WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.080 While my body resides in Canada, where there's a federal election today, 00:00:04.080 --> 00:00:07.520 my mind resides in the ethereal realm of tech news. 00:00:07.520 --> 00:00:11.120 So in the voting booth, I covered my eyes and just scribbled something random. It's whatever. 00:00:11.120 --> 00:00:17.760 This is what matters! The Homebrew Channel, a set of tools for running software on jailbroken Wii consoles, 00:00:17.760 --> 00:00:23.840 has had its GitHub repository archived in a slap in the face to the many people 00:00:23.840 --> 00:00:28.800 still booting up their Wii's every day. I know someone uses this as their main PC. 00:00:28.880 --> 00:00:35.600 And I actually do think that's great. Don't stop. The group that maintains the HPC repository and who have now archived it, 00:00:35.600 --> 00:00:41.040 Fail Overflow, said they knew a while ago that a critical homebrew component called 00:00:41.040 --> 00:00:45.120 LibOgc contained code stolen from Nintendo, 00:00:45.120 --> 00:00:49.920 which is a bit like holding a giant pulsing beacon that attracts lawyers. 00:00:49.920 --> 00:00:56.720 But they didn't know that much of the rest of LibOgc's code was also stolen from an open source 00:00:56.720 --> 00:01:04.960 project without any attribution. And that crossed Fail Overflow's ethical principle against stealing two things. 00:01:06.160 --> 00:01:12.320 Everybody gets one. On the plus side, seems like all the Wii homebrew resources will still be available, 00:01:12.320 --> 00:01:17.760 at least until Jack Black hears about this. Oh, because Jack Black played Bowser, 00:01:17.760 --> 00:01:20.960 which is the last name of Nintendo of America president, Doug Bowser. 00:01:20.960 --> 00:01:26.320 Try to keep up. Large parts of Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and southwestern France 00:01:26.320 --> 00:01:32.880 experienced a sudden power outage this morning. Power has since been restored to about half of Spain, 00:01:32.880 --> 00:01:35.440 with the rest hopefully coming back tomorrow. 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:40.080 Traffic lights, elevators, and electronic doors stopped working, 00:01:40.080 --> 00:01:46.320 shops and restaurants were plunged into darkness, and the Madrid Open Tennis Tournament was suspended. 00:01:46.320 --> 00:01:49.840 God! While some were initially concerned about a cyber attack, 00:01:49.840 --> 00:01:54.400 Spain and Portugal's primary power supplier and minor GI Joe villain, 00:01:54.400 --> 00:02:03.200 RedElectrica, said no. This was the result of grid oscillation caused by extreme temperature variations in Spain. 00:02:03.200 --> 00:02:09.040 You know, you're hot, then you're cold. Somebody call Katy Perry, there is a social media opportunity here. 00:02:09.040 --> 00:02:12.960 Variations like that may be having a strong effect in that region due to 00:02:12.960 --> 00:02:17.280 heavier reliance on renewable energy sources like wind and solar, 00:02:17.360 --> 00:02:23.680 which successfully powered 100% of Spain's energy grid for the first time on April 16th. 00:02:23.680 --> 00:02:28.880 I mean, hey, it's great for the planet. It's just that for various technical reasons, 00:02:28.880 --> 00:02:33.680 renewable energy is often less resilient to sudden environmental changes. 00:02:33.680 --> 00:02:41.760 That's a challenge we should maybe solve soon, because oil is gross and slimy, and coal is dirty, and it gets everywhere. 00:02:41.760 --> 00:02:46.000 I'm over it. And there's a couple buzzy science experiments going around right now. 00:02:46.080 --> 00:02:49.600 The first one involves researchers from the University of Zurich, 00:02:49.600 --> 00:02:55.680 who conducted an unauthorized experiment secretly posting 1,700 comments, 00:02:55.680 --> 00:03:00.400 which were partially AI generated in the Change My View subreddit, 00:03:00.400 --> 00:03:05.600 to see how effective AI-assisted content could be at manipulating public opinion. 00:03:05.600 --> 00:03:12.720 The answer? Pretty successful. The posts were generally rated as more persuasive than the human baseline. 00:03:13.200 --> 00:03:16.560 No one in the subreddit was aware of the experiment, though, 00:03:16.560 --> 00:03:20.960 until after the researchers, who have successfully remained anonymous thus far, 00:03:20.960 --> 00:03:24.880 told the sub's mod team about it, prompting some members of the sub, 00:03:24.880 --> 00:03:31.680 to point out that if it's so easy to pass the researchers' AI posts off as human, 00:03:31.680 --> 00:03:38.560 what the researchers may have just studied is how effective AI content is at persuading other AI bots. 00:03:39.120 --> 00:03:44.000 Speaking of which, the other buzzy study is one in which researchers at Carnegie Mellon 00:03:44.000 --> 00:03:48.960 University created a simulated company and staffed it with AI agents, 00:03:48.960 --> 00:03:53.520 tasked with doing normal human worker stuff, browsing the web, writing code, 00:03:53.520 --> 00:03:56.800 running programs, and communicating with coworkers. 00:03:56.800 --> 00:04:00.560 Unlike in the first study, these AIs kind of sucked, 00:04:00.560 --> 00:04:04.480 with the researchers highlighting a lack of common sense and social skills, 00:04:04.480 --> 00:04:09.280 incompetence in web browsing, and even lying to themselves without realizing it, 00:04:09.280 --> 00:04:16.640 which may be more human than many of us realize. The study calls into question Microsoft's recently published work trend report, 00:04:16.640 --> 00:04:22.000 which predicts every human will soon manage a team of AI agents, 00:04:22.000 --> 00:04:26.240 which, if chatGPTs recently rolled back update as any indication, 00:04:26.240 --> 00:04:29.760 would just glaze you for every prompt you provide. 00:04:29.760 --> 00:04:33.200 You do the best prompts. Thank you, boss. 00:04:33.200 --> 00:04:36.320 Slay. I'm not even going to check who's winning the election right now, 00:04:36.320 --> 00:04:40.080 because the real winner is you, because you get to hear these quick bits. 00:04:40.080 --> 00:04:44.880 Google announced last week that first and second generation nest learning thermostats, 00:04:44.880 --> 00:04:51.440 which launched in 2011 and 2012, will no longer receive updates after October 25th of this year, 00:04:51.440 --> 00:04:56.720 meaning they'll still work as thermostats, but they'll lose their smart features like remote 00:04:56.720 --> 00:05:03.040 control. But Android Authority argues that Google did give customers a sizable credit towards a new nest, 00:05:03.040 --> 00:05:09.840 and for better or for worse, this is kind of an inevitable consequence of techifying our homes. 00:05:09.840 --> 00:05:15.200 Google doesn't have the resources to keep 20 different models of the thermostat properly updated. 00:05:15.200 --> 00:05:20.480 They need those resources to keep finding new and innovative ways to ruin search. 00:05:20.480 --> 00:05:25.440 The Wall Street Journal published a concerning piece on how Meta discouraged the development 00:05:25.440 --> 00:05:30.800 of guardrails for the company's AI chatbots, even when they knew it would lead them to engaging 00:05:30.800 --> 00:05:35.760 in explicit romantic roleplay with users it knew to be miners. 00:05:35.760 --> 00:05:40.560 Zuck reportedly wanted less guardrails after competitors in a hacking competition weren't 00:05:40.560 --> 00:05:47.280 able to get Meta's AI to misbehave as much as other chatbots, which meant they were bored. 00:05:47.280 --> 00:05:54.000 Thankfully, after the journal demonstrated Meta AI's ability to sex with users posing as children, 00:05:54.000 --> 00:06:00.880 Meta added some guardrails back. In other Meta news at their antitrust trial, we learned that Reddit leadership 00:06:00.880 --> 00:06:04.000 doesn't consider its site a social networking platform. 00:06:04.560 --> 00:06:08.960 And the judge doesn't understand why anyone would reply to a celebrity on Twitter. 00:06:08.960 --> 00:06:12.080 Both things that I'm also going to blame Meta for, just because. 00:06:12.080 --> 00:06:18.800 Leakers on the ChipHell forums claim that an RTX 5080 Super and 5070 Super are in the works 00:06:18.800 --> 00:06:26.560 featuring big upgrades to VRAM. According to these sources, the 5070 Super would get an additional 6 gigabytes for a total of 18 00:06:26.560 --> 00:06:33.520 gigs of memory while the 5080 Super would jump from 16 to 24 gigs, which would make these cards 00:06:33.520 --> 00:06:36.960 much better at running games at higher resolutions and more importantly, 00:06:36.960 --> 00:06:41.120 prevent more accumulation of complaints about how gaming isn't even worth it. 00:06:41.120 --> 00:06:46.320 With 12 gigabytes of VRAM, what is this? VRAM for ants, etc. 00:06:46.320 --> 00:06:53.280 An astronaut Don Petit, Petit, returned to Earth from the International Space Station on April 20th, 00:06:53.280 --> 00:06:56.320 his 70th birthday. Ah, nice. 00:06:56.320 --> 00:07:00.480 Which he wasn't super happy about, actually, because all of his aches and pains apparently 00:07:00.480 --> 00:07:07.280 virtually disappear when he's up there. Now, when reporters implied that he didn't look too good when he exited the capsule, 00:07:07.280 --> 00:07:13.360 he replied that, well, that's because he didn't feel too good, because all of the aches came back. 00:07:13.360 --> 00:07:17.200 And that just leads me to wonder whether old people would have a way better time 00:07:17.200 --> 00:07:20.400 if we put, you know, old folks' homes in space. 00:07:20.400 --> 00:07:26.880 There's long-term health effects, but, you know, it'd be fun. 00:07:26.880 --> 00:07:30.880 Even more fun, the idea of you coming back here on Wednesday for more tech news. 00:07:31.840 --> 00:07:35.760 Wow, that would really be something. You know, I think we'd have a good time. 00:07:36.400 --> 00:07:39.040 Hey, you know what? Think about it. No pressure. 00:07:39.680 --> 00:07:40.240 Please, though.