If a tech newsman falls in the woods and there's no one around to hear,
will there be anything for him to report? Hmm, who can say?
This is why I stay indoors. Rumors about Windows 12 requiring a subscription
swirled this week after German site DeskModder
found references to a subscription addition in a Canary Channel Windows 11 Insider preview build
that is absent in other Windows 11 builds. Nine way, you might be saying,
if you speak terrible German. And you might be right, while outlets like Neowyn initially supported
DeskModder's hypothesis, Windows Central, the world's premier experts
in looking outside, have argued that this subscription language
isn't referring to the client version of Windows 12,
but a newly discovered IoT Enterprise subscription edition
of Windows 11. However, the subscription language
could be a reference to new features in the future version of Windows
that will require a subscription, such as the inevitable rollout of the consumer version
of the Windows 365 cloud PC service.
And Windows 11 is only gonna have more AI stuffed into it.
I could easily see Microsoft charging to have Bing attend meetings for you
and make you sound smarter, like every plot line involving twins.
Except Danny DeVito and Earl Schwarzenegger. I'm just imagining them both doing impressions
of the other. I'm just a tiny little guy.
Epic game CEO Tim Sweeney said at a recent conference
that his company will start charging non-game developers
for their use of Unreal Engine next year, which means that Tim Sweeney
may have only just realized non-game developers
are using the service. Like, for example, green screen-based gaming news shows.
What do you do? What, stop that. What do you do? Stop it, stop.
Good, great. Unreal Engine has been free for any user to download
and use since 2015, with Epic starting to take a 5% cut
after any game built with it surpasses $1 million in revenue.
But that's not what the Mandalorian is. It's a streaming TV series that started out promising
before beginning the slow and arduous process of destroying its credibility among fans.
And they didn't have to pay Tim Sweeney a cent for their virtual set pieces.
Unreal Engine is being used by producers of film and TV shows, VTubers with mocap setups,
and Coldplay, who brought BTS back as holograms
after the K-pop group was tragically killed.
What? They're alive? What about Tupac?
No? Crap. Who are you talking to?
Huh? Anyway, Sweeney admitted at Unreal Fest
that Epic Games figured out that they had a financial problem
10 weeks before they decided to lay off over 800 people.
But how is Tim Sweeney supposed to know that free Unreal Engine access,
giving away free games and starting then losing
a massive lawsuit with Apple will cost so much money?
Meta's new AI has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
It came out last week that the company's new AI chatbot was trained on public Facebook and Instagram posts,
though they excluded posts only shown to friends and family to respect consumers' privacy.
Meta then took all that money they saved by trolling their own platforms for training data
and passed those savings on to celebrities and influencers
by paying the millions to use their faces and likenesses for their weird experimental fictional AI characters.
But how else could they get Charles D'Amelio to make sure our dance moves aren't sus?
Meta's new EMU AI image generator also couldn't avoid controversy this week.
Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp users have been using the new sticker generation tool
to make stickers of Elon Musk packing some dub, dubong,
dubong hunkeros. Is that a real word?
No, it's a euphemism for breasts, but it's also complete nonsense.
Okay. And then someone used it to create hot Karl Marx
who has even bigger Bedonga gongs, hana hoogs.
Thankfully, some more cultured individuals have used the tool properly to give Waluigi a gun.
Go ahead, Nintendo, don't give him his own game. See what happens.
Quick bits fill me with joy. It's too much for my body to handle.
The pressure alone makes it immeasurable pain. Please, make it stop!
Just kidding, I beg. Apple apparently seriously considered switching the default search engine
for private browsing on the iPhone and Mac from Google to DuckDuckGo,
the internet's number one bird-themed search engine. As part of the current antitrust case
against Google search, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg
testified that from 2017 to 2019, they were in talks with Apple
because even in incognito mode, Google's browser tracking can be hard to duck.
DuckDuckGo pitched similar proposals
to Mozilla, Opera, and Samsung, but eventually gave up
because it concluded that Google's contract with each company was the biggest thing ducking them over.
TSMC and Samsung are allegedly struggling to make large enough yields of three nanometer nodes,
with the companies only achieving 50% and 60% yields respectively.
That's a big problem for Samsung because they need to get up to 70% yield
if they wanna get orders from Qualcomm. On the other hand, this might be for the best
as by some analyses, the three nanometer node is barely worth switching to.
And the three nanometer node is also being blamed for overheating iPhone 15 Pro chips
as if that phone needed any more things to go wrong with it.
Now the display is burning in too. What happened with this phone, Apple?
Tim Cook likes his chips fried. Ratings.com has been running an extensive burning test
on three OLED PC monitors. For about five months now,
they've been playing CNN's 24 seven news on the two existing OLED monitors with Samsung panels
and one with an LG panel. The Samsung panels are already showing burn in,
though that may be due to their higher brightness according to PC Gamer,
though they also point out that the sample size of three is a bit small, which is weird
because my doctor is always telling me that three is too many legs for a person to have.
But I know he's just jealous of how fast I'll be able to run once I get another one.
I'll find it. Luxury fashion house Prada has announced a partnership
with Axiom Space to design NASA's next gen lunar spacesuits
for the 2025 Artemis III moon mission.
The Axi-moo, it's not how you say it, spacesuit named after how Prada acquires feathers
for its hats. Axi-moo.
For fashion. Will be designed with the aim of increasing mobility
and protection on the lunar surface. No word yet on whether it will be cerulean
or the usual white. Another goal is to address comfort
and the human element neglected in the design of legacy suits.
And as such, each Axi-moo suit will come with a safiano leather clutch
and heels no taller than two inches. When we meet the aliens, they'll be impressed.
First impressions are so important. We were going to ignore you, but wow.
And Google Japan has once again found themselves with a surplus of both money and tabs of LSD.
So they decided to make a keycap that is a wearable cap
that functions as not just a single key switch but an entire keyboard.
How? Well, thanks to an internal gyroscope, you can select another character to type
by turning the hat before you press it. Finally, a reason to turn your hat to the side
that isn't a very out of date attempt at impersonating one of the youths.
Hello, fellow kids. And you'll be very out of date
if you don't come back on Monday for more tech news and then the youths will laugh at you.
You don't want that?