Hello and welcome to GameLegged. Sights, no, it's tech news time.
Oh my God, you're so good. Intel has called out AMD for misleading branding
in an arguably hypocritical new marketing presentation
it published before swiftly taking it down
when it was spotted by Tom's hardware and others. Sadly for Intel and Barbara Streisand,
the internet never forgets. The presentation tech uses imagery to represent AMD
as an untrustworthy snake oil salesman and contains four core truths intended to help consumers
see through its competitors' witchcraft. The first is that current gen Ryzen processors
secretly use AMD's 2019 chip architecture
unlike current gen Intel processors which use Intel's top of the line 13th gen architecture
released in 2023 and created by very slightly tweaking Intel's 12th gen architecture from 2021.
So much is much different. Never mind Intel's 2015 14 nanometer Skylake architecture
which as PC gamers Jeremy Laird points out, Intel rebadged twice and sold as 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th gen.
It's like when I was a kid, my parents gave me the same easy bake oven
five years in a row for my birthday. To be fair to Intel, there's more than a little truth
to some of their accusations like Ryzen's naming conventions being confusing
but that's as rich as a triple thick chocolate pie coming from Intel.
Intel could have also helped its own case if it didn't cherry pick benchmarks
in its real world performance marketing push back in 2019
and wasn't equally guilty of oiling the old snake.
That's what snake oil is for, right? That sounds like an innuendo.
Thankfully AMD actually did help Intel's case today
by unveiling its Ryzen 8040 series of laptop chips
which appear to be pretty much the same hardware wise
as last year's 7040 series but with higher clock speeds and other optimizations.
Look, I don't wanna blame the victim here but maybe AMD should fix their naming scheme
if they don't want other companies to post mean PDFs about them.
Didn't work for me but I never know. Google has finally launched their new AI model Gemini
which it claims beats GPT-4 on a wide range of benchmarks
but notably not in Heliswag which is self evidently the most important one.
Google describes Gemini as natively multimodal
as it was trained on images, text and video itself
instead of relying on plugins to other models.
Gemini also comes in three versions, Nano which is more lightweight, Pro which is more middleweight
and Ultra which can canonically defeat Goku.
It's called Gemini, that's why there's three of them. Yeah, what?
As of today, Gemini Pro is now powering Google's AI chatbot, Bart.
It's currently in English only but it will soon be available in 170 markets
around the world. Still not Europe or Canada though,
presumably due to a fear of adequate antitrust regulations
and moose, they're everywhere, they're in the walls.
As of December 13th, Gemini Pro will be available to developers as well as Google's enterprise customers
via Google AI Studio or Google Cloud Vertex AI.
Then at some point in 2024, Gemini Ultra will replace Gemini Pro within Bard
and will be made available to users through a cloud API.
Despite recent turbulence, OpenAI's GPT-4 remains Google's and everyone else's
biggest rival in the LLM space to the point that chat GPT was Wikipedia's
most viewed article of 2023 with over 49 million page views.
That's at least better than last year when the Russian invasion of Ukraine
got beat out by Jeffrey Dahmer. That came out of nowhere.
Twitch has announced that by the end of February next year,
it will end all business in South Korea, where it says its cost to operate is prohibitively expensive.
According to Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, the company has been running at a loss in South Korea.
And despite reducing source quality to a maximum of 720p
and experimenting with peer-to-peer models for source quality, its network fees in the country
are still 10 times more expensive than most other countries.
Clancy has stated that Twitch will work with affected streamers
and will help them migrate to alternative streaming platforms like YouTube and the Korean based Africa.
Hmm. That is a name.
Is that what it's called? Yes. Did they get licensing for that?
Streamers outside of South Korea with significant Korean fan bases
may also see a significant hit to revenue.
It's hard to understand how Twitch, the world's largest live streaming platform,
could fail in South Korea, a global hotspot for eSports.
But the answer may lie in South Korea's 2016
sending party network pays law, which requires parties sending information
over the internet to pay a fee to telecoms
rather than just the receiving party, which is how it works everywhere else.
This effectively allows South Korean telecoms to double charge for internet traffic.
It's like splitting the check on a date, except that both parties pay the full price
for the entire meal. No wonder it's hard to find someone right now. Quick bits are a lot like seafood stew.
It's a bunch of tasty little bite-sized chunks. And if you consume it more than four days
after it was prepared, it'll make you sick. iMessage support on Android is finally here
for real this time. Thanks to messaging company Beeper's new app, Beeper Mini.
Unlike Sunbird, which shut down after huge security concerns were brought to light,
and Beeper's existing service, combining iMessage with other chat apps,
Beeper Mini doesn't sign in with your Apple ID
on a Mac and a server farm somewhere. Instead, Beeper claims to have reverse engineered iMessage,
allowing Android users to sign in directly to Apple services.
It's not free though. It costs two bucks a month, which should keep the ship afloat
until Tim's elite assassins extrapolate Beeper's location.
What? They're in the house. Barbara, get down.
I and Barbara will find you.
Come on, Barbara, let's go. Some of the earliest videos posted to Instagram
have been losing audio. And are instead displaying an error message
claiming that the video has no sound. Several users have reported distress
after finding that old videos of precious memories and deceased loved ones and pets lacked all audio.
Luckily, according to The Verge, that audio isn't lost forever.
The videos can be heard when played through a browser, just not in the app itself.
Meta is apparently aware of the issue and working to fix it, but in the meantime,
consider somewhere more secure to keep your important data.
Maybe a hard drive in an existential despair proof bunker.
Are you really relying on Instagram to keep these?
All right. A lawsuit against Amazon for selling spy cams
is going forward after the company's motion to dismiss the case was denied.
The plaintiff claims that the E-giant should have foreseen that a camera hidden in a clothes hook
that won't attract attention, according to its product listing,
might be used to illegally record people while they're getting undressed.
I just, just maybe.
Confirming that they do indeed have a brain, the judge agreed this claim was credible enough
for the suit to go forward. While Amazon may have put people at risk
by selling this camera, if this lawsuit exposes them,
they will at least have the luxury of not being filmed. Microsoft has announced that individuals,
not just businesses, will be able to pay for Windows 10 extended security updates
past the OS's scheduled expiry date of October 14th, 2025,
just over 10 years after it launched. It's seemingly the tech giant's latest admission
that Windows users don't actually prefer it when you make basic features worse.
How could we have known? Microsoft is already committed to bringing co-pilot
and other previously Windows 11 exclusive AI features
to the older OS, a year after saying Windows 10 wouldn't receive
any more big feature updates. It's all a little confusing,
but I understand that Microsoft has its hands full finding more products that can slap a co-pilot sticker on.
And the UK is considering using face scanning tech
to age gate pornography, following the controversial online safety bill
passing into law. To be fair, some supermarkets in the UK
allow customers to buy booze with a face scan itself checkout,
but that's at a physical location with human staff there to spot any 14 year old wearing a fake mustache.
The UK wants adult websites to estimate a person's age from a selfie,
which sounds super cool, but the government does admit to one small problem.
Quote, there's little evidence that the AI method of age estimation
will be fair, reliable, or effective. But once they figure that out, there'll be no problem.
It'll be working like a charm. Once we figure out this whole, it works thing.
Just like you'll be able to come back here on Friday for more TechLinked, no face scans required.
We trust that you wouldn't look at anything you're not supposed to. You're a good person.
Don't.