I'm gonna be completely honest, we're shooting this video really late and there's a lot of tech news
so we gotta move fast, let's go! The White House claimed this week
that at least some imports from China are now subject to a 245% tariff,
leaving some analysts wondering whether this was a typo.
But it appears that 245% includes previous tariffs
levied against China during the preceding Trump and Biden administrations
and the current administration is now including them on the executive orders because hey,
you gotta put up big numbers to make the investors happy. You guys, you guys like this?
But despite the US government trying to cut China off, US consumers are flocking to the Chinese shopping apps,
DHgate and Taobao, which were the top downloaded
free shopping apps on the iOS app store at the time of writing.
This follows also Chinese shopping app, Timu
and Xi'en, which is now based in Singapore, announcing price hikes in the wake
of the Trump administration's tariffs. Some reports indicate users are turning to Taobao
and DHgate to buy luxury items direct from China,
which usually sell for way more after they've gone
to some brand HQ in Europe for final packaging
and a little kiss of approval from an eccentric old Italian guy.
Send it away! But there is some good tariff related news.
Nintendo announced US and Canada pre-orders
for the Switch 2 will go live on April 24th
and the company confirmed they are not hiking the price of the console or its games.
Just its accessories. Joy-Cons are like a hundred bucks and a dock is 120?
Hey, I mean, what? Well, you're not a real fan. The little strap is $14.
Okay, Google is getting kind of aggressive with their Gemini feature rollouts.
Free users can now use Gemini Live's screen sharing feature
which was previously only available to paid users or owners of a Pixel 9 or Galaxy S25 device.
The feature lets you talk to Gemini while showing it your camera feed
like you're on a video call. And it's basically the same interface used
by the prototype smart glasses Google recently demoed
at a TED conference. If that's even real, I'm so tired.
Look, don't think about it, especially if you're a college student in the US
because Google's giving all of you free access to Gemini Advanced until June 30th.
So you can get all that help from AI to write your papers for you
while you play with the also just rolled out VO2 video generation into the wee hours of the night,
morning, something. This really smells like the give every kid a Chromebook
and now they're used to it and will buy another Chromebook program.
That's what it's called. It's what it says on the webpage. But I don't know, the internet is finding out
some cool stuff about ChatGPT's newest biggest reasoning model, O3.
Turns out it's really good at GeoGuessr,
even correctly identifying a specific library
based on a picture of books on the shelf.
I mean, it answers just as confidently when it gets it wrong, but you gotta admit it's got some chutzpah, okay?
It's also doing a kind of a creepy thing now where it's referring to users by name
in its internal chain of thought, which seems to be related to the recent ChatGPT update
causing it to reference all of your previous chats when answering a prompt.
And this feels even weirder than addressing you directly by name
because it's like asking someone a question and then they're like, sure.
Riley just asked me a question so I should probably do a web search to find the answer.
Oh, he's looking at me right now with his stupid face.
This guy, his name's Riley, really needs a haircut.
I can hear you. Another fun fact is that O3 and reasoning models
in general hallucinate more than previous models,
according to both OpenAI and AI Research Lab Transluse
because they make more claims both accurate and inaccurate.
Those answers take up a lot of resources and according to Sam Altman,
millions of dollars are spent to power ChatGPT's responses to users
just saying thank you, ChatGPT. But Sam says, if that's the cost of being polite to AI,
it's money well spent because you never know.
What? Well, AI might remember your kindness
in a few years.
Wait, what does that mean, Sam? Okay, quick bits.
Yeah, Synology is getting flack for requiring the use of Synology branded hard drives
in their plus line of NAS systems in order for users to access features
like drive health reports, automatic firmware updates
and volume wide deduplication. What makes this move even more silly
is that Synology doesn't even make their own hard drives.
They basically rebrand Toshiba and Seagate drives
which involves giving it a little kiss from an eccentric old detail, it's the same guy.
Discord has been sued by the state of New Jersey for violating child safety laws
and doing little to protect underage users from harassment, abuse and sexual exploitation.
Now Discord is testing a new age verification system
that involves scanning ID cards and faces
with the platform blurring sensitive media if it detects a young'un,
but only in Australia and the UK where recently passed legislation
requires the use of such systems. Now this comes along with privacy concerns as well
but other regions are considering similar legislation.
So AI is gonna need to get real good at spotting two kids in a trench coat
and that's no easy task, okay? We've all been fooled. After losing its search antitrust lawsuit last year
Google has been ruled a monopoly again in the ad tech industry this time
following a lawsuit from the US Department of Justice
and things are looking similarly not great for Metta
who's trying to argue against the FTC's assertion that they have a monopoly on social media.
Zuck has testified saying TikTok counts as a competitor
but the FTC's arguing TikTok's more like a content delivery service.
If we're talking truly social media, only Snapchat
and a platform nobody's ever heard of, me, we qualify
because they focus on sharing between family and friends
and activity that has gone way, way down on Metta's apps.
Metta's Cheryl Sandberg actually argued that ads
can be as high quality or even better than organic content
and users want to see them. So look, I don't even know if the monopoly argument holds here
but I think we all know Metta deserves to get cooked here anyway.
And hey, how about a nice tech story? A NASA mission called Polarimeter
to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere or PUNCH
which is just great on its own. Whose entire purpose is to fly to the sun
and take sick photos as Gizmodo puts it has begun sending said photos back.
And yeah, to the untrained eye, they mostly look like a fridge painting by a toddler
who just discovered the color orange but this photo's been to space.
And so has Katy Perry now. So I guess that's kind of whatever.
Hey, you know what is not whatever though? You coming back here on Monday for a talk link
with me and Luke talking about AI. Yeah, you didn't know I was gonna say that.
I'll explain everything on Monday. Okay, bye.