So today's intro was going to involve a whole intricate Rube Goldberg machine, but unfortunately
it didn't work. So I threw a bit of a tantrum and then I tripped and fell on it and smashed it.
Anyway, here's the tech news, I guess. Samsung officially launched the Galaxy XR,
its much-anticipated mixed reality headset at an event yesterday. It's the first headset powered by
Android XR, the OS for headsets announced by Google last December, and Samsung says it's
designed as the first step in their vision of an open, scalable XR ecosystem. The price for entry?
A nice, cool, 1800 US dollars, which is worth approximately half an Apple Vision Pro, unless
you're on eBay, where the corpses of a dead dream litter the landscape. Under the hood,
it packs the new Snapdragon XR 2 Plus Gen 2 chip, a stunning micro OLED display, full hand and eye
tracking, and a UI that looks hauntingly similar to the Vision Pro. And of course, Google's Gemini
will let you do amazing things you couldn't do before, like organize your Windows. Do people still
want an AR headset after the Vision Pro bombed? Well, just in case they don't, Samsung confirmed
they're also working on smart glasses, which could compete with Meta's Ray-Bans through a
partnership with the brands Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. So whether you want to enter the
metaverse or just forget what sunlight looks like, Samsung's got you covered. Literally.
OpenAI has fulfilled the prophecy and introduced Atlas, a web browser with chatGPT built in.
Atlas is meant to become more helpful over time by using its memory of your chats and searches
to better comprehend what you're doing and complete tasks for you. If an AI learning to
understand and imitate your browsing behaviors scares you too, don't worry. The feature is
completely optional, so you can make it so your browser won't even know that you're gaslighting it.
Plus, OpenAI says Atlas will pause to ensure you're watching it when it accesses sensitive
sites like your bank, or when it just learned how to stand on one leg and just wants you to be
proud of it. Look at me. Look at me. But what about incognito mode? I hear all the freak saying,
don't worry, Atlas has that. And it will temporarily log you out of chatGPT,
so it will remember nothing of your secret tryst. But that also means it won't remember
the specific kind of cat photos you like. Moving on, Atlas's announcement video shows
its shopping and filling carts based on simple prompts, which is a worrying level of power,
given that security research from Brave Software found that hidden text in an image
can manipulate AI browsers like perplexities comment. They showed that this text can trick
a browser into, among other things, visiting a hacker-controlled website. Great, we're putting
our web browsing in the hands of a hallucinating gullible Greek titan. Atlas was a titan?
The effects of Monday's major Amazon web services outage are still being felt,
with some Slack users reportedly being completely unable to leave work conference calls,
which sounds like something out of a late-night snack-induced stress dream. Speaking of sleeping,
during the outage, thousands of 8-sleep bed owners found they couldn't adjust these smart beds'
position or temperature, resulting in some folks roasting in their blankets, like proverbial pigs.
I'm not calling these poor people pigs. I'm just being clear about that.
8-sleep then introduced a new outage mode to control the bed even during an AWS service
disruption. Still, the outage might be a good distraction for Amazon,
because the New York Times is reporting on leaked documents that suggest Amazon plans to
replace 600,000 human employees with robots by 2033. The report says Amazon's robotics team
aims to automate 75% of the company's operations, and they're expecting to cut around 160,000 U.S.
jobs by 2027. However, an Amazon spokesperson attempted to downplay this news, telling The Verge
that this holiday season, they're planning on hiring 250,000 humans. Who may or may not go on
permanent holiday shortly afterwards. Seems like Amazon could use some business management help
from our sponsor. Fun fact, the QuickBits enjoy watching those marble races more
than Rube Goldberg machines. They're faster, and it's all about speed with the QuickBits.
You know that more than anyone. TSMC has produced the first NVIDIA Blackwell GPU wafer on American soil,
marking a big win for domestic chipmaking, sort of. Before these wafers actually become usable GPUs,
each wafer still has to fly back to Taiwan for packaging. And that's where TSMC handles their
chip on wafer substrate and high bandwidth memory stacking, critical steps that bond multiple chips
and stack memory inside the processor. And they have said, we're only doing it there. So until
those advanced processes exist in Arizona, these Made in America chips will keep earning
frequent flyer miles on their way to Taiwan and back. Maybe they'll take up holiday sometime.
YouTube is rolling out AI likeness detection, a tool designed to catch deep fakes before they
go viral. Because they will go viral. You've gotta stop them. Creators can opt in by doing a quick
selfie scan, letting Google's AI compare faces and voices in uploads to detect impersonations.
It's just occurring to me now that this also gives them more accurate data about what your face
looks like specifically and how to reproduce it, which is the same thing you have to do when
you log into the Sora app. Okay, if someone tries to use your likeness, YouTube can flag, label,
or block the video automatically. Because if Google is serious about one thing, it's about
giving creators the tools they need to fight content created with other tools Google created
to fight creators in the marketplace of content. Speaking of AI, a new study by the European
Broadcasting Union and the BBC found that nearly 45% of AI assistant responses about current major
events contained major issues. For example, Google Gemini claimed the NHS in the UK does
not recommend vaping to help quit smoking. Well, not only does the NHS actually recommend it,
it's objectively the coolest way to quit. With a younger generation increasingly using AI for
news, I think everyone can see how that could start getting a bit capital H, Harry. I don't know
why there was a capital H. A tiny bionic eye implant, first developed by a company called
Pixium Vision back in 2022, is finally delivering on its promise, helping blind patients read again.
The system, now refined by the aptly named Science Corporation, suddenly more suspicious of this
whole thing, uses a rice-sized microchip implanted under the retina and a pair of smart glasses
that record the world in front of you. The system uses both of these components to create
infrared light signals, something that can be converted to actual visual information
by the eye-inserted chip. In recent trials, more than 80% of patients with severe macular
degeneration regained enough vision to recognize letters and small words. At this rate, we'll
need implants just to unsee half the stuff on the internet. When are those coming?
And researchers in Japan have made a breakthrough in the field of
enteral ventilation via anus, aka EVA, aka butt breathing. Let me explain. In 2024,
researchers snagged an Ig Nobel Prize in physiology for showing that mice, rats, and pigs
can actually absorb oxygen through their rear ends. If scientists put some oxygenated liquid in
there, which is a key detail, now the same group is studying whether using this method
can be used to bypass blocked airways or clogged lungs in humans. And the first step,
asking 27 healthy male volunteers to hold some regular non-oxygenated liquid inside of there
and clench. And we swear we're not just doing this because we think it's funny. And these guys,
they turned out alright with the only adverse effect so far being some bloating and discomfort,
obviously. I feel like they could have gotten the same findings from taking those 27 guys to
Taco Bell, but I think that study already won an Ig Nobel Prize. You know what? I think we
should all take a butt breath. We'll be back on Friday with more tech news. I've got to go pick
up the pieces of my Rube Goldberg machine. Maybe I can salvage something. Hey, let me know in the
comments what your favorite Rube Goldberg machine is. Do they have names?