Nvidia’s GeForce Trading Cards, EU Chat Control Vote, Claude Reflect + more!

NVIDIA has released 14 new GeForce cards. Sadly, you won't be able to put any of them in your PC because they're not graphics cards, they're trading cards. I guess technically you could put them in your PC. They just wouldn't do anything. I'm Riley Murdock, this is TechLinked, and this is NVIDIA's new GeForce Trading Cards Series 1, each of which celebrates a moment in NVIDIA's gaming history from the 1999 GeForce 256 to a Cyberpunk 2077 RTX 2080 Ti. You know, that joyous period before they abandoned us to a wretched economy where a new GPU costs more than a used Honda Civic. Nope, you can't afford a lot of gaming hardware these days and you also can't buy these cards. You have to win them through Summer of RTX giveaways or collect them at event booths at conventions like QuakeCon and Gamescom. Now, if you were hoping for cards that could, I don't know, run games, keep looking. Because rumors about an RTX 5090 SE are seemingly bull . A leak that has been spreading around online says that this card would have 32 gigabytes of VRAM paired with a 384-bit bus, which according to Overclock3D, it is not a combination that would be compatible at all. It also doesn't help that the rumor comes from GameGPU, a website which according to an Nvidia subreddit mod is unreliable and actually banned from the subreddit. But hey, if you manage to grab a few trading cards, you just need to be patient and wait for Logan Paul to put one on a chain and wear it in a video and just then wait a little bit for idiots to care about the value of it. And then you finally afford a GPU. The European parliament just voted on whether to kill the EU's infamous mass message scanning law, known by its detractors as Chat Control 1.0. And despite the majority of the votes that were cast being in favor of nuking it, the controversial law was not struck down. And that's because for this specific type of vote, the EU requires an absolute majority, meaning more than half of the total parliamentarians. But because of the number of absentees and abstentions, opponents of the law only managed a simple majority. Now, for those of you who don't know, Chat control 1 is a provisional EU law that allows the mass scanning of private messages for material that could harm children Now it provisional because this is in place while they work on more fleshed out legislation. It's the classic conundrum of trying to do a good thing by doing maybe a bad thing. One good outcome of the vote, however, was that parliament did pass an amendment to the language specifically excluding end-to-end encrypted apps like WhatsApp, from the scope of the law. Despite what some outlets are reporting, however, Chat Control 1.0 is not yet active. First, it needs to be reviewed by the EU Council, which as far as I understand it is kind of like the European version of the Council of Elrond. They now have three months to either approve it, reject it, or find some otherwise unoccupied guys to carry it to a volcano. Anthropic has launched Reflect, a Spotify wrapped style mindfulness dashboard that reveals all the topics you bother Claude the most about and your peak pestering hours with options to set quiet hours and let Claude nudge you to touch grass. It's a great way to track your habits, like paying 20 bucks a month to ask AI questions you could have Googled for free, or better yet, run on a local model instead of using data centers. Anyway, luckily you can't see your total time spent on Claude. It's a stat the wellbeing team didn't want to maximize, but they'll still add it later anyway. Reflect is all about reflections, asking you the occasional humiliating question like, what's one thing you wanna keep doing yourself, even if Claude could do it faster? But honestly, these questions are important. If you don't reflect enough, you end up like OpenAI, which is killing its ChatGPT Atlas browser barely a year after launch. Turns out nobody wanted to ditch Chrome for it. So Atlas's agentic tricks are getting stuffed into the ChatGPT desktop app and a Chrome extension. Now, if all this AI news is stressing you out, it's time for some mindful meditation. That'll really put you in the right frame of mind to hear about our sponsor. Vessi, are you tired of soggy socks ruining your day? Do you ever wish you had the durable feet of a hobbit? Well, I don't think a hobbit feet are naturally occurring, But Vessi says these Stormburst shoes are waterproof thanks to their Dymatex lining And they definitely hold up in action Rain puddles trails city streets These guys will keep your feet dry while staying breathable and comfortable Heck, their grippy outsole gives you confidence on slippery ground. And they're easy to throw on when adventure calls. So get out there with your fellowship brother. Plus, they're vegan. I bet Tom Bombadil likes that. So don't let a little rain in your weak baby feet keep you home. Get 15% off your first pair at vessi.com slash techlink, plus free shipping, a one-year warranty, and 30-day hassle-free returns. I told my therapist about the Quick Bits, and he said they were a metaphor for my inability to focus on anything for longer than 60 seconds. Then a bird flew by the window of his office, and I can't remember what he said next. It's probably not important. Patreon has partnered with Cloudflare to block AI training crawlers from scraping creators' work. This is part of an initiative Cloudflare announced last week to block AI crawlers on ad-supported pages starting September 15th. The goal is for Patreon to be an anchor partner with the hope of other platforms following suit. Jack Conte, Patreon CEO, says that he's partnering with Cloudflare because creators on his platform deserve credit and compensation for their work. There's Jack continuing his long tradition of being one half of indie funk pop band Pomplamoose and the one tech CEO that doesn't suck. Accenture, the massive consulting company your dad's rich friend Doug works for, has suffered a data breach where a hacker has claimed to have stolen 35 gigabytes of data. Now, while that doesn't sound like a lot, it reportedly includes RSA and SSH keys, which could expose the data of Accenture's clients. Which isn't great news since the firm serves most of the Fortune 100, including McDonald's, Walmart, Microsoft, Pfizer, and a bunch of others. So depending on what's in that corpus of leaked data, we could be feeling aftershocks of this hack for years to come. Fingers crossed those aftershocks don't hit McDonald's. If we're going to endure the slow rolling dystopia that is 2026, we're going to need Big Macs. John Deere has finally settled the FTC's right to repair lawsuit, ending an era where farmers paid thousands for simple fixes to their equipment that the company would only allow authorized dealers to perform. The settlement will give farmers and independent shops access to the same repair tools and software that Deere previously reserved for its dealers or as I call them Deerellers The main drawback of the settlement is that the access to these tools, unfortunately, only lasts 10 years, though advocacy groups are already gearing up to fight the good fight in 2036, when we'll all be living underground, hiding from the robots. Now, the other drawback is that without the lawsuit, I now have nothing to talk to my farmer uncle Don about at family functions. God I do not want to marry any of his sheep. Meta has pushed an update to its smart glasses that will permanently shut off the camera If you tamper with the privacy light Nice a rare privacy win boy I hope the rest of this story doesn't immediately undermine this sense of joy I feel anyway the Financial Times is now reporting that the company is working on a pair of glasses that is recording all the time without ever activating the light. No! What? According to the FT, these super sensing glasses will continuously record audio and snap photos every few seconds, constantly feeding those two streams of data into Meta's AI so it can help you recall your day. It's just trying to help. Man, huh. If only there was any other way that humans could remember what happened to them. We need AI. And surgeons at UC San Diego have tele-operated a pair of humanoid robots to yank the gallbladders out of two live pigs. It was a world first. The bots are just off-the-shelf Unitree G1s, apparently collectively nicknamed Surgy, driven by hand motions, a headset, and a foot pedal. And the cool thing is here that you can outfit them for surgery for under 75 grand, just a fraction of the half million dollars required for the da Vinci system normally used for these kinds of operations. Now, in case you were wondering about the pigs, they recovered fine, despite the operation taking hours instead of the more typical 30 minutes. But I think in this case, it's fine. I don't think they had anything on their schedule. My sheep wedding isn't for a few weeks, but it'll be way less than a couple of weeks until this Monday, when you're gonna come back for more tech news. As for me, I'm gonna do something important And I was about to... I keep forgetting what I'm supposed to do. I need those meta glasses.