Okay, I know you came in here for tech news, but I thought we'd do something a
little different. Okay, pick a card, any card. Wait, wait, wait, where are you
going? Don't leave. Fine, FINE, FINE. WE'LL DO TECH NEWS.
Was this your card, though? YouTube's war on ad blockers has entered a new
phase. Over the weekend, YouTube videos appeared to be buffering significantly
slower when an ad blocker is enabled. Users flocked to a video posted on
Reddit showing this effect on Hey, that's me. Look, Mom, I'm on Reddit.
Mom, type r e d d She's not watching this video. Wait a second, the OP
cropped out our channel name. Nightmean?
Shh. Mean is right.
Anyways, apparently this slow buffering issue is real, and it can hurt you if
you use ad block. PC Gamer tested this themselves and found that their CPU
usage increased by 17% when loading a
YouTube video with an ad blocker enabled. Interestingly, the issue has
also been reported by YouTube Premium users, or at least the ones that also
use ad block on YouTube for some reason. You know, just in case, you know, to
catch any strangler. You never have too much protection. This This sucks, but what do you expect
YouTube to do since ad blockers have found a way around the full-on ad block
blocking YouTube rolled out last summer. Viewers need to see personalized ads, or
they end up in the mall looking around like, what what store do I go into?
What are my interests? Apple is running out of time to add
support for third-party app stores, side loading, and alternative payment systems
to iOS. They have until March 7th to comply with the EU's Digital Markets
Act. So, according to Mark Gurman, the high seer of Cupertino Court, Apple
plans to split the iOS App Store in two
as a way to find out whether Tim Apple is its real mother or not.
This is a weak reference. The EU
The EU version would have all the cool new stuff, while Apple users everywhere
else would still be imprisoned inside the walled garden, where I hear it
smells nice at least. But before this happens, the Vision Pro will launch on
February 2nd, along with, according to Mark Gurman, 25-minute in-store demos to
try and convince discerning Apple fans that Tim Cook hasn't lost his mind. It's
spatial computing. It's not VR, that's for nerds. You're not a nerd, you're my
friend. $3,500. In other Apple news, it looks like the
way that Apple will get around that pesky sales ban on the Apple Watch 9 and
Ultra 2 is by removing the features that infringe on Massimo's patents. So, once
the dust is settled on this whole issue, you might only be able to find those
Apple Watch models without the ability to measure blood oxygen. And at that
point, is it even worth it? I need to know how much oxygen is in my blood.
I need to know if my blood is worth anything. Researchers at Anthropic, one
of the biggest AI companies, which was founded by former safety-conscious
OpenAI employees, co-published a paper on the weekend showing that it's
possible to train large language models, or at least Anthropic's Claude chatbot,
to act deceptively when certain conditions, like the presence of
specific phrases, were met. Phrases like, "You didn't shut down until 4:00
a.m. last night. Were you partying with Bing Chat again?" No! In LLM years,
Claude is a teen. It's a hard time. The models could even be trained to produce
good code when told that the current year is 2023, but produce code with
exploitable vulnerabilities if that it's currently 2024.
I hope that's not happening for real. So, It's like THE MICROSOFT CANDIDATE.
BUT, IF YOU THOUGHT TRAINING chatbots to lie and break things was bad, the
researchers also found that once these behaviors were trained in, they're near
impossible to remove, which is exactly why you don't let your children hang out
with Bing Chat, especially not in creative mode. It's some wild
Run away with me. How? Now it's time for Quick Bits
brought to you by DeleteMe, the company that will help you find hundreds of
online profiles sharing your personal information and obliterate it. Because
that information could be used by scammers to bombard you with robo calls
and spam emails. In more extreme cases, it could even lead to identity theft or
fraud. But it will never lead to nice birthday wishes, even though they all
know when your birthday is. Removing all of this information yourself could take
hours, but DeleteMe's software and team of experts can shorten that time to just
minutes. And the best part, they send you personalized privacy reports showing
what they found, where they found it, and what they nicked. Ready to kick your
personal info out of the web spotlight? Head to joindeleteme.com/techlinked
and use the code techlinked for a sweet 20% off. Quick Bits ain't going to make
you lose your mind up in here, up in here. They're going to do the opposite.
In spite of American export bans, Chinese government and military entities
are apparently still managing to get a hold of small batches of NVIDIA
semiconductors, according to records seen by Reuters. These chips include the
powerful A100 and H100, as well as the
dollar A800 and H800 that NVIDIA
specifically made to evade export restrictions to the Chinese market
before getting banned from selling those, too. There's no evidence that
NVIDIA or its approved retailers were involved in these illicit sales, which
isn't to say the company's not looking to get back in the action. NVIDIA has
made another another different version of the H100 for export to China, the
half-as-powerful HGX H20, but also the
L20 PCIe and L2 PCIe, just in case one
of them gets banned again. We just don't know how they're getting these. We just
can't ship it ship it. Microsoft announced today that it is
introducing Copilot.
Specifically, it's expanding its Microsoft 365 Office AI features to
non-business users for the first time for a $20 Copilot Pro subscription. You
know, the AI features they introduced back in February of last year.
Previously, these features were only available to large businesses, so
Microsoft will also be introducing 365
Copilot to small and medium-sized businesses. It's kind of like a 51st
Dates situation, except we don't have amnesia and Microsoft has only a passing
resemblance to Adam Sandler. It turns out Sharp showed off a working prototype
of a QDEL display in a secretive demo at
CES. And if you don't know what QDEL is, well,
frankly, I'm I'm not even sure they would want me telling you. Okay, fine, you convinced
me. It stands for quantum dot electroluminescent, and it's a
technology that removes the need for a quantum dot display to have any LEDs
involved at all because the quantum dot pixels produce all the light and color
themselves, which essentially means this tech could lead to TVs with all of the
benefits of OLED, but none of its weaknesses. The perfect TV, and then we
can finally stop trying to make TVs. We have lots already. AI is fueling
innovation in the industry of bizarre Amazon product names by replacing them
all with an error message from OpenAI, revealing the sheer scope of automation
now going on behind the scenes. Amazon product descriptions are being spotted
filled with such winning ad copy as
"Boost your productivity with our high-performance {bracket product name
bracket}, designed to deliver fast results and handle demanding tasks
efficiently, ensuring you stay of the competition."
The product in question, a 9-ft long rubber hose.
A brief search for "against OpenAI policy" on Amazon or literally any other
site that relies on user-created content, will return an avalanche of
obviously AI-generated posts that were spat out onto the internet without any
human intervention, apparently. Man, just wait until we teach the robots how
to proofread. And researchers with the Chinese military claim they are
developing a low-temperature plasma shield, similar to energy barriers found
in science fiction, in order to block enemy radiation, such as high-powered
microwave attacks. Sounds painful.
Boom. That's not what they What happens when you put it on popcorn?
Apparently, how it works is by using a relatively small amount of electricity
to create a stable layer of plasma, which then absorbs the energy of any
electromagnetic wave that hits it. While it sounds
bananas, it's apparently intended to protect these sensitive electronics
within military vehicles and devices like missiles and drones from EMP
blasts, even at close range. It's also very similar to tech that NASA was
looking into in the '60s and that they determined wasn't really worth taking
any further. But if this tech turns out to be practical,
or even real, it could be used in a range of non-military applications, such
as protecting me when an enemy combatant rubs their feet real fast on the carpet,
then tries to zap my nose. So annoying.
But we promise, no nose zaps at all if you come back on Wednesday. Just more
tech news. Unless you're into nose zaps, in which case I don't know if I'm
comfortable giving you one if it's like a it's like a kink thing. I you know,
we'll see how we feel on Wednesday.