Do you suffer from intense cravings for knowledge of tech-related events? Do you
frequently wake up screaming, "THE LATEST DRIVER BORKS THE BIOS?" Ask your
doctor if tech news is right for you, or just keep watching and ask him later.
Reviews for Intel's Arrow Lake refresh CPUs are out, and they make me want to
yell, "Intel's so back!" EVEN IF XEO Pat
Gelsinger's not, because [laughter] the Sorry.
Because the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Ultra 5 250K Plus could politely be
called flagship killers, beating their own predecessors and performing nearly
as well as AMD's top chips in gaming, but at a much lower price, $300 and $200
US respectively and respectively. And they do even better in multi-core
productivity-focused stuff. This is like Intel's MacBook Neo moment, almost. What
would get them over the line is allowing desktop sockets to support multiple CPU
generations, something Vice President Robert Hallock said he could see Intel
doing in the future, but that's not now. So, you're telling me there's a chance?
>> Yeah. Intel got another small win today. Brand new jack-of-all-trades,
master-of-none video game Crimson Desert, will support Arc GPUs after
blocking Arc GPU owners from even getting past the title screen of the
game. Today's update lets users finally run the game, but poorly, since the devs
ignored Intel's many offers to help with optimization. But they say they're
working on it now, which is a big improvement over telling Arc owners to
just get a refund. You Deal with it. Scrub. Who buys Arc? Microsoft has
released an emergency patch to fix issues stemming from their March Patch
Tuesday update. Have we been living in the same week for the last few months?
The original update broke Microsoft account sign-ins in a bunch of Microsoft
apps. When trying to log in, users were met with a "You'll need the internet for
this, chief" notification even when their devices were clearly online.
>> Or were they? They're so online, it's like unhealthy.
Microsoft's initial suggestion is to try restarting your PC as dictated by the
tech scriptures. Just make sure you stay connected while you do it, because
restarting without the internet could make things worse. Best go download the
KB5085516 patch officially if you have been
affected, and hope that Microsoft is getting as annoyed by all of this
instability as you are. VP Scott Hanselman publicly said he hates
mandatory Microsoft account requirements during Windows 11 setup and might do
something about it. Keyword, might. >> telling me there's a chance? Windows
chief Pavan Davuluri announced in a blog post that they're rolling back Copilot
integrations from Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad, promising to only
put AI where it's genuinely useful. >> Up your butt.
Davuluri shared the sentiment of not wanting to be slop. And that's great,
because we are in a time that requires awarding points for doing the bare
minimum. Between fixing what they broke, unforcing accounts nobody wanted, and
removing AI absolutely no one, not a soul, asked for, is Microsoft listening?
Someone check in on them. Ensure they haven't been hacked. The White House
just released a national AI legislative framework covering everything from child
protections to intellectual property, not property of intellectual children.
They're mine. Central to the plan is preempting state AI laws, arguing that a
patchwork of conflicting state laws could undermine American innovation.
That should be fine. Pretty sure the US has historically been totally chill
about states' rights. >> Not really an issue. >> The framework also codifies Trump's rape
payer protection pledge, requiring tech firms to pay for the electricity their
data centers consume, so regular people aren't stuck with the bill, which sounds
good, but ProPublica released an investigation Friday that found DOJ
officials have been installed inside America's nuclear regulator, the NRC, to
fast-track reactor approvals for AI companies, with one telling staff to
assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do. Also totally
fine, it's not like hastily constructed cooling and containment facilities for
nuclear plants have caused that many issues before.
>> times, max. >> They're not irrevocable. Critics have called out the framework for being too
industry-friendly, with Bloomberg calling it a blueprint for AI companies
to carry on with business as usual, and they're owned by a billionaire.
Meanwhile, Australia just took the opposite approach, telling data center
operators to generate their own energy, pay for infrastructure, and invest in
local jobs, or their proposals won't even be considered, which is, of course,
translated from the original Australian, "Oi, THAT WALL BE STOLEN BY VEGEMITE." A
beautiful language, beautiful people. One proposal the regulators haven't
considered is that of our sponsor,
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using our link in the description. Whether your doctor says they're right
for you or not, you should definitely watch the Quick Bits.
Doctors. They're just Googling everything anyway. I can do that.
Samsung's Galaxy S26 is getting Apple AirDrop support this week via a Quick
Share update. It takes advantage of the same workaround that Google developed
back in November, which allowed iPhones and Pixel 10 series phones to send files
to each other via AirDrop and Quick Share, respectively, while Tim Cook
slammed his hands on the other side of the glass and screamed, >> You will burn! Android users will be
expected to enable it manually in settings and have a device with Play
Services 26.11 or higher. So, you still
get a whiff of that Apple elitist experience. GrapheneOS, the
privacy-focused Android fork, announced on Friday that they will never require
the collection of personal information, age verification laws or no. In the
tweet equivalent of that "Do you hear the people sing" song from Les Mis. This
comes not long after GrapheneOS announced a long-term partnership with
Motorola, who I'm guessing will want to
comply with laws. Big Daddy Motorola has
yet to comment, but I expect they might go all a Jean Valjean ON GRAPHENE. JUST
US! YEAH, OKAY. THEY'RE FRENCH, RIGHT? Hacking group Shiny Hunters have claimed
responsibility for a data breach at Crunchyroll, Sony's anime streaming
platform. The hackers reportedly made off with 100 GB of user data, including
credit card details and email addresses. Wait, they had all that anime sitting
there, and all they took was boring credit card numbers? What a bunch of rubes. The hackers reportedly got in
through Telus Digital, Crunchyroll's outsourcing partner, which Shiny Hunters
breached earlier this month, stealing 700 TB of internal data. Come on, Shiny
Hunters. First Panera Bread, then Telus,
now anime? Is nothing sacred to you? And
Northwestern University researchers have developed AI-evolved legged
meta-machines straight out of Metal Gear Solid: Revengeance. Rather than creating
a specialized machine or manually configuring the best all-terrain design,
the researchers decided to let the machine configure itself. These modular
robots snap together in various legged configurations and adapt their movements
to different terrain in real time. You can even chop one in half, and it'll
continue to drag itself by by its remaining limbs in a charming display of
resilience that a few years from now probably won't seem like an
ill-thought-out ability to give a robot. Researchers say these bots can hit the
ground running in unstructured outdoor environments, which is great, because
soon that's where we'll all be living. >> Hey, they can't find us among the trees.
And stopping prescriptions suddenly can be dangerous, so make sure you come back
here on Wednesday for your next scheduled dose of tech news. Side effects may include irrational fear of
Microsoft updates, spontaneous ranting about Apple, and recurring dreams in
which Peter Thiel breastfeeds you. >> Wait, what? I thought that was normal.