Okay, it's time for serious tech news.
It's serious! Stop!
An Intel press release dropped this morning, suddenly announcing CEO Pat Gelsinger's
retirement after less than four years in the position with some real
mafia energy. Mr. Gelsinger is currently resting, but he sends his regards. No for the questions.
Insider sources told Bloomberg and Reuters that Intel's board of directors
weren't happy it was taking so long for Gelsinger to turn the ship around after years of previous executives
continually breaking off the rudder. So they gave him a choice to step down or
be forced out. So it makes sense why Gelsinger is also stepping down from the board. The vibe would be
super awkward according to an insider source I just made up. Some are theorizing Pat was spending too much money to fix the company's issues, which angered
shareholders. The board would prefer to hire a new guy to try and fix things in less than four years. Maybe try
taking away free coffee again? I don't know. Or maybe Intel's upcoming Arc Gen 2 gaming GPUs will help. The company confirmed a reveal tomorrow at 9 a.m.
Eastern to officially divulge whether all of those leaks were real,
including the one from the weekend where the funky kit show
casually broke embargo to show off an Arc B580 and this other one showing the B570 with 10 gigabytes of VRAM.
I hope old Pat took the new GPUs home with him. He's got a lot of time to game now.
I was this close to making him my other dad.
NZXT's flex program, which rents out PCs for a monthly subscription, has been called a scam for engaging in
manipulative bait-and-switch tactics by YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, who I've never heard of.
It's more than flex just being a bad deal though. GN's hour-long video highlights things like NZXT offering a named build, like the
Player 3 PC, which has an RTX 4070 Ti Super if you buy it, but an RTX 4070
non-super if you rent it. Yet the performance of the two configurations is presented as the same, so many people wouldn't catch this.
Our tech-linked analysts have assured me that I probably would though.
NZXT is also accused of changing subscription prices,
sometimes every day and jacking up prices for customers a few months in. NZXT has responded, saying they are
aware of the recent claims made against us and are actively reviewing the situation.
Although I hope that the fact that you can build your own PC with less than a year's worth of flex monthly payments isn't a recent claim.
What? Well, that's news to me. I mean, why are we doing this? That's NZXT, by the way.
Blizzard is forcing Game Store GOG to delist the original versions of Warcraft 1 and 2, because Blizzard just launched
remastered versions of those on Battle.net. So why would you ever need to buy both originals for 15 bucks or 13 bucks with the discount code MakeWarcraftLiveForever?
Well, GOG says one reason is that you'll get an offline installer,
so you don't have to wake up one day to find a Blizzard exec, took away your game because he doesn't like you.
GOGs also tweaked the code themselves, improving performance and adding support for high resolutions and upscaling.
And they added Warcraft 1 and 2 to their GOG preservation program, promising to update the game
so it stays compatible with modern and future systems, even after it's delisted on December 13th.
They're fixing other people's games. Now, if that's not in the spirit of ZUGZUG, I don't know what is.
Quick bits, though, are no joke. I tried to make them laugh once. I barely escaped.
Leaks for new Radeon GPUs from AMD are also starting to pop up.
In case you thought they were gonna let Intel and NVIDIA have all the fun for the next few months,
the Radeon 8800XT is about to enter mass production,
so it's expected to launch in early 2025, with ray tracing performance similar to the RTX 4080
and better than the RX 7900X, while using 25% less power.
That's all according to a couple of reliable leakers on the ChipHell forums named Zhang Zhanghao
and WJM47196, Titans in the industry.
Microsoft is getting real serious about making you Windows 10 using motherf***ers upgrade to Windows 11 already.
Tweaking a help page for Surface devices and updating hundreds of other support documents
with banners and notices saying essentially, Hey, you got less than a year until Windows 10 loses support.
Quit screwing around. No doubt Microsoft is aware that market share for Windows 11 actually dipped this month,
losing some ground to Windows 10. I don't know. It's like throwing an ad in people's faces when they start up their PC,
makes them not want to listen to it. I know Microsoft. I'm as confused as you are.
Open Source Router Project OpenWRT has offered custom firmware for ages,
but now they'll be offering their own hardware in collaboration with the Software Freedom Conservancy,
an organization that may not actually let deprecated apps like Notepad roam free on a big stretch of grassy land somewhere,
but I'm gonna imagine they do. Anyway, the OpenWRT router and its specs were actually announced back in January with an almost unbrickable design.
And you can get it as just a board or with a case and everything.
I'm guessing it's the best thing you can buy on AliExpress.
That's the only place you can get it. I don't know why. Apple is being sued by Amar Bhakta, a current Apple employee of four years,
for spying on its staff through work-related and personal devices.
It's not the first time an employee has expressed concern over Apple's surveillance of its own workers.
In 2021, Jacob Preston took issue with Apple requiring him to sign into certain work-related services using his personal Apple ID.
It comes across a bit hypocritical when Apple touts their commitment to privacy as a differentiator compared to other tech giants.
But it makes more sense when you think about it like this. Consumer privacy just depends on employees not having any, is that hard to understand?
And an AI startup called World Labs has released demos of 3D worlds it says can be generated from a single image and navigated like a video game.
It's just a video game where you can only move about two feet in any direction.
But that's just the prototype. World Labs says things will get more immersive since instead of using generative AI to predict pixels,
they're predicting an actual depth map of a 3D space.
Is this just procedural generation? Is this just No Man's Sky again?
Oh man, I can't wait to jump into some AI-generated 3D worlds and explore every nook and cranny to find all the fun things the developers left for me.
Oh, I'll leave you with a reminder to come on back on Wednesday for more tech news so you can keep your mind sharp.
After all, brain rot is apparently the Oxford word of the year for 2024.
We can do better.