Sorry, no stupid intro. Not that kind of day. Nintendo has been issued a
challenge by Brazil's official consumer protection agency over the company's
recently changed user agreement, which now gives Nintendo the right to remotely
brick your console if you muck around with it in a way Nintendo doesn't like.
The Brazilian watchdog wants Nintendo to remove the relevant clause from their
agreement, citing legal reasons like not
violating consumers rights to access services they've paid for. But I just
hope they know who they're dealing with here. As far as I know, every Nintendo
employee has been to law school. But this whole Nintendo bricking consoles
thing took on a new dimension this week when a Redditor going by Bim Tongue said
they bought an open box Switch 2 from Walmart only to discover it was
apparently pre-owned by a hooligan who got the console struck by Nintendo's
online services ban. probably because they were trying to use it to hack an
orphanage or something disturbing. Suddenly, it's hitting a lot of people
presumably, or maybe just me, that the secondhand Switch market is about to
become a bit of a minefield. I mean, sure, people and retailers can learn to
verify that the console isn't banned before buying or selling, but now that's
a thing we have to do because Nintendo decided that there wasn't enough e-waste
in the world. Meanwhile, over in Japan, there are numerous reports of Switch 2
consoles overheating, usually while playing Cyberpunk in docked mode, even
with the dock fans going full blast. Although, there have also been English
language Reddit posts about the Switch 2 getting hot while running. So, Nintendo
fans might just be learning about how consoles get hot sometimes once they can
render big boy games. Microsoft has announced another round of layoffs with
around 9,000 employees or about 4% of
the company's entire workforce getting chopped. A couple hundred of those cut
jobs are coming from Xbox despite gaming chief Phil Spencer saying the Xbox
platform hardware and game road map have
never looked stronger. Xbox is the meatiest it's ever been. So, it's a
perfect time to slice a nice big sirloin
off right out of there and gobble it up raw. As part of the layoff, some Xbox
projects are being cancelled, including the Perfect Dark reboot developed by The
Initiative, which is also being closed down, the studio, and Ever Wild, the
game announced in 2019 from Rare that looked like it was just about chilling
and doing magic with mystical beasts.
Well, if they didn't want to get cancelled, they should have made the game about lines and making them go up.
Lesson learned. Open AAI is still trying to fight a court order in the New York
Times lawsuit, forcing them to retain and provide the chat GPT logs of all
users. Something the company says they don't want to do because they care so so
much about user privacy. You guys don't even know how much we care about user
privacy. It's it's a big deal. To be clear, privacy obviously is an issue
with the order. But though OpenAI doesn't say it, the logs could also
reveal more evidence of copyright infringement or hallucinated nonsense
improperly attributed to a source that didn't even say that. But also, the logs
could provide ammunition to potential plaintiffs looking to take the advice of
the judge who recently ruled that metaanthropic training their AI on
copyrighted materials was fair use, but
only because the plaintiffs in that case made the wrong arguments. They should
have worked at Nintendo first and gone
to law school. That was dumb. The judge said other authors or news organizations
could make a stronger case against Meta or OpenAI by focusing on how the use of
Llama or Chat GBT has affected the market for books or news content. Or if
you don't want to go the legal route, you could use Cloudflare's new payper
crawl feature, which will let content creators charge AI companies to set
their web crawlers loose on the creators content. After all, as NT columnist
Kevin Ruse said in response to Sam Alman lamenting the violation of user privacy,
"It must be really hard when someone does something with your data you don't
want them to." Which is almost too perfect of a segue to our sponsor,
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delete me today. Okay, I had a whole introduction for the Quickbits typed
out, but my dog just ate it. I swear AMD
has dropped new GPU drivers that boost the RX970 XT's gaming performance by up
to 27% according to extensive testing by
Hardware Unboxed. The 9070 XT performed slightly worse than the RTX 570Ti when
it launched, but now performs 3% better
on average. Meanwhile, people are just trying to find out if the RTX 5050 is
even launched or not. In a blog post published yesterday, NVIDIA said it was
coming in the second half of July, but GPU partner Ino3D said their 50/50s are
on shelf now. And if you're getting deja vu, it's because this is the third 8 GB
card from NVIDIA this generation without any launch day reviews. I don't know,
maybe they're just sparing reviewers from feeling dumb for staying up all night reviewing a card no one's going to
buy. Speaking of no one, nothing has fully unveiled what it calls its first
true flagship phone, the Phone 3, which
will actually properly launch in the US for 800 bucks on July 15th with four 50
megapixel cameras and a fun little glyph
display on the back. You know, it's fun because it's like a normal display. Uh,
but worse, that's rude. It's fun. like
nothing's first overear headphones, the headphone 1, which has buttons
and will also launch on July 15 for 300 bucks. But will you want the nothing
some things or the Honor Magic V5, the
thinnest foldable ever with a noticeable crease in the display and also it's only
available in China? Hard choice. Theater
chain AMC will now advise you ahead of time that you'll have to sit through
about 25 to 30 minutes of ads before your movie starts. I mean, okay, some of
those are trailers. That's not fair. The change comes after AMC announced they'll
be following their competitors in showing more ads before films start, but
at least they're letting you know so you don't pay the same as a month of Netflix
to trek to the theater to sit through a TV show episode's worth of slot before
you can see your movie. It's nice. and musical artist Lord with an E. Uh, her
new album Virgin was released last week with a number of physical variants
including a fully transparent CD which
many fans discovered is not actually playable in many CD players with the
main problem being uh because of how CDs
work. Uh, see the CD is read by a laser
which is light uh which goes through
transparent things. Anyway, this Redditor got it to work in a CD player
with a tray. So, I don't know. Look for one of those maybe. Uh Lord posted some
fun facts about the album on Twitter, which I'm sure is great, but none of
them say anything about whether the clear CD idea uh was tested beforehand.
Like, this seems like designing a cup with a hole in the bottom and then never
pouring something in there before you sell it to be. I mean, may Hey, maybe
it's a prank. It's art. Look, don't prank me. Uh just come back on Friday
for more tech news, okay? Let's keep this straightforward. All right.