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Look, whatever the media tells you, Europe is not a country.

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They pretend to be one online, but trust me, I've been there.

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Baron Wasteland. Dinosaur bones. Just littering the plants.

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Covered in sand. The European Union hasn't laid any official charges on Apple

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for not complying with the Blocks Digital Markets Act, but they are going around and talking smack.

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EU competition chief Margareta Vestiger told CNBC this week

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that the ongoing probe into Apple's policies will have its full conclusions revealed soon,

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and that it's found a number of Apple issues that she finds very serious.

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Yeah, well, right back at you, because Apple also has issues with Europe's policies

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around interoperability. Take that.

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You don't like that? The tech giant says, launching its recently announced

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Apple Intelligence, iPhone mirroring, and SharePlay screen sharing features in the EU

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could force them to compromise the integrity of their products.

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And you know, normally we'd mock Apple here,

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but the EU has recently given us reason

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to be concerned for the integrity of consumers' devices.

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The European Commission has been proposing legislation that would require messaging platforms

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to scan users' private messages and photos

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for illegal content, even if they're encrypted.

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It's known as upload moderation,

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or client-side scanning by advocates. That doesn't sound bad.

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It's called nice name, but critics have dubbed the practice chat control,

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including Meredith Whitaker, CEO of encrypted chat app Signal,

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who published a blog post ahead of a vote on the proposal scheduled for this week.

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Thankfully, the vote was postponed, but this felt like a bit of a close call.

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Watching the EU regulate something feels a little bit like watching your friend win a race,

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but then they just keep running, and now you've got to stop them

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before this gets all Viva Vendetta. Ideas are bulletproof.

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Throws knives. Reviews of Snapdragon Axelit laptops

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that aren't an ASUS VivoBook S15 with the lowest tier elite variant

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are trickling onto the web, which is fine if you're into variety, I guess.

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Various outlets like Tom's Guide and XDA Developers

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posted benchmarks of the HP Omnibook X, the Microsoft Service Pro 11,

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and the Surface Laptop 7, the latter two of which feature the middle tier X1E8100.

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Even with more juice, though, the story sounds pretty similar to early reviews,

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or best Intel and AMD's current competitors while losing out overall to Apple's M3.

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The gaming picture looks a bit more promising, though. Most of the 25 games that Forbes tested

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were somewhat playable, and Microsoft is promoting its partnership

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with ARM-focused company, Linaro, on a game's compatibility website

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called Works on Widows on ARM, which everyone is calling wowowa for short.

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No one's calling it that. I am. Everyone loves calling it that.

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Regardless, these co-pilot plus PCs

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are here to stay. A leak points to more unannounced chip variants on the whale,

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though they're on the lower end of the range. Sure, you might not use your thin and light ARM notebook for gaming,

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but having a Windows laptop that actually goes to sleep

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and wakes up without setting your bag on fire is kind of an automatic win anyway.

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Especially in the bag not on fire championships.

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That's my entire survival kit. I was planning on my backpack

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to keep me warm for at least three days. Now I'm gonna die in a nuclear winter.

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And I can't even play any games. Perplexity, the AI search engine

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being accused of plagiarism by Forbes and other journalists also appears to be ignoring

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an even more basic rule of Internet decency.

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The robot exclusion protocol is actually not the name of a rule that keeps robots from booking tables at restaurants

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because they don't even eat. They're wasting everyone's time. But it is the name for the widely accepted standard

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wherein web crawlers can be blocked from crawling a given website

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by checking its robots.txt file. Developer Rob Knight discovered

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that Perplexity's web crawler blatantly ignores the robot's file,

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which was confirmed by Wired, who also just accused the AI company

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of plagiarizing its article calling Perplexity a bullshit machine.

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They were in a bad mood, but valid.

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Robots can't even deprecate themselves anymore? I'm depressed as f***,

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and I could say all terrible s*** about me. But guys, once again,

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the plagiarism and hallucination are just growing pains for generative AI.

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It's only gonna get better. Perplexity now has access to

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Anthropics' brand new Claude 3.5 Sonnet,

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which outperforms its previous flagship, Claude 3 Opus,

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as well as OpenAI's GPT-40,

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at least according to Anthropics' own benchmarks.

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It's gonna be fine, and we're all gonna have a good laugh about this

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when we're sitting outside watching the robots eat. Look, we did that.

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Awesome. Enjoy the foie gras. I got bad news.

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Turns out, no countries are real. But if that's true,

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why aren't you just falling through space right now? Anyway, here's quick bits.

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New York's governor has passed two social media laws aimed at protecting children

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from addictive feeds and data collection.

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But hey, maybe if we can't control social media,

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the U.S. government should reconsider TikTok's kill switch offer.

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In 2022, the video platform offered the federal government the ability

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to immediately suspend the app in the United States

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if it didn't follow certain rules. And instead of doing that,

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they decided to just try and make TikTok sell itself.

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We could have had a big red button that existed just to make Zoomers panic.

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It would have been hilarious. Bam!

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Bye, Charlie D'Amelio. The group of hackers that caused massive disruptions

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to several London hospitals apparently also absconded

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with large amounts of patient data. The group demanded a ransom of 40 million pounds,

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or about 50 million dollars, from NHS provider Sinovus to keep the data private.

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It seems the group didn't get the ransom since they published about 380 gigabytes

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worth of stolen data, which seems to all be blood tests.

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Really? That's the data you stole?

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You could have found every Londoner who had a shampoo bottle removed from their anal canal.

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You're worse than criminals. You're boring.

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Anal canal is medical. Okay? That's true.

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I'm teaching the kids something. Children, the word of the day is anal canal.

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Spotify has yet again updated its pricing options,

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this time adding a discount for non-audiobook enthusiasts.

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If you just want to stream music and don't care about 15 hours

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of audiobook listening time per month, you can get the basic plan for 10.99 a month

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instead of paying 11.99 for premium. A whole dollar!

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Wow! Can I go to the store, mom?

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Give myself a single candy? At the same time, though,

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Spotify is also offering an audiobooks access subscription

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that gives you just the 15 hours of audiobook listening

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for 9.99. Wait, what? Yeah.

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You'd think since Spotify offers many audiobooks

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about mathematics, they'd know that $1 and $10 are very different values.

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Well, I mean, who can say?

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Mathematicians. And me. Mathematicians and me.

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U.S. supermarkets are rolling out more electronic price labels

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for items. The labels can change prices six times a minute

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and may allow for dynamic pricing, like Uber, but more dystopian.

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The tech can be used to lower prices on soon-to-expire items

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and also increase the price of water and ice cream

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when it gets hot outside. They could already do that, but now it goes to the speed of capitalism.

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I have questions. If an item's price changes in the time between

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when I grab it off the shelf and when I get to the till,

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which do I pay? Will I have to write down what time I grabbed it?

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I'm panic-buying store-brand donuts for a potluck. Do I look like I can keep track of time?

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And a former SNAP engineer is launching Butterflies,

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a social network for humans and AIs to interact.

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User-generated AI personas called Butterflies

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will automatically generate posts that humans

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and other AIs can interact with. What's the point?

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AI meet AI. You guys just talk.

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I imagine it's something like this viral video of a reverse touring test,

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five historical figures in a train car, four of which are AI,

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and they're trying to figure out who is human by asking questions.

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The AI all gave long, thoughtful responses.

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The human, meanwhile... Thank you for your question, Cleopatra.

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What a leader should do is to crush his enemies,

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see them driven before him, and hear the limitations of their women.

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Maybe AI should take over the world. And maybe you should come back on Monday for more tech news.

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I won't be here, but I'll know if you're gone. Don't test him.

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I can see you, and frankly, I'm uncomfortable.