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This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. When you visit the doctor, you probably hand over your insurance, your ID and contact details. It's just one of the many places that has your personal info and if any of them accidentally expose it, you could be at risk for identity theft. Lifelock monitors millions of data points a second. If you become a victim, they'll fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year@lifelock.com podcast terms apply.
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Look, we all go back and reuse our old work from time to time. Sometimes I'll copy and paste a segment I did in like 2019 into a new episode and you never even notice because of how I look the exact same. So is it really so bad that intel just launched the Core i5 110 built with the company's Comet Lake architecture from 2019 when they couldn't figure out how to get past their 14 nanometer process. So they just kept optimizing it and renaming it for 14 nanometer plus and then 14 nanometer plus plus recycling. You know it helps fish and frogs from the specs, the Core i5 110 appears to literally be a rebadged Core i5 10,400 which is available on Amazon for 130 USD, but the rebadged version is priced at 200 bucks cause it's a collector's item. Honestly, you're disrespecting the hobby. This isn't the first time intel has helped the environment. Back in July, they quietly rebadged a Core i5 12400 as the Core i5 120F, but at least that came with a 100 MHz boost compared to the original Alder Lake chip from 2021 two years ago. I don't know, intel might be scraping the bottom of the barrel here after firing their consumer products boss and the chief architect behind its Xeon CPUs, leaving the remaining leadership serving the tech world equivalent of week old donuts. Which for the record, I would still eat. They're fine. Nepal has gone from banning social media to using discord to elect an interim prime minister. Now to explain that, we've got a fast track through the past two weeks, so stay with me. Here we go. Last month, posts on Nepali social media calling out government corruption and income inequality were trending heavily. On August 28, the government gave social platforms a week to conform to new monitoring requirements and then blocked the ones that didn't, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. That triggered intense protests in the capital city Kathmandu, during which police used live ammunition against protesters, killing 19. The government quickly lifted the social media ban, but surprisingly that didn't really calm anyone down. The protests intensified and multiple government buildings and politicians homes were set on fire, including the prime minister's, with his wife still inside. Contrary to many reports, she is still alive but in critical condition, according to the NOW xpm, who resigned and fled the country with the government in limbo. A civic group called Hami Nepal organized a Discord Channel that quickly amassed tens of thousands of members, including the leaders of the so called Gen Z protest movement. Incredibly, the army then asked the Discord Channel organizers to nominate a new leader of the country. So they had a poll on Discord and the winner, former Chief Justice Susheela Kharki, was officially sworn in as the country's interim prime minister this morning. She'll be overseeing elections for everyone who missed the Discord invite, but it's nice to know the GamerChat app can replace a parliament in a pinch. Nintendo announced some pretty surprising things during this morning's direct livestream, including the addition of Virtual Boys games to the Switch online library this coming February to relive the days when playing a VR game was like wearing a first gen Batman suit in that it didn't let you turn your head. You'll need to either purchase a $100 replica of the original Virtual Boy hardware, which opens up so you can slot in your Switch, or the $25 cardboard version, which you will use exactly once. Nintendo also revealed the title of the next Mario movie, the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, presumably starring Princess Rosalina. Rosalina. It doesn't matter, but she's voiced by Chris Pratt. But my favorite reveal was Pokemon Pocopia, which is kind of like Pokemon meets Minecraft Animal Crossing. Oh, and also you play as a Ditto who wakes up in some kind of wreckage to discover its trainer is perhaps missing or worse. And then it takes on human form in kind of a wiggly, wacky copy of its trainer. It then reshapes the land with its shape shifting abilities, morphing its hands into Scyther blades and Hitmonchan's boxing gloves and, you know, vomiting up furniture. I'm not sleeping on that, but I do agree with this commenter who's unironically excited to use Ditto's body horror capabilities for farming. I have so many questions. Does the Ditto think it is its trainer? It is this the Ditto's way of coping with the trauma of loss, along with the usual questions about the morality of enslaving and forcing sentient beings to battle. I had to stop playing Pokemon because I just start spiraling and the only thing that ever stops it is our sponsor Micro center, where September is all about overstock and clearance. So trust me, you'll want to take advantage of the best items on sale all month long, like this 4K game capture station for 40 bucks off or half off of this wireless mouse shaped like a capybara. Like, come on, you're gonna miss out on this. Adopt that thing. Phoenix. Congratulations. You are getting a Micro Center. That's right. Later this year, Micro center will open their 30th store inside you. So sign up to get a free 128 gig flash drive when the store opens. And I bet you didn't know how. Micro center also has tech news and tutorial articles and a PC builder tool and even more stuff you don't know about. So learn about it at the link in the description. Thanks Micro Center. Look, we all go back and reuse our old work from time to time. Sometimes I'll copy and paste a segment I did in like 2019 into a new episode and you never even notice because of how I look. The exact same quick bits. Yeah, yeah, that'll work. All of the new iPhone 17 models, and probably the iPhone Air as well, will have a setting that disables POP Pulse Width modulation or pwm, which should reduce the screen flickering issues experienced by some iPhones and iPads at low brightness levels. MacRumors spotted the change in a pre release version of iOS 26 which launches on Monday, but someone also found a screenshot of the setting already, which is being celebrated by the 17,000 people who apparently visit the subreddit rpwmsensitive every week to participate in a big group cry. Well, not anymore if they buy new iPhones. AI company Perplexity is being sued once again, this time by Merriam Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica. They are really gonna throw the book at them. Yeah, as usual, the lawsuit accuses Perplexity of copyright infringement and improper attribution, which the company has been weathering lawsuits over since at least early 2024 from many other people. Meanwhile, the FTC has launched an investigation into the harms posed to kids by chatbots from all of the other major AI companies, including Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Xai. I fully expect the defense to revolve around arguing that AI is basically sentient and these chatbots are only a couple years old, so if anything, we need to defend them from the heinous plot prompts being slung at them by human kids. Honestly, I think the legal system might be ready for this at this point, PC parts company Height has directed all owners of its all in one liquid cooler, the Thicc with two C's Q80 trio, to stop using it and remove it from their system immediately. It's haunted by the ghost of a certified baddie. No, there's apparently a fragile internal component that can cause leakage. Thankfully, the company's earlier model, the thick Q60, uses a different design and is totally fine. But the thick Q80 was too thick. You never go full thick. And researchers in Taiwan have managed to get plants to suck up more carbon dioxide from the air by replacing the enzyme that plants normally use for that process with a more efficient one with the new enzyme. A specific weed being tested in this study weighed two to three times more as the control plants produced more seeds and had more leaves that were also larger, which all mean that they sucked up more carbon. So this could either lead to a great way to mitigate climate change or dinosaurs running amok on the mainland. How? Chaos. Chaos theory. It's just. Yeah, sometimes dinosaurs show up. Sometimes you show up Back here for more tech news on Monday, too. Hey, maybe bring some dinosaurs and we can play around with them. You know, my favorite is Therizinosaurus, just FYI.