All of my opinions are italicized and sources are in blue.
Just like the 4060 Ti, this GPU barely outperforms its last generation counterpart, the 3060. This is clear looking at the specs. The RTX 4060 has less cores than the 3060, less VRAM, less PCIe lanes, and a lower bit memory bus. At best, the 4060 is 15% faster than the 3060. That may seem good in a vacuum, but there are other graphics cards on the market. Most notably is the last generation RX 6700 XT from AMD. At the time of writing, the 6700 XT is $10 more than the 4060, comes with a free game on Newegg, and performs up to 20% better than the 4060. The 6700 XT can also outperform the 4060 Ti in some games. Nvidia didn’t even try to make a better GPU in terms of hardware. The only advantages come from Nvidia’s new software. Only when using Nvidia’s DLSS 3 with frame gen, the 4060 barely comes out faster than the RX 6700 XT. What is the cost of this better performance? Higher input latency, worse visuals, and it is only supported by a handful of games. Nvidia even tried to entice reviewers to only look at DLSS 3 results to obstruct real performance.
In conclusion, the 4060 is a terrible GPU and Nvidia does not care about the consumer market. They are chasing the enterprise market that got them to their $1 trillion market valuation last month. Since the 4060 is ~20% worse than the 6700 XT, the only fitting price for it is $250 or less, not $300. If you are in the market for a GPU, then buy a 6700 XT or find a used GPU for a compelling price.
The Pixel Fold is Google’s attempt to make a folding phone. Based on reviews from various news outlets, the Pixel Fold is one of the best folding phones yet. Like the Oppo Find N, the Pixel Fold is a compact phone on the outside, with a 5.8 inch screen. Unfolded, it has a 7.6 inch screen with rather large bezels, even worse than the original Galaxy Z Fold. The Pixel Fold has Google’s in-house SOC, the Tensor G2. While it may be better at machine learning compared to the Z Fold 4, which has the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, the Pixel Fold is slower compared to other foldables. Since Google is the company that maintains Android, the Pixel Fold works great with first party Google apps. Other apps, like social media, are unoptimized and do not fill the entire display. That is not exclusive to the Pixel Fold since other foldables are not optimized either.
Now for the headlining feature, it breaks after four days. Ars Technica found that the screen on the Pixel Fold died after four days of light use. The cause of this death is a small spec got in between the bezel and the plastic layer, as seen in the image below. Once the display was closed, the pressure of the other display side was enough to puncture the OLED panel. This durability flaw is not acceptable on a $1800 phone.
YouTube is looking to take a more aggressive approach in preventing viewers from using ad blockers while watching videos on its platform. As BleepingComputer reports, people have been posting screenshots on social networks like Reddit that show a pop-up notice warning them that their player will be blocked after three videos. The warning says YouTube will block their ability to play videos on the platform unless they disable their ad blocker or add the website to their white list. “Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide,” the notice continues. To go ad-free, the company tells users to get a YouTube Premium subscription so “creators can still get paid”. I hope my ad-blocker goes unnoticed, which is uBlock Origin.
The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is the foundation of Android today, being an open-source version of the platform that’s maintained by Google. This version of Android also ships with a variety of open-source apps, except the messaging and dialer apps. The good news is that this shouldn’t affect the vast majority of consumers. Many brands either have their own phone and messaging apps or rely on Google’s newer, closed-source phone and Messages apps. The bad news is Google has been removing features from AOSP little by little. Louis Rossmann calls it “A death by a thousand cuts”. The reason people create forks of Android is because Google collects all of your information. Now, these open source developers would have to create their own dialer and messaging apps in order for them to work. Over time, AOSP might be completely discontinued or become a shell of what it once was.
Gamurs is a gaming news conglomerate that owns multiple gaming news sites including Dot Esports and Destructoid. In March, Gamurs fired, by some estimates, around 40 percent of its workforce. Now, just months later, the media group has been caught putting up a job listing for an “AI Editor,” who with the help of an “AI Content and SEO Strategist” would use AI, like ChatGPT, to output up to an astounding — if not outright impossible — 200 to 250 articles of questionable quality per week. According to the listing, the “AI Editor” would have to “write headlines, add links, add images, and other WordPress production processes,” and would be expected to “rewrite content where appropriate”. Assuming a five-day work week, that’s a lot to ask of one person to do with up to 50 articles per day, or less than ten minutes per article. The pay isn’t remarkable, either. At the listed salary range of $40,000 to $55,000 per year, that works out to roughly $4.23 per article, at best. It is terrible to see large companies fire massive quantities of their staff. This has to be one of the strangest job listings I have ever seen.
UK Police blame Android SOS feature for uptick in false emergency calls
Amazon recruiting small businesses to perform local deliveries for them
Google Kills off AR glasses (How Google of them)
The Vatican Releases Its Own AI Ethics Handbook
Cleaner accidentally ruins decades of US college’s research by turning off freezer
Researchers attempt to reconstruct rooms from reflections in a human eye
