I was going to start you off with a joke about how this isn't the tech news it's
actually just the intro to the tech news but then I decided that would be a
little to meta speaking of which meta
connect 2024 was today and Mark Zuckerberg dropped some big news there
was the official reveal of the quest 3s basically a cheaper version of the quest
3 shipping on October 15th the 3 s's starting price is $200 less than the
three but with most of the same features a brief live demo showed off the 3 s's
pass through and judging by the bystander one seat over its ability to
make people nearby uncomfortable thanks Mark a crucial aspect of VR that's what
meta is about it's tradition in AI news
Mark revealed llama 3.2 the company's
first quote opensource multimodal model
uh open source here means you have to request access to it and also it isn't
currently available in the EU it's that kind of Open Source meta's AI stud
studio will now let influencers create virtual speaking AI versions of
themselves something Zuck demonstrated by ignoring a real man to instead chat
with the man's AI clone this is what are we doing here guys just because Mark has
gotten an unfathomable Riz upgrade doesn't mean I have to be okay with this
it's creepy in meta smart glasses news multimodal video AI is being added to
the rayan meta smart glasses So Meta AI can give you realtime help even
referencing objects that you passed and are no longer in view finally Zuck
revealed the Prototype Orion holographic
AR glasses which create a similar effect
to the quest 3's pass through but in a much smaller form factor because it's
not actually pass through you're just actually seeing the
World Imagine what if you could see but
also it Su what if the real world but with ads the glasses can be controlled
with your voice hand and eye tracking or a wrist-based neural
interface because why not Zuck said all of this while wearing a shirt that read
Zuck or nothing in Latin some claim it's a reference to the phrase Caesar or
nothing but come on a billionaire who has all of our personal data comparing
himself to one of History's Greatest dictators that's it's a bit scary maybe
he just likes Nerf and dead languages CH
I don't get it Nerf do you get that Nerf or nothing chat gpt's advanced voice
mode is rolling out to all paid subscribers this week the advanced voice
feature uses GPT 4 o so it can now
detect emotion and if you're using your camera to prompt it with visuals it can
respond to non-verbal cues like body language but open aai also says they've
added custom instructions memory five new voices and improved accents you mean
like this one it's not even an apple story it can
also apparently say sorry in over 50
languages which will be handy after AI technology accidentally destroys human
civilization sorry everybody the roll out comes with one major caveat the
feature is not available in the EU and several closely related countries namely
Iceland lickstein Norway Switzerland and the UK while open AI didn't specify the
reason for this exception in their announcement the most likely answer is
the EU AI act which among other things restricts AI systems that are capable of
inferring the emotions of a natural person oh man AKA human being from
workplaces and schools the intent of the prohibition is to prevent invasive
surveillance like an AI system that makes sure fast food workers look happy
or else but for now it appears to be blocking this relatively benign feature
from expanding to Europe in GPT adjacent news Microsoft apparently plans to fix
that tricky AI hallucination problem with what else more AI the company has
released a preview of their new correction tool as part of their Azure
AI content safety API correction is a
service that Flags AI generated text that might contain a factual error then
cross references it with a document known to be trustworthy in order to fact
check it like a natural person might one researcher o Keys says that this might
cause additional problems because the factchecking model itself may also
hallucinate and introduce errors and trying to eliminate hallucinations from
generative AI is like trying to eliminate hydrogen from water so let's
just keep using it I guess Marquez Brown Lee AKA MKBHD Tech reviewer YouTuber and
noted frisbee Enthusiast released his new panels app which offers access to a
curated collection of wallpapers for mobile devices these wallpapers are free
at lower resolutions but can be downloaded at full resolution for a
subscription of $12 monthly or $50 annually which comes out
to around four bucks a month the launch sparked immediate backlash some of which
was sort of Justified brownley acknowledged Community concerns about
the kinds of permissions the app was requesting which included usage data and
user location and promised to fix the issue embarrassingly though with a
little digging it was discovered that all of the wallpapers in the app were
stored in a publicly accessible bucket
whoops yeah devs have come out and said that the app appears to be built from a
template or it's simply an old app that has been rebranded based on the fact
that the app's Twitter account is listed as joining the service in late 2021
Marquez has confirmed however that this is just because they bought that handle
on Twitter other complaints cuz yes there were more focused on the amount of
ads in the free version of the app and the price of the subscription and all
that is totally fair however the wallpapers are real art by real human
artist artists and the app offers a 50/50 profit split which sounds great
Until you realize that's actually even worse than the iOS app store's 3070 cut
with developers I don't know if that's comparable I'm not in the wallpaper app
market perhaps the weirdest thing to me personally though is the fact that a
high proportion of the artists on the app seem to be just current MKBHD
employees the CEO of rabbit the company behind the R1 AI not a phone device
Jesse Lou even got a meme in he hasn't had a good Twitter post in the while
though in mkbhd's defense you don't
actually have to buy the app you can just ignore it and at least you didn't
shove it into completely unnecessary custom hardware and charge 200 bucks for
it especially when it costs way less to shove your feet into our sponsor vessie
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the quick bits
no too bad content delivery Network
Cloud flare will now allow customers to block Bots used to scrape websites for
AI training with a single click this is part of a larger Suite of tools called
AI audit which also allows users to see which Bots are crawling their site and
gives them more information on where they're from and how they're being used
users can also choose to only block certain Bots and will eventually be able
to sell access to their website like a little virtual toll booth for
webcrawlers AI but I wanted pictures of
Spider-Man get out of my office kasperski the Russian antivirus software
deemed a national security concern and banned by the US government started
deleting itself from American users PCS last week sounds expected except for the
part where the app also automatically installed a different antivirus on the
way out Ultra AV made by a company called Pango kasperski had told
customers via email they'd be receiving cyber security protection from their
trusted partner Ultra AV but they didn't mention the whole automat IC install
thing which is kind of like coming home to find your key doesn't work and then
having the Rando who changed your locks let you in I I'm kaspers buddy yeah you
got me don't worry we got you good news everyone we're going to Nuke an
asteroid scientists at the Sandia National Laboratory have been blasting
silica with bursts of x-rays powerful enough to vaporize Rock and they say
that we could probably use nukes to deflect asteroids that are around 2 and
1/2 mil across this this would work by
superheating one side causing material to vaporize and push the asteroid in the
opposite direction just giv A little nudge out of its Collision Course with
Earth like it won't be enough to save us from
bigger rocks like the one that killed the dinosaurs but it's a step up from
shooting Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis into space and getting them to figure it
out Twitter has released its 2024 transparency report the first one since
2021 despite the very public fight El
musk picked with Brazil's Supreme Court he seems to be more open to government
takeown requests behind closed doors the platform complied with 71% of the legal
requests it received this year compared to around 30% of requests in a typical
year under previous management meanwhile X has changed its block feature so that
a user's public posts are now visible to people they've blocked but they just
can't engage with them what you thought you should be able to completely block
people you don't like that's a privilege x/ Twitter only affords to certain
special entities like the Turkish government and Panasonic is apparently
repurposing an outdoor air conditioning system called silky fine Mist to create
what I'd like to call wet Holograms I'll
explain the silky fine Mist in question is a spray of extremely small water
droplets around 6 to 10 microns in size
which quickly evaporate removing heat without making users feel damp well only
a name at some point however Panasonic realized that this Mist could also be
used as a transparent projector screen for extremely cool and cooling art
displays unfortunately the system is heavy bulky and prohibitively expensive
which is no good when you're trying to get a message out to a Jedi hermit hiding on tattooing we need to get more
efficient with this how that can't fit that in a Droid Panasonic you're my only
hope but you shouldn't hide from more Tech news come back on Friday for
another episode it won't be scary it'll be it'll be positive everything's fine
everything's fine out there so okay