missing the fact that individual users deleting even their entire Gmail accounts
will help save about as much water as leaving the pub to go piss in the Thames.
Now that Eric Migokovsky has regained the rights to the Pebble brand,
his company Core Devices has unveiled the actual design of the Pebble Time 2,
which goes for a bit more of a refined look compared to the Core 2 Duo,
which has been renamed to the Pebble 2 Duo, thank goodness.
Migokovsky also compared it to the Pebble Time Steel
and, oh God, the Bezzels. It comes in some nice new colorways,
and yes, we might only be talking about this because of nostalgia, but time.
Like a pebble washed smooth by the rains of time.
And YouTuber Basically Homeless posted a fun video
about how he hacked his own muscles to get good in CS2.
He created a setup with a Raspberry Pi, a TENS machine,
and other stuff that forced his muscles and even his trigger finger to contract
in response to the computer signal before his brain could get to it.
And after a lot of trial and error, he did in fact get good.
The all natural way. Holy, we're in agreement then, it's not cheating.
Yeah, yeah, I'll, I'll leave it. Excellent, thank you. The link to the full video
in all of our news sources are in the description as always, but you knew that already
because you watch every TechLink episode. And you're gonna watch the next one on Friday, aren't you?
When you could be out in the forest, finding more money to solve all the world's problems.
We got Craig for that. Get Craig on it.