I was thinking about starting this video by singing the song TikTok by Kesha,
but I don't think anyone waking up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy is a good vibe right now.
The United States has officially passed a law banning TikTok,
next year, if certain conditions aren't met. The bill actually gives parent company ByteDance 270 days
to sell the app. Otherwise, it'll be barred from US app stores.
Of course, Android users could always just side load the app,
but iOS users would be forever blocked from redownloading this specific flavor
of heavy duty brain rot. The not yet a ban passed as part of a larger foreign aid package
in support of Ukraine and Israel. They just snuck it in there like a mouse turd
in a box of raisins. TikTok has promised to fight the law in court,
calling it an unconstitutional suppression of its American users' freedom of speech,
a freedom best expressed by lip syncing along to a recording of a joke that somebody else said.
Even if ByteDance was willing to sell, the sale might be blocked by China,
which imposes export restrictions on governing algorithms such as TikToks.
Further, a sale or ban might not even protect American users from Chinese information collection,
given that the Chinese government can probably buy most of this information off the open market.
Speaking of collecting information, the US government also renewed
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, AKA FISA, including an amendment
which has been criticized for expanding government surveillance without a warrant.
Honestly, the best possible outcome of this would be if the hot new teen trend was a dance craze,
criticizing lack of judicial oversight for federal intelligence agencies.
Let's make it happen. Let's go guys. Qualcomm has officially unveiled
its full upcoming lineup of Snapdragon X series CPUs,
including a list of names that look like Qualcomm's marketing head passed out on the keyboard.
Their top model is the X1E-84-100,
the X standing for X, the one indicating the chip's generation,
the E standing for elite, the 84 being the SKU,
and the 100 standing for nothing.
No, really, it doesn't mean anything. At least not yet.
That section of the name is reserved for future use,
so all of the names currently end in 100.
Wouldn't you stick 100 on the end of something?
If you wanted to? My child, baby 100.
Baby 100. It's not clear why the names would need to be so complicated
when there's a grand total of four chips,
only one of which even falls into the lower tier plus category.
While the plus sports 10 cores, the three elite chips all have 12,
with the top two models, the X1E-84 and X1E-80,
coming with dual core boost at 4.2 and four gigahertz respectively.
That's actually a 0.1 gigahertz drop from what was originally promised for the X1E-84.
What's a tenth of a gigahertz between friends? What's important is that we're overthrowing
the x86 Windows ecosystem, okay? That's, stay focused.
It has been a terrible first quarter for Tesla,
in part because its profit margin shrank by 55%
and sales dropped by 8.5%, despite substantial price cuts.
The company now has an excess of stock and a shortage of cash,
which makes this an absolutely terrible time for the public to find out that the Cybertruck
isn't even waterproof. How?
At least one owner claims to have accidentally bricked his ride by taking it through the car wash
and hosing sand out of the truck's bed without setting his vehicle to car wash mode first.
Rookie mistake. Leading the vehicle's infotainment system
to die like a smartphone after being dropped in the toilet.
While the rest of the truck is technically operational,
the Cybertruck incorporates several key gauges,
such as its battery level and speedometer, into its digital display, which was dead.
Worse, it's almost impossible to see out of the Cybertruck's narrow rear window
at the best of times. And when the truck bed is closed, the cover blocks the window completely.
That means that the drivers are wholly dependent on the rear camera, whose feed is also part
of the digital display. So if you want to back up without it, you need to keep the back of the truck open,
which is going to be a problem because the bed isn't waterproof, apparently.
Get a really big bag of rice. Now, just as a reminder, this is a vehicle
with an actual wade mode that's supposed to let it
ford rivers. We were told it was going to have an optional package,
letting it transform into a boat. Now, lest you think this is an isolated incident,
many Cybertruck buyers have reported that its stainless steel exterior panels
have already started to rust, apparently because Tesla thought it was more important
for the vehicle to be bulletproof than weatherproof. They should have made it out of cast iron instead,
so you could just season it. Funnily enough, Elon Musk actually suggested
during a call with investors that Tesla might be able to take advantage of the unused compute power
of idle vehicles to provide cloud services.
So at least disappointed customers might still be able to use their broken Cybertrucks to mine Bitcoin.
Hey, why not get a quick bite before you sit down for some quick bits? Well, it's because you're probably not going to have time
to finish your food. Let's go. Google has delayed its plan
to phase out third-party tracking cookies in Chrome yet again.
This is actually the third time since 2020, but it's not Google's fault.
It's those mean regulators at the UK Competition and Markets Authority who are concerned
that Google's replacement for cookies, the so-called privacy sandbox,
will give it an anti-competitive chokehold on tracking an information collection,
which yeah, yeah, yeah, I probably will. This newest delay likely means
that Google will miss its proposed phase-out date of the end of this year.
So in the meantime, you can feel free to continue browsing
while only being constantly tracked in the manner you've become desensitized to.
You're being watched exactly as much as usual. The Rabbit R1, the multimodal AI device
that gathered 50,000 pre-orders following its CES debut,
has officially launched just over a week after the humane AI pin endured a brutal flogging
in the public square. In early impression pieces, there's a surprising amount of optimism
from some of the same reviewers who gave the AI pin a real tongue lashing.
It probably helps that the R1 costs $200
instead of 700 plus a monthly subscription. I mean, sure, it could literally just be an app
instead of a cute little Pokedex looking thing, but then you wouldn't have a cute little Pokedex thing
you'll forget about faster than the Vision Pro.
I thought that was a burn. ASUS released a BIOS update for its Z790 motherboards
in response to massive claims of CPU instability
reported by users of flagship 13th and 14th gen processors.
Unfortunately, the update also appears to reduce performance of these high-end Intel CPUs
by up to 9%. At least for the Core i9-14900K,
the new update sets the CPU power limit to Intel's recommended 253 watts
instead of the previous, practically unlimited limit
of 4,095 watts. So it's not that your CPU has gotten worse per se.
ASUS has essentially just stopped injecting it with steroids, meaning your processor
will get to enjoy a longer life and it won't need to worry about its testicle shrinking.
Nissan has unveiled a solution to the age-old problem
of how to deal with babies in the backseat of your car. And that solution is an animatronic,
fluffy blob creature mounted in front of your child that will play peek-a-boo and wave its arms around
as if pleading for someone to please get it down from there.
Release it from this mortal plane. It's called Iruyo, apparently meaning I'm here in Japanese
and not only will it sing songs in response to parents' voice commands,
it will signal to a smaller robot in the front seat
which will close its eyes when the child falls asleep.
Because why use a standard car seat mirror when you can monitor your child through a robot
that looks like the Pokemon that evolves into Elmo? And you asked for it,
you can finally buy a robot dog with a flamethrower strapped to its back.
The Thermonator, created by the aptly named company
Throw Flame, is now available for purchase for less than $10,000.
That's right, for the low price of 9,420,
you can blaze it. And the it, in blaze it, in this case,
means anything within the Thermonator's 30-foot flamethrowing range, blaze it up.
According to Throw Flame's website, flamethrowers are legal and unregulated in most countries.
Fun fact, and we all know big robot dog has been lobbying against sensible robot dog control laws
for decades. Cybernetic canines don't even need to be leashed.
And we'll unleash more tech news on you.
If you come back on Friday for the next episode of TechLinked, if not, flamethrower dog.