While my body resides in Canada, where there's a federal election today,
my mind resides in the ethereal realm of tech news.
So in the voting booth, I covered my eyes and just scribbled something random. It's whatever.
This is what matters! The Homebrew Channel, a set of tools for running software on jailbroken Wii consoles,
has had its GitHub repository archived in a slap in the face to the many people
still booting up their Wii's every day. I know someone uses this as their main PC.
And I actually do think that's great. Don't stop. The group that maintains the HPC repository and who have now archived it,
Fail Overflow, said they knew a while ago that a critical homebrew component called
LibOgc contained code stolen from Nintendo,
which is a bit like holding a giant pulsing beacon that attracts lawyers.
But they didn't know that much of the rest of LibOgc's code was also stolen from an open source
project without any attribution. And that crossed Fail Overflow's ethical principle against stealing two things.
Everybody gets one. On the plus side, seems like all the Wii homebrew resources will still be available,
at least until Jack Black hears about this. Oh, because Jack Black played Bowser,
which is the last name of Nintendo of America president, Doug Bowser.
Try to keep up. Large parts of Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and southwestern France
experienced a sudden power outage this morning. Power has since been restored to about half of Spain,
with the rest hopefully coming back tomorrow.
Traffic lights, elevators, and electronic doors stopped working,
shops and restaurants were plunged into darkness, and the Madrid Open Tennis Tournament was suspended.
God! While some were initially concerned about a cyber attack,
Spain and Portugal's primary power supplier and minor GI Joe villain,
RedElectrica, said no. This was the result of grid oscillation caused by extreme temperature variations in Spain.
You know, you're hot, then you're cold. Somebody call Katy Perry, there is a social media opportunity here.
Variations like that may be having a strong effect in that region due to
heavier reliance on renewable energy sources like wind and solar,
which successfully powered 100% of Spain's energy grid for the first time on April 16th.
I mean, hey, it's great for the planet. It's just that for various technical reasons,
renewable energy is often less resilient to sudden environmental changes.
That's a challenge we should maybe solve soon, because oil is gross and slimy, and coal is dirty, and it gets everywhere.
I'm over it. And there's a couple buzzy science experiments going around right now.
The first one involves researchers from the University of Zurich,
who conducted an unauthorized experiment secretly posting 1,700 comments,
which were partially AI generated in the Change My View subreddit,
to see how effective AI-assisted content could be at manipulating public opinion.
The answer? Pretty successful. The posts were generally rated as more persuasive than the human baseline.
No one in the subreddit was aware of the experiment, though,
until after the researchers, who have successfully remained anonymous thus far,
told the sub's mod team about it, prompting some members of the sub,
to point out that if it's so easy to pass the researchers' AI posts off as human,
what the researchers may have just studied is how effective AI content is at persuading other AI bots.
Speaking of which, the other buzzy study is one in which researchers at Carnegie Mellon
University created a simulated company and staffed it with AI agents,
tasked with doing normal human worker stuff, browsing the web, writing code,
running programs, and communicating with coworkers.
Unlike in the first study, these AIs kind of sucked,
with the researchers highlighting a lack of common sense and social skills,
incompetence in web browsing, and even lying to themselves without realizing it,
which may be more human than many of us realize. The study calls into question Microsoft's recently published work trend report,
which predicts every human will soon manage a team of AI agents,
which, if chatGPTs recently rolled back update as any indication,
would just glaze you for every prompt you provide.
You do the best prompts. Thank you, boss.
Slay. I'm not even going to check who's winning the election right now,
because the real winner is you, because you get to hear these quick bits.
Google announced last week that first and second generation nest learning thermostats,
which launched in 2011 and 2012, will no longer receive updates after October 25th of this year,
meaning they'll still work as thermostats, but they'll lose their smart features like remote
control. But Android Authority argues that Google did give customers a sizable credit towards a new nest,
and for better or for worse, this is kind of an inevitable consequence of techifying our homes.
Google doesn't have the resources to keep 20 different models of the thermostat properly updated.
They need those resources to keep finding new and innovative ways to ruin search.
The Wall Street Journal published a concerning piece on how Meta discouraged the development
of guardrails for the company's AI chatbots, even when they knew it would lead them to engaging
in explicit romantic roleplay with users it knew to be miners.
Zuck reportedly wanted less guardrails after competitors in a hacking competition weren't
able to get Meta's AI to misbehave as much as other chatbots, which meant they were bored.
Thankfully, after the journal demonstrated Meta AI's ability to sex with users posing as children,
Meta added some guardrails back. In other Meta news at their antitrust trial, we learned that Reddit leadership
doesn't consider its site a social networking platform.
And the judge doesn't understand why anyone would reply to a celebrity on Twitter.
Both things that I'm also going to blame Meta for, just because.
Leakers on the ChipHell forums claim that an RTX 5080 Super and 5070 Super are in the works
featuring big upgrades to VRAM. According to these sources, the 5070 Super would get an additional 6 gigabytes for a total of 18
gigs of memory while the 5080 Super would jump from 16 to 24 gigs, which would make these cards
much better at running games at higher resolutions and more importantly,
prevent more accumulation of complaints about how gaming isn't even worth it.
With 12 gigabytes of VRAM, what is this? VRAM for ants, etc.
An astronaut Don Petit, Petit, returned to Earth from the International Space Station on April 20th,
his 70th birthday. Ah, nice.
Which he wasn't super happy about, actually, because all of his aches and pains apparently
virtually disappear when he's up there. Now, when reporters implied that he didn't look too good when he exited the capsule,
he replied that, well, that's because he didn't feel too good, because all of the aches came back.
And that just leads me to wonder whether old people would have a way better time
if we put, you know, old folks' homes in space.
There's long-term health effects, but, you know, it'd be fun.
Even more fun, the idea of you coming back here on Wednesday for more tech news.
Wow, that would really be something. You know, I think we'd have a good time.
Hey, you know what? Think about it. No pressure.
Please, though.