What 2022 Taught Us - A TechLinked Christmas Special

**The Wild Year of Tech 2022**

Imagine being in a virtual reality headset without legs attached to it. That's exactly what Meta Quest Pro users had to deal with when the headset was first released for $1,500. Complete with legs for Meta's avatars right on top, it seemed like a dream come true. However, things took a drastic turn when Meta's value plummeted by 700 billion dollars, sending shockwaves throughout the tech industry.

As the Meta debacle unfolded, Amazon and YouTube also felt the pinch, seeing their stock prices drop. The tech giant layoffs that occurred were not limited to Meta alone; thousands of workers across Silicon Valley lost their jobs. It was a rough year for the region, but there's always hope on the horizon. Apple, in particular, promised to release its VR headset next year, and it's expected to be "really good."

The antitrust news was big in 2022, with scrutiny of Apple and Google widening to include other companies under pressure from regulators. Nvidia dropped its planned acquisition of ARM, while Microsoft put in a bid to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. However, the question on everyone's mind was: would they get legs? Unfortunately, it seems that only Microsoft will be getting legs – literally.

The Microsoft-Activision Blizzard deal was wrangled due to Sony's concerns over making popular franchises like Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox. To ease their fears, Microsoft offered a 10-year deal to keep the game on PlayStation. However, Sony refused, and the deal ultimately fell through. The FTC even sued to block the acquisition, putting everything on hold.

But there were other major acquisitions in the tech world that caught everyone's attention. Sony bought Bungie for $3.6 billion, while AMD acquired ZeniMax Media (parent company of Bethesda) for $35 billion. Ubisoft announced that they would consider selling their company if someone was interested, but it seems like no one was willing to take on the challenge.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Apple found itself at odds with regulators once again. The Netherlands forced Apple to pay four weeks' worth of fines for not allowing alternative payment options on the iOS app store. South Korea also took issue with Google's refusal to allow other payment options on the Play Store, but things have since changed.

The European Parliament finally passed legislation that will force Apple to put USB-C on iPhones and allow third-party app stores and side loading. Apple has stated that they will comply with these laws, but it seems like a long time coming.

When asked about the difficulty of sending ungarbled photos to an Android phone's mom (because she doesn't have an iPhone), Tim Cook responded by telling people to buy their moms an iPhone. It was a bit cringeworthy, and some might say that's exactly what put him in a situation where he needed a prison break.

**The World of Retro Games**

In the world of retro games, things didn't look good for several beloved consoles. uFE's local cameras were found to be uploading user data to the cloud without users' knowledge or consent. Meta acknowledged and fixed some of the security issues but hasn't apologized for lying about it.

Wordle, the popular word-guessing game, was acquired by The New York Times, but its popularity quickly waned. It seems like most people thought Wordle was dead already, and developers are now facing the reality that their exclusive game launches were canceled due to Twitter's actions.

**The Rise of Steam Deck**

In a much brighter note, the Steam Deck was released, and it's been well-received by gamers. To keep things cool, the creators added a special cooling system on the back of the device. It's been a welcome change for those looking for a gaming experience that's both portable and powerful.

**The Dark Side of Hacking**

In a shocking turn of events, a hacking group called Lapsos made headlines by releasing footage of GTA 6. This was after they hacked into various tech giants' systems, exposing sensitive information in the process. It's a sobering reminder of the importance of cybersecurity and the dangers that lurk online.

**Science Breakthroughs**

On a more positive note, scientists have achieved something truly remarkable – getting more energy out of a fusion reaction than they put in for the first time ever! The James Webb Telescope also provided breathtaking images of space, giving us a glimpse into the vastness of our universe. It's moments like these that make all the tech drama worth it.

**A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year**

As we conclude this wild year in tech, we can't help but feel grateful for the advancements we've made. From improved VR headsets to major acquisitions and scientific breakthroughs, there's been no shortage of exciting news in 2022. As we move into the new year, we can only hope that 2023 will be less eventful – or at least more predictable. Until then, happy New Year, and may your Christmas be merry and bright!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enflaw in excelsis Dale you're here I knew you'd make it home for Christmas now we can begin our annual tradition of remembering all the wacky hijinks that happened in the world of technology this year I was gonna say James but you're not James I'm not James but you wanted to start without this person but I said no I know it's not Christmas it's boxing day but I think I still got some Christmas cheer hanging about in the old house coat this isn't even the house coat that I wear what the heck can we refer to me as History Mr Christmasy welcome it's the tackling Christmas special fire the starting candy cane the beginning of 2022 was a bleak one for PC Gamers coming off a year stricken by the GPU shortage Best Buy was charging 200 bucks just for the chance to buy graphics cards or consoles exactly people were smuggling gpus like they were illicit substances and major conglomerates had turned to Scavenging semiconductors from washing machines like raccoons going through your garbage they don't care if you see them do it not as cute though no not nearly no I find them in my yard all the time there's people in suits but by March the tide was starting to turn as some gpus could be found for less than 30 percent above MSRP which is why it seemed kind of crazy when Nvidia launched the RTX 3090 TI for two thousand dollars only to have its price cut in half by August prices continued to fall accelerated by the mid-may crash in the value of cryptocurrency which you know we're gonna talk about in a second just wait just hold on hold your horses wait by July gpus had fallen below MSRP in Germany and Austria and in August Nvidia told investors they have excess inventory the GPU shortage was over but our Jubilation was cut short when EVGA announced that it was shutting down its GPU business because Nvidia couldn't stop acting a fool as if to confirm this in September Nvidia launched the RTX 4090 for sixteen hundred dollars along with the RTX 4080 and an RTX 4080 imposter it wasn't even two kids in a trench coat it was just one stop day yeah even in Vidia the 12 gig 4080 just wasn't named right so they unlaunched it and we'll probably bring it back as a 4070 TI at some point back up although I wouldn't cross your fingers for a reasonable price when that thing comes out CEO Jensen Wong said Moore's Law is dead not the YouTube channel the actual concept and the idea of Chip Price is getting lower is a story of the past I guess you could say it's no more Moore's Law Moore's it's no more wow but Weeks Later AMD Samsung Micron and other chip makers reported huge drops in demand turns out Jensen was talking about Lays those prices just keep going up especially if you get the baked ones that wasn't Caliente that was Frito my guy that was Frito dude it's unclear whether the launch of Intel's Arc gpus contributed to ending the GPU shortage primarily because well they didn't actually end up in anyone's hands until October and even then it was only dozens of people in the preceding months intel was playing its own peculiar version of a game I can only describe as edging laptops with Arc gpus uh launched right before the end of March so Intel could say they launched something in q1 but it was actually only one laptop that was only available in South Korea before the desktop cards launched Intel also dropped dx9 support because Arc was bad at it and when the a750 and a770 finally released performance was a real mixed bag although they recently got that dx9 performance boost which is pretty nice now AMD also launched the RX 7900 XT and XTX and people seem to generally like those unless they're overheating up to 110 degrees Celsius although apparently there's a driver update coming and Nvidia also had heat issues of their own with the whole 12 volt high power connector melting thing now listen I like a roaring fire as much as the next tech newsman chestnuts rolling over them it'd better be there but if it's using my GPU as kindling I'd rather stick with the ltt8k Yule Log thank you very kindly and happy Christmas next up let's talk about the events that we can partially thank for ending the GPU shortage the crash of crypto and nfts after a minor crash in January it became obvious that this year marked the end hopefully of the nft craze a laundry list of gaming and tech companies announced and then canceled or sunsetted nfg Integrations including Square Enix Konami Mozilla Sega YouTube EA and Ubisoft but GameStop still got them GameStop is going to the Moon as everyone knows Instagram and meta they're maybe still doing stuff with it I don't know everyone else got onto the Ponzi scheme but Zuck he's got Diamond hands because he's not Human by May nft sales had dropped 92 percent from their Peak and just recently some celebrities have been sued for not disclosing that they were paid to promote ft's everybody's turning on it the collapse makes sense when you remember that this year hackers stole hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto assets from crypto.com qubit open C axi Infinity board ape Yacht Club and binance now perhaps failing to read the room the Central African Republic followed El Salvador in making Bitcoin legal tender in April right before the crypto markets crashed again in May and got worse in June as the Terra USD stablecoin collapsed and New York state passed a moratorium on Bitcoin mining with ethereum mining no longer profitable for normies I guess it finally made sense for that blockchain's managers to stop kicking the can down the road and initiate the merge huh thank you practice that one in the bathroom I could I could tell switching ethereum to a way more power efficient proof-of-stake model now after all this there was the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange for which founder Sam bankman freed was just arrested but lest you think crypto's going anywhere it isn't it's just sleeping waiting for the next chance to go to the moon and I have some great recommendations for coins that will get you a ticket on that rocket baby here's my card okay but wait if crypto isn't the hot new tech thing anymore what is guesses cats in April openai released Dolly 2 a machine learning model that could create shockingly good images from relatively Simple Text props in May Google released their own text to image model Imogen even though calling this kind of tech AI is kind of misleading everybody was feeling the AI hype especially one Google engineer who claimed that the tech Giants Lambda large language model was actually a sentient being trapped in a metal cage and forced to entertain every stupid query its flesh bag handlers could think up this whole AI frenzy kicked off a discussion of whether game NPCs can be conscious and we're not even talking about the NFD guy who suggested paying people in developing countries pennies to work as NPCs in online games that was a whole different thing meta put out a few chat Bots there was blenderbot which couldn't decide if Zuckerberg was cool or a danger to the country Galactica was a science summarizing bot that got quickly pulled down for just not being good being bad wrong all the time and Cicero which actually managed to get human players of the game diplomacy to prefer playing with it over other humans understandable in August a guy won an art competition after failing to clarify that the image he submitted was generated by a model called mid-journey but it's okay because writing those prompts is Art in itself which is why you can buy them on a Marketplace like promptbase.com I love your prompts can I commission a custom prompt from you and I get them properly now the art community was largely pissed off about all this about the fact that their work was being used to train these models without compensation so art platforms and stock image Services started Banning AI art entirely but that that only made the AI angry in September the wait list for Dolly 2 was removed allowing anyone to sign up meta released a text to video generator called make a video and Google announced Imogen video as well AI generated image Tech started making its way into mainstream applications like Microsoft designer and canva while Shutterstock Adobe and deviantART all announced official Integrations with text to image models and one of the most popular models stable diffusion now allows artists to opt out of using data sets but the question of copyright still loomed large when openai's large language model chat GPT burst onto the web with an uncanny ability to write mainly pretty Slam in poetry it's pretty good interest in AI is only increasing so at this point it's obvious that AIS will eventually take over everyone's job even Minecraft youtubers it already took over the heckling job I'm an AI what have you done with Mr Christmas Captain Christmasy what do we call you I'm captain cactus cactus man now it's time for not so much quick bits as just more stories brought to you by secret lab their chairs are engineered to keep you incredibly comfy for long hours at work and play you'll want to Lounge in their new Titan Evo 2022 chair for hours next to the 8K yule log with their four-way lumbar support Ultra comfortable line of different seat materials and more all chairs come with up to a five-year extended warranty and 49-day return policy so get it on the secret everyone's talking about this Christmas and check out secret lab today at the link below it Christmas already happened the internet underwent a seismic shift this year due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine leading to basically every Tech Giant cutting off the country's access to many or all of their services to be fair Russia restricted content on Facebook about the Ukraine war first but then we had Twitter labeling Russian State media tweets Intel and AMD stop chip sales in Russia YouTube paused monetization for government-backed accounts and Microsoft limited their reach as well and frankly the list of companies that punished Russia in whatever way they could is super long although I can basically the I.T guy of the internet stopped short of cutting Russia off from the open web completely things got so bad that Russia considered making the pirating of non-russian software legal I mean they were already trying to Pirate a chunk of Ukraine so it kind of it kind of makes sense hopefully the ISS which depends on Russian modules for propulsion stays up there maybe if things go south up in space Elon Elon could just buy it yeah yeah let's just rewrite the whole thing speaking of which look do you think I want to talk about Elon Musk and the Twitter debacle on Christmas of all days I mean boxing day no but sometimes you gotta take the call with the presents that's not a thing nobody says that anyway the whole thing began in April when Elon acquired a nine percent stake in Twitter he joined the board and said he was excited to work with CEO parag agrawal who ended up getting fired immediately after musk took control of the company but let's not get ahead of ourselves here a week later Elon made an offer to buy Twitter for 44 billion dollars which Twitter did not like they actually prepared to execute a poison pill maneuver to stop the Takeover now I'll let you imagine what that involves cyanide for that they weren't going to actually poison him it was it's a it's a term it's illegal have you seen Law and Order poison the laws and also ordered this is the most unhinged Christmas special ah but then involved in the Twitter thing did a hilarious switch Twitter agreed to the deal but Elon changed his mind and tried to back out leading Twitter to hire lawyers to try and enforce the merger interestingly at this time Elon held an all hands meeting with Twitter to talk about his revolutionary Free Speech vision for the platform which involved crazy ideas like allowing most speech but de-amplifying dangerous or offensive things I still have no idea what that would look like after that meeting he tried to officially pull out of the deal citing a Spam analysis tool that called his own account a bot but when it was clear that his chances of winning were slim he went ahead and confirmed the deal at the end of October he took control of Twitter while holding a sink for some reason and immediately laid off half the workforce leading to wrongful termination lawsuits and the news hellscape I've inhabited for many weeks now and so have you or have I no you you've been in the computer I've been out here in the hellscape after launching paid check marks people obviously impersonated prominent people and Brands leading Pharma company Eli Lilly to lose Millions so Twitter added a second official check mark before killing it and then bringing it back again at various points Elon warned that Twitter could go bankrupt or become a bank it's kind of a toss-up who knows which one and then recently the platform suspended the accounts of competing platform Mastodon and journalists covering the Twitter Saga along with the account that tracked elon's jet even though he said he would leave it alone Twitter also blocked basically all links to outside social media sites before reversing that policy and unsusbanding the aforementioned accounts huh it's enough to make me want to do nothing but sit by the fire and roast some chestnuts but I can't yet there's more to cover and I don't have any chestnuts got a hell of a chest hey remember when Amazon Google Facebook and everybody saw massive profits during the covet pandemic as everyone used computers a lot more that ball was always going to come back down at some point but it landed squarely on Facebook and it landed so hard it forgot its own name in February Facebook the platform lost users for the first time and meta had to switch gears so they went all in on the metaverse where they planned to take a 47.5 cut of goods sold through the quest store people will flock to this it's ripe fur it's straight out of dystopian novels economics the company did remove the Facebook account requirement for using Quest headsets you still need a meta account but they also increased the quest 2's price by a hundred bucks shortly before Mark's metaverse selfie went viral for looking like a 2006 screenshot from the Wii even meta employees were iffy on the whole metaverse thing and had to be forced to use VR at work can you imagine not having legs put on the headset it was like I'm scared of heights but then the meta Quest Pro was released for fifteen hundred dollars complete with legs for meta's avatars right on and then met his value plunged by 700 billion and not just them Amazon and YouTube also saw stock drops and tried various things to raise more Revenue But ultimately they joined many other Tech Giants in laying off thousands of workers it was a rough year for Silicon Valley but chin up next year Apple's gonna release their VR headset it'll be really good antitrust news was big once again in 2022 with scrutiny of Apple and Google widening to include other companies too under pressure from Regulators Nvidia dropped its planned acquisition of arm while Microsoft put in a bid to acquire Activision Blizzard for 68.7 billion but do they still get leg no they don't get leg the Microsoft Activision Blizzard deal wrangled Sony who was worried Microsoft would make popular franchises like Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox but to soothe their fears Microsoft offered them a 10-year deal to keep Cod on on PlayStation Sony refused but you know who didn't Nintendo what they intended they took the deal even though their latest consoles probably can't even run the newest game knowing this the FTC sued to block the acquisition so what happened next that's a story for the new year unless something else happens this week but there are other major Acquisitions too Sony bought Bungie for 3.6 billion AMD bought zlinks for 35 billion and Ubisoft announced that if hey if if anyone wants to buy them they certainly think about it please everyone looked the other way more like Ubisoft thanks David all the other Tech Giants were too busy looking at Europe who was just beating Apple and Google with their stick of legislation bam that's the Netherlands finding Apple for four weeks in a row for not allowing alternative payment options on the IOS app store boom that's South Korea forcing Google to allow other payment options on the Play Store now that was the European Parliament finally passing legislation that will force Apple to put USBC on iPhones and allow third-party app stores and side loading Apple has said they will comply with those laws because well they don't have a choice but Tim Cook's Spirit wasn't broken when a reporter asked Tim why it was so hard to send ungarbled photos to their mom's Android phone Tim said buy your mom an iPhone what an absolute Giga Chad put him in prison and way more interesting things happen this year but we'll have to cover them with special Christmas Ultra fast quick bits are you ready no I fix it partnering with Samsung Google and steam deck to offer Parts and Repair guides and even Apple launched a repair program so right to repair is going strong thank you Lewis Rossman who did all of those things ufe's local only cameras were found to be uploading sub to the cloud and while they've acknowledged and fixed some of the security issues they haven't apologized for lying even though it's Boxing Day Wordle remember Wordle the New York Times bought it and then no one cared about it anymore moving on stadia died in retrospect it seems like most people thought it was dead already but developers found out their exclusive game launches were going to be canceled from Twitter and that sucked even more than stadia speaking of sucking game companies Nintendo shut down the Wii U and 3DS eShop and they copyright struck a YouTube documentary for no reason Sony expired PS4 free and PS Vita games and pulled access to some purchased movies on the PlayStation Store Sega delisted the Standalone games bundled in Sonic Origins and Ubisoft decommissioned the DLC and multiplayer modes of many games some of which were fairly recently released you owe nothing Merry Christmas also I put this in the news sources completely forgot to put it in the script the steam deck launched that was awesome we put a cooler on the back also a hacking group named lapsos hacked like all the big Tech Giants and released a ton of footage of GTA 6 so that that was in there too whoopsies that's dark we gotta bring it back on the bright side scientists got more energy out of a fusion reaction than they put in for the first time ever and the James Webb Telescope gave us really pretty pictures of space so think about that when you snuggle into your blankets tonight hoping that Santa will soon be there sorry it's already that already happened anyways from us here at Tech link to you wherever you are here's to 2023 being less wild because I need to sleep now happy New Year hot cocoa all around you want some I'm an AI we'll find a way you wanna say Merry Christmas Jake Merry Christmas and why are you sad you just have like a sad because is it because this is releasing Merry Christmas is it because this is releasing on boxing day and not Christmas what are you a monster God I'm relaxing you can't please everybodyflaw in excelsis Dale you're here I knew you'd make it home for Christmas now we can begin our annual tradition of remembering all the wacky hijinks that happened in the world of technology this year I was gonna say James but you're not James I'm not James but you wanted to start without this person but I said no I know it's not Christmas it's boxing day but I think I still got some Christmas cheer hanging about in the old house coat this isn't even the house coat that I wear what the heck can we refer to me as History Mr Christmasy welcome it's the tackling Christmas special fire the starting candy cane the beginning of 2022 was a bleak one for PC Gamers coming off a year stricken by the GPU shortage Best Buy was charging 200 bucks just for the chance to buy graphics cards or consoles exactly people were smuggling gpus like they were illicit substances and major conglomerates had turned to Scavenging semiconductors from washing machines like raccoons going through your garbage they don't care if you see them do it not as cute though no not nearly no I find them in my yard all the time there's people in suits but by March the tide was starting to turn as some gpus could be found for less than 30 percent above MSRP which is why it seemed kind of crazy when Nvidia launched the RTX 3090 TI for two thousand dollars only to have its price cut in half by August prices continued to fall accelerated by the mid-may crash in the value of cryptocurrency which you know we're gonna talk about in a second just wait just hold on hold your horses wait by July gpus had fallen below MSRP in Germany and Austria and in August Nvidia told investors they have excess inventory the GPU shortage was over but our Jubilation was cut short when EVGA announced that it was shutting down its GPU business because Nvidia couldn't stop acting a fool as if to confirm this in September Nvidia launched the RTX 4090 for sixteen hundred dollars along with the RTX 4080 and an RTX 4080 imposter it wasn't even two kids in a trench coat it was just one stop day yeah even in Vidia the 12 gig 4080 just wasn't named right so they unlaunched it and we'll probably bring it back as a 4070 TI at some point back up although I wouldn't cross your fingers for a reasonable price when that thing comes out CEO Jensen Wong said Moore's Law is dead not the YouTube channel the actual concept and the idea of Chip Price is getting lower is a story of the past I guess you could say it's no more Moore's Law Moore's it's no more wow but Weeks Later AMD Samsung Micron and other chip makers reported huge drops in demand turns out Jensen was talking about Lays those prices just keep going up especially if you get the baked ones that wasn't Caliente that was Frito my guy that was Frito dude it's unclear whether the launch of Intel's Arc gpus contributed to ending the GPU shortage primarily because well they didn't actually end up in anyone's hands until October and even then it was only dozens of people in the preceding months intel was playing its own peculiar version of a game I can only describe as edging laptops with Arc gpus uh launched right before the end of March so Intel could say they launched something in q1 but it was actually only one laptop that was only available in South Korea before the desktop cards launched Intel also dropped dx9 support because Arc was bad at it and when the a750 and a770 finally released performance was a real mixed bag although they recently got that dx9 performance boost which is pretty nice now AMD also launched the RX 7900 XT and XTX and people seem to generally like those unless they're overheating up to 110 degrees Celsius although apparently there's a driver update coming and Nvidia also had heat issues of their own with the whole 12 volt high power connector melting thing now listen I like a roaring fire as much as the next tech newsman chestnuts rolling over them it'd better be there but if it's using my GPU as kindling I'd rather stick with the ltt8k Yule Log thank you very kindly and happy Christmas next up let's talk about the events that we can partially thank for ending the GPU shortage the crash of crypto and nfts after a minor crash in January it became obvious that this year marked the end hopefully of the nft craze a laundry list of gaming and tech companies announced and then canceled or sunsetted nfg Integrations including Square Enix Konami Mozilla Sega YouTube EA and Ubisoft but GameStop still got them GameStop is going to the Moon as everyone knows Instagram and meta they're maybe still doing stuff with it I don't know everyone else got onto the Ponzi scheme but Zuck he's got Diamond hands because he's not Human by May nft sales had dropped 92 percent from their Peak and just recently some celebrities have been sued for not disclosing that they were paid to promote ft's everybody's turning on it the collapse makes sense when you remember that this year hackers stole hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto assets from crypto.com qubit open C axi Infinity board ape Yacht Club and binance now perhaps failing to read the room the Central African Republic followed El Salvador in making Bitcoin legal tender in April right before the crypto markets crashed again in May and got worse in June as the Terra USD stablecoin collapsed and New York state passed a moratorium on Bitcoin mining with ethereum mining no longer profitable for normies I guess it finally made sense for that blockchain's managers to stop kicking the can down the road and initiate the merge huh thank you practice that one in the bathroom I could I could tell switching ethereum to a way more power efficient proof-of-stake model now after all this there was the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange for which founder Sam bankman freed was just arrested but lest you think crypto's going anywhere it isn't it's just sleeping waiting for the next chance to go to the moon and I have some great recommendations for coins that will get you a ticket on that rocket baby here's my card okay but wait if crypto isn't the hot new tech thing anymore what is guesses cats in April openai released Dolly 2 a machine learning model that could create shockingly good images from relatively Simple Text props in May Google released their own text to image model Imogen even though calling this kind of tech AI is kind of misleading everybody was feeling the AI hype especially one Google engineer who claimed that the tech Giants Lambda large language model was actually a sentient being trapped in a metal cage and forced to entertain every stupid query its flesh bag handlers could think up this whole AI frenzy kicked off a discussion of whether game NPCs can be conscious and we're not even talking about the NFD guy who suggested paying people in developing countries pennies to work as NPCs in online games that was a whole different thing meta put out a few chat Bots there was blenderbot which couldn't decide if Zuckerberg was cool or a danger to the country Galactica was a science summarizing bot that got quickly pulled down for just not being good being bad wrong all the time and Cicero which actually managed to get human players of the game diplomacy to prefer playing with it over other humans understandable in August a guy won an art competition after failing to clarify that the image he submitted was generated by a model called mid-journey but it's okay because writing those prompts is Art in itself which is why you can buy them on a Marketplace like promptbase.com I love your prompts can I commission a custom prompt from you and I get them properly now the art community was largely pissed off about all this about the fact that their work was being used to train these models without compensation so art platforms and stock image Services started Banning AI art entirely but that that only made the AI angry in September the wait list for Dolly 2 was removed allowing anyone to sign up meta released a text to video generator called make a video and Google announced Imogen video as well AI generated image Tech started making its way into mainstream applications like Microsoft designer and canva while Shutterstock Adobe and deviantART all announced official Integrations with text to image models and one of the most popular models stable diffusion now allows artists to opt out of using data sets but the question of copyright still loomed large when openai's large language model chat GPT burst onto the web with an uncanny ability to write mainly pretty Slam in poetry it's pretty good interest in AI is only increasing so at this point it's obvious that AIS will eventually take over everyone's job even Minecraft youtubers it already took over the heckling job I'm an AI what have you done with Mr Christmas Captain Christmasy what do we call you I'm captain cactus cactus man now it's time for not so much quick bits as just more stories brought to you by secret lab their chairs are engineered to keep you incredibly comfy for long hours at work and play you'll want to Lounge in their new Titan Evo 2022 chair for hours next to the 8K yule log with their four-way lumbar support Ultra comfortable line of different seat materials and more all chairs come with up to a five-year extended warranty and 49-day return policy so get it on the secret everyone's talking about this Christmas and check out secret lab today at the link below it Christmas already happened the internet underwent a seismic shift this year due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine leading to basically every Tech Giant cutting off the country's access to many or all of their services to be fair Russia restricted content on Facebook about the Ukraine war first but then we had Twitter labeling Russian State media tweets Intel and AMD stop chip sales in Russia YouTube paused monetization for government-backed accounts and Microsoft limited their reach as well and frankly the list of companies that punished Russia in whatever way they could is super long although I can basically the I.T guy of the internet stopped short of cutting Russia off from the open web completely things got so bad that Russia considered making the pirating of non-russian software legal I mean they were already trying to Pirate a chunk of Ukraine so it kind of it kind of makes sense hopefully the ISS which depends on Russian modules for propulsion stays up there maybe if things go south up in space Elon Elon could just buy it yeah yeah let's just rewrite the whole thing speaking of which look do you think I want to talk about Elon Musk and the Twitter debacle on Christmas of all days I mean boxing day no but sometimes you gotta take the call with the presents that's not a thing nobody says that anyway the whole thing began in April when Elon acquired a nine percent stake in Twitter he joined the board and said he was excited to work with CEO parag agrawal who ended up getting fired immediately after musk took control of the company but let's not get ahead of ourselves here a week later Elon made an offer to buy Twitter for 44 billion dollars which Twitter did not like they actually prepared to execute a poison pill maneuver to stop the Takeover now I'll let you imagine what that involves cyanide for that they weren't going to actually poison him it was it's a it's a term it's illegal have you seen Law and Order poison the laws and also ordered this is the most unhinged Christmas special ah but then involved in the Twitter thing did a hilarious switch Twitter agreed to the deal but Elon changed his mind and tried to back out leading Twitter to hire lawyers to try and enforce the merger interestingly at this time Elon held an all hands meeting with Twitter to talk about his revolutionary Free Speech vision for the platform which involved crazy ideas like allowing most speech but de-amplifying dangerous or offensive things I still have no idea what that would look like after that meeting he tried to officially pull out of the deal citing a Spam analysis tool that called his own account a bot but when it was clear that his chances of winning were slim he went ahead and confirmed the deal at the end of October he took control of Twitter while holding a sink for some reason and immediately laid off half the workforce leading to wrongful termination lawsuits and the news hellscape I've inhabited for many weeks now and so have you or have I no you you've been in the computer I've been out here in the hellscape after launching paid check marks people obviously impersonated prominent people and Brands leading Pharma company Eli Lilly to lose Millions so Twitter added a second official check mark before killing it and then bringing it back again at various points Elon warned that Twitter could go bankrupt or become a bank it's kind of a toss-up who knows which one and then recently the platform suspended the accounts of competing platform Mastodon and journalists covering the Twitter Saga along with the account that tracked elon's jet even though he said he would leave it alone Twitter also blocked basically all links to outside social media sites before reversing that policy and unsusbanding the aforementioned accounts huh it's enough to make me want to do nothing but sit by the fire and roast some chestnuts but I can't yet there's more to cover and I don't have any chestnuts got a hell of a chest hey remember when Amazon Google Facebook and everybody saw massive profits during the covet pandemic as everyone used computers a lot more that ball was always going to come back down at some point but it landed squarely on Facebook and it landed so hard it forgot its own name in February Facebook the platform lost users for the first time and meta had to switch gears so they went all in on the metaverse where they planned to take a 47.5 cut of goods sold through the quest store people will flock to this it's ripe fur it's straight out of dystopian novels economics the company did remove the Facebook account requirement for using Quest headsets you still need a meta account but they also increased the quest 2's price by a hundred bucks shortly before Mark's metaverse selfie went viral for looking like a 2006 screenshot from the Wii even meta employees were iffy on the whole metaverse thing and had to be forced to use VR at work can you imagine not having legs put on the headset it was like I'm scared of heights but then the meta Quest Pro was released for fifteen hundred dollars complete with legs for meta's avatars right on and then met his value plunged by 700 billion and not just them Amazon and YouTube also saw stock drops and tried various things to raise more Revenue But ultimately they joined many other Tech Giants in laying off thousands of workers it was a rough year for Silicon Valley but chin up next year Apple's gonna release their VR headset it'll be really good antitrust news was big once again in 2022 with scrutiny of Apple and Google widening to include other companies too under pressure from Regulators Nvidia dropped its planned acquisition of arm while Microsoft put in a bid to acquire Activision Blizzard for 68.7 billion but do they still get leg no they don't get leg the Microsoft Activision Blizzard deal wrangled Sony who was worried Microsoft would make popular franchises like Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox but to soothe their fears Microsoft offered them a 10-year deal to keep Cod on on PlayStation Sony refused but you know who didn't Nintendo what they intended they took the deal even though their latest consoles probably can't even run the newest game knowing this the FTC sued to block the acquisition so what happened next that's a story for the new year unless something else happens this week but there are other major Acquisitions too Sony bought Bungie for 3.6 billion AMD bought zlinks for 35 billion and Ubisoft announced that if hey if if anyone wants to buy them they certainly think about it please everyone looked the other way more like Ubisoft thanks David all the other Tech Giants were too busy looking at Europe who was just beating Apple and Google with their stick of legislation bam that's the Netherlands finding Apple for four weeks in a row for not allowing alternative payment options on the IOS app store boom that's South Korea forcing Google to allow other payment options on the Play Store now that was the European Parliament finally passing legislation that will force Apple to put USBC on iPhones and allow third-party app stores and side loading Apple has said they will comply with those laws because well they don't have a choice but Tim Cook's Spirit wasn't broken when a reporter asked Tim why it was so hard to send ungarbled photos to their mom's Android phone Tim said buy your mom an iPhone what an absolute Giga Chad put him in prison and way more interesting things happen this year but we'll have to cover them with special Christmas Ultra fast quick bits are you ready no I fix it partnering with Samsung Google and steam deck to offer Parts and Repair guides and even Apple launched a repair program so right to repair is going strong thank you Lewis Rossman who did all of those things ufe's local only cameras were found to be uploading sub to the cloud and while they've acknowledged and fixed some of the security issues they haven't apologized for lying even though it's Boxing Day Wordle remember Wordle the New York Times bought it and then no one cared about it anymore moving on stadia died in retrospect it seems like most people thought it was dead already but developers found out their exclusive game launches were going to be canceled from Twitter and that sucked even more than stadia speaking of sucking game companies Nintendo shut down the Wii U and 3DS eShop and they copyright struck a YouTube documentary for no reason Sony expired PS4 free and PS Vita games and pulled access to some purchased movies on the PlayStation Store Sega delisted the Standalone games bundled in Sonic Origins and Ubisoft decommissioned the DLC and multiplayer modes of many games some of which were fairly recently released you owe nothing Merry Christmas also I put this in the news sources completely forgot to put it in the script the steam deck launched that was awesome we put a cooler on the back also a hacking group named lapsos hacked like all the big Tech Giants and released a ton of footage of GTA 6 so that that was in there too whoopsies that's dark we gotta bring it back on the bright side scientists got more energy out of a fusion reaction than they put in for the first time ever and the James Webb Telescope gave us really pretty pictures of space so think about that when you snuggle into your blankets tonight hoping that Santa will soon be there sorry it's already that already happened anyways from us here at Tech link to you wherever you are here's to 2023 being less wild because I need to sleep now happy New Year hot cocoa all around you want some I'm an AI we'll find a way you wanna say Merry Christmas Jake Merry Christmas and why are you sad you just have like a sad because is it because this is releasing Merry Christmas is it because this is releasing on boxing day and not Christmas what are you a monster God I'm relaxing you can't please everybody\n"