Tech news won't keep you alive in a desert island situation, but it could give you more to think about.
Like, hmm, maybe Nintendo was right to DMCA everyone like that.
And then you die. ChatGPT was all the rage, but get ready to hear more about projects based on auto-GPT,
a GitHub project posted two weeks ago that modifies large language models like OpenAI's GPT
to function as semi-autonomous agents. That means when you give it a goal instead of giving you a response and then waiting for a prompt
number two, like a fun chatbot, it will give itself feedback based on its own performance
and continue acting in pursuit of its goal until you shut it down.
Like a terminator from the movie Terminator. Every time you use it, you have to put it into a molten metal.
Auto-GPT spawned many similar projects, many of which are trending on GitHub,
including an official Microsoft project called Jarvis.
In case you didn't quite understand, these AIs act more like little humans than before,
which is why researchers just published a study where 25 of them were put in a video game.
And when one of them was given the idea to throw a Valentine's Day party,
the agents autonomously sent out invites, met new acquaintances,
asked each other on dates to the party, and then actually showed up.
Which is, frankly, much better than many humans could do.
So that's one thing. Another concerning AI thing is scammers, who are currently, right now,
tricking normal people into thinking their loved ones have been kidnapped
using voice cloning AI and caller IDs spoofing.
So it actually looks almost exactly like the scene from Taken,
except you don't have a certain set of skills. You're just Tammy.
Just Tammy! Now, we can look at things like the recently announced Dolly 2.0,
an open source LLM with promise as a chat GPT competitor for the people,
as a cool democratization of AI tech.
But given how this tech has gone from being future scary to scary right now,
it's we're scared about it now, we should be asking whether we need democratization
or regulation. Which is why the US government agency responsible for these things
is currently seeking public comments to help it put together laws
to protect us from the eldritch horrors literally every programmer
is cooking up on their laptops right now.
I need to calm down. In lighter news, this fun leaked video has given us a glimpse of a new Windows UI
custom made for gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck or ROG Ally.
So that's, that's cool. Hey, this is cool. Now, given that the handheld Windows mode is being made for an internal hackathon project,
it's unclear whether Microsoft is for sure going to release something like this.
I mean, not doing so would lead more people on board the Linux gaming hype train,
but maybe Microsoft is fine with that, you know? We've got so many people using Windows, it's almost too many.
Stop using Windows, please. But one feature that Microsoft is officially working on is a present sensing mode,
which has shown up in a Windows 11 preview build. This uses various device sensors to tell whether you're present at your PC,
both physically and perhaps mentally. Frankly, I'd love my PC to sense when I'm getting distracted and do a little
Riley, are we present right now?
And Western Digital no sooner got their MyCloud service back up and running a week after being
hacked than those same hackers demanded the company pay to reclaim 10 terabytes of stolen data.
I mean, you don't send a ransom note right after you steal the thing.
That'd be rude. TechCrunch reporters spoke to one of the hackers and were able to confirm that at least
some of the stolen data was legitimate. The hackers claimed to have personal info like email addresses, phone numbers, and more
of both WD staff and customers. If the company isn't willing to pay the minimum eight figure ransom,
The hackers say they'll start posting the data on the website of
Hacking Group that these hackers are not a part of, but who they know to be professional.
You can't just post things on like 4chan. I mean, as an extortionist, there are just some things you don't do.
Oh, you thought that stuff was tech news?
Wait till you see the Crick bits, which are also in that category.
The FBI has arrested the 21-year-old suspected of leaking a trove of classified U.S. government
documents on a Discord server called Thugshaker Central.
According to the Washington Post, the suspect is a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard
who ended up posting screenshots of the documents after growing frustrated that the members of
his military-themed Discord group were ignoring the text-based posts that he had spent hours typing
up. It's working so hard. Markings and environmental clues in the photograph printouts
helped investigators determine the man's identity, but Discord has also said they are
cooperating with law enforcement. So remember gamers, don't make this guy's key mistake,
joining the Massachusetts Air National Guard. NVIDIA has released some helpful statistics claiming
that 83% of gamers with RTX 40 series cards, which is 0.68% of all Steam users,
according to Steam Survey, turn ray tracing on with 79% of the same group turning DLSS on.
Now there's two main questions this has brought up. One, if you flip on ray tracing one time,
decide you don't want it and then flip it off, does that count? The other question,
why are nearly 20% of these gamers buying an RTX 40 series card and not using the RTX features?
What? Did you put it in your mom's computer? Why did you do that?
Chonky 3-slot RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards have been showing up dead in greater numbers due to
sagging in their PCIe slots, which causes bending and uneven thermal stress,
according to a video from German computer repair technician Chris Fix. Specifically,
the solder points of memory chips nearest to the PCIe socket are the most likely failure point.
So you might want to check in on that if you've got a big card in your rig because look,
we all love a top of the line Chonky boy. But that chonk comes at a price.
Hashtag chonk awareness, hashtag save that chonk. Twitter has announced a new feature where Twitter
creators will be able to offer paid subscriptions where followers can access exclusive tweets and
long form video. And you might be thinking, hey, that just sounds like super follows.
But to that we say no, it isn't. It's called something different now.
The company hopes to include newsletters and other Twitter features as potential bonus content
later down the line. Of course, Twitter already had a newsletter tool,
but it was shut down three months ago in what is becoming just par for the course.
They had, they had that feature. And then, and today the European Space Agency launched an
unmanned spacecraft on a mission to determine whether the icy oceans of Jupiter's largest moon,
moons, multiple, Callisto, Europa and Ganymede? Oh, it's not Ganymede.
Whether they're able to support life, not intelligent life,
just the dumb kind. We're insulting them already. Some of you may know that Jupiter is the Roman
name for Zeus, while each of the moons is named after an ancient mythological hottie that Zeus
consorted with. Fittingly, the initial launch was delayed due to risk of flight.
The moons are busy. How do you put a sock on a moon? And we'll put a sock on the channel until
Monday because that's when you should come back for more fresh hot batch tech news.
That's the thing about news. It's different every time. We're going to figure out how to put a sock
on the channel. We haven't figured that out yet. Also, you can still watch the videos of the weekend.