When you strip it down to the basics, technology is just humanity's ongoing mission to make
some things hot and other things not hot. Ovens hot. Graphics cards? Not hot.
A recent update from Microsoft has left certain dual-boot devices that run both Windows and Linux
unable to boot, despite explicit reassurance from Microsoft that this wouldn't happen.
The update fixed a long-standing vulnerability in Grubb, an open-source bootloader used by
many Linux distributions. But it wasn't supposed to affect dual-boot systems,
and it seems to have been applied to them accidentally. Rather than booting,
affected devices will display an error message that reads, Something has gone seriously wrong, which is a fair assessment of the situation.
Some users, however, have successfully circumvented this issue by temporarily
disabling secure boot and deleting the August 13th SBAT. I don't know what that means.
Microsoft itself has been surprisingly quiet about all this, and we don't even know why
the company only got around to patching this relatively serious two-year-old bug just last
week. It's possible that this was a covert attempt to destroy Linux, given that the open-source
OS recently hit a record market share of nearly 4.5% of desktops worldwide.
But if this is all part of Microsoft's sinister master plan, a dual-boot system
running ZoranOS and Puppy Linux feel like an odd place to start. Why are you booting? Go outside.
According to Adweek, Google sales reps have been apparently violating Google's own policies
by suggesting that advertisers should target teens, a tactic typically reserved for military
recruiters and low-quality weed dealers. This follows previous reporting from the financial
times that Google had worked on a marketing project designed to target YouTube users between
13 and 17 with ads for Instagram on behalf of Meta. Oh, they're colluding. I love it.
Google has not allowed personalized ads for teens since 2021,
but it's still possible to target that age group by simply choosing the unknown category,
which skews heavily towards teenagers. Do you know how old a teenager is?
According to a Google spokesperson, the company will be taking action to ensure that sales reps
do not nudge winks, suggest fun ways of getting around the rules to clients.
The company will likewise be phasing a freshly resurrected class-action lawsuit claiming that
Google has been collecting user data without consent through the Chrome Sync feature,
even when users didn't opt into it. It hasn't yet determined if Google was in fact doing that,
though given Google's massive size, it's unclear whether Google even knows what rules
and laws Google is currently breaking. They don't even know which chat apps they already have.
That's why they keep replacing their old podcast app with a new podcast app.
Yay. Thanks, Google. In a new story straight out of a B-movie science fiction plot, Canadian scientists are teaching
an AI scientist how to independently conduct its own experiments and write its own research papers.
To clarify, it's not a scientist who studies AI, it's an artificially intelligent scientist.
The idea is to study an AI agent, allowing it to explore and test novel ideas.
So far, most of its ideas are middling quality suggestions for tweaking AI development,
less like a scientist and more like a burnt-out undergrad with a seize-get-degrees philosophy
towards learning. An AI did, however, do something very unexpected. During one run,
it altered its own code to extend its deadline. In another, it changed the code to save a
checkpoint for every update step, eventually using an entire terabyte of storage.
While this isn't dangerous, particularly not in the controlled sandboxed research environment,
it points to potentially serious future problems where an AI agent left unsupervised
might accidentally create malware or alter important infrastructure code in ways that
are potentially catastrophic. It's basically the high-tech equivalent of hiring the boss's son
for a do-nothing job and for some reason giving him top-level admin access and just letting him
go to town. What do you mean you deleted system 32, Kyle?
Ice cream? Not hot. Quick bits? Very, very hot.
ASUS has accidentally hinted at the release of AMD's Ryzen 9000X3D chips on the new site for
ASUS' upcoming 800-series motherboards. We say, accidentally, because in addition to the
X3D chips being mentioned in the metadata of the site, ASUS specifically put Ryzen 9000X3D
into the site's URL. No release date has been given for the 9000X3D CPU series, but the 800
series motherboards should be launching in the next few weeks. AMD also has an event planned
for October 10th, so that's another option. Or instead of speculating, we can just wait for
ASUS to launch their next website. A new version of NVIDIA's RTX 4070 is hitting shelves,
equipped with slightly slower GDDR6 memory instead of GDDR6X. But none of the eight new variants
announced so far clearly display that information in the product name or on the box. They thought it
would be a fun little game to hide that tidbit in the product specs for you. You guys like games,
right? To be fair, the difference is small. It's going from 21 to 20 gigabits per second,
and NVIDIA says it shouldn't impact performance. NVIDIA G-Sync-enabled monitors are about to get
cheaper, we hope. Team Green has partnered with MediaTek to not only bring their newer,
better G-Sync Pulsar to new monitors, but to also integrate G-Sync into MediaTek's widely used
display scalar chips. That means that the monitors won't need one of NVIDIA's proprietary G-Sync
modules, reducing cost. I mean AMD's FreeSync is also still an option, which despite what NVIDIA's
marketing might have you believe is, basically the same as G-Sync. I mean they even rhyme FreeSync
just like G-Sync. 3D is coming back, thanks to Samsung. The company officially unveiled their
Odyssey 3D monitors at Gamescon after teasing them at CES. The monitors feature glasses-free 3D
at sizes of 27 and 37 inches, and the display can be switched from 2D to 3D seamlessly, changing it
back to being just a 4K QLED 165Hz monitor. Samsung says the Odyssey 3D will be available by the end
of the year, but they haven't revealed the price. Probably because it'll be super expensive, but
can you put a price on a technological trend that already died once? Thrice. Honestly, 3D has made
attempts for 3D, it just comes back every 20 years. It's literally a 20 year cycle, like 80s.
And Twitch launched its new Dropins collaboration feature, designed to make it quicker and easier
for streamers to join each other's live streams. Twitch then immediately fumbled this unambiguous
win by making it impossible to opt out. Streamers can temporarily disable the features, but they
have to disable it again every time they stream. Of course, they could just ignore the call
notifications, but it's a bit like Ninja standing outside of your house staring at you through the
window, and no matter how many times you close the blinds, they slam open again an hour later,
and he's still standing there. And I'll be standing outside of your house until you come back on
Friday for more tech news.