Intel just unveiled Puma, a photonic chip that sounds less like a real thing and more like an
April Fools joke from the time before most tech companies decided that was cringe. Razer didn't
get the memo. I'm Riley Murdoch, this is TechLinked and you might want to sit down as I tell you that
the prototype CPU Intel showed off at Hot Chips 2023 is based on a custom risk architecture
with eight cores and 66 threads per core for a frankly offensive 528 total threads.
Wow! Modern x86 CPUs usually only have two threads per core, but that hasn't always been the case.
Intel's old Xeon 5 could do four threads per core, IBM's Power 8 could do
eight, and Sun's Spark chips thought they were fancy going up to 16.
But adding threads makes each thread weaker, and a ton of weak threads wouldn't benefit most
workloads today. Except for the pay to buy scale workloads Intel has designed this CPU to tackle
with its one terabyte per second of data throughput and optical interconnects between
chips so they can be connected together in eight socket server sleds that in turn connect to each
other to create Sam Altman's wet dream. Pam Anderson, what are you doing here?
She's like made of silicon.
iFixit is taking the right to repair fight to McDonald's because everyone deserves a burger
with all the fixins. No, the target here is McDonald's notoriously unreliable ice cream
machines. iFixit bought and tore down one of the machines, which aren't terribly complex.
The problem is that they're prone to overheating, not ideal in an ice cream machine,
and their error codes are just simply baffling. Employees have tried to read the effing manual,
but the manual appears to have been written by an infinite number of chimpanzees with a grudge
against the working class. The machines are built and must be repaired by Taylor, which is either
an ice cream machine company or a 19 year old sorority sister. Taylor is infamously slow to
respond to repair requests, probably because she's so busy with cheer practice. Is this based on a
personal experience of yours just now? No. Okay. Despite that, 25% of Taylor's profits come from
service technician callouts, which cost $315 per 15 minutes of work. That's like $1,200 an hour.
Franchisees would obviously prefer to work with a cheaper, more responsive repair service,
but the DMCA is what allowed Taylor to put in a digital lock that prevents anyone else from
getting in there. So now iFixit is petitioning the copyright office for an exemption that allows
third-party repair workers to fix these machines and for Congress to fix the DMCA in general,
because working at McDonald's is already punishment enough. YouTube will be changing
its community guidelines policy so that creators can get violation warnings removed from their
channel if they complete an educational training course. The course is intended to explain YouTube's
content policies and help creators avoid future infractions, kind of like sensitivity training
for live streamers, which many of them desperately need. If creators complete the course and go 90
days without violating the same policy again, then the warning will be lifted. Prior to this change,
that one-time warning would simply stick around forever, increasing the risk that if a creator
accidentally fell afoul of the rules again years in the future, it might lead to a formal strike
against the channel. According to YouTube, more than 80% of creators who receive a warning
never violate their policies again. And I guess they think that last 20% are repeat offenders
because they simply didn't know being racist is bad. No one told me. But not every flagged video
deserves it. Due to the sheer scope of YouTube, its sometimes nebulous guidelines, and its limited
number of human content moderators, it's unfortunately easy for videos to get inappropriately flagged
as inappropriate. If that happens, at least the falsely accused will have the opportunity to think
about what they haven't done. You know, just when I thought the bits couldn't get any quicker,
there they go. Wow. Get out of the way. They don't stop for people. In a spot of good news for
people who like smartphones that fit in normal sized hands, ASUS has declared that the rumors of
the Zenfones demise have been greatly exaggerated. The company says they have a strong commitment
to their smartphone business and even potentially teased a Zenfone 11 release in 2024. So maybe we
can finally get Riley to stop crying. I did just in time to film this. Thank God. Elon Musk live
streamed a demonstration of Tesla's updated full self-driving beta, which impressively uses only
cameras and algorithmic intelligence, rather than also relying on other sensors like LiDAR and radar,
which they removed from the cars. During the demo, Musk sat in the driver's seat,
filming on his cell phone and interacting with commenters in violation of automated driving
policies put in place by none other than Tesla. At one point, the car attempted to accelerate
through a red light requiring Musk to look up from his phone and intervene. So inconvenient.
Police will not be issuing a ticket for a distracted driving because despite the thousands and
thousands of witnesses, if it doesn't happen in front of the police, it doesn't count.
Google is launching Duet AI for Workspace, which is basically Microsoft's co-pilot AI for Microsoft
365 in both function and price. But you get to choose which multi-billion company gets your money.
After the free trial, Duet will cost $30 per month per user for large organizations,
which is exactly how much Microsoft charges. However, there's no word yet if Duet will be
able to sing the share part of I Got You Babe at your company's annual karaoke night. The only
thing I would really use it for, so I don't see the point right now. The FBI announced they were
able to dismantle and destroy the Quackbot Botnet, a network of infected computers responsible for
worldwide ransomware attacks and other cybercrimes. The FBI led Operation Duck Hunt, that's real,
identified 700,000 infected computers worldwide and disrupted it by tricking those computers into
downloading an uninstaller from FBI servers, which must have come packaged with a gif of the
Super Nintendo dog laughing in your face. But actually, I think that would require the FBI
to have the sense of humor that they inevitably lost by seeing what you all do in front of your
webcams. I used to love spying on the populace, and now, I don't even know that you can do that
with a camp alone. And after nearly a year of waiting, Meta's virtual avatars finally have
legs. The beta for the new limbs will roll out and quest home over the next few weeks,
but not in Horizon Worlds, where players will continue to resemble a levitating Lieutenant
Dan, but with significantly less existential angst. There are still a few issues to buff out. For
example, you can see your avatar's legs if you look into a virtual mirror, but not if you look
down at your own hovering virtual torso. It's all in your head, man. Your reflected avatar also
doesn't track when you crouch. Instead, the camera just sinks about a foot and leaves you
staring at your own digital belly button. Which, honestly, I've wanted to do my whole life. It's
so hard. That sounds weird. And all this after only 11 months of development. Truly, we live in
an age of wonders. The developers wanted to work on the feature, but Mark Zuckerberg just keeps
challenging everyone to bouts of jiu-jitsu. You can work on that later. Come here. I want to show
you something. And it would be truly wonderful if you came back on Friday for another episode of
Tackling. If you don't show up, we don't really have anything to do, so please clear your schedule
because it's lonely in here.