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You're back again?
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You've been consuming a lot of tech news lately.
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I think it's time to talk to someone.
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No, not me.
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I don't count.
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I'm not real.
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Qualcomm has announced a new series of laptop processors
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representing a quantum leap forward in performance and power efficiency.
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So the company has modified their Snapdragon branding
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the only way any executives know how, adding an X.
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It's because they're all teenagers in the 90s.
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But this isn't just a naming change.
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Snapdragon X chips will be the first publicly available processors developed by Nuvia,
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a company founded by a few key members of the Apple Silicon team
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and acquired by Qualcomm in 2021.
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Like Apple's M1 and M2, Qualcomm's upcoming laptop CPUs,
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which will be revealed at the Snapdragon Summit later this month,
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won't simply feature modified off-the-shelf ARM Cortex chips,
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but a fully custom architecture called Orion.
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Building their own custom architecture is partly why Apple was able to achieve
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the mind-blowing performance and efficiency boost they did with the M1,
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which made the PC master race question everything they had ever known.
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Gaben is just a man?
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He can bleed just like us?
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All that said, there's more than a handful of reasons
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to be skeptical that these chips will be good.
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ARM is still suing Qualcomm over not paying the proper royalties for Nuvia-produced products,
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and Qualcomm's existing laptop processors
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have a reputation for sucking almost as bad as the ARM version of Windows.
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So Snapdragon X chips already have their work cut out for them.
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I mean, do we even want Apple Silicon chips for PCs? Sounds dumb.
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Microsoft has gone deep on AI, but they haven't quite figured out how to make any money off of it yet,
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probably because they've been scrolling past a lot of excellent advice from former crypto bros on social media.
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Diamond hands.
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Create pictures of diamond hands.
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GitHub Copilot, Microsoft's coding assistant, costs users $10 a month,
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but reportedly lost Microsoft over $20 per month per user,
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with power users apparently costing Microsoft up to $80 a month in electricity costs and other service fees.
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One and a half million people have already tried GitHub Copilot,
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and Microsoft Service is incredibly popular among coders,
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which is terrible news for Microsoft.
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Even worse, this isn't necessarily a problem that will disappear as users scale,
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because the LLM that powers Copilot sucks up resources like a black hole doing a keg stand.
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That's what we used to call Jimmy in college.
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As of this past April,
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ChatGPT cost OpenAI an estimated $700,000 a day just to run.
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That's probably why both Microsoft and Google
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will be charging an additional $30 per month per user
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for the recently announced AI-powered upgrades to their business software suites.
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AI made up 10 to 15% of Google's energy consumption back in 2021,
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and researchers estimate that if generative AI was added to every Google search,
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it would consume as much energy as the entire country of Ireland.
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That's either a lot or not very much at all.
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I don't typically think of energy in units of Ireland's.
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And crucially, neither do the Irish.
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A California court has ruled that Facebook's ad targeting system is discriminatory
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because it requires advertisers to choose demographic characteristics like age and gender
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to determine which users will see their ads.
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This is then amplified by Facebook's lookalike audience tool,
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which attempts to match businesses with potential customers
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that share similar traits to their current audience.
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To be clear, this wasn't a dispute over ads featuring truck nuts and whiskey-flavored toothpaste.
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Real product.
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Really?
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Yes. I'm getting those ads.
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Rather, an older woman found that she was being excluded from ads
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offering favorable deals on life insurance targeted at younger men.
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If upheld, the decision might require every ad-based platform on the internet
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to restructure their ad targeting systems,
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so Meta is likely to appeal the decision.
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Can't have that.
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Also in California,
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the Delete Act passed into law,
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which means that California data brokers must offer free, simple channels
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for users to request that their information be deleted.
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And an expansive right to repair bill was also recently signed into law,
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though it passed with Apple's blessing,
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so take that with a grain of salt.
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You know what they say, an apple a day keeps the regulators away,
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which must be why there's no apples in Europe. Fun fact.
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Now it's time for Quick Bits,
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brought to you by LTTStore.com.
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Feels weird, but okay.
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They, we, just announced the Stubby Screwdriver last month,
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and it has the same great ratchet as the full-sized LTT screwdriver.
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Its light back force makes it easy to drive any screw,
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whether or not they signed the waiver.
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Old Stubby here is four inches in length,
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so it's super pocketable and legal to carry on planes for self-defense if things come to that.
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The strong magnet in the shaft ensures the six included bits and your screws don't go anywhere
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except into the handle's built-in bit storage
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and the proper screw holes, respectively.
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You just called me a screw hole? What?
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Anyway, Mr. Stubby Screwdriver-son is durable
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and made with chemical-resistant plastics,
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and you can get yours at the link below.
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Oh, Quick Bits, man.
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I could listen to them forever up until we hit five.
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Adobe has announced major updates to AI features across its creative suite,
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including three new generative AI models, Firefly 2, Firefly Design, and Firefly Vector,
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