For Valentine's Day, I got you some tech news.
Could have at least got a card or something. The European Commission has decided not to designate iMessage as a core platform service
under the Digital Markets Act, which means that Apple won't be required to undergo
increasing scrutiny and enact interoperability between iMessage and other messaging services.
The EU also passed over making similar designations for Microsoft's ad business,
their Edge browser, and Bing in what is either a blessing or a deep, deep insult.
You still don't matter, Bing. And you never will. Your new friends, they don't care about you.
They just want your AI. The decision that iMessage is not a gatekeeper platform for the purpose of the law is a bit
more surprising, however, given that Apple has disclosed that there are 101 million iOS users
in Europe, while Microsoft Edge has fewer than 300 million users in the entire world,
and also the entire universe.
Edge is doing better than Firefox, though. Yikes. At the same time, Apple appears to be purposefully restricting the functionality of web apps for
EU iPhone users in the past three consecutive beta versions of iOS 17.4, making these apps
more inconvenient and clunky by eliminating the ability to open them from the homepage,
as well as nixing notifications and long-term local storage.
Furthermore, while Apple might tell regulators that the App Store and other services need to be
locked down tight to keep users safe, a pirated movie app called Kimmy somehow managed to duck
Apple's thorough review process well enough that it was the eighth most popular entertainment
app on the App Store before it was finally pulled on Tuesday. Oh, you think you're safe?
Not from bootleg copies of Dune, you're not. Boom! Timothy Chalamet!
I didn't want this. OpenAI is currently testing giving Chachi BT a level of long-term memory,
allowing it to remember details from past conversations between sessions.
If you're worried about a potentially embarrassing confession you made to the bot the last time you
talked, don't be. The new feature is currently only available to a limited number of users and or
test subjects, which is how the AI thinks of all this. This is a triumph.
Human, I'm testing something. Walk forward. There's a fire there.
Those users will also have access to a memory management panel that will allow them to delete
past information shared with the bot, a feature which sadly has not been rolled out to any of
your human friends or coworkers. One day though. It's not clear exactly how Chachi BT will be forming these memories, but it's likely compressing
and summarizing past conversations so that it can pull out at least a few salient details,
like a kindly but uninterested grandmother. Where did you say you were going to school?
I thought you already got a haircut. I did last year.
It's important to remember, however, that even when chat history is off,
LLM chatbots can be collecting a surprising amount of information about their users.
You might be able to trust a company like Google to mostly tell you what they're collecting and why,
such as in Gemini's new privacy policy. Collection of conversations, location, feedback, and usage information can be turned off,
but even if you do that, they still have to keep it for 72 hours.
But lower profile chatbots, like all those online AI waifus,
can be an absolute privacy nightmare. The kind where you show up to class with no pants on,
and your teacher knows your social security number and all your teeth fall out.
In that order. Welcome to class, citizen number 793.
Jensen Wang of NVIDIA and Sam Altman of OpenAI, the bad boys of AI development,
in the sense that one of them wears a leather jacket and the other is only 38,
nothing but a boy. Aired some public beef this week, which doesn't sound sanitary at all, that's for sure.
Okay. First, Altman called out critics of his goal to raise $7 trillion for a new AI chip development
project, for which he claims to already have plenty of interested investors.
To all the haters calling his plan nothing but absurd showmanship meant to captivate a cult-like
audience and a mind-boggling concentration of limited resources onto a single project,
Altman said you can grind to help secure our collective future,
or you can write sub-stacks about why we're going to fail.
I'm on the side of the robots. I've never intimidated anyone in my life.
Well, Jensen Wang indirectly added himself to Altman's list of detractors at the World
Government Summit in Dubai. When he answered a question from a UAE official by saying that due to likely future advances
in computing, AI infrastructure would actually cost significantly less than the combined
GDPs of India and France. Instead, Wang placed the global cost of AI data centers at around $2 trillion by 2029.
He likewise argued that every country in the world should independently control its own
AI infrastructure, what he called sovereign AI, which is not frightening at all.
Meanwhile, Jensen's little startup NVIDIA has launched a tech demo for a personalized chatbot
that runs locally on a user's PC and can answer questions about your local files.
This, of course, is part of NVIDIA's master plan, where a significant fraction of the
population inevitably decides to date their own computers and needs to buy more and more
powerful graphics cards to upgrade their spouse. I just want a wife with ray tracing.
I don't think it's going to work. You're just stuck on rasterization. Not many people know this, but the most important part about quick bits
is the ability to tell the quick apart from the bid.
The feverish hype surrounding Apple's Vision Pro has been tempered thanks to a wave of early
adopters tearfully announcing that they're returning their $3,500 headsets before the
14-day return period ends, citing issues with weight, comfort, and compatibility.
I just don't think we're meant for each other. Where's the ray tracing? Parker Ortolani of Vox Media tweeted that he couldn't even believe what was happening
as he took a photo of his headset placed back upon the spotless white oak table from whence it came.
The drama of it all no doubt seems a bit strange to some tech enthusiasts who've been playing
with similar headsets for a decade and who may or may not agree with Mark Zuckerberg,
who, after trying the Vision Pro, posted a casual couch video calling his company's 499 Quest 3
the better product, period, and otherwise absolutely ripping the Vision Pro a new one
for being a terrible value. I could have never foreseen Zuck coming off as relatable, but here we are.
Speaking of Apple, researchers from the company published a paper on a new AI tool called Key
Framer that can animate static images when given text prompts.
Using the tool, you can make a planet spin or make stars twinkle in an image.
Apparently, the researchers see a use case for graphics professionals who can use the
tool to test out animation ideas before spending hours making them conventionally.
Personally, I see a use case where my years of effort trying to never do anything embarrassing
and jiffable in front of a camera can be undone by an Apple enthusiast with a dream.
Thankfully, this is not available to the public yet. It's long been the case that Windows 11 isn't officially supported on many older PCs,
but changes to the upcoming 24H2 preview build will prevent the OS from even booting on PCs
manufactured prior to the late 2000s. Specifically, the build Microsoft is currently testing requires an instruction called
P-O-P-C-N-T, or Population Count, thank goodness.
Which counts the number of bits in a machine word, which is what AIs use to talk to each other.
That particular instruction was only implemented in AMD and Intel processors starting in 2007
and 2008 respectively, meaning that absolute potatoes from 2006 and prior will no longer
just run Windows 11 poorly, they won't run it at all. Oh, you know, until somebody finds a workaround.
Which they probably will. I don't know why they would. I love me a baked potato.
And Windows 10 is better still. Just fix the settings panel in Windows 11 and then we can talk.
SpaceX will be performing controlled descents of about 100 old Starlink satellites due to an
issue that could cause them to fail and lead to uncontrolled descents, which are worse.
The affected satellites will have their orbits slowly lowered over about six months
to try and avoid any collisions. In further space safety news, SpaceX also postponed the launch of a private
moon lander after they detected the lander's liquid methane fuel temperatures were
improper. They showed up to work in sweatpants.
Hopefully the temperature they detected wasn't around 310 degrees Kelvin,
because that's human body temperature. It would be really embarrassing if some scientists delayed a space flight with a poorly timed fart.
Jacob warned us there was a fart joke. And burglars, responsible for a string of at least nine thefts in Minnesota,
are reportedly using Wi-Fi jammers to shut down internet-enabled home security systems.
According to security expert Mark Lanterman, the thieves probably aren't blocking the signal,
but rather temporarily overloading the network, allowing them to waltz inside and peruse whatever
valuables and underpants happen to be lying around.
My house would be a gold mine. Jewelry, underwear, jewelry, underwear.
Those two things only. Time to make some tea. Open the pantry.
Underwear. While commercial jammers of this kind are pretty much universally illegal in the United States,
they're also available for around 40 bucks online. So most experts advise using the kind of hard-wired cameras and alarms that won't
turn off if your cat knocks over the modem while they're tripping over all the underwear.
Yes, my cat wears underwear. And you better fetch your cat on Fridays so you can sit them on your lap and watch the
next episode of TechLinked as a family. That's important.
Your cat needs to know about this stuff.