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This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up, required compatibility and availability. Veris 18
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Microsoft is finally fixing search in Windows 11 by giving users the ability to turn off the parts that everyone hates. What a great idea they just had. I'm Riley Murdoch. This is TechLinked, and today we learned that if Windows users pull together and unite behind a common cause, we can achieve incremental and delayed successes. The new feature, which was spotted in a recent preview build, exists as a couple of toggles in the privacy and Security section of the Settings app that that will let you turn off both web searches and Microsoft Store results, resulting in a Windows search experience that should only return results about what's actually on your computer. Yeah. Finally, Microsoft has also reportedly enhanced the search function itself, making it faster and more reliable. According to Microsoft, this indexing has gotten good enough that you can find files by typing as little as two two characters. And a new feature called Search by Substring will more effectively find files if you can only remember parts of the file name in the middle of the name. This sounds kind of like how search behaved before, but you know, sometimes it's you gotta bring things back. It's like the 90s. They took the good stuff out so that they could put it back in now. Now it's worth noting that at least the Bing list part of the way that search works was launched in Europe some time ago because they were forced to by regulation, but there's no firm release date for when this thing will come to the rest of us. Non EU Windows users can, however, take solace in the knowledge that their suffering will end soon. When it comes to search, at least, all the other problems are definitely still there until Microsoft fixes it by bringing back the good thing they took away. AMD's latest adrenaline drivers bring FSR 4.1 its most recent AI upscaling and frame gen tech to previous gen RX7000 series GPUs. And despite running on the older hardware, it's a clear step up from earlier FSR3 landing almost on par with Nvidia's DLSS 4.5. I say almost because claiming AMD is on par with Nvidia is a fast way for Lisa Su to get uninvited by Jensen from the Thanksgiving family dinner that I'm pretty sure they don't have cause they're more distant cousins than that. It's I don't know. These are notably the cards AMD had implied FSR 4.1 couldn't run on, so consider this a rare free upgrade, one that turns 43 average FPS into 64 on a RX 7900 XTX. Over 300 games support it, but for those that don't, you can enable it through an adrenaline override with the caveat that games still do need existing FSR 3.1 support. Jack Nguyen, AMD's senior VP, also mentioned in the announcement tweet that integrated graphics aren't being forgotten here. Rdna3apus will get their own lightweight version of FSR, a perfect diet model for those IGPUs watching their wattage and quietly asking does this TDP make me look fat? Meta has just launched a cheaper alternative to its Ray Ban Meta glasses, creatively named Meta Glasses.
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Whoa.
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We took the Ray Ban out so it's easier. The new glasses, which start at $300 and are still built in partnership with Ray Ban's parent company, Essilor Luxottica, which I believe owns like every pair of sunglasses in the world, it's theirs. We'll still have a camera and open ear speakers, but it won't have internal displays like the Meta Ray Ban. Not to be confused with the Ray Ban Meta, it also thankfully won't have the Ray Ban branding. Yeah, Meta, that was definitely the issue everyone had with the old glasses. The branding, not the non consensual filming, or the attempt to quietly add facial recognition software, or the fact that you were sending footage of people using the toilet and having sex to Kenyan data annotators to help train AI models. All that stuff's totally fine. Totally fine. In fact, Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth told Gizmodo that back in his day, people were uncomfortable about phones having cameras and they got over it. So everyone should just chill, okay? Every time people don't like something and then they're okay with it, that's what we want. I don't know, Andy. My smartphone never sent footage of me taking a to Kenya without me knowing. Although if it did, I wouldn't know, so that's fair. It's also fair that you should check out our sponsor Dbrand, who has a bunch of discounts they want me to tell you about. 20 bucks if you is the amount that you could save when you bundle any case with a screen protector so amazing even an idiot could put it on $55. That's the amount you could save on Kill switch kits for switch two, steam deck, other other finky things. 60%. That's a good number. And it's how much you could save on dBrand's most legally provocative product, the Dark Plates. 30% is how much you could save on skins that are made from, you know, dead animal material. I'm really selling it. And save a whopping $0 on the new Companion Cube skin for the Steam Machine. Not yet. Too soon. To check out all those discounts, go to mybossisveryshort.com it's true. Buckle up and shift into drive. We're merging into the Quick Bits shoulder check. Motherboard prices are plummeting as total sales drop over 2025% on weak demand. You know, because I mean, there's nothing to plug into them. Flagship motherboards like the ASRock Z890 Taichi are being spotted at 56% off its lowest price ever. Or ROG Strix B650Ei, my favorite motherboard. 40% off for small form factor lovers. You know what? I suggest a moment of silence for the motherboard, an empty nester whose RAM and GPUs all left to go live at an AI data center and and don't even call home. Social media Ruined A generation Meta's controversial key logging program for its employees has been paused in response to privacy concerns raised by said employees. Those concerns were sparked when all of the tracking data which was being collected leaked internally, exposing all of the employees activities, including private conversations and performance data. We're just leveling the playing field now. I know exactly how bad Steve is doing. What they're calling an internal data leak, however, seems to be just that. They wrote the data from the key logging system to a database that everyone in the company had access to. It was leaked, so jury's still out, I guess. On if it was a good idea to fire thousands of engineers and replace them with a hastily cobbled together AI. Cloudflare is working with Chrome Edge and Firefox on Private Access Control tokens, or pact, a way for websites to tell humans from bots without using captchas, logins or extra tracking. PACT would let trusted websites issue anonymous tokens your browser can flash to other sites, proving that you're a real human or that an agent's acting on the behalf of one. Yeah, flash me your tokens, Riley. He's got some pretty good tokens. It's timely as recently bots have passed humans in web traffic for the first time ever, and becoming a minority on the thing we built to connect people is an irony that's up there with inventing cars for freedom, only to sit in traffic. Man, I feel so powerful right now. I could go anywhere as soon as this clears up. Wikipedia has indefinitely blocked Larry Sanger, one of its own co founders, over off Wiki canvassing, which basically means he he rallied his outside followers to swarm an internal Wikipedia discussion and tip it the way that he wanted it to go, instead of letting the site's editors hash it out by consensus like they normally do. So Sanger is indefinitely blocked, AKA he's been submitted to the Tantalus treatment. He can see the whole library, but the moment he reaches for it, the edit button pulls away. Google it and Singapore's Nipsea Group scientists have made a car coating so black it turns a vehicle into a flat city silhouette. And unlike the famous Vantablack before it, this one might actually survive on a car. The researchers fixed Vantablack's fragility that left it with adhesion and durability issues. The new color mixes carbon black with carbon nanotubes. It's been so long, I've missed you. Anyway, the tubes trap light instead of reflecting it, allowing it to spray on normally and survive humidity in testing. So. So finally, that ecstasy dealer you knew from high school can absolutely murder out his car for real this time, along with everyone else on the street who didn't see the car coming. Nissan Serely Hope you come back on Friday for more tech news, but I Mazda, say goodbye for now because it's time to Jeep it movin'. These stories aren't gonna wrangle them.