It's time for tech news, where we bring you all the news and none of the old's from the world of technology.
Oh, is that a VCR? Get it out of here!
Blehh, it makes me nauseous! Amazon Web Services just announced its own chatbot, two new server chips,
as well as an expansion of its partnership with NVIDIA to use their chips. Just in case.
The new chips include the ARM-based Graviton 4,
with 96 cores and up to 45% faster performance than its predecessor,
and the Tranium 2, an AI accelerator with four times the performance and twice the energy efficiency.
Announcing these chips while acting as if they're not going to drop NVIDIA as soon as they physically can
actually isn't that weird. Being able to offer customers access to hardware from either company
helps Amazon. What is weird is the name they gave their new enterprise-focused chatbot.
Q. Now, if that sounds familiar, it may be because of last week's story about Open AI's
secret algorithm called Q-Star, said to be a massive breakthrough in the development of AGI,
which supposedly led to all that Sam Altman drama, although it's largely being dismissed as rumors
now. AI researchers are notorious for their love of hot goss.
They call it hallucinating! You will never guess what my chatbot said. Wow.
Now, it's unlikely that Amazon's Q has anything to do with that, because it's not built on Open
AI's tech, but rather on multiple LLMs from Anthropic and Meta, as well as Amazon's own
Titan family of models. The Q name is apparently a reference to the character Q from James Bond,
the franchise that Amazon owns through its subsidiary MGM. Because asking a chatbot to
produce a questionably accurate summary of your Q4 sales is just like getting a cool laser watch.
It's not. And I'm upset about it. I want the watch.
Nearly 4,000 auto dealers throughout the U.S. have published an open letter asking the federal
government to slow down its plans for mass EV adoption, because even with a significant tax
credit subsidy, unsold EVs are clogging their lots, like oil clogged dinosaur arteries millions
of years ago. That's how they died. Strangely, U.S. EV sales are on course to hit a record
high this year, at 9% of all vehicles sold. Yet those are still rookie numbers, compared to EVs
making up 33% of vehicle sales in China, 35% in Germany, and 90% in Norway. Those guys love
electricity. They shock themselves for fun. Oh, Sven, stop! The White House wants half of new
cars sold in the U.S. to be EVs by 2032, and nine states have plans to ban the sale of new
gasoline vehicles by 2035, not including plug-in hybrids. Now, this wouldn't eliminate gas vehicles,
because the average car stays on the road for around 12 years, which may come as a shock if you,
like the writer of this episode, Jessica, own a car that's old enough to legally marry.
But still young enough to date Leonardo DiCaprio? I hope you get to drive it down the aisle one day.
The federal government has earmarked $5 billion to invest in a national network of charging
stations, but most people are buying new cars for where they can go now, not where they think
they might be able to go a few years from now. Hybrids, meanwhile, are apparently flying off
the shelves even faster than traditional gas vehicles, validating the more cautious approach of
Akio Toyoda, chairman of Toyota, who isn't saying, I told you so,
but that's probably because he's speaking Japanese.
Online developer conference DevTernity has been cancelled following the revelation that an organizer,
Eduard Cizovs, apparently just made up several female speakers at the conference,
fabricating their biographies and credentials entirely from whole cloth.
If he had used cloth, that might have been a bit better. It was just nothing.
These fake speakers first came to broad attention after Gerge Oroch,
writer of tech newsletter Pragmatic Engineering, pointed out on Twitter that two out of three
of the event's female speakers didn't appear to exist. Not only that, but many female speakers
at other events, run by the same organizer, didn't exist either, except as a fake bio and
an AI-generated image of a pretty young woman. At least one of the fake women, Julia Cursina,
had a social media account that often posted the exact same content as that of the organizer,
word for word, but with the addition of a flirty wink or kiss emoji.
Are you a woman and haven't been using those? You're doing it wrong.
Cizovs claimed that one of the fake women was a demo persona from their test website
that was mistakenly included in the speaker list. Yeah, he totally wasn't trying to catfish
prominent male tech speakers with inclusivity requirements into participating in his conference
by pretending that a bunch of hot chicks were going to be there. Who would do that?
He's doing totally cool guys. It's an online only conference.
What now? What is it boy? The quick bits fell down a well? It's the sixth time this week.
Apple has reportedly sent a proposal to Goldman Sachs to end their banking partnership within
the next 12 to 15 months, according to sources familiar with the matter who spoke to the Wall
Street Journal. That doesn't necessarily mean that Apple's savings accounts and credit cards
are coming to an end, just that Apple would need to find another issuing partner sometime over
the coming year. It would be a major surprise, however, because the program was extended to
2029 only last year as part of Goldman's Pivot to Main Street, where they would offer services
to retail customers, aka people without yachts. However, shortly after that effort led to
significant losses, leading Goldman to really reconsider this whole working with the pores
thing. It's just not reliable. Was it the whales? Did the whales get your yacht too?
Some U.S. Postal Service offices are apparently unable to deliver mail on time because of a service
agreement to cheaply deliver packages for Amazon in rural areas. In November, this deal was
implemented in Bemidji, Minnesota, where carriers are now being told to prioritize Amazon packages
and being forced to work overtime with scheduled sick days banned for the rest of the year.
Delivery companies in San Juan County, Washington are accusing Amazon of diverting
more packages to USPS since November as the county's post offices face similar issues.
But don't worry, any overworked mail carriers with prime memberships can get same-day delivery
on a new piss jug. Sony has announced a new firmware license that will allow photography
enthusiasts to add four custom original grid lines to their Alpha 7.4 camera's viewfinder,
all for the low low price of $150 for a JPEG, sorry, PNG.
A7-4 users have been asking for more significant firmware updates, but this is probably not what
they had in mind. According to Sony, these fancy new lines will help shutterbugs take more consistent
photos. In their announcement, Sony then listed a random assortment of places you could take those
photos, like schools, photo studios, theme parks, cruise ships, and malls, followed by a bunch of
large block quotes in a manner that says, be student desperately trying to fill a word count.
Think of all the things you could take pictures of. I mean, rocks. Maybe it is worth 150 bucks.
Benchmarks for the first Ryzen Z1 mini PC, the Phoenix Edge, are out. Unfortunately,
even though the unit is rated for 54 watts, testing by YouTuber ETA Prime indicates it
maxes out at 40 watts before throttling. The Ryzen Z1 is best known for powering the
non-extreme version of the ROG Ally. The manufacturer has plans for an Z1 extreme mini PC,
likely meaning that this particular product is going straight into the bargain bin if it ever
manages to hit shelves. Dried. So we're going to miss. And a web browser for Android TV keeps
getting banned for being a web browser. First, Israeli TV companies DMCA the app called Downloader
for allowing users to view a pirating website. Just looking at it. You can't do that with other
browsers. And this week, an anti-piracy group called MarkScan issued a DMCA because Downloader
was infringing on the copyrighted work of properties of Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc.
and an authorized example of the work could be seen at WarnerBros.com. You can't actually
watch anything on Warner Bros. website. So I guess they're accusing Downloader of accessing a website.
Man, wait until they find out about Google Chrome. It can access all the websites. Google.com,
Rocks. And you'll have to wait until Friday to find out more tech news. I mean, unless you go
somewhere else for your news, but you wouldn't do that, right? It would be kind of cringe.