Hey, you know what nobody has ever said? I want less Zilla.
There's too much Zilla around here. The Mozilla Foundation, ha ha.
The parent organization of the Mozilla Company, purveyors of the world's fifth most popular web browser,
is eliminating its global programs and advocacy divisions.
That advocacy was centered on fighting for a free and open internet,
something that hasn't really gotten less important recently.
While the Foundation says that this is a fight that remains core to their mission,
they are revisiting how they pursue that work.
This restructuring comes with layoffs for 30% of Mozilla's roughly 120 employees,
that's a lot, which is actually the second round of layoffs this year, following 60 job losses
on the company side in February. All in all, it's a significant loss in capacity,
and there isn't an obvious successor to take up the advocacy slack.
Chrome's too busy waging a war against ad block extensions,
and Edge acknowledges neither the law of God nor man.
Edge's just gonna edge, ha ha. Not all hope is lost, however,
as the internet archive is once again archiving webpages
following a month-long hiatus due to a cyberattack.
Users will once again be able to capture important, but ephemeral webpages
using the archives save page now feature. The internet archive also says that the backlog
of pages requested by users while the archive was down
are now being processed. It's not entirely clear why the internet archive
has become such a target for hackers, given that it's not affiliated with any government,
and it doesn't have a lot of spare cash. This is like getting mad at the global world order,
so you set fire to a community center. Lawn bully kinda coming.
Reviews are in for AMD's Ryzen 7 9800 X3D,
and so far, it sounds like Dr. Lisa Sue has a chart-topping new single on her hands.
Rasin' up. The 9800 X3D blows Intel's new top-of-the-line chips
out of the water, and by new top-of-the-line chips, I mean the one from last gen.
Ba-doom. All right. Pretty much every review is singing this chip's praises,
but Hardware Unboxed saw it get up to 26.5% better
than the Core i9-14900K, and 33% better than the Core Ultra 9 285K.
See how that works? It's not just gaming though, there are also some pretty significant
productivity improvements. You're gonna be able to run so many instances
of Banzai Buddy. Of course, the big change that has allowed for this show-stopping performance
is the addition of that 3D V-Cache, even more so than AMD's first gen 3D V-Cache,
which was placed on top of the die, causing potential cooling issues.
Now, the cache is under the processor, meaning you can even overclock this thing,
which they already said. If that's not enough, you might be interested to know
that Zhang Zhang Hao, a reliable source of hardware leaks,
says that their supply chain contacts confirm
that AMD is working on an X3D version of a Zen 5 threadripper.
Further, the next generation Strix Halo APUs
will likely see 3D V-Cache upgrade as well
on the more high-end AMD laptops.
Honestly, this would be a completely happy story if it wasn't for Pat Gelsinger
standing at the back of this room, manfully refusing to cry.
And womanfully and childrenfully. And even fully want.
Jarvis, Google's rumored AI agent that can use your computer for you,
has been officially confirmed thanks to reliable leaker, Google,
who accidentally published an internal preview on the Chrome web browser extension store.
It's been taken down, but you didn't miss out on much.
The current build doesn't have the right access permissions yet, so users who downloaded it weren't able to get it to work.
Google planned to publicly reveal Jarvis in December
alongside its next big LLM release, but you know how it is.
It's only the first week of November, but you're already hearing Mariah Carey.
Jarvis, whose name is almost certainly inspired by Tony Stark's AI Butler,
is intended to be a helpful online assistant that can collect information, do your shopping,
or book travel tickets. That being said, if you've ever had
an Instacart shop or replace your Krimini mushrooms with a big bag of jumbo marshmallows,
you can probably guess that these kinds of simple tasks can turn out to be quite a bit more complex in practice.
It's also notable that literally every big company with skin in the AI game
is doing the exact same thing right now. Anthropic AI agent, open AI, AI agent, Microsoft,
first party spyware that takes picture every three seconds for your own good,
but it's cool this time. You know what else is cool? Our sponsor.
You know why they're called quick bits, right? It's because they contain baking soda
as a leavening agent instead of yeast. This is a joke about quick breads like banana breads.
I promise this is funny to people who cook. Thank you, Jessica.
It helps me if I imagine a cooking person on the other end of the screen going,
I'm, pfft, what? Upgrading your MacBook's SSD is possible once again
thanks to repair YouTuber iBofRCC,
who created a custom PCB add-on and swappable SSD modules
to replace soldered-on storage in MacBooks with M-Series processors.
The module design isn't completely finalized yet, and once installed, you need a second Mac
to run Apple Configurator to complete the setup, but that might not be a problem for Apple fans,
especially any who might have just bought a second Mac Mini
when they discovered doing that cost the same as upgrading the RAM and storage.
But come on, Apple's gotta pay their engineers to do their job worse than some random guy on YouTube.
Meta says they have found a way to keep teens from lying about their age on Instagram.
It's an AI-powered tool the company calls an adult classifier, which sounds less like a tool
for finding teens and more like a BuzzFeed quiz. Which Stanley Cup represents you?
Instagram introduced teen accounts in September, which have stronger default privacy settings.
The adult classifier will apparently sort users into one of two groups, older or younger
than 18, based on those users' own account data
like their profile and what content they interact with. Unfortunately, after being exposed to thousands
of 30-year-old Transformers enthusiasts, the classifier exploded.
You're welcome. Steam's game recording feature is now out of beta,
meaning it's available to all sigmas like me.
The feature allows users to record gameplay without leaving the app.
Even non-Steam games can be recorded as long as they allow Steam overlay to run.
In more good news, the Steam Deck will finally be available in Australia on November 19th.
Finally, young impressionable Australians won't be participating in shady back alley deals
where they purchase smuggled Steam decks with their hard-earned dimmies and chicken salt.
Now they can send their dimmies and chicken salt to me instead, please.
Gotta send them some soy sauce. It's been ages since I had some dimmies.
Got the rumblies. A YouTuber made an e-bike battery
using 130 used disposable vapes
to make a point about e-waste. Chris Dole took the individual batteries out of the vapes
and converted them into a 48-volt 1500-watt battery
that powered an e-bike for more than 20 miles with almost no pedaling.
Of course, it wasn't that easy to get his hands on 130 discarded vapes.
He had to collect them at places like a music festival.
Just a single music festival had hundreds of littered batteries
that could explode if damaged. Was getting rid of cigarettes a bad idea?
We're saving the kids' lungs, but at what cost? Are we?
And the FTC has sued Dave.
Sorry, not the guy in your fantasy football league, although that son of a bitch has it coming.
Dave the Banking app specializing in cash advances.
The FTC says Dave misled customers, charged hidden fees,
and made canceling memberships unreasonably difficult. In an official response,
Dave said the lawsuit was regulatory overreach,
possibly in between swigs of Pab's blue ribbon. If you let it get warm, it tastes like piss.
This is stupid, man. Dave thinks the government should leave him
and his friends alone, including banking apps with normal guy names,
and these are real, Marcus, Frank, Finn, and Mr. Cooper.
You leave Cooper alone! You leave Cooper out of this! I'm picturing these as kids in like an 80s adventure movie,
and Mr. Cooper is like the older role model for the little gaggle of young-
Guys, we gotta get Cooper out of jail! So close. Now how about you be a role model
for the rest of the audience and come back on Friday for more tech news?
Sure, we're just using the tech news as an excuse to write silly things that make us giggle,
but you can't argue the news isn't in there. This is a business.