Zuck, tired of the metaverse, posting a video to Instagram with the caption "our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit". He also told The Verge that "we've come to this view that, in order to build the products that we want to build, we need to build for general intelligence" - also referred to as AGI (artificial general intelligence). He doesn't have a "clear definition for AGI or an idea of when it will arrive", but "the important part is actually the breadth of it, which is that intelligence has all these different capabilities where you have to be able to reason and have intuition". Good luck with that "responsible" bit Mark, I trust you've learned from your mistakes.
Medion Australia (aka Aldimobile) was fined $259,440 after ACMA found "1600 cases where SIM-swap requests were completed without the customer verification check, along with one password reset request". These unauthorised SIM-swap requests "led to nine known cases of people having their SIMs swapped illegally, five of whom suffered financial losses totalling over $160,000". It's fucked that something so basic wasn't done by a company that absolutely knows better, putting their customers at massive risk. I reckon in addition to the $260k fine, the people who lost money should sue Aldi for whatever they lost, as it's Aldi's fault the scammers got their phone number to approve any transactions! I am not a lawyer but that sounds like a solid case to me.
Netflix, Spotify and YouTube have all said they won't have an app for Apple's Vision Pro VR headset. Not, "we have an app coming soon, just not on launch", neither of them has any intention (at the moment) of developing a native app for it at all. Both Netflix and YouTube said people can just watch whatever they like in the browser. Watching video is one of the main use cases I've seen for Vision Pro, so not having what is arguably the two most popular ways to watch video available except in a web browser, is a pretty shit experience. Probably doesn't help that Netflix competes with Apple TV+, Spotify competes with Apple Music and Google competes with, well, almost everything Apple does. Why would you want to make your competitors niche product better? Maybe if Apple Vision Pro takes off and achieves some sort of critical mass, but right now don't give Apple the satisfaction, fuck 'em.
Want a Steam Deck but don't need it to be portable? Check out ChimeraOS - it's "an operating system that provides an out of the box couch gaming experience. After installation, boot directly into Steam Big Picture and start playing your favorite games". It only works with AMD GPUs but looks like a really interesting project. Check out this video on YouTube of it in action. It runs Linux and takes advantage of Steam's Proton compatibility tool (just like on the Steam Deck) to play a heap of games that don't have native Linux support. Perfect for building your own game console if what Sony and Microsoft are offering don't do it for ya.
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
Telstra's Mobile Exchange on Wheels MKII (Telstra / Flickr)
📻 Standing in the Way of Control (Soulwax Nite Version) - Gossip
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