Datasets:

metricv
/

metricsubs-segmenter

+Yes,
+you did come here for tech news,
+but you'll leave with something even more precious.
+This image in your mind.
+Ah ha ha ha ha, please, no applause.
+It's my pleasure.
+Google's plans to control the web are running into a couple snags
+from haters who are just mad they didn't start their own tech giant.
+The company has responded to merciless criticism of its proposed Web Environment Integrity
+API for Chrome, deemed a DRM for websites,
+and is shelving it in favor of the much different
+Android WebView Media Integrity API,
+which will apparently be much narrower in scope.
+Of course, the reason it doesn't need to be broader
+is because Android already has environmental attestation
+and uses its Play Integrity API to scan users' phones for root privileges.
+So what's a few more scans among friends?
+The new API could be used to block malicious apps and malware,
+but it could also prevent the rise of more apps like the now dead Vanced,
+which gave regular YouTube users premium features like ad-free videos and a good time.
+But Google's crusade against ad blockers might cause legal trouble in the EU.
+Privacy experts like Alexander Hanf claim that
+YouTube's anti-ad blocker measures violate Article 5.3 of EU's e-Privacy Directive,
+meaning that after forcing Apple to change their whole closed ecosystem, shtick,
+Europe might set its sights on Google next.
+As if the tech giant hasn't had enough controversy,
+they're also integrating generative AI into their advertiser tools
+because spam art is what ads need more of,
+and testing YouChat, a YouTube chatbot that users can ask about the video they're watching,
+because who has time to actually watch videos when there's all these AI toys to play with?
+I mean, I always read the comments.
+Basically the same thing.
+YouTube is also considering an AI feature that summarizes large comment sections,
+a handy feature for creators to figure out what their subscribers are talking about at a glance,
+though judging by our comment section,
+the overall effect will be like a supportive mom who's
+been possessed by a demon.
+You're doing great, sweetie.
+I hate your beard.
+Take a shower.
+Anyway, love you.
+A judge recently unsealed an amended FTC privacy complaint against Kochava,
+the world's largest mobile data broker,
+revealing disturbing allegations that the company has collected and sells a staggering amount of sensitive information
+that is linked or easily linkable to specific individuals.
+The original FTC lawsuit was blocked back in May because the complaint didn't provide enough evidence,
+but now apparently they're back with the goods and, ooh boy,
+it is spicy.
+Muy picante.
+According to the FTC, Cochava sells data including personal information like names, addresses, phone numbers,
+and precise geolocation within a few meters,
+but also demographic information like race, gender, annual income, political affiliation, religion, and...
+pregnancy status.
+I didn't have another finger.
+Kochava customers, who are hopefully just advertisers,
+could easily trace an individual's movements from their home to their work,
+to a hospital, to a church,
+or even to an emergency shelter.
+Geez.
+Allegedly, Cochava doesn't just collect information about what apps an individual uses,
+but also what they do while inside them and how much money they spend.
+You know, an easy rule of thumb of whether a product is dangerously invasive is asking yourself,
+could a domestic abuser use this to find their estranged spouse simply by typing
+pregnant female, Caucasian, Houston, candy crush,
+green party into a search bar?
+Maybe?
+MyQ, best known for their smart garage door openers,
+has apparently spent the last several months
+repeatedly blocking unauthorized third-party smart home apps from access to their devices.
+That might make sense,
+but MyQ currently has very few authorized software partners
+because they require partners to pay them for the right to interact with their devices.
+Home Assistant recently announced that they will be deactivating their MyQ integration
+since it isn't working anymore and because,
+as an open-source project,
+paying MyQ's fee simply isn't sustainable.
+You know, like when you don't have money and everyone wants to go to McDonald's?
+This has left MyQ customers in a situation
+where the apps they use to manage all their other smart devices
+simply can't interact with their garage doors.
+You might wonder why a garage door opener company
+would be trying to interfere with its customers' ability to open their garages.
+But MyQ is probably trying to force customers to use its official app,
+probably called Reddit,
+which since October has been serving obnoxious ads that interfere with the functioning of the app.
+Oh, it is Reddit.
+Sometimes even pushing the open garage button off the screen.
+While the iOS version of the app is still at 4.8 stars,
+its Android counterpart recently dropped to 3.9
+due to all of those selfish customers
+who think they shouldn't get ads on an app for a product they already paid for.
+Like, what's your problem?
+What, do you think that when you go to the restaurant,
+you should just get food when you pay for it?
+Like,  bringing it back to McDonald's.
+Quick Bits move at near relativistic speeds and thus experience significant time distortion.
+With every Quick Bit,
+I grow a fraction of a second further out of sync with the universe as you perceive it.
+Did y'all know Kim and Kanye got divorced?
+To the surprise of several Apple users,
+when they received their brand new 14-inch M3 MacBook Pros,
+the devices came installed not with a standard up-to-date operating system,
+but with an unreleased build of macOS Ventura 13.5 from back in July that couldn't be updated.
+Apple has already released an update addressing the issue,
+but this would seem to indicate that Apple's been stockpiling devices with M3 chips for the last four months.
+Apple usually creates these separate incompatible versions of its OS
+in order to keep potential leaks out of public betas,
+but it's not clear how it wound up getting sent to consumers.
+My theory?
+Snake, you've created a time paradox!
+Who's Pete Davidson?
+You mean Skeet Davidson?
+I heard he's dating Kim!
+According to reliable leaker and my best friend,
+Copite7Kimmy, please don't say that's not true,
+expensive GPU lovers should expect Nvidia
+to launch the RTX 40 Super Series
+during the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show in January.
+That would make sense considering that Nvidia reportedly
+won't be releasing the RTX 50 Series until at least 2025,
+and they tend to pair their gaming launches
+alongside big industry events.
+Fellow leaker, MegasizeGPU, has also revealed images
+of Nvidia's retail branding inserts for the series,
+and apparently Nvidia has changed the stylized typeface
+of the old Super logo with the same boring sans-serif font  it uses for literally everything else.
+Why can't at least the word Super be Super?
+Only the prices, I guess.
+The driving app Waze has launched a new safety feature
+called Crash History Alerts.
+Basically, using AI and reports from the app's community,
+Waze will alert drivers if the road they're about to turn
+onto is prone to accidents.
+However, the notifications are light on detail
+so as not to distract drivers.
+They won't tell you if the crashes are major versus minor,
+or if they involved cars, pedestrians, and or cyclists.
+Hypothetically,
+you won't know if there's been a daily crash
+at an intersection for the last year,
+or if a single car knocked over an entire bike race.
+I said I'm sorry, okay?
+I can still hear the squeals
+of all those men's Lycra rubbing together.
+A team of researchers from the Universities of California  and Sydney
+have developed an artificial brain
+from a network of randomly arranged silver nanowires.
+Dr.  Frankenstein et al.
+It's alive and strangely antibacterial.
+Its structure pattern changes predictably with electrical stimulus
+and can maintain that pattern when the stimulus is removed,
+meaning the network can learn dynamically
+and more efficiently than traditional AI training
+all in real time.
+In the near future, these silver networks
+could become more popular than GPUs,
+and maybe even grills.
+What, you've got silver on your teeth?
+I've got it in my brain, bro.
+And a software engineer used an AI-powered service
+to apply for 5,000 jobs,
+leading your mother to ask,
+what's your excuse?
+I hate you!
+She's still possessed.
+As Wired explains, the software engineer in question
+used a service called JobGPT
+from the accurately named Lazy Apply
+and landed around 20 interviews
+out of the 5,000 applications,
+compared to the other 20 interviews he got
+after manually applying to 200 to 300 jobs.
+40 interviews and still unemployed.
+I'm not sure the amount of applications is the problem.
+Some recruiters quoted in the article
+are okay with the applicants using AI tools,
+but others likened it to asking out every woman in the bar
+regardless of who they are,
+which is apparently a bad thing.
+Oh, well,
+sorry for being too nice,
+my lady.
+And it'd be nice if all you came back on Friday
+for more tech news, no matter who you are,
+unless you're Jeffrey Gardner from middle school.
+F*** you, Jeff.

Watch Out, Apple... [5v72vj2nFN0].txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,162 @@

+You're back again?
+You've been consuming a lot of tech news lately.
+I think it's time to talk to someone.
+No, not me.
+I don't count.
+I'm not real.
+Qualcomm has announced a new series of laptop processors
+representing a quantum leap forward in performance and power efficiency.
+So the company has modified their Snapdragon branding
+the only way any executives know how, adding an X.
+It's because they're all teenagers in the 90s.
+But this isn't just a naming change.
+Snapdragon X chips will be the first publicly available processors developed by Nuvia,
+a company founded by a few key members of the Apple Silicon team
+and acquired by Qualcomm in 2021.
+Like Apple's M1 and M2, Qualcomm's upcoming laptop CPUs,
+which will be revealed at the Snapdragon Summit later this month,
+won't simply feature modified off-the-shelf ARM Cortex chips,
+but a fully custom architecture called Orion.
+Building their own custom architecture is partly why Apple was able to achieve
+the mind-blowing performance and efficiency boost they did with the M1,
+which made the PC master race question everything they had ever known.
+Gaben is just a man?
+He can bleed just like us?
+All that said, there's more than a handful of reasons
+to be skeptical that these chips will be good.
+ARM is still suing Qualcomm over not paying the proper royalties for Nuvia-produced products,
+and Qualcomm's existing laptop processors
+have a reputation for sucking almost as bad as the ARM version of Windows.
+So Snapdragon X chips already have their work cut out for them.
+I mean, do we even want Apple Silicon chips for PCs? Sounds dumb.
+Microsoft has gone deep on AI, but they haven't quite figured out how to make any money off of it yet,
+probably because they've been scrolling past a lot of excellent advice from former crypto bros on social media.
+Diamond hands.
+Create pictures of diamond hands.
+GitHub Copilot, Microsoft's coding assistant, costs users $10 a month,
+but reportedly lost Microsoft over $20 per month per user,
+with power users apparently costing Microsoft up to $80 a month in electricity costs and other service fees.
+One and a half million people have already tried GitHub Copilot,
+and Microsoft Service is incredibly popular among coders,
+which is terrible news for Microsoft.
+Even worse, this isn't necessarily a problem that will disappear as users scale,
+because the LLM that powers Copilot sucks up resources like a black hole doing a keg stand.
+That's what we used to call Jimmy in college.
+As of this past April,
+ChatGPT cost OpenAI an estimated $700,000 a day just to run.
+That's probably why both Microsoft and Google
+will be charging an additional $30 per month per user
+for the recently announced AI-powered upgrades to their business software suites.
+AI made up 10 to 15% of Google's energy consumption back in 2021,
+and researchers estimate that if generative AI was added to every Google search,
+it would consume as much energy as the entire country of Ireland.
+That's either a lot or not very much at all.
+I don't typically think of energy in units of Ireland's.
+And crucially, neither do the Irish.
+A California court has ruled that Facebook's ad targeting system is discriminatory
+because it requires advertisers to choose demographic characteristics like age and gender
+to determine which users will see their ads.
+This is then amplified by Facebook's lookalike audience tool,
+which attempts to match businesses with potential customers
+that share similar traits to their current audience.
+To be clear, this wasn't a dispute over ads featuring truck nuts and whiskey-flavored toothpaste.
+Real product.
+Really?
+Yes. I'm getting those ads.
+Rather, an older woman found that she was being excluded from ads
+offering favorable deals on life insurance targeted at younger men.
+If upheld, the decision might require every ad-based platform on the internet
+to restructure their ad targeting systems,
+so Meta is likely to appeal the decision.
+Can't have that.
+Also in California,
+the Delete Act passed into law,
+which means that California data brokers must offer free, simple channels
+for users to request that their information be deleted.
+And an expansive right to repair bill was also recently signed into law,
+though it passed with Apple's blessing,
+so take that with a grain of salt.
+You know what they say, an apple a day keeps the regulators away,
+which must be why there's no apples in Europe.
+Fun fact.
+Now it's time for Quick Bits,
+brought to you by LTTStore.com.
+Feels weird, but okay.
+They, we, just announced the Stubby Screwdriver last month,
+and it has the same great ratchet as the full-sized LTT screwdriver.
+Its light back force makes it easy to drive any screw,
+whether or not they signed the waiver.
+Old Stubby here is four inches in length,
+so it's super pocketable and legal to carry on planes for self-defense if things come to that.
+The strong magnet in the shaft ensures the six included bits and your screws don't go anywhere
+except into the handle's built-in bit storage
+and the proper screw holes, respectively.
+You just called me a screw hole?
+What?
+Anyway, Mr. Stubby Screwdriver-son is durable
+and made with chemical-resistant plastics,
+and you can get yours at the link below.
+Oh, Quick Bits, man.
+I could listen to them forever up until we hit five.
+Adobe has announced major updates to AI features across its creative suite,
+including three new generative AI models, Firefly 2, Firefly Design, and Firefly Vector,
+with nine grams of protein.
+Adobe is also launching its first text-to-vector image generator,
+and they teased a new AI upscaling tool,
+which can be used for both clips of old movies and GIFs so compressed they're about to collapse into a supernova.
+Deep fry.
+Another upcoming feature is Fast Fill,
+essentially generative fill for video.
+And unlike many companies,
+we can trust that Adobe has the bravery to make us pay through the nose for it all.
+T-Mobile has decided its Price Lock guarantee is only for their newest, most expensive plans,
+and is therefore forcibly switching subscribers with cheaper, grandfathered plans onto higher-cost ones.
+Hey, it's business.
+For the affected plans,
+customers will allegedly be alerted on the 17th
+before being charged an extra $10 a month per line.
+Something T-Mobile won't go out of their way to tell you is
+you can opt out of the change by calling customer service and complaining a lot.
+It's the one simple trick that cell phone providers hate.
+Intel has released two new driver updates for their ARC GPUs this past week.
+The first increases performance by up to 119%,
+as long as you're playing one of the 20 listed games,
+with the big winner being this year's hottest game, Deus Ex Human Revolution.
+It gets better every year.
+And the main character's voice sounds even more...
+I didn't ask for this.
+Even more gaspy.
+I'm part robot, you know.
+Fortunately, Intel's newest driver update increases starfield performance by 117% or 149%,
+depending on resolution.
+To celebrate, Intel quietly released an even more budget graphics card, the A580.
+This would be great news if it wasn't like $10 less than some models of the much superior A750.
+I know you're trying to compete with Nvidia, Intel,
+but that doesn't mean you should emulate their pricing strategy, okay?
+So let's take a step back.
+Google has changed the default option for logging into personal accounts.
+Instead of putting in your password,
+users will start seeing prompts to create and use passkeys,
+which are digital credentials unlocked by things like a fingerprint,
+a face scan, a pin, basically anything that doesn't give you the option of
+using strong password one exclamation mark for every account you have.
+Passkeys are rolling out in more places across the tech universe,
+but you can still use your password and opt out of seeing the new prompts every time you log in,
+if the risk of being hacked for you is part of the whole thrill.
+Oh no, don't hack me.
+That would be naughty.
+And a 22-year-old Firefox bug has finally been fixed by a 23-year-old first-time Firefox coder,
+who was horrified to find out that the annoying bug that caused tool tips to hang around in the foreground,
+even after command tabbing away from the browser,
+was almost as old as they are.
+In fact, it's so old, it actually predates the name Firefox,
+going back to when the browser was just called Mozilla.
+The bug likely lasted two decades
+because it was both tricky to reproduce
+and more annoying than dangerous,
+just like me.
+Got him!
+And the trick to getting more tech news is to come back on Friday for another episode of TechLinked.
+That's the kind of little tips.
+You won't learn that stuff elsewhere,
+so come on back.