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