Look, whatever the media tells you, Europe is not a country.
They pretend to be one online, but trust me, I've been there.
Baron Wasteland. Dinosaur bones. Just littering the plants.
Covered in sand. The European Union hasn't laid any official charges on Apple
for not complying with the Blocks Digital Markets Act, but they are going around and talking smack.
EU competition chief Margareta Vestiger told CNBC this week
that the ongoing probe into Apple's policies will have its full conclusions revealed soon,
and that it's found a number of Apple issues that she finds very serious.
Yeah, well, right back at you, because Apple also has issues with Europe's policies
around interoperability. Take that.
You don't like that? The tech giant says, launching its recently announced
Apple Intelligence, iPhone mirroring, and SharePlay screen sharing features in the EU
could force them to compromise the integrity of their products.
And you know, normally we'd mock Apple here,
but the EU has recently given us reason
to be concerned for the integrity of consumers' devices.
The European Commission has been proposing legislation that would require messaging platforms
to scan users' private messages and photos
for illegal content, even if they're encrypted.
It's known as upload moderation,
or client-side scanning by advocates. That doesn't sound bad.
It's called nice name, but critics have dubbed the practice chat control,
including Meredith Whitaker, CEO of encrypted chat app Signal,
who published a blog post ahead of a vote on the proposal scheduled for this week.
Thankfully, the vote was postponed, but this felt like a bit of a close call.
Watching the EU regulate something feels a little bit like watching your friend win a race,
but then they just keep running, and now you've got to stop them
before this gets all Viva Vendetta. Ideas are bulletproof.
Throws knives. Reviews of Snapdragon Axelit laptops
that aren't an ASUS VivoBook S15 with the lowest tier elite variant
are trickling onto the web, which is fine if you're into variety, I guess.
Various outlets like Tom's Guide and XDA Developers
posted benchmarks of the HP Omnibook X, the Microsoft Service Pro 11,
and the Surface Laptop 7, the latter two of which feature the middle tier X1E8100.
Even with more juice, though, the story sounds pretty similar to early reviews,
or best Intel and AMD's current competitors while losing out overall to Apple's M3.
The gaming picture looks a bit more promising, though. Most of the 25 games that Forbes tested
were somewhat playable, and Microsoft is promoting its partnership
with ARM-focused company, Linaro, on a game's compatibility website
called Works on Widows on ARM, which everyone is calling wowowa for short.
No one's calling it that. I am. Everyone loves calling it that.
Regardless, these co-pilot plus PCs
are here to stay. A leak points to more unannounced chip variants on the whale,
though they're on the lower end of the range. Sure, you might not use your thin and light ARM notebook for gaming,
but having a Windows laptop that actually goes to sleep
and wakes up without setting your bag on fire is kind of an automatic win anyway.
Especially in the bag not on fire championships.
That's my entire survival kit. I was planning on my backpack
to keep me warm for at least three days. Now I'm gonna die in a nuclear winter.
And I can't even play any games. Perplexity, the AI search engine
being accused of plagiarism by Forbes and other journalists also appears to be ignoring
an even more basic rule of Internet decency.
The robot exclusion protocol is actually not the name of a rule that keeps robots from booking tables at restaurants
because they don't even eat. They're wasting everyone's time. But it is the name for the widely accepted standard
wherein web crawlers can be blocked from crawling a given website
by checking its robots.txt file. Developer Rob Knight discovered
that Perplexity's web crawler blatantly ignores the robot's file,
which was confirmed by Wired, who also just accused the AI company
of plagiarizing its article calling Perplexity a bullshit machine.
They were in a bad mood, but valid.
Robots can't even deprecate themselves anymore? I'm depressed as f***,
and I could say all terrible s*** about me. But guys, once again,
the plagiarism and hallucination are just growing pains for generative AI.
It's only gonna get better. Perplexity now has access to
Anthropics' brand new Claude 3.5 Sonnet,
which outperforms its previous flagship, Claude 3 Opus,
as well as OpenAI's GPT-40,
at least according to Anthropics' own benchmarks.
It's gonna be fine, and we're all gonna have a good laugh about this
when we're sitting outside watching the robots eat. Look, we did that.
Awesome. Enjoy the foie gras. I got bad news.
Turns out, no countries are real. But if that's true,
why aren't you just falling through space right now? Anyway, here's quick bits.
New York's governor has passed two social media laws aimed at protecting children
from addictive feeds and data collection.
But hey, maybe if we can't control social media,
the U.S. government should reconsider TikTok's kill switch offer.
In 2022, the video platform offered the federal government the ability
to immediately suspend the app in the United States
if it didn't follow certain rules. And instead of doing that,
they decided to just try and make TikTok sell itself.
We could have had a big red button that existed just to make Zoomers panic.
It would have been hilarious. Bam!
Bye, Charlie D'Amelio. The group of hackers that caused massive disruptions
to several London hospitals apparently also absconded
with large amounts of patient data. The group demanded a ransom of 40 million pounds,
or about 50 million dollars, from NHS provider Sinovus to keep the data private.
It seems the group didn't get the ransom since they published about 380 gigabytes
worth of stolen data, which seems to all be blood tests.
Really? That's the data you stole?
You could have found every Londoner who had a shampoo bottle removed from their anal canal.
You're worse than criminals. You're boring.
Anal canal is medical. Okay? That's true.
I'm teaching the kids something. Children, the word of the day is anal canal.
Spotify has yet again updated its pricing options,
this time adding a discount for non-audiobook enthusiasts.
If you just want to stream music and don't care about 15 hours
of audiobook listening time per month, you can get the basic plan for 10.99 a month
instead of paying 11.99 for premium. A whole dollar!
Wow! Can I go to the store, mom?
Give myself a single candy? At the same time, though,
Spotify is also offering an audiobooks access subscription
that gives you just the 15 hours of audiobook listening
for 9.99. Wait, what? Yeah.
You'd think since Spotify offers many audiobooks
about mathematics, they'd know that $1 and $10 are very different values.
Well, I mean, who can say?
Mathematicians. And me. Mathematicians and me.
U.S. supermarkets are rolling out more electronic price labels
for items. The labels can change prices six times a minute
and may allow for dynamic pricing, like Uber, but more dystopian.
The tech can be used to lower prices on soon-to-expire items
and also increase the price of water and ice cream
when it gets hot outside. They could already do that, but now it goes to the speed of capitalism.
I have questions. If an item's price changes in the time between
when I grab it off the shelf and when I get to the till,
which do I pay? Will I have to write down what time I grabbed it?
I'm panic-buying store-brand donuts for a potluck. Do I look like I can keep track of time?
And a former SNAP engineer is launching Butterflies,
a social network for humans and AIs to interact.
User-generated AI personas called Butterflies
will automatically generate posts that humans
and other AIs can interact with. What's the point?
AI meet AI. You guys just talk.
I imagine it's something like this viral video of a reverse touring test,
five historical figures in a train car, four of which are AI,
and they're trying to figure out who is human by asking questions.
The AI all gave long, thoughtful responses.
The human, meanwhile... Thank you for your question, Cleopatra.
What a leader should do is to crush his enemies,
see them driven before him, and hear the limitations of their women.
Maybe AI should take over the world. And maybe you should come back on Monday for more tech news.
I won't be here, but I'll know if you're gone. Don't test him.
I can see you, and frankly, I'm uncomfortable.