We all know the enemy of your enemy is your friend. But what if you have another enemy who's the enemy of the first enemy who's now your friend?
Why do you have so many enemies you should try being nicer to people?
Chip Rivals, Intel, and AMD have joined forces to defend themselves against the rising threat
of ARM processors, who apparently think they're good enough to power MacBooks and Windows PCs now.
Team Red and Blue announced at Lenovo's Tech World Conference that they've recruited giants
like Microsoft, Google, and more to the x86 advisory group.
Despite those companies recently building their own ARM server chips to get away from x86.
But darling, you can't decline an invitation to an advisory group, it simply isn't done.
Perhaps more confusing is the addition of famous computer boys Tim Sweeney and Linus Torvalds
as luminaries on the board, which means they get to wear cool robes and sit in the biggest
chairs in the boardroom. To prove that x86 isn't dead, Intel also took the opportunity to show off
the first Panther Lake sample chip built on Intel's 18a node, the one that the company said
it's completely focusing on instead of the 20a node used in its Aero Lake desktop chips,
launching late next week. Might seem a tad early to get the Panther Lake hype started now, but
it's probably in Intel's best interest as more leaked benchmarks in CPUZ and Blender
show disappointing performance from the Aero Lake flagship Core Ultra 9 285K.
Thankfully, Intel is going to get some emotional support from its new PAL AMD,
who's expected to launch the Ryzen 9 9800X3D the day after the Aero Lake launch.
Both Google and Amazon are turning to SMRs, small modular nuclear reactors,
which are prefabricated and easily assembled with an output capacity of up to 300 megawatts.
Google has announced an agreement to buy power from Kyros Power, a company with a yet untested
SMR design that recently began construction of an unpowered demo reactor. Amazon, meanwhile,
is giving money to two utility companies to study the possibility of adding SMRs to their
existing large non-modular reactors, as well as investing in startup X-Energy,
which has its own equally untested SMR design. This sounds like a good idea, that's for the
scientists, we gotta get these AIs going guys. SMRs have been a popular idea for getting around
the prohibitive upfront costs of old school reactors, which can take decades to build,
but due in parts to regulatory barriers and public uncertainty, they've been slow in coming.
Currently, the only successful SMRs in the world are in Russia and China, built in 2020 and 2021,
respectively. However, the new hotness in the tech world, AI, is burning a hole through many
companies budgets with its exorbitant energy draw. While Microsoft has jumped onto a scheme to get
the old three-mile island reactor up and running, there aren't exactly a lot of old unused reactors
just sitting around in basically serviceable condition. Nuclear energy has become far more
efficient over the last few decades, especially with techniques like fuel reprocessing, though that
itself has raised concerns over nuclear proliferation, because fun fact, it's also how you extract
plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. But if we don't build the reactors, how are we gonna make
the AI that will one day nuke us all? Think about it. The only way to win is to not play!
The recent rollout of Windows 11 version 24H2 is causing its fair share of chaos,
as major Windows updates are wont to do. Users have reported widespread connectivity issues
after restarting their newly updated devices, while others have found that their mouse cursor
disappears completely when they click on text fields in chromium-based apps, including Microsoft
Edge. Another bug causes the system file checker to misclassify files as corrupted,
attempt to fix them and re-scan them, only to find them corrupted yet again, like an IT
sycophus. Microsoft did this on purpose to punish it. There's also a phantom 8.63 Gigabyte update
cache that can't be deleted, which Microsoft says is actually just a reporting error. All of these
issues should be fixed at some point, but depending on how serious your device has been affected,
you might just want to roll back to version 23H2, or maybe just roll over and go back to bed.
Probably the most serious bug is the one causing some western digital SSDs to repeatedly crash,
like a narcoleptic bus driver. Makes sense to me. The affected SSD models are the SN580
and the SN770, which lack a DRAM module and instead use a host memory buffer, or HMB,
in the computer's system memory to store a map of where data is located on the SSD.
This recent Windows 11 update changed these SSDs' maximum HMB size from 64 megabytes to
200 megabytes, causing them to freak out. Notably, there are other vendors that sell SSDs
with 64 megabyte HMBs, and it's not yet clear why only western digital SSDs are having this
problem. It is possible to fix the issue with a rollback, that is, if you can manage to do so
before your PC poops its pants. Good luck. The quick bits are not your enemy.
They're not your friend either. Kinda like Switzerland.
Or Lichtenstein. The FTC has unveiled the final version of its new Click to Cancel rule,
which will require subscription services to make cancellation as easy as signing up.
Not a usual chicanery where you check a box at checkout to sign up, but you've gotta send a
12-page form written in blood to a P.O. box in Bermuda to get out.
Stop sending me postmates! The rule applies to online companies like Amazon, yes, but it also applies to brick-and-mortar
businesses like gyms, which are typically harder to break up with than Bluebeard.
He's a mythological figure who murders all his wives. And that's your Jessica Fun Fact for the day.
Adobe has unveiled its Firefly Text-to-Video AI Generation tool,
which distinguishes itself from its competition with a training database that Adobe says is
exclusively composed of above-board, licensed content.
The tool is still in beta, but it will definitely be more appealing to large brands who'd
rather not get their assets sued off. In response to the rise of Deepfakes enabled by these kinds of easy-to-use tools,
Startup Reality Defender has developed its own tool to detect live Deepfakes NVIDIA calls,
one that will hopefully be ready in time for my Skype call next week
with the Pope and the Dalai Lama. Big tech news fans, those guys.
SpaceX literally caught a rocket in midair during its fifth test flight of the massive
Starship rocket. The rocket's first stage, Super Heavy Booster, launched the Starship, essentially the upper
stage that is meant to hold people, to 130 miles above the ground, then slowly descended to be
caught by the mechanical arms of the launch tower.
I missed you. Now, SpaceX wants to move on to catching the Starship itself, too.
We're going to be shooting tubes of people into the sky, and then catching them in a
giant clamp. It's like the most high-stakes game of catch you've ever seen.
Don't drop it. But Elon Musk never got from his own father. The bell is now tolling for UBlock Origin, as the extension may or may not be supported
by your Chrome browser. While the extensions page in the Chrome Web Store says the extension may soon no longer
be supported, some users have actually been told by Chrome that UBlock Origin and other
extensions are definitely unsupported, with the browser explicitly turning said extensions
off. It's the end of an era. Anyway, I'll see you all on Firefox.
And multiple U.S. owners of EcoVac's robot vacuums have reported that their once-faithful
dustbusters started following them around, screaming slurs and obscenities.
It has begun. To be clear, these devices were just hacked.
They did not suddenly gain sentience and speedrun their way to antisemitism.
According to an investigation by ABC, a PIN code is required to access these EcoVac's
video feeds, but there's no server-side validation, meaning that it's easily bypassed.
Worse, the company was warned about this issue back in 2023 and simply told users not to worry
about it in a statement to TechCrunch. I mean, what's the worst that could happen?
A tiny mobile camera could be used to constantly monitor you in your most intimate moments?
Yes. But hey, we don't mind if you monitor us on Friday for another episode of TechNews.
You could even second monitor us if you have to. But I feel like you're missing out on at least 10% of the experience.
2% is Riley's mustache. Whatever floats your boat.