We don't normally do serious intros here at TechLink, but it sounds like a ton of people
are about to lose their jobs and that really sucks.
What happened, Intel? You used to be cool, man. You used to be cool.
Effective July 15th, the first phase of Intel's plan to reduce their workforce by 20% that
they announced earlier this year will commence with 107 jobs eliminated across four facilities
in Santa Clara. These are related to their automotive business. Wait, Intel has an automotive business?
Had. Had an automotive business.
And it's getting shut down. But don't worry, it gets worse.
Xbox is also laying people off next week, according to Jason Schreier.
This was originally supposed to be thousands of Microsoft employees, but apparently these
jobs are going to come almost entirely from the Xbox team.
Wow. Windows search team dodging a bullet again. But three's the magic number, right?
Well, dating app Bumble is empowering management to make the first move in laying off 30% of
their workforce because business is down as people have slowly realized that dating apps
suck for all genders. Of course, all of these terminations from all three companies have been in the name
of profits because capitalism demands that you must be over six feet.
And regular LTT sponsored D brand is facing their own capitalistic crisis after telling
their customers whose joy cons were detaching that they were just holding their kill switch
too wrong. The company issued a massive first response to users complaining about the switch to accessory,
explaining why and how the issue is clearly just user error.
Only to receive backlash from the community, part of which included a screenshot of our
own line of Sebastian holding it the same wrong way. Now this might be victim blaming, but don't base your model of how you hold things on
the guy who has half a dozen dropping compilations, okay?
Just think for a second. However, it seems that the you're holding it wrong strategy is working about as well
for D brand as it did for Apple 15 years ago. And D brand has since done a 180 and issued an apology statement with a better plan to
properly fix the kill switch too, with another update coming on July 10th.
But don't expect any apologies from AI companies anytime soon because US district judge William
Alsup, Alsup, Alsup, Alsup has ruled that yes, you can train large language models on
copyrighted works as long as those works were purchased.
And I don't mean purchasing the rights. I mean, you literally have to buy a copy of the book.
It's definitely better than them just pirating everything. At least for now, they've got to pay hundreds or, or no, thousands of dollars to acquire
training material. But that seems like a pittance compared to the potential revenue they'll earn from the
trained models. The law is murky, and Judge Alsup came to this copyright conclusion, at least partially
because authors admitted that training these LLMs didn't result in direct copies or infringing
knockoffs. Officer, I'm just buying a lot of guns, but I'm not going to use them.
Come on. Yet. Anthropic, the company being sued in this case, is happy with this result, no doubt,
but will be back in court to fight the accusation that they pirated 7 million books to build
a research library. There it is. There's the piracy.
Oh, sorry. I was just trying to finish off these quick bits.
NVIDIA has announced another card that's dead on arrival, the RTX 5050.
It's only going to be $50 cheaper than the 5060 while offering way fewer CUDA cores,
and based on what we can glean from the spec sheet, way fewer frames per second.
Now NVIDIA isn't planning on sending any of these out for review, but I will still provide
you with my preliminary review. F*** you, NVIDIA.
And if you want a purchasing decision, do yourself a favor and pretend the 5050 doesn't
exist. Maybe? The all-black iPhone 17 Pro.
ImagineBoo himself has leaked images of the upcoming devices and the design is, uh, well,
it's another iPhone. But there's now another bump below the camera bump.
That is the innovation we like to see. We'll just have to wait to see how annoying it's going to be when the camera bar gets
caught sliding under your pocket like a pixel or something. Speaking of minor design improvements for expensive hardware, Noctua put out a 9 and
a half minute video explaining the new NF-A12X25G2 120mm fan is about 9% better than the last
one. Now, it comes with a progressive bend impeller. You know what else has a progressive bend?
What I don't have, though, is a centrifugal-turbulator hub, an ETA perf motor, or super torque.
What? How's a guy supposed to compete in this market?
Come on! And when I say come on, I mean tell me more about those HDMI 2.2 specifications that are
getting into the hands of manufacturers. Who knows when consumers will be able to get the cables, and who knows how long the cables
will be when they have to support 96 gigabits per second of bandwidth, but I look forward
to when I can game at 16K at 60fps when I'm 80.
Honestly, while I can't get anywhere close to saturating all of that bandwidth, maybe
ASUS China's general manager can. Tony Yu managed to pull about 1900 watts of power through an RTX 5090 with BTF connectors.
You know, the ones that are on the back. To accomplish this feat, the Mad Lad used two power supplies, and both the 16-pin connector,
as well as the GCH power connector that ASUS has been working on.
And magically, none of the cables melted yet.
But I'm starting to melt under these blazing hot studio lights, so come back next time for
more tech news. I'm melting! Oh, I'm melting!
Oh, I'm melting!