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This episode is brought to you by focus features. On March 27, Focus Features invites you to be a part of the most explosive movie of this year's Sundance and South by Southwest Film Festivals. The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocalyptimist is being called supremely entertaining and the most urgent movie of our time. The AI doc, or How I Became an Apocalyptomist, rated PG13 only in theaters March 27. Phew.

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Oh, we did end up getting our scheduled shipment of tech news, but it was kind of close. Apparently someone made a huge mistake and now ships are having trouble distributing crucial resources throughout the world or something. Anyway, brain off tech news time Nvidia's DLSS5 reveal has been met with overwhelming backlash from gamers and the gaming industry, spawning memes calling the AI enhanced characters yet yassified looks maxed freaks, and game developers referring to it as game design without art direction. As with all AI generated content, there's legitimate concern about art becoming homogenized, everything kind of becoming the same, an issue which has never affected games before. Digital Foundry was the first to cover it, and while they did mention in their video that people might not like the tech, they ended up getting dragged through for glazing the demo a bit too hard. At one point they said, we've never seen elves look this realistic as they toggle DLSS5 on and off, making an Oblivion elf NPC morph into simply different versions of Mickey Rourke. Digital Foundry's follow up video is appropriately titled why we should have Waited with our coverage. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has told Tom's Hardware that critics of DLSS5 reducing the tech to an AI slop filter are pushing completely wrong, saying it's not post processing at the frame level, it's generative control at the geometry level. But even if those strange words do make sense, saying DLSS5 can make game characters look like they were photoshopped by a middle schooler using geometry, it's not. I don't know, it's not better now. To be fair, ray tracing and DLSS frame gen were both mocked at launch and not now. Those enjoy generally neutral to positive sentiment. So we may want to entertain the admittedly outlandish idea that the Internet might be overreacting a bit to something. Despite the intensity of the backlash and the tone deafness of Nvidia's response, there were a handful of dissenting opinions from the gaming community, with senior character artist Jorgen Ava Cilkute stating that the online response is extreme for what the tech actually is, and that most critics don't grasp that on a technical level, DLSS5 allegedly is just enhancing lighting rather than generating images from prompts. I've never seen lighting add makeup to someone's face before, but there could be a special light I don't know about. PC Gamer also acknowledged that DLSS5 makes environments pretty, and Nvidia's real mistake was in using overhyped language and focusing on characters in their demos. But the Verge has what is probably the most realistic take here. DLSS5 is to games what motion smoothing is to TVs, something you'll turn off when visiting your relatives. For their own good. They don't. It's not their fault they don't have taste AMD has responded to a growing scandal over laptops made by Chinese company chewy, mislabeling their CPUs, essentially catfishing customers. The so called Silicon Gate started when Notebook Check found that the Chuwi Corebook X reported its CPU as a Ryzen 5 7430U, but it was actually an older Ryzen 5 5500U. Honestly understandable mistake. They look similar. We're not even talking about a wrong sticker on the laptop situation here. The BIOS window settings and even CPU Z were unable to notice anything amiss, despite what the actual dye under the heat sink seems. When Chuwi got caught a second time doing the same thing with its CoreBook plus model, they chose to do the reasonable thing and ensure this issue was fixed by sending legal threats to Notebook Check for breaking the stories. Which, to no one's surprise, triggered a bit of a Streisand effect. Tom's hardware also confirmed a performance deficit of up to 20% in specific workloads, while warning that other brands sharing the same ODM motherboard might be compromised. The chip continues to hit the fan as Chewy's Hong Kong distributor Hornington announced just a funny name, announced a recall of the three affected products, and offered full refunds. Chewy themselves haven't really commented publicly on the scandal, and frankly, it's unclear what anyone can do if they don't want their arms ripped off. Sorta works, but CPU Z released an update specifically to ensure this trickery can be caught, and in their statement AMD said they had no knowledge of the matter beforehand and reserved the right to unleash their legal team, the corporate equivalent of saying her sis, we don't know her like that, she don't sit with us. Our sponsor does though. Jawa, the number one online marketplace to buy and sell new and used gaming gear and get awesome custom PCs at amazing prices. It's built by gamers for gamers. Every listing is manually checked for quality and their verified sellers have been vetted by the Jawa team. So what do you want? Huh? GameCube controllers. They got them hot pink Wii console. It's on there. Unlocked Xbox Series S that lets you play games from a bunch of other consoles. That's really specific. But yes, it's on there too. Transactions are protected on both sides, buyer and seller, so you're not rolling the dice on some random forum post. And if you've got an old GPU sitting around, you can sell it directly to Jawa. No listing, no waiting. Check it out Jawa at the link below. Lucky for you, shipping delays can't delay the quick bits from entering your bloodstream directly. Right now it's happening. Ah, intel dropped a couple cool things this week. The Core Ultra 7 270HX plus and Core 9 290HX plus are mobile versions of the Arrow Lake refresh desktop chips that that launched recently. And a new driver will let integrated and discrete arc GPUs download pre compiled shaders via the cloud instead of doing it themselves, cutting loading times by more than 3 times and by 37 times in God of War Ragnarok, which is less of a benchmark and more of a cry for help. What was it doing before? Mozilla is adding a free built in VPN with a 50 gigabyte per month data cap to Firefox 149, which will be rolling out March 24th. Now, free VPNs are usually sketchy, but Mozilla's entire brand is built on privacy and trust, so they have a bit of a motivation not to harvest your data and ruin everything. Firefox is also debuting a new mascot called Kit, which Mozilla went out of their way to say is not a fox or a red panda. Stop calling it that, while also explicitly stating that Kit has no mouth and it won't even be able to scream either. Google's personal intelligence feature is now available to all free Gemini users in the US not just paid subscribers who can now allow Gemini to access all of their Google apps and personalize its responses. And in a glorious exception to the general trend of AI things these days, it's opt in. You don't It'll leave you alone. Sort of. Google says Gemini doesn't train directly on your inbox or photo library, but Gemini will absolutely read them when you ask it to and Maybe when it just gets bored or something, you know? Samsung confirmed to Bloomberg yesterday that it's killing off the $2900 Galaxy Z Tri Fold just three months after launch. The company had apparently always positioned the double folding phone as a showcase of its engineering rather than a mass market product. Why would you want to mass market a product that shows off your engineering? Not for us selling it in small batches directly through their website, Industry sources told South Korean newspaper Dong Ae Ilbo that this was because rising component costs left virtually no profit margin. The small scale nature of the releases led every batch to sell out in minutes, with resellers flipping them for nearly triple the price. Which I mean, is oddly appropriate. Trifold, right? Yeah. Am I After seeing this extreme customer demand for the phone, Samsung made the only logical choice to stop selling it. Wait, so I'm still and a student engineer has designed and built a 3D printed shoulder mounted rocket launcher, making 3D printed handguns suddenly seem quaint and banal. Alisher Kojayev also included guidance and flight control systems in the prototype, using about $96 in parts. Because this kid is not screwing around, his website describes how billion dollar state arsenals are now in the reach of determined individuals using readily available parts, tools and skills. However you feel about a functional guided projectile costing less than a nice dinner for two or One thing's for sure, it'll probably keep someone in Washington up tonight, and you'll be up at night wondering what the tech news is if you don't come back on Friday for more tech news. Either that or you'll be worrying about gas prices. But we don't talk about that. We just talk about AI slopping games, an ill thought out operation. Crippling a global shipping bottleneck won't affect that. Probably.