QAnon weirdos will be banned from Twitter, starting immediately
Apple to go beyond carbon neutral and aims to achieve net zero emissions by 2030
Small bits of news you might find interesting
The self-driving car industry’s claims over the years have come up empty
Cheap Intel i3-9100F CPU, Audio Technica turntable, DJI drones, Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen2, Kingston A2000 SSD
Twitter finally took a stand against those fucked up QAnon units using their platform to spread harmful conspiracy theories. Twitter said "we will permanently suspend accounts Tweeting about these topics that we know are engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension" as well as "1. no longer serve content and accounts associated with QAnon in Trends and recommendations, 2. work to ensure we're not highlighting this activity in search and conversations, 3. block URLs associated with QAnon from being shared on Twitter". NBC News has a bit more background. It's good that Twitter is taking action against this nonsense, after all, the standard you walk past is the standard you're comfortable with and I can't imagine anyone at Twitter comfortable with QAnon. Now it sets precedent for other social networks like Facebook, which is riddled with QAnon bullshit, to salt the Earth of these nutjobs.
Apple is taking their green-washing to the next level and are committing to making its carbon footprint to net zero by 2030. This isn't carbon neutral basic stuff, but an actual reduction in CO2 across their business and their supplier's businesses so that each device sold will have "zero climate impact". Apple's latest environmental report goes into a bit more detail regarding how they plan to move from carbon neutral to net zero emissions. This is cool and all but at a more practical level I wish Apple would do some small things with their products that would help reduce their ecological impact - use industry standard Torx screws instead of proprietary Pentalobe, use pull-tab adhesive instead of epoxy to make it easy to replace batteries, bring back RAM & SSD in slots for easy upgrades and make it all-round easier and cheaper for repairs worldwide. I really wonder if Apple's product design could change just slightly to improve product longevity.
Jeff Bezos is increasing his lead as the world’s richest man, earning US$13b in one day for a total of US$189b of wealth (that’s more than any ASX listed company!).
AMD has a bunch of new APUs (CPUs with built in graphics) based off the latest Zen 2 architecture that look cool but are only for OEMs (HP, Dell, etc) for now.
Snapchat is actually growing as a business according to their latest financial results. 9m new active users and revenue up 17%. Good for them.
The federal government has set up the Australian Broadband Advisory Council that’ll inform government on how society can benefit from the NBN & 5G.
OnePlus has a new “midrange” smartphone called Nord with a Snapdragon 765G chipset, 5G radio, quad cams, etc that’s pretty cheap but won’t get a local release
Arstechnica has a solid article taking a broad look at the self-driving car industry in 2020. All the hype from 2-3 years ago has fizzled out. Industry leaders Waymo said they'll have a driver-less commercial taxi service in Phoenix by the end of 2018 - they have it in a few small blocks. This "failure" (I'd argue it was never a realistic target in the first place and they all knew it, but said it anyways because YOLO) has cascaded down to other less avant-garde robocar startups like Aurora, Zoox and Cruise. As a result more startups are focusing on less lofty goals than transporting humans on urban streets, to trucking and last-mile deliveries. The moral of the story is "we are five years away of self-driving cars and trucks".
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Audio Technica LP60X turntable - $188.30 at JB Hi-Fi
DJI Mavic Mini Fly More Combo - $719.10 from DigiDirect’s eBay store using the code POFF10
DJI Tello Drone - $127 delivered from David Jones
Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 (14” 1080p, Ryzen 5 4500U, 512GB SSD, 16GB RAM) - $935 from Lenovo
Kingston A2000 1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD - $159.89 at Shopping Square
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