Tech news, I love tech news. I mean, you start talking about connector tables,
CPUs, software updates, it's getting hot in here, do you mind?
I might need the room. Intel's next-gen GPUs codenamed Battle Mage
will launch this fall, according to industry sources who spoke to German tech outlet Computerbase
at Embedded World 2024. These mysterious beings reportedly indicated
that Intel wants Battle Mage graphic cards to arrive before Black Friday,
aka November 29th, aka the OG Prime Day.
If this is true, it means Battle Mage should go head-to-head with NVIDIA's Blackwell gaming GPUs,
which are set for a launch in Q4, according to equally mysterious board partners.
Although the RTX 5090 is rumored to launch first, and if Intel follows their Alchemist launch playbook,
they'll lead with an upper to mid-tier card. So it might be more like going head to sternum,
which I have seen work well. Line is to be Luke.
Right now though, Intel is taking on NVIDIA in the AI chip space.
Team Blue just announced their Gaudi 3 accelerator,
which they say can beat NVIDIA's H100
every sometimes running certain models. But hey, at least that's better than the new
ARM-based Axion data center chip that Google just announced that thing
won't run AI language models at all, because it's a CPU, not an AI accelerator.
Well, that's all for me. John, after years of inaction,
a bipartisan pair of legislators has released a discussion draft
for new federal data privacy legislation
titled the American Privacy Rights Act. How appropriate.
Oh, never again, guys. The act would create a national standard
for data privacy that preempts the current state-by-state patchwork of privacy legislation.
It would also limit what kinds of information companies can collect and create a set of consumer data rights
similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation GDPR.
Many businesses actually like the idea of a national privacy standard,
primarily because that would reduce the difficulty and cost of compliance.
However, this also means that the bill is likely to receive opposition from both states
that currently have much higher and states that have much lower consumer protections,
which is what scuttled Congress last attempt at fixing this mess.
Look, you can't just stick California and Texas in the same room and expect them to get along.
They're like cobras and mongooses, mortal enemies.
But there's a lot of reasons to think that regulations like this can help.
The EU's GDPR has forced companies to make significant changes to how they handle data
and their new antitrust rules, making it easier to switch browsers on most devices,
seem to have resulted in small browsers making significant gains in terms of market share
in the region. What competition? Without new legislation though,
most of the pushback against American companies that mistreat their customers is coming extremely gradually
through regulatory bodies. Today, the FCC rolled out its new broadband consumer labels,
which are standardized across different ISPs and must clearly list every single fee, cap,
and charge associated with the plan and must be clearly displayed for all customers at signup.
The labels are also explicitly based on nutrition labels,
like you'd find on the back of a box of corn flakes, which makes me wonder how many calories
are in a wireless router? Are they having protein or carbs?
And what is the latency of my next bowel movement? Several major AI image generators
are struggling to depict interracial relationships, especially Asian men in relationships with white women.
Mia Sato of The Verge first reported this issue a few weeks ago with Instagram's AI,
which would consistently produce pictures of two people of the same race
when asked to create mixed-raced couples. Strangely, while it was basically impossible
to coax it into creating an image of an Asian man and a white woman, it was far easier
to get it to create images of a white man with an Asian woman or a black man with a white woman.
Even then, it struggled with prompts like black man and white girlfriend,
but not with white woman and black boyfriend. Several other news outlets jumped on the idea
that Asian men replicated these results. Shortly after, meta seems to have blocked prompts
with keywords like Asian man, though this was mysteriously reversed
after Mia Sato asked them about it. But it also turns out that this isn't an issue
exclusive to meta. OpenAI's Dolly 3 almost managed to create
a mixed Asian white couple by somehow creating
the most Asian-looking white women known to men, or men.
When prompted with Asian man with white wife mid-journey,
also produced a lot of oddly caucasian Asian women, as well as inexplicably a black man and a white woman
in what appears to be traditional Chinese clothing. Verge writers were eventually able to get mid-journey
to create an image of an Asian man and a white woman, but this only worked when the prompt was clearly platonic
and mentioned academia. This is amazing.
Google's Gemini wasn't able to produce interracial couples of any kind in any time,
Viking or whatever, of course, because Google shut down its ability to generate images
of people after the racially diverse Nazis incident back in February.
The feature was supposed to return in March, so we can assume Google's still trying to get it
to stop generating images of Schindler's list as cast by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
I bet the rap solos are gonna be awesome in that. Schindler's hermanos.
A quick bit is only really a quick bit if it comes from the quick region of France,
otherwise it's really technically sparkling techniques. On Monday, we talked about how version 24H2 of Windows 11
is blocking third-party modifying apps that alter the iOS's UI.
But it turns out that these changes actually go much, much further.
A sizable list of apps, drivers, and hardware IDs
can trigger an update hold on Windows 11 version 24H2,
including two Intel drivers, a real-tech wireless USB 2.0 adapter driver,
an AMD Radeon software executable, and an iCloud services executable.
While Microsoft often blocks older software, that is likely to cause instability,
several of these newly blocked apps and executables were released relatively recently.
This is likely because Microsoft is making some pretty extensive changes in the new version,
mostly related to the AI features it wants to mix
into the OS like mint through chocolate, in the sense that a lot of us do not want it there.
And don't come at me, mint lovers. It's like the cilantro of OS.
Yes. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Cilantro is great.
It's great for you. I'm a mutant. TikTok is working on a new app called TikTok Notes,
and you guessed it. It has nothing to do with notes or note taking.
It's a photo posting app. This isn't the first we heard about this.
Last month, the leaks suggested TikTok was working on an Instagram competitor called TikTok Photos,
a name that apparently made too much sense to everybody.
Even more offensive, no one at TikTok, not a single person named the photo app TikTok.
If they want to do so now, they have to pay Jacob Rush $7 million.
And I get royalty rights for saying it first on camera. Automatic, the parent company of WordPress,
has acquired Beeper, the message company that you remember these guys.
They spent the last several months getting their iMessage Bridging service repeatedly blocked
by Apple. That being said, Beeper will apparently operate as a mostly independent subsidiary.
Automatic does, however, plan to eventually merge Beeper with its other messaging service, text.com.
Beeper had only around 115,000 users prior to acquisition,
but they've also got a wait list of over 450,000.
An entire Oakland's worth of people. Luckily for them, Beeper's new Android app
is also leaving beta, though there's no word on when or if iMessage Bridging will return.
For Timothy Cook of Apple, God's his blue bubbles most jealously.
Texas Education Department will be introducing an AI-powered grader called Auto Scoring Engine, or ASE,
for written questions on standardized tests. The only subjects excluded from computer grading
appear to be Spanish assessments. So get ready to find out what a robot thinks of your essay
on George Orwell's 1984 essay. ASS-O?
While the ASE is intended to replace human graders,
which would save the state an estimated $15 to $20 million per year,
around 25% of the tests will be sent for further human review as a measure of quality control.
Texas has clarified that the AI-powering the ASE is not chat GBT, but an AI model purpose-built for grading.
Regardless, this move brings us one step closer to the future dystopia.
We're all schooling, both homework and grading. It's completely AI generated.
Let the robots handle it, leave me out of it. And according to Cloudflare,
Monday's solar eclipse managed to depress US internet traffic by 8%.
Though that's less impressive when you consider that nearly 100% of what I see on the internet
depresses me on a daily basis. For example, I learned from the internet
that Google searches for eyes hurt, spiked during the eclipse in both the United States
and Canada. Nothing makes me lose faith in humanity more
than people being confused as to why they have eyeball pain after they optically raw-dogged the sun.
The first thing you learn about the sun is don't look at it. But it won't be a pain for you to come back on Friday
for more tech news. The best part is you can stare at us for as long as you like,
but maybe don't for too long. Don't make it weird.
We like the watch time, but there's a limit.
You will go blind.