Look, we all go back and reuse our old work from time to time. Sometimes I'll copy and paste a
segment I did in like 2019 into a new episode and you never even notice because of how I look
the exact same. So is it really so bad that Intel just launched the Core i5-110 built with the
company's Comet Lake architecture from 2019 when they couldn't figure out how to get past their
14 nanometer process so they just kept optimizing it and renaming it 14 nanometer plus and then
14 nanometer plus plus? Recycling. You know, it helps fish and frogs. From the specs, the Core i5-110
appears to literally be a rebadged Core i5-10400 which is available on Amazon for 130 USD but
the rebadged version is priced at 200 bucks because it's a collector's item. Honestly,
you're disrespecting the hobby. This isn't the first time Intel has helped the environment.
Back in July, they quietly rebadged a Core i5-12400 as the Core i5-120F. But at least that came with
a 100MHz boost compared to the original Alder Lake chip from 2021. Two years ago. I don't know,
Intel might be scraping the bottom of the barrel here after firing their consumer products boss
and the chief architect behind its Xeon CPUs, leaving the remaining leadership serving the
equivalent of week old donuts. Which for the record, I would still eat. They're fine.
Nepal has gone from banning social media to using Discord to elect an interim Prime Minister.
Now to explain that, we've got a fast track through the past two weeks so stay with me.
Here we go. Last month, posts on Nepali social media calling out government corruption and
income inequality were trending heavily. On August 28th, the government gave social platforms a week
to conform to new monitoring requirements and then blocked the ones that didn't,
including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. That triggered intense protests in the capital city,
Kathmandu, during which police used live ammunition against protesters, killing 19.
The government quickly lifted the social media ban, but surprisingly, that didn't really calm
anyone down. The protests intensified and multiple government buildings and politicians homes were
set on fire, including the Prime Ministers with his wife still inside. Contrary to many reports,
she is still alive, but in critical condition according to the now XPM who resigned and fled
the country. With the government in limbo, a civic group called Hami Nepal organized a Discord
channel that quickly amassed tens of thousands of members, including the leaders of the so-called
Gen Z protest movement. Incredibly, the army then asked the Discord Channel organizers
to nominate a new leader of the country. So they had a poll on Discord and the winner,
former Chief Justice Sushila Kharky, was officially sworn in as the country's interim Prime Minister
this morning. She'll be overseeing elections for everyone who missed the Discord invite,
but it's nice to know the Gamer Chat app can replace a parliament in a pinch.
Nintendo announced some pretty surprising things during this morning's direct live stream,
including the addition of Virtual Boy games to the Switch Online Library this coming February.
To relive the days when playing a VR game was like wearing a first gen Batman suit,
in that it didn't let you turn your head, you'll need to either purchase a $100 replica of the
original Virtual Boy hardware, which opens up so you can slot in your Switch, or the $25
cardboard version, which you will use exactly once. Nintendo also revealed the title of the
next Mario movie, the Super Mario Galaxy movie, presumably starring Princess Rosalina Rosalina?
It doesn't matter, but she's voiced by Chris Pratt. But my favorite reveal was Pokemon
Pokopia, which is kind of like Pokemon meets Minecraft slash Animal Crossing. Oh, and also
you play as a ditto who wakes up in some kind of wreckage to discover its trainer is perhaps missing
or worse, and then it takes on human form in kind of a wiggly wacky copy of its trainer.
It then reshapes the land with its shape-shifting abilities, morphing its hands into cipher blades
and hitmonchans, boxing gloves, and, you know, vomiting up furniture. I'm not sleeping on that,
but I do agree with this commenter who's unironically excited to use ditto's body
horror capabilities for farming. I have so many questions. Does the ditto think it is its trainer?
Is this the ditto's way of coping with the trauma of loss? Along with the usual questions about the
morality of enslaving and forcing sentient beings to battle, I had to stop playing Pokemon
because I just start spiraling. Look, we all go back and reuse our old work from time to time.
Sometimes I'll copy and paste a segment I did in like 2019 into a new episode, and you never
even notice because of how I look the exact same. Quick bits! Yeah, yeah, that'll work.
All of the new iPhone 17 models, and probably the iPhone Air as well, will have a setting that
disables pulse width modulation, or PWM, which should reduce these screen flickering issues
experienced by some iPhones and iPads at low brightness levels. Mac rumors spotted the change
in a pre-release version of iOS 26 which launches on Monday, but someone also found a screenshot
of the setting already, which is being celebrated by the 17,000 people who apparently visit the
subreddit rslashpwmsensitive every week to participate in a big group cry. Well, not anymore
if they buy new iPhones. AI company Perplexity is being sued once again,
this time by Miriam Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica. They are really gonna throw the book out.
As usual, the lawsuit accuses perplexity of copyright infringement and improper attribution,
which the company has been weathering lawsuits over since at least early 2024 from many other
people. Meanwhile, the FTC has launched an investigation into the harms posed to kids by
chatbots from all of the other major AI companies, including Google, Meta, OpenAI, and XAI. I fully
expect the defense to revolve around arguing that AI is basically sentient, and these chatbots
are only a couple years old, so if anything, we need to defend them from the heinous prompts being
slung at them by human kids. Honestly, I think the legal system might be ready for this at this point.
PC parts company Height has directed all owners of its all-in-one liquid cooler, the THICC with
2C's Q80 Trio, to stop using it and remove it from their system immediately. It's haunted
by the ghost of a certified baddie. No, there's apparently a fragile internal component that
can cause leakage. Thankfully, the company's earlier model, the THICC Q60, uses a different
design and is totally fine, but the THICC Q80 was too thick. You never go full thick.
And researchers in Taiwan have managed to get plants to suck up more carbon dioxide from the air
by replacing the enzyme that plants normally use for that process with a more efficient one.
With the new enzyme, a specific weed being tested in this study weighed two to three times more as
the control plants produced more seeds and had more leaves that were also larger, which all
mean that they sucked up more carbon. So this could either lead to a great way to mitigate climate
change or dinosaurs running amok on the mainland. How? Chaos. Chaos theory. It's just, yeah.
Sometimes dinosaurs show up. Sometimes you show up back here for more tech news on Monday too.
Hey, maybe bring some dinosaurs and we can play around with them, you know? My favorite is
Thrysinosaurus. Just FYI. Yeah, big claw.