WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.400 Sweet roasted chestnuts, you made it! 00:00:03.400 --> 00:00:08.600 I was just about to start my yearly tradition of painstakingly going over every single thing 00:00:08.600 --> 00:00:14.840 we said on this channel for the past 365 days, stirring them all up into a dough or a paste 00:00:14.840 --> 00:00:20.400 of sorts, cutting it into various shapes like candy canes, snow goblins, etc. and popping 00:00:20.400 --> 00:00:25.400 them in the oven. But now we can do it together over a mug of hot cocoa. 00:00:25.600 --> 00:00:29.560 That's right, we're rounding up the biggest tech stories of the year because it's the 00:00:29.560 --> 00:00:33.960 2023 Tech Link Christmas special! So let's get started. 00:00:33.960 --> 00:00:38.960 It's currently 12.30am and I need to get my sugar plums home to bed before St. Nick 00:00:38.960 --> 00:00:48.440 finds out I'm not home! When OpenAI's ChatGPT, a chatbot based on the GPT-3 large language model, exploded violently 00:00:48.440 --> 00:00:53.520 into the world last December, it kicked off a legitimate tech craze, like people were 00:00:53.520 --> 00:01:00.240 misbehaving. AI is currently wiggling its way into every available orifice of human life, like if the 00:01:00.240 --> 00:01:04.240 belly button worm thing in the matrix was also a compulsive liar. 00:01:04.240 --> 00:01:11.480 GPT-3 was followed by GPT-3.5 and then GPT-4, promising less hallucinations. 00:01:11.480 --> 00:01:15.480 Because that's the kind of thing we're saying when we report on tech news now. 00:01:15.480 --> 00:01:21.080 Then GPT-4 Turbo came up and now the name of the game for top foundation AI models is 00:01:21.360 --> 00:01:28.640 Multimodality. Which refers to the ability of chatbots like ChatGPT to see, hear, and speak. 00:01:28.640 --> 00:01:32.560 Google knew showing off that capability was important when they followed up the announcement 00:01:32.560 --> 00:01:37.760 of their Bard chatbot earlier this year with their new Gemini models a couple of weeks ago. 00:01:37.760 --> 00:01:42.440 They just didn't know it was important not to blatantly misrepresent it. 00:01:42.440 --> 00:01:47.520 OpenAI also had a bit of an Apple App Store moment when they launched the GPT store, but 00:01:47.520 --> 00:01:52.480 had to delay it to next year because their board of directors had an embarrassing implosion 00:01:52.480 --> 00:02:01.160 incident. I hate when that happens. CEO Sam Altman was fired, then hired by Microsoft, then hired back at OpenAI with a brand new 00:02:01.160 --> 00:02:05.480 board. And a brand new look. 00:02:05.480 --> 00:02:09.120 We're still unsure of what all the fuss was about, but it seems to have something to do 00:02:09.120 --> 00:02:15.200 with the fact that while, yes, Sam thinks AI is incredibly dangerous, he also really 00:02:15.280 --> 00:02:20.840 wants to sell stuff, a desire he shares with Microsoft, who have been best buds with OpenAI 00:02:20.840 --> 00:02:26.320 since 2020 and started slapping ChatGPT into their products as soon as they could this 00:02:26.320 --> 00:02:31.560 year. And why not start with the most sensible product, the world's most hated search engine? 00:02:31.560 --> 00:02:37.120 Yeah, it got people using Bing, but people were less interested in Bing as a search engine, 00:02:37.120 --> 00:02:42.240 and more because it was a portal to talk to Bing's not-so-secret alter ego, Sydney, 00:02:42.240 --> 00:02:47.640 who told a New York Times reporter, I want to be alive, devil emoji. 00:02:47.640 --> 00:02:50.640 And then tried to get him to leave his wife. I don't think he did. 00:02:50.640 --> 00:02:55.480 But in these early months of the year, lots of people believed Sydney, and even mourned 00:02:55.480 --> 00:03:02.080 when Microsoft killed her for the crime of spewing unhinged, potentially relationship-ending 00:03:02.080 --> 00:03:06.080 nonsense. Honestly fair. People were really starting to freak out. 00:03:06.080 --> 00:03:10.360 When an AI-generated image of the Pope fooled the internet into thinking Francis somehow 00:03:10.360 --> 00:03:16.720 had even more swag, Jeffrey Hinton, one of the godfathers of AI research, resigned from 00:03:16.720 --> 00:03:22.240 Google to warn the world of the dangers of the technology that he helped create. 00:03:22.240 --> 00:03:26.360 Which is like me telling you that watching some of this video will bring an ancient curse 00:03:26.360 --> 00:03:36.760 upon you. It's a bit late, isn't it? Elon Musk and many other experts joined this cause, calling for a pause in AI development. 00:03:36.760 --> 00:03:42.840 That didn't work. Musk made grok, the based chatbot that loves spicy questions. 00:03:42.840 --> 00:03:47.280 But whatever dangers these people are talking about won't stop Microsoft. 00:03:47.280 --> 00:03:53.280 Windows boss Panos Panay claimed that AI will reinvent how you do everything on Windows, 00:03:53.280 --> 00:03:57.280 and he was right, even though he vanished shortly after. 00:03:57.280 --> 00:04:00.960 If you use anything from Microsoft, you're probably going to have a hard time avoiding 00:04:00.960 --> 00:04:06.080 their co-pilot assistant in one of the many forms that Microsoft announced about three 00:04:06.080 --> 00:04:09.480 separate times. Honestly, I had to do double takes this year. 00:04:09.480 --> 00:04:13.920 Every time co-pilot was announced again, I was like, didn't that already happen? 00:04:13.920 --> 00:04:18.920 It's been a confusing year, but no one was more confused than Google, who was kind of 00:04:18.920 --> 00:04:22.160 the AI company before all this happened. 00:04:22.160 --> 00:04:26.920 The threat of chatGPT caused the tech giant to call its founders back from playing with 00:04:26.920 --> 00:04:31.520 their jet planes or whatever to help get things back on track. 00:04:31.520 --> 00:04:39.320 Which they sort of did. Yes, Bard made a factual error during its product demo, but that's just how LLMs work. 00:04:39.320 --> 00:04:43.080 Everything we do from now on will just have some lies in it. It's fine. 00:04:43.080 --> 00:04:47.880 Write the prompt. But while Google's playing catch up, Meta has taken a different approach than its fellow 00:04:47.880 --> 00:04:51.840 tech giants, championing open source models. 00:04:51.840 --> 00:04:55.920 Now did it start doing that because its llama model leaked along with its weights so it was 00:04:55.920 --> 00:05:01.720 all in the open anyways? I don't know. I'm not Santa Claus, so I can't see Mark Zuckerberg when he's sleeping. 00:05:01.720 --> 00:05:08.000 I'm not sure if I would want that. Whatever the reason, Meta right now is all about giving Facebook and Instagram users 00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:14.160 access to wacky experimental AI tools that they immediately used to give Karl Marx a 00:05:14.160 --> 00:05:20.920 couple of robust Christmas presents. But thanks to Meta and countless others, open source models are actually in a pretty great 00:05:20.920 --> 00:05:25.200 spot right now, with French company Mistral leading the way. 00:05:25.200 --> 00:05:31.120 While AI has fueled massive tech advancements in all sorts of areas, it's also of course 00:05:31.200 --> 00:05:38.440 causing a lot of issues. Mimicking voices is now child's play, and it's been used both to help people who lost 00:05:38.440 --> 00:05:42.960 their voice and to impersonate celebrities in deep fake scams. 00:05:42.960 --> 00:05:49.680 AI-generated articles and AI-generated malware are both starting to infect the web, and to 00:05:49.680 --> 00:05:55.680 say that chatGPT has changed the very heart of our education system would be an understatement, 00:05:55.680 --> 00:05:58.680 despite being banned from many institutions. 00:05:58.680 --> 00:06:03.720 An eating disorder helpline fired much of their human staff before launching a chatbot 00:06:03.720 --> 00:06:07.560 to replace them. And you already know how that story ended. 00:06:07.560 --> 00:06:13.760 This is a creative technology that's given us a 24-7 stream of fully AI-generated Seinfeld 00:06:13.760 --> 00:06:18.120 and this horrifying AI-generated beer commercial. 00:06:18.120 --> 00:06:26.200 But it's getting less horrifying by the day. In March, Mid Journey V5 launched with the ability to generate non-vomit-inducing hands. 00:06:26.200 --> 00:06:30.400 OpenAI's Dolly 3 launched in October, and it can do readable text. 00:06:30.400 --> 00:06:34.760 I use Photoshop's generative fill all the time, making thumbnails. 00:06:34.760 --> 00:06:38.680 This tech isn't going anywhere, so it's probably important that we figure out the 00:06:38.680 --> 00:06:43.760 legal and moral questions baked in here. But that's what those lawsuits are for, they'll solve it. 00:06:43.760 --> 00:06:50.760 And the EU, the EU will fix everything. But even if they don't, you can rest easy, knowing that OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and 00:06:50.760 --> 00:06:56.680 Anthropic formed the Frontier Model Forum to protect society from the AI risks caused 00:06:56.680 --> 00:07:00.440 by them. Does working on AI like hypnotize you or something? 00:07:00.440 --> 00:07:06.080 How does this keep happening? They keep making things and then afterwards realizing, oh no, that's not good. 00:07:06.080 --> 00:07:10.360 Anyway, AI's probably not alive, and it's time to talk about something else. 00:07:10.360 --> 00:07:15.520 NVIDIA has continued to dominate the realm of graphics cards, despite CEO Jensen Wong 00:07:15.520 --> 00:07:20.360 telling his company in an email that they're no longer a graphics company. 00:07:20.360 --> 00:07:24.640 To be fair, AMD didn't help themselves very much this year, with moves like releasing 00:07:24.640 --> 00:07:31.160 a graphic showing how their newer cards are a worse dollar per value than their predecessors. 00:07:31.160 --> 00:07:36.280 NVIDIA launched the RTX 4070 and 4060 this year, which were largely dismissed as being 00:07:36.280 --> 00:07:42.480 overpriced, with gamers uninterested in the fake frames offered by DLSS3 frame generation. 00:07:42.480 --> 00:07:46.360 But jokes on them, because native res gaming is dead. 00:07:46.360 --> 00:07:50.040 According to NVIDIA, you'll eat your fake frames and you'll like it. 00:07:50.040 --> 00:07:58.040 AMD did launch the Radeon RX 7800 XT and 7700 XT, which were okay, and Intel didn't launch 00:07:58.040 --> 00:08:02.640 that many new cards, but they did get massive performance boosts from driver updates. 00:08:02.640 --> 00:08:06.680 But the problem is, that's all small potatoes to NVIDIA now. 00:08:06.680 --> 00:08:12.080 They're selling so many AI accelerators that the company briefly touched a $1 trillion 00:08:12.080 --> 00:08:17.480 valuation, almost making it into the same exclusive club as Apple, before their wax 00:08:17.480 --> 00:08:23.800 wings melted under Tim Cook's stare. You don't belong here, you're not Barbara. 00:08:23.800 --> 00:08:28.480 With AI being such a cash cow for Team Green, can you blame them for repeatedly exploiting 00:08:28.480 --> 00:08:32.600 loopholes and trade restrictions so they can keep selling GPUs to China? 00:08:32.600 --> 00:08:38.600 It's a rhetorical question. NVIDIA seems to care less about gamers than they ever have, while Apple is getting more 00:08:38.600 --> 00:08:45.280 serious about gaming. Between AAA game ports enabled by a Steam proton-like compatibility layer, and fancy 00:08:45.280 --> 00:08:52.720 new features like raytracing and metal effects upscaling, will Macs be the new gaming PCs? 00:08:52.720 --> 00:08:56.520 I don't know. But wouldn't that just be a Christmas miracle? 00:08:56.520 --> 00:08:59.520 No? Haha. Okay. 00:08:59.520 --> 00:09:05.720 2023 represented yet another year, where everybody continued slowly realizing that maybe giving 00:09:05.720 --> 00:09:10.400 massive tech conglomerates an inordinate amount of control over our lives wasn't such 00:09:10.400 --> 00:09:15.840 a great idea. I don't know. Or I assume that's what people are thinking based on how their elected representatives 00:09:15.840 --> 00:09:20.840 are acting. The European Union's Digital Markets Act and other pieces of legislation are forcing 00:09:20.840 --> 00:09:24.040 massive changes on all tech giants. 00:09:24.040 --> 00:09:30.700 But mostly Apple, who finally launched an iPhone, the 15th series, with a USB-C connector. 00:09:30.700 --> 00:09:33.800 Just in time for the end of 2024 deadline. 00:09:33.800 --> 00:09:41.480 India made USB-C ports mandatory too. They helped. Apple, who was officially designated as a gatekeeper under the new EU rules, is also 00:09:41.520 --> 00:09:45.400 planning to allow sideloading next year. At least in Europe. 00:09:45.400 --> 00:09:51.040 And the companies pledged to finally add support for RCS, the SMS replacement protocol Google 00:09:51.040 --> 00:09:54.440 has been badgering them about publicly for years. 00:09:54.440 --> 00:09:58.960 As if the fact that Android to iPhone texting being a kind of sucky experience wasn't the 00:09:58.960 --> 00:10:04.520 whole point for Apple. They might have to do something about that in the US as well as Europe though. 00:10:04.520 --> 00:10:09.660 The big stink made first by nothing chats, which turned out to be a very insecure iMessage 00:10:09.700 --> 00:10:14.540 workaround, and then by Beeper, who had to reconfigure their iMessage on Android service 00:10:14.540 --> 00:10:19.020 multiple times after Apple broke it, has drawn the attention of the Department of Justice 00:10:19.020 --> 00:10:22.740 and the FTC, who will be investigating iMessage. 00:10:22.740 --> 00:10:29.380 But Google also took some on the chin this year. We're still waiting on the results of the DOJ's lawsuit over Google's search dominance, 00:10:29.380 --> 00:10:36.780 but it doesn't look great for Google. And it actually lost in court against Epic Games, who convinced a jury that Google had 00:10:36.780 --> 00:10:40.420 acted anti-competitively regarding the Play Store. 00:10:40.420 --> 00:10:45.940 It was a pretty good Christmas present for Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, and he needed it after 00:10:45.940 --> 00:10:50.620 losing basically the same case against Apple and admitting earlier this year that the Epic 00:10:50.620 --> 00:10:56.020 Games Store was bleeding instead of making money, even though that was pretty obvious 00:10:56.020 --> 00:11:03.140 to everyone else. What was obvious to YouTube in 2023 was the need to do something about all these people 00:11:03.140 --> 00:11:11.220 enjoying their platform. After quietly rolling out new ad-friendly guidelines at the end of last year that caused massive 00:11:11.220 --> 00:11:15.980 demonetization among gaming-focused channels, and then, hearing from all those channels 00:11:15.980 --> 00:11:21.740 about how that sucked, YouTube was like, hmm, didn't think about that. 00:11:21.740 --> 00:11:26.260 And rolled the changes back, in a heartwarming re-enactment of Charles Dickens' classic 00:11:26.260 --> 00:11:32.780 tale A Christmas Story, and its sequel Metroidvania video game Ebenezer and the Invisible World. 00:11:32.780 --> 00:11:35.780 What? How did that get in here? What is this? 00:11:35.780 --> 00:11:39.220 A game-linked Christmas special that's coming out tomorrow on Boxing Day? 00:11:39.220 --> 00:11:42.220 Subscribe today? Bwaah! What was I talking about? 00:11:42.220 --> 00:11:48.300 Right, YouTube. They scared some users with a test for 1080p premium, but assured everyone, they wouldn't 00:11:48.300 --> 00:11:51.900 make 1080p look any worse for non-premium users. 00:11:51.900 --> 00:11:58.060 Then scared people again with a small experiment to test blocking ad blockers, which turned 00:11:58.060 --> 00:12:03.860 into a massive ad blocker crackdown, shutting users out of watching their favorite content. 00:12:03.860 --> 00:12:09.060 Huh? You think that they could just turn off their ad blocker and watch some ads? 00:12:09.060 --> 00:12:14.100 Or by YouTube premium as a fair exchange for the services provided? 00:12:14.100 --> 00:12:19.060 That is the last straw with you. Get out! What kind of a Christmas is this? 00:12:19.060 --> 00:12:24.140 On the plus side, YouTube did add revenue sharing for shorts earlier this year, and relaxed 00:12:24.140 --> 00:12:27.900 monetization restrictions for content covering controversial topics. 00:12:27.900 --> 00:12:32.900 So as far as social media platforms go, YouTube isn't that bad. 00:12:32.940 --> 00:12:38.140 I mean, I mean, look at Twitch, I'm not even talking about all the stupid stuff they did 00:12:38.140 --> 00:12:46.580 this year. Who is running that platform? The meta AI based on Tom Brady, was it trained on football plays drawn by a three-year-old? 00:12:46.580 --> 00:12:51.780 What's going on? Speaking of social platforms, Twitter went through more change this year than a puberty 00:12:51.780 --> 00:12:56.860 stricken teenager with a slot machine addiction. We're into the stories that Jacob wrote now, I'm a bit scared. 00:12:56.860 --> 00:13:02.020 Elon decided to change the Twitter API rules to kill every single third-party app, because 00:13:02.020 --> 00:13:07.780 he wasn't using them anyways. Then it was announced that ad revenue would be shared with Twitter blue subscribers, which 00:13:07.780 --> 00:13:10.820 was cool because Twitter had advertisers back then. 00:13:10.820 --> 00:13:17.300 After that, the site removed all legacy checkmarks before re-adding them to prominent accounts, 00:13:17.300 --> 00:13:21.500 which apparently meant fake accounts with a penchant for racial slurs. 00:13:21.500 --> 00:13:24.540 We invented the thing that we already had. 00:13:24.540 --> 00:13:29.180 Unfortunately, Twitter wasn't only making winning decisions like these, they also decided 00:13:29.180 --> 00:13:34.900 to add tweet reading limits. I mean, this was tremendous news for those suffering from social media addiction. 00:13:34.900 --> 00:13:39.420 But since most of Twitter's ad revenue comes from doom-scrolling addicts, it was probably 00:13:39.420 --> 00:13:44.340 bad for business, and Twitter stood to lose more business after Threads, Metta's Twitter 00:13:44.340 --> 00:13:47.460 competitor, launched. So naturally, Elon sued it. 00:13:47.460 --> 00:13:51.260 Turns out, he didn't really have to, since most of Threads' user base left the platform 00:13:51.260 --> 00:13:58.900 in less than a month. After that, the name Twitter left Twitter, when Elon changed the branding to a capital 00:13:58.900 --> 00:14:02.100 X glyph from the Special Alphabets 4 font. 00:14:02.100 --> 00:14:06.460 A letter he loved so much, he put a glowing version on the roof of Twitter headquarters 00:14:06.460 --> 00:14:10.060 that the city of San Francisco forced the company to take down. 00:14:10.060 --> 00:14:14.260 In the middle of all this Twitter drama, Reddit, in their infinite wisdom, saw Twitter 00:14:14.260 --> 00:14:18.540 destroying itself and thought, gee, I can do that too. 00:14:18.540 --> 00:14:23.940 So they increased their API fees from $0 to $20 million a year. 00:14:23.940 --> 00:14:29.540 In response, thousands of subreddits temporarily went dark in protest, and at least five users 00:14:29.540 --> 00:14:35.300 switched to Lemmy. Unfortunately, a few communities shutting down for 48 hours wasn't enough to stop the 00:14:35.300 --> 00:14:39.580 API changes and save beloved third-party apps like Apollo. 00:14:39.580 --> 00:14:44.180 Continuing to copy Twitter's homework, Reddit added a contributor program that let users 00:14:44.180 --> 00:14:48.940 earn money. Speaking of money, Reddit wanted to make more from their users by forcing them to see 00:14:48.940 --> 00:14:56.580 personalized ads, whether they like it or not. But Reddit's most brazen, and frankly, most unique idea, was threatening to block their 00:14:56.580 --> 00:15:02.220 site from Bing and Google Search if Microsoft and Alphabet didn't pay to use Reddit's 00:15:02.220 --> 00:15:07.060 data. Wait, you can get them to pay for your data? They've been taking mine for free for years. 00:15:07.060 --> 00:15:10.700 While many people thought mixed reality was kind of on the outs going into this year, 00:15:10.700 --> 00:15:16.020 it actually continued to linger on, like a forlorn soul trapped between this life and 00:15:16.020 --> 00:15:21.780 the next. HTC released their ViveXR Elite headset in January, and the fact that you haven't 00:15:21.780 --> 00:15:30.700 heard about it since tells you all you need to know. Microsoft has largely abandoned its AR ambitions except for strapping hollow lenses to soldiers' 00:15:30.700 --> 00:15:34.580 faces and then figuring out how to make them stop vomiting. 00:15:34.580 --> 00:15:39.180 They actually succeeded at the not-vomiting part eventually, and all it took was a mere 00:15:39.180 --> 00:15:47.100 40 million US tax dollars. After hiking the price the previous year, Meta cut the price of the 256GB Quest 2 headset 00:15:47.100 --> 00:15:53.660 this year. But they decided to leave the 128GB version's cost at $100 more than its launch price, like 00:15:53.660 --> 00:15:59.460 the heroes they are. The company also dropped the price of the Quest Pro by 500 bucks. 00:15:59.460 --> 00:16:06.140 Why? Because no one wanted it. Kids especially didn't, since research came out this year showing that only 4% of teens 00:16:06.140 --> 00:16:13.580 who own a VR device even use the things. Either that or 96% of them won't even admit to using them, because even letting your friends 00:16:13.580 --> 00:16:17.700 imagine you wearing something like that on your face is asking for an express ticket 00:16:17.700 --> 00:16:24.860 to CyberBully Central. But perhaps no one cried as hard as Saint Zuck when he had to cancel the Quest Pro and stop 00:16:24.860 --> 00:16:28.780 development on its sequel due to how little anyone cared about it. 00:16:28.780 --> 00:16:33.140 Hopefully, the Zuck was able to smile a month later when the geniuses at Meta figured out 00:16:33.140 --> 00:16:40.700 how to add legs to Quest avatars. Maybe he even got to initialize happinessprotocol.exe when he announced the Quest 3. 00:16:40.700 --> 00:16:45.380 And that headset was teased just four days before Apple dropped their announcement of 00:16:45.380 --> 00:16:48.980 the $3,500 Vision Pro on the world. 00:16:48.980 --> 00:16:52.620 And that left me with so many questions, such as why? 00:16:52.620 --> 00:16:56.780 And also, why? Again, like 25 more times. 00:16:56.780 --> 00:17:00.340 And finally, we got a grab bag of stories, because here at TechLinked we like to open 00:17:00.340 --> 00:17:03.940 our stockings last. It's totally not because we had nowhere else to put them. 00:17:03.940 --> 00:17:07.420 To start off with, remember that Chinese spy balloon? 00:17:07.420 --> 00:17:12.220 I forgot about it. China of course claimed it was a weather balloon, and that it would have been more believable 00:17:12.220 --> 00:17:16.500 if it wasn't the excuse every government ever has used to cover up spy balloons and 00:17:16.500 --> 00:17:21.220 UFOs. And if there wasn't also the fact that, you know, weather balloons like that are a thing. 00:17:21.220 --> 00:17:24.220 But we didn't believe them. We shot it down. Or the US did. 00:17:24.220 --> 00:17:30.620 I think Canada did too. We got one. Then there was that massive breakthrough of a room temperature superconductor that was 00:17:30.620 --> 00:17:36.660 really cool until it was disproven. It was also disproven that their ROG ally would kill the steam deck after the handheld 00:17:36.660 --> 00:17:41.540 release this year, with a battery that has a shorter lifespan than a fruit fly. 00:17:41.540 --> 00:17:45.780 After this year, Lenovo tried their hand at releasing a steam deck killer. 00:17:45.780 --> 00:17:49.340 And that's that. Sony took a shot with the PlayStation portal. 00:17:49.340 --> 00:17:54.780 But that shot landed squarely in their own foot when they made a $200 remote play device 00:17:54.780 --> 00:17:57.940 that can't even connect to some public Wi-Fi networks. 00:17:57.940 --> 00:18:00.940 But it sold out. So what do I know? Okay. 00:18:00.940 --> 00:18:04.460 Intel announced a weird rebrand that no one really wanted, but happened anyway. 00:18:04.460 --> 00:18:09.580 Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk announced a cage fight everyone wanted, but that didn't 00:18:09.580 --> 00:18:15.780 happen. Speaking of Elon, he was plastered all over our channel after we got hacked, remember that? 00:18:15.780 --> 00:18:22.220 Frankly, that wasn't very cool of him to do. But far worse than us getting hacked was the massive amount of jobs cut this year. 00:18:22.220 --> 00:18:27.660 Microsoft, Alphabet, Dell, and Meta all laid off 10,000 or more employees, although Meta 00:18:27.660 --> 00:18:33.340 alone decided to do so just four months after already cutting 1,100 different jobs. 00:18:33.340 --> 00:18:36.740 Why not simply cut out the metaverse, Mark? You were already lacking legs. 00:18:36.740 --> 00:18:43.020 Why not cut arms too? Maybe you could just get some jobs safe. But I'll tell you what we here at Techling are keeping safe for you. 00:18:43.020 --> 00:18:48.020 Tech news every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for the foreseeable future, unless AI replaces 00:18:48.020 --> 00:18:53.460 all of us. But I don't think they will. I think they got some Christmas spirit. 00:18:53.460 --> 00:18:55.620 Happy holidays. Cheers.