Welcome to the realm of my people, a land flowing with tech news.
Used to flow with milk and honey, but we found out pretty quickly why that wasn't sustainable.
Long the smell! The M2 MacBook Air can be upgraded to pretty much match the performance of an M2 MacBook
Pro just by including some tiny coolers called AirJets inside the chassis, according to a
number of outlets who all posted about it this morning as if they're in a club I haven't
been invited to. The AirJets are solid state active cooling chips made by a company called ... Frorâ¦
Froray? I tried my best. What it's worth.
Who installed them in a MacBook Air and invited the Verge, PC World, and a small man who also
works in our building to check it out. And sure enough, the AirJet equipped M2 MacBook Air performed as well as the M2 MacBook Pro
in a longer Cinebench test, where thermal throttling held back the vanilla fanless MacBook
Air. was left to slowly cook its own insides
while continuing to try and run the benchmark. I mean, it's inhumane.
So, Fror is pleading with Apple and other laptop makers
to please buy our air jets and integrate them into laptops
so that no MacBook Air or the human thighs
upon which it may rest has to suffer like this.
Come on, students aren't allowed to have hot plates in their dorms. It's against regulation.
The inshidification of the web was exemplified this week
when tech bro Jake Ward's Twitter post about pulling off an SEO heist went viral.
While many initially thought said heist was a way to stick it to Google's
search engine optimization paradigm, which has been blamed for many of the web's
structural problems, Jake was actually sticking it
to his company's competitor and humanity at large.
The heist involved indexing all the URLs
in the sitemap for this competitor company, feeding those into Jake's byword service
to generate article titles and outlines with AI,
and then having AI actually write all those articles
to be published online. In other words, this guy tweeted instructions
on how to actively try to make the internet suck.
Just taking a big dump into the well of knowledge. As I said, this process of figuratively kicking
the worldwide web's shins for money is called inshidification as coined by journalist
and possible inventor from the future, Corey Doctorow.
But Google actually has been trying to fix some of the web's SEO problems.
This morning, they released more tools that can help content appear higher in search results
if they're from social media sites or discussion forums,
where the posts are 100% human-generated.
The bots are gone, Elon did it. Meanwhile, non-human-generated videos
are getting a lot more impressive thanks to new releases this week from Stability AI and Runway.
Stable video diffusion is a new AI video generator
that can create two to four second-long video clips from a single image and do it locally on an NVIDIA GPU.
While similar tools have been available for a while, Stability has released the code and waits for their model,
which is exclusively for research.
If you're more into losing money to make money, AI video company Runway released its motion brush tool,
which lets you paint on areas of an image that you would like the AI to wiggle a bit for you.
Just by right here, just kind of like blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that's art.
Seriously though, the results are pretty impressive, even if AI video is still limited
to generating only a few seconds at a time. But if that annoys you, you're in luck.
Runway also announced Runway.tv, a 24-7 stream of content
made using Runway's generative AI tools.
I dipped in there for about a minute before I was overwhelmed by the mix
of perverse fascination and existential dread, but I can say it is definitely content.
Something's happening on that webpage. Quick bits at a time like this?
The perfect time for quick bits? Yes, let's!
At Microsoft's request, cybersecurity firm Blackwing Intelligence,
sounds intimidating, tested the biometric authentication in three laptops
from Dell, Lenovo, and Microsoft, and found that the embedded fingerprint sensors
could all be bypassed with relative ease. Somewhat ironically, Microsoft's was the easiest,
which is probably not what Microsoft wanted to hear. This is a dastardly smear campaign,
by Microsoft, against Microsoft. Only the Lenovo device offered
encrypted host-to-sensor communication, and while all three technically supported
Microsoft's secure device connection protocol, only the Dell device came with it enabled by default.
Look, Microsoft, I don't wanna sound like your mom here, but there's no point in you having a safety helmet
if you're just not gonna wear it, okay? Just, just put, just wear the helmet!
I'm worried sick! Multiple users have taken to Google support forums
to complain about their files disappearing from Google Drive.
Many even complained that their folder structure had reverted back to an earlier state,
like a Digimon that had been energy blasted a few too many times.
It's been a long time since I've watched that. I don't know if it's accurate.
A Google employee on the forum said they're investigating the issue,
and warned affected users not to make changes to their Google Drive or the app data folder on their PC
if they use desktop syncing. Hopefully they find out what happened soon,
and what happened is that Bard snatched that data up. He's always doing that.
He thinks it's a prank. Bard, come on, give it back!
That's not, oh, scamp. Police are warning parents about the dangers of name dropping.
This is not to be confused with the phenomenon of aged out frat boys claiming to know famous people
to impress strangers. The police are talking about the new on by default iOS feature
that allows users to easily share contact info with other iPhone users,
framing this as a threat to children's safety.
The thing is, the phones have to come within a few centimeters for the feature to work,
and it only shares what you put on your contact card,
and it will only share if you tap the actual share button
while you're doing it. So, you know, maybe the police should worry more
about the shirtless guy with no grasp of personal space claiming he knows Drake.
That just seems, he's in the fountain.
Can we do something? And a new study is claiming that Zoom fatigue is real
and leads to increased stress, decreased productivity,
and a pervasive sense of disconnection. Scientists measured the brain and heart activity
of participants watching a 50 minute presentation with half watching in person and the other half remotely.
Naturally, to accurately measure stress levels, they recruited subjects
from the calmest population on earth, university students.
Sure, we can all agree torturing undergraduates for science is fun, but wouldn't it have been easier
to simply ask literally anyone who's ever used Zoom
if they actually enjoyed it? Well, the reason we didn't do that
is because we know the answer. But regardless, please remotely come back
for more tech news here on Wednesday. And for science's sake,
please write your heart rate in the comments below.