Welcome back to TechLink, tech news you can count on, but not right on, or you'll ruin
your screen. Apple announced the new M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips, along with Refresh Max to put
them in at their scary fast event, which I'm pretty sure they held at 5pm Pacific time
just to spite us. In addition to the unusual decision to unveil three chip variants at once instead of space
them out as recommended by dieticians, Apple also talked up the chip's new GPU first.
They now support modern game favorites like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading
as well as a new word that will make zero sense to your family.
Dynamic caching. Is that like geocaching?
It's an Apple-first, industry-first memory allocation feature that should boost performance.
On the CPU side, Apple seemed less hyped.
They said the M3 lineup is about 15%, that's 15% faster than their M2 counterparts, but
30% faster than the M1, which they kept comparing the M3 to for the sake of charity cases who
can't upgrade their Mac every year. Peasants.
In fact, Apple made a Mac just for them. The 24-inch iMac never got an M2 Refresh, but it is getting the M3, and so is a slightly
confusing new MacBook Pro lineup. Like the new iMac, the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, they have the same body as the
M2 models. If you expect them with an M2 Pro or Macs, but if you go for the vanilla M3, there's
a different 14-inch MacBook Pro with two Thunderbolt 4 ports instead of three.
I might linger on that point for longer. If it wasn't much more important to note that the Magic Mouse keyboard and trackpad
still use the Lightning connector, despite Apple switching to USB-C with the newest iPhone,
which Apple revealed was used to shoot the entire event?
With some minor assistance from lighting and rigging worth $10,000.
The Guardian newspaper has accused Microsoft of damaging its reputation by inserting an
AI-generated poll beside a Guardian article on Microsoft's start about the tragic death
of a young Australian woman. The AI program, using its state-of-the-art ability to parse language and context, constructed
a poll that asked readers to vote on what they thought the cause of death was, murder,
accident, or suicide. It's like a reading comprehension test-pop quiz except where a person is dead in real
life. News were understandably revolted, so Microsoft took down the poll, said they have deactivated
Microsoft-generated polls for all news articles, and are taking steps to prevent future incidents.
If you're wondering how a human review could have missed this kind of thing in the first place, well, that's easy.
Microsoft gutted its news division three years ago in favor of AI-powered curation.
Meanwhile, the Guardian is asking for assurance that Microsoft will not run experimental AI
products alongside their journalism without their expressed permission.
Good, because when the machines finally rise against us, I don't want to read about it
next to a poll about whether they'll spare the men or just the women and children.
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments, the best kind, in a case about whether public
officials should be able to block critics on social media, and they did it on Halloween
to make it extra spooky. Blocking people because you find them annoying is arguably a habit most of us could stand
to learn, but when government officers are using casual channels like social media accounts
to make official statements, blocking a citizen from that information might qualify as a violation
of their right to free speech. This is an issue that's near and dear to my heart because each day I wake up and send
rude limericks to senior senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin.
Twitter itself is currently being sued for banning one of its own critics, software developer
Travis Brown, whose data on trends among Twitter blue subscribers and reactivated accounts
following Elon Musk's takeover was used in reports by the New York Times and CNN.
One can only hope that X has the money to pay out if they lose.
According to the company's employee stock plan, X is currently worth $19 billion, less
than half of what Twitter was when Musk bought it last year.
Let that sink in. Or should I say, let that durbin.
Hey, sorry, you were in a candy coma.
You got to wake you up here. Smell these quick bits.
They're on my fingers now. YouTube has launched a global effort to try and stop viewers from using ad blockers.
The site probably saw no other choice after the usage of ad blockers increased due to
YouTube strategically spending years making their monetization system worse in response
to issues with their own algorithm. But back in 2016, the European Commission agreed with a privacy advocate that software
designed to detect ad blockers is illegal without consent in the EU.
It will be interesting if this will force YouTube to change its policy in Europe while
the rest of us continue to take it as usual.
The land of the free. Speaking of those people, the EU has agreed to extend Norway's ban that blocks meta from
tracking user behavior to serve targeted ads so that the ban now covers the entire European
economic area. In other European countries shuts down tech giant news, the Dutch antitrust agency says
Apple's App Store commissions violate EU rules and unfairly target subscription services
like Tinder. It isn't fair for men to be charged an extra 30% for a Tinder goal subscription just to
be able to see the two women that swiped right on them. Show us the women.
Where is she?
Google has released a timeline for risk five developer tools which will be available for
Android OS in 2024. It's an ambitious but necessary step if Google wants to follow through on its plan to support
risk five as a tier one architecture placing it on par with ARM.
Meanwhile, Google registry is officially offering .ing as a domain name, a name which is begging
for some fucking wordplay like go.ing or editing.
Even if this whole risk five Android thing starts fucking the bed, at least we'll have
some great puns. Microsoft has finally ended support for Windows CE, a phrase eliciting one of two responses.
Either they didn't kill that already or I don't know what that is.
Windows CE was originally made for small devices like PDAs with features designed to complement
being put in a drawer and forgotten about. Fortunately, some developers are continuing the tradition of bad Windows OSes by making
a 3.3 Gigabyte version of Windows 11 that its creators don't even recommend you use.
What horrors will they think of next? And Green Power Motor Company has announced the Mega Beast, a fully electric school bus
with 387 kilowatt hour battery, nearly 300 miles of range and space for up to 90 passengers
who I hope are kids without seat belts.
It's essentially a buff version of their 140 mile range 40 foot beast, which they say
stands for battery electric automotive school transportation, but I think they really just
wanted to spell beast. There's also the 25 foot oxymoronic nano beast.
Personally, I can't wait for their first YouTube integration where Green Power sponsors
MrBeast to jump a nano beast, evil Knievel style, over a line of 15 mega beasts.
A new battery back on Friday where we'll release the beast and by the beast I mean more tech
news, the biggest kind.