WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.920 People keep saying they want a new LTT Christmas album, but what about a tech-linked album? 00:00:05.920 --> 00:00:11.040 It's just a 35 minute long, tech news-themed cover of We Didn't Start the Fire by Billy Joel. 00:00:11.040 --> 00:00:19.120 Care to invest? YouTube is real jazzed about a new ad format they've been piloting for about a year on TVs. 00:00:19.120 --> 00:00:24.880 It's called PAWS ads, and involves an ad popping up as soon as viewers pause the video they're 00:00:25.520 --> 00:00:31.200 because tech executives cannot bear the thought of anyone's eyeballs going literally one second 00:00:31.200 --> 00:00:35.200 without fresh content. They'll dry out, they need to be lubricated. 00:00:35.200 --> 00:00:40.400 Well great news! In their Q1 earnings call, Google said the PAWS ads pilot 00:00:40.400 --> 00:00:44.960 drove strong brand lift results, and while they didn't say whether they planned to roll this 00:00:44.960 --> 00:00:49.200 out to more users, it would be kind of weird for them to decide they've made enough money from 00:00:49.200 --> 00:00:54.240 this kind of ad, and now it's time to stop. It also seems to align with similar PAWS screen ads, 00:00:54.240 --> 00:01:00.000 recently rolled out by Roku and the UK streaming service Channel 4, the latter of which apparently 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:05.680 puts the ad right in front of the paused video so you can't even get a closer look at a big bloke 00:01:05.680 --> 00:01:11.680 on Gogglebox. He looks funny. At least YouTube's version shrinks the video a bit and throws the 00:01:11.680 --> 00:01:17.200 ad up on the side. Admittedly, that doesn't sound too bad. If the top comments on a Reddit post 00:01:17.200 --> 00:01:21.440 about the format or anything to go by, it looks like part of the reason YouTube has kept the 00:01:21.440 --> 00:01:27.840 trial going for so long is because, as far as ad placements go, this is one of the less invasive 00:01:27.840 --> 00:01:33.360 options. The ad still robs you of the crumb of attention you were about to use to have an original 00:01:33.360 --> 00:01:38.560 thought, but let's be honest, it wasn't that good. Qualcomm's big claims about its ARM-based 00:01:38.560 --> 00:01:44.960 laptop chips continue. The company now says their recently announced Snapdragon X Plus may be a 00:01:45.040 --> 00:01:52.240 tier lower than its upcoming X Elite lineup, but it can still outperform Apple's M3 by about 10%, 00:01:52.960 --> 00:01:58.160 at least in multi-threaded performance. That's a bit hard to believe, given that a new leaked 00:01:58.160 --> 00:02:03.760 benchmark of what is presumably Microsoft's upcoming Surface Laptop 6, powered by a Snapdragon 00:02:03.760 --> 00:02:10.240 X Elite, couldn't beat a MacBook equipped with an M3 Pro, but it does get mighty close. 00:02:10.320 --> 00:02:16.000 That is, if all of these early benchmarks are to be believed, which they are not, according to a 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:21.360 piece published yesterday by Semi-Accurate, a tech news site seemingly admitting that they may be 00:02:21.360 --> 00:02:27.520 talking out of their ass. We give you the truth, kind of multiple sources told Semi-Accurate that 00:02:27.520 --> 00:02:33.920 Qualcomm is cheating on their X Elite benchmarks and public demos. The company denied those claims 00:02:33.920 --> 00:02:38.880 in a statement published yesterday. As usual, the proper advice here is to wait until actual 00:02:38.960 --> 00:02:43.200 reviewers get their hands on the product, but it's just hard to ignore the possibility that 00:02:43.200 --> 00:02:52.240 Windows on ARM could be something other than hot garbage. Although, given a recent analysis 00:02:52.240 --> 00:02:59.120 predicting that the coming wave of AI PCs will be accompanied by a 10-15% price hike, 00:02:59.120 --> 00:03:04.640 Qualcomm intensely pushing Snapdragon X hype could very well just be the world's most hilarious 00:03:04.800 --> 00:03:14.240 prank. TikTok parent company ByteDance has until January 19th to sell the app or get deported, 00:03:14.240 --> 00:03:17.760 thanks to a recently passed law, but it ain't giving up that easy. 00:03:20.160 --> 00:03:25.280 It's a green card marriage. The Chinese tech giant says it's preparing to sue the U.S. government 00:03:25.280 --> 00:03:30.400 to block the legislation, and sources told Reuters that if the company's legal options fail, 00:03:31.120 --> 00:03:33.200 it will burn TikTok to the ground. 00:03:41.760 --> 00:03:48.160 But other sources told the information that despite the public bravado, ByteDance is considering an 00:03:48.160 --> 00:03:54.560 option to sell TikTok without its proprietary recommendation algorithm, the source of all its 00:03:54.560 --> 00:04:00.080 power. However, ByteDance explicitly denied this report in a post on the social media site owned 00:04:00.080 --> 00:04:06.560 by the company, Totsau. While reporting about this law has focused on TikTok, any number of other 00:04:06.560 --> 00:04:12.480 social apps with over 1 million American users and owned by a foreign adversary defined as North 00:04:12.480 --> 00:04:19.920 Korea, China, Russia, and Iran, like, for example, WeChat, are also affected. The clock is now ticking, 00:04:19.920 --> 00:04:24.960 and American TikTok users seem to be having a tough time imagining what they would do if the app was 00:04:24.960 --> 00:04:30.960 banned. Well, India banned TikTok in 2020, and everyone just moved to YouTube shorts and reels. 00:04:31.760 --> 00:04:35.600 As of anything, I feel like TikTok deserves to be banned for giving us shorts and reels. 00:04:35.600 --> 00:04:38.240 We didn't want that either. What is a quick bit? 00:04:39.760 --> 00:04:45.280 No. No, really, I'm asking because I don't know anymore. Is that a little segue before the ad 00:04:45.280 --> 00:04:51.120 break, or is it all the little stories after? Nobody knows. The FCC has voted in a split 00:04:51.120 --> 00:04:57.120 three-two decision to restore Obama-era net neutrality rules that prevent internet providers 00:04:57.120 --> 00:05:01.840 from favoring certain websites over others. And to be fair, you'd probably be pretty annoyed to 00:05:01.840 --> 00:05:08.480 find out that the reason why Naruto Shippuden on Hulu won't stop buffering is because Comcast is deep 00:05:08.480 --> 00:05:14.720 in the pocket of big, crunchy roll. That being said, it's not clear that this kind of foul play 00:05:14.720 --> 00:05:19.360 is actually happening. And further, judicial review might find that this newest change to the 00:05:19.360 --> 00:05:24.880 net neutrality rules is a violation of the major questions doctrine, which basically means that 00:05:24.880 --> 00:05:30.160 elected officials should be making big policy decisions, not random appointed bureaucrats. 00:05:30.160 --> 00:05:33.920 After all, we don't vote for the FCC chair. That's what the Illuminati's for. 00:05:34.960 --> 00:05:42.080 Apple has open sourced a family of AI models called OpenELM that are designed to run on device 00:05:42.080 --> 00:05:47.280 rather than through cloud servers. And because of this, the largest OpenELM model has three 00:05:47.280 --> 00:05:53.440 billion parameters, about 500 times fewer parameters than OpenAI's GPT-4. Naturally, 00:05:54.320 --> 00:06:01.600 they all kind of suck. On the MMLU benchmark, Apple's smallest OpenELM model scored 25.72 00:06:02.240 --> 00:06:09.440 out of 100. For reference, GPT-4 scored 86.4. Speaking of open sourcing disappointments, 00:06:09.440 --> 00:06:16.400 though, Microsoft has released the source for the infamously buggy and unpopular MS-DOS 4.00 00:06:16.960 --> 00:06:21.040 After finding out the news, Redditors joined together in asking Microsoft 00:06:21.040 --> 00:06:24.160 to please open-source something else. It's okay to open-source things 00:06:25.040 --> 00:06:29.200 if they suck. It's literally giving your younger brother the crappy thing you're done with. 00:06:29.200 --> 00:06:34.560 Nintendo's highly anticipated Switch 2 console will apparently have joy cons. 00:06:36.320 --> 00:06:42.880 And they'll attach to the console magnetically, according to Spanish site Vandal, who also 00:06:42.880 --> 00:06:47.360 correctly reported on the Switch OLEDs features before that console was released, 00:06:47.360 --> 00:06:51.760 so I guess we can trust them a little bit. Vandal's reporting is based on information 00:06:51.760 --> 00:06:57.280 from Switch 2 accessory makers. And while Vandal doesn't know if current joy cons will also be 00:06:57.280 --> 00:07:02.240 supported by the upcoming console, they claim your Switch Pro controllers will be compatible, 00:07:02.240 --> 00:07:06.480 at least until the joysticks start drifting more than the entire city of Tokyo. 00:07:06.720 --> 00:07:17.680 A high school principal in Baltimore was temporarily suspended after a recording 00:07:17.680 --> 00:07:27.040 of a racist rant in his voice was uploaded to social media. Except that it turns out it wasn't 00:07:27.040 --> 00:07:33.120 a recording of him at all. It was an AI deepfake created by the school's athletics director, 00:07:33.200 --> 00:07:37.840 who the principal had investigated for possible corruption. This is scandalous. 00:07:40.960 --> 00:07:46.240 The athletics director has since been arrested, but it seems he was only caught because he used 00:07:46.240 --> 00:07:52.560 school computers as well as his school-issued email address to sign up for the voice duplication 00:07:52.560 --> 00:07:58.640 service and to distribute the fake recording. This would seem to indicate that, disturbingly, 00:07:59.120 --> 00:08:04.400 dumb people can make deepfakes now. And according to a recently published research paper, 00:08:04.400 --> 00:08:12.000 biotech startup ProFluent has created an AI model trained on CRISPR gene editors pulled from nature, 00:08:12.000 --> 00:08:18.720 which can create artificial gene editors previously unknown to God or man. ProFluent has apparently 00:08:18.720 --> 00:08:24.880 already used this technology to edit human DNA, which honestly feels a little fast. 00:08:25.600 --> 00:08:29.840 It seems now we're not just making AIs that can make new and improved AIs, 00:08:29.840 --> 00:08:35.760 we're making AIs that can make new and improved human beings. Uh, but have we considered what 00:08:35.760 --> 00:08:40.800 will happen if the AI starts hallucinating while making our new generation of Gattaca children? 00:08:40.800 --> 00:08:45.360 Wow, good reference. I mean, you could just be giving birth and boom, elephant baby. 00:08:45.840 --> 00:08:54.960 But the best thing about our future elephant offspring is that they won't forget 00:08:54.960 --> 00:09:00.400 to come back on Monday for more tech news. I think, isn't that a myth? They must forget.