Between Avatar 1 and 2, the humans went from harvesting unobtainium to slurping up alien
whale brain juice. It's a cautionary tale about how they should have been harvesting
tech news from the get-go. And also something about colonialism. Did you see Avatar 2?
In 3D. Now that's technology. Discord has confirmed a data breach in which hackers were able to access
government IDs. Discord says that the hackers hit one of their third-party customer service providers
and gained access to some personal information shared by users with that provider, including
users' names, emails and other contact details, IP addresses, messages with support agents,
and a small number of images of government IDs. Again, which is crazy because I thought the UK
government rolled out age checks only after they made all the hackers promise to leave the IDs alone.
Hopefully all the other hackers stick to the agreement and we won't see any more IDs get
compromised from the hundreds of other popular platforms that have also collected them.
Microsoft is assuring gamers that their Xbox hardware isn't going anywhere.
Console elves won't steal it away in the middle of the night. When Microsoft announced they'd be raising the price on multiple tiers of their Game Pass
subscription service, rumors began to spread that this focus on profiting from software
and membership fees marked the end for Xbox hardware. However, Microsoft has now stated
that they are still investing in upcoming first-party consoles and devices made by Xbox.
It makes sense that Microsoft isn't totally giving up on Xbox hardware because apparently
they're still figuring out exactly how to make those gaming services profitable.
According to The Verge, Microsoft is considering launching a free,
ad-supported Xbox cloud gaming service while a Bloomberg report came out saying
Microsoft lost almost $300 million in sales by putting Call of Duty 6 on Game Pass.
So yeah, maybe it's not time to jump ship on building hardware quite just yet.
That said, it doesn't look like Xbox is doing a good job of releasing hardware either
because apparently a first-party Xbox handheld was cancelled when Microsoft wouldn't commit
to filling AMD's minimum order requirements for the chips inside the hardware.
Well, we really just don't know if we're going to sell that many, so I was like,
can we just do like, Baker's Dozen? The Xbox brand is 23 years old now, and like many others,
it's age. It's clearly going through a bit of an existential crisis, something that routinely
happens at age 23 these days. It's true though. Hey, I hope you figure out who you want to be,
Xbox. I may be time to go backpacking to find yourself. You know who seems to be really figuring
themselves out recently? Xbox's first-party hardware partner AMD, who has entered into
another lucrative partnership, this time with OpenAI. The new partnership was announced today,
and we'll see OpenAI deploy what they describe as six gigawatts worth of AMD's Instinct AI GPUs,
which I guess translates to potentially millions of GPUs over the next several years,
beginning with one gigawatt of the upcoming Instinct MI450 GPU in the first half of 2026.
Great, Scott! What a missed opportunity for these nerds to have referenced the 1.21
gigawatts used to time travel and back to the future, but whatever.
The deal is worth tens of billions of dollars a year for AMD and gives OpenAI the ability to
acquire up to 10% of that company for a penny per share. Not only is this deal seemingly great for
AMD's wallet, but it also highlights growing confidence in their AI GPUs, which could help
them become more competitive with NVIDIA, who obviously dominates that field. Yet,
the production demands of making all of these enterprise AI GPUs has PC gamers concerned that
AMD's head is in the cloud instead of the desktop market, which is already dealing with a storage
and memory-related pricing apocalypse. I don't think Dr. Lisa Sue will forget about us. She took
an oath to protect the vulnerable, heal the sick, and all that stuff, you know? Right?
Now, in the way of water, the second Avatar movie, sure, those Metcaina clan kids can swim fast,
but there's no way they're beating the Quickbits. Quickbits don't even have to hold their breath.
Intel's imminent Panther Lake mobile CPUs are reportedly set to feature another kind of chip
branding. Yay! Every Panther Lake CPU will allegedly include integrated graphics,
but the models with the highest spec will be referred to as Core Ultra X. Elon has gotta be hyped on
this, and you can expect to see a Core Ultra X9 and X7 chip. Make it stop. Like Jason X, these Core
Ultra X CPUs are gonna be beefier than their compatriots. The CPUs will use 12 XE3 GPU cores,
a big jump from the 8 XE2 cores found on Lunar Lake processors, so Intel is clearly focused on
making more powerful iGPUs to compete with AMD's APU. For a while there, we thought about combining
Techlinked with Jackass to create Techlinked X, but there were just too many casualties.
The Nintendo Switch 2 supports multiple versions of NVIDIA's DLSS as discovered by
Digital Foundry in one of their recent YouTube videos. One version is practically the same as
the one you'd find on NVIDIA's PC GPUs, but the second version is a sort of DLSS light that
prioritizes performance and appears built to upscale games beyond 1080p on the Switch 2.
This lighter version is far less resource-intensive, but becomes more apparent during camera motion,
revealing unfiltered pixels. According to some reporting by Digital Foundry, game developers
working on Switch 2 titles are able to choose which DLSS variant best suits their performance
targets. Do a Mario impression saying, It's a me! Super sampling! Open AI and Johnny Ive are
hitting some roadblocks on the way to creating their secretive AI device. According to a report
by the Financial Times, Open AI and Ive, the legendary Apple product designer, are working
to build a palm-sized piece of hardware that doesn't have a screen but uses audio and visual cues to
serve as your AI assistant. However, they are running up against the privacy concerns created
by designing hardware that is always listening and or watching, along with concerns about how
much compute power is needed for a mass consumer product to run Open AI's suite of models.
So far, this all sounds a bit like that AI friend product Linus tried on ShortCircuit,
named Riley. And he seemed to hate. But that's only because there can only be one AI Riley.
Wait, Activision's Ricochet anti-cheat appears to be doing what it's supposed to.
Thank god. Cheating is the scourge of many competitive online games, in case you didn't know,
but with the launch of Call of Duty Black Ops 7's early access beta, Ricochet appears to be
catching cheaters hyper-efficiently. Uh-oh. They claim to be stopping 97% of cheaters within 30
minutes of their first sign-in, and that fewer than 1% of cheating attempts are making it into
matches. This is great news. Hopefully, Ricochet's work sets an example for the rest of the gaming
industry. But the standard they've set for themselves also needs to be maintained, because
the game is only in early access and concurrent gameplay numbers have been lackluster for a Call
of Duty game. As the anti-cheating ramps up, people care less about the game. The Astros aren't in
the MLB playoffs, and they're clearing cheaters off of a COD game. Maybe there is hope for fair
play after all. I'm sure that joke makes sense. To someone, yeah, yeah. But I wouldn't know.
And in Japan, NTT East Group has teamed up with Chiba Prefecture to protect the poultry industry,
with drones equipped with lasers. This doesn't need to be said, but this is bad ass.
Chicken defending laser drones. Sadly, the more I tell you about these drones,
the more pedestrian and logical this plan all sounds. But I'm gonna do it anyway.
Lasers aren't gonna set fires or anything like that. They're actually being used to scare other
birds away from interacting with the chickens in order to avoid any spread of avian flu,
which will help to avoid having to call the chickens. We're living in the future, baby.
I'm gonna start shooting a laser pointer at my nephew whenever he comes at me with a runny nose.
Get away from me, Goopy. And that's why you're not a parent. And you should get away from me, too.
But come back on Wednesday for more tech news. I've got to get my Nevi language lessons in.
I'm trying to learn it before fire and ash. That's Avatar 3, so I don't have to use any
subtitles. Hey, olove means until next time.