Windows Weekly 947: Hallucinated Clown Shoes

Protesters take over Microsoft's Building 34, objecting to the company's technology being allegedly used by Israel. Is it more than simply cybersecurity usage, and how is Microsoft handling employee activism? In other news, Gemini suddenly vaults to the front of AI image editing capability, and the OG Gears of War has been remastered at least twice (but now it's cross-platform).

Windows 11

Resume from your (Android) phone in testing in Dev and Beta channels
Copilot app gets semantic search and new home page across all Insider channels
25H2 feature focus: Administrator Protection probably works but it's more disruptive than even UAC was
Windows 11 gets a nice Bluetooth quality update
Parallels Desktop 26 for Mac is out, but it's a minor update for individuals

Microsoft 365

Microsoft to fix one of the biggest issues with Word
Reminder: OneNote for Windows 10 hits EOL in October

Apple's AI floundering continues as it considers a Perplexity or Mistral acquisition
And tests a Gemini AI model for Siri in-house
Perplexity offers a $5 per month Comet Plus subscription that pays content makers
Anthropic sort of brings Claude extension to Chrome
NotebookLM audio and video overviews are now available in over 80 languages
And AI Mode is now available in Search in over 180 countries
Norton's AI web browser gets off to a rough start
Proton Lumo gets a big update
Rant: The real problem with the Windows 2030 talk, and why everyone (on both sides) is wrong about AI

Dev

Microsoft lets Visual Studio devs tune-down GitHub Copilot, finally
Microsoft makes some progress with improving Windows App SDK, supposedly

Xbox and gaming

Xbox Cloud Gaming expands to Xbox Game Pass Core Standard, adds PC games for the first time
Steam and other stores come to Xbox app on PC
Activision says it will reverse some of the stupidity it introduced in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
Nintendo invented the 30 percent fee that's still common today in digital app/game stores, but when it did so, the fee actually made sense... and it still does today, but only for the videogame industry

Tips & Picks

Tip of the week: Edit images with Gemini
Tip of the week: Subscribe to Chris's new newsletter, The Windows ReadMe
App pick of the week: Gears of War
App pick of the week: NVIDIA Broadcast app

Hosts: Leo Laporte and Paul Thurrott

Guest: Chris Hoffman

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Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

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Published on 1 day, 19 hours ago

Podcast Episode Details

Windows Weekly 947: Hallucinated Clown Shoes