Wait, so you're watching my video? To listen to my tech news?
Haha. Okay. Intel and ARM have announced a multi-generation agreement to make it easier for Intel's foundry
services to fabricate ARM-based chip designs.
It's a heartwarming story of two intense chip design rivals getting over their differences
and working together in the service of makin' more money.
Indeed, Intel shares rose on the news showing that in war, there's no winners, unless your
side wins. Now, before the processor nerds get too excited about the possibility of Intel branded processors
based on ARM technology, the deal actually involves ARM helping Intel to optimize Intel's
fab processes for producing ARM-based chip. Did I say chipped?
Chips. That should make it a lot easier for companies who do design such chips, like Qualcomm and
MediaTek, to hire Intel to actually make them. But if that's too boring for ya, just recall that Intel has described plans to produce
hybrid chips that combine x86, ARM, and RISC-5 CPU cores in a single package.
It may end up being the swamp water of computer processors, but it would be different and
special. Like me.
The RTX 4070, complete with the architecture named after Ada Lovelace, hit shelves tomorrow.
NVIDIA captured the innovative spirit of history's first computer programmer by releasing an arguably
overpriced GPU with only modest spec upgrades over the previous generation.
At $599, or $600 USD, NVIDIA says the card provides 1.8x the performance of the RTX 3070,
which launched at a price of $100 less. Oh, but that 1.8x jump only applies to games that support NVIDIA's DLSS 3 frame generation
feature. It's more like 1.3x in unsupported games.
Very cool. You know that a product launch is going to go well when the company community manager
feels the need to wade into Reddit and do damage control before anyone's even bought
one. The RTX 4070 isn't bad. In fact, it's really good and decent value for the money, all things considered.
But that all things considered includes the fact that NVIDIA is using its dominant market
position to keep discrete GPU prices high, even though sales have been dropping since
late 2021 and hit historic lows last December.
Despite that, NVIDIA's revenue actually increased by 64% year over year in 2022.
Now you, as a gamer, might feel slightly a bit ripped off by that, but think about it
from NVIDIA's perspective. Why produce more GPUs and sell them for a fair price when you can just sell fewer GPUs
and make that same, if not more, money?
Now don't you feel silly?
Twitter has recently purchased around 10,000 GPUs and hired talent from Google's AI-focused
subsidiary DeepMind to reportedly develop a new chat GPT rival.
This comes shortly after Elon Musk signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause
to all AI development beyond the current capacity of GPT-4, which apparently didn't stop the
bandwagon, so Elon had no choice but to hop on and try to catch up.
And can you blame him? Given recent struggles with advertiser retention, pivoting Twitter to another business model
isn't the worst idea. Well, I say Twitter, but Twitter Inc. as a distinct entity no longer exists, according
to a court filing in California, it has instead been folded into X-Corp, a company that has
no other notable holdings, so they might as well just have changed the name and saved
the paperwork. Fans of pointless trivia will note that X.com was the original domain of former Musk Project
PayPal, and that X-Corp is a company run by Spider-Man villain The Hobgoblin in the Marvel
Trading Card game for the Nintendo DS. X is also the name of Elon Musk's proposed Everything app, and I think there's one of
those letters in his kid's name too. The Everything app is a concept that does not make sense and never will, because a tool
that does everything is one that has been optimized to do nothing.
The Swampwater concept returns once again. A quick bit is like a forehead kiss from your favorite aunt, so this next segment is like
five whole kisses.
LinkedIn is rolling out their own verification program, but it isn't just to give subscribers
a pretty little button next to their name, it's to verify you are who you are and where
you work by submitting your government ID and verifying your work email.
Think of it like verification on Tinder, except instead of preventing you from squaring with
a catfish, it's to prevent impersonators from screwing your entire career.
And it's different from Twitter verification because it's free, like in the olden times.
Your dreams are over. I mean, dreams, the game is over.
Sony will be ending live support for Game Making Suite Dreams this coming September, which
is kind of surprising given that Dreams was released for the PS4 only four years ago to
great hopes and fanfare. Dreams will still be available for purchase and entirely playable, but it will be migrating
to a new server with a per player data cap for any new content.
So you can still create anything you can imagine as long as your imagination is under 5GB.
Universal Music has apparently told streaming platforms like Apple and Spotify to block
AI services from scraping melodies and lyrics from songs that it holds the copyright to.
And we do mean told, not asked. Universal Music is the second largest record label in the United States with a market share
of over 30%. Universal Music has also been sending out a massive number of takedown notices against
AI generated songs. While it's hard to sympathize with a massive faceless business conglomerate, AI companies
probably deserve more than a little pushback for treating the copyrighted production of
artists as a free training database.
But the artists signed it away anyway.
Monitor IO, a company that made a gadget that would continuously monitor your network speed
and status, announced they would be shutting down their business and monitoring service
this month. But in some bizarre twist, they decided that customers who bought a product for them should
still be able to use it?
They are providing an image that will allow the device to still be run when the company's
servers shut down. But April Fool's was days ago.
Is this bizarre or what? Tim Allen, where are you?
And the FBI is cautioning against using built-in USB ports at charging stations in public
places like airports and hotels because bad actors have figured out ways to infect your
devices with malware to access them remotely, proving once again how we can't have nice
things or even shitty things like airports. The FCC calls this juice jacking, which is not to be confused with that one Reddit post
who instantly regretted reading. So stay safe out there, use your own chargers, and avoid coconuts.
I don't get it either. I don't want to get it. But make sure you don't avoid coming back on Friday for more tech news, more ladders,
and if you do come back, we may tell you the etymological origin of the word news.
We may make it up, but only if we can think of something funnier than the truth.
It's just new, a clerk. Where are you going, James?
I'm out of here.