Australia to finally get vehicle fuel efficiency standards, RACV to replace Tritium EV chargers in VIC

They're still consulting and whatnot, but the federal government's preferred model for a New Vehicle Efficiency Standard is online for everyone to see. Australia will finally join every other developed country in having a pathway to ensure cars sold here use less fuel over time and eventually, be zero emissions. Ben Lever's blog has a solid look at the finer details of the plan, which is overall good, but if the government takes the coward option, it'll create a loophole that car makers will exploit to sell bigger, more polluting vehicles like what happened in the USA. Also in EV related news, the RACV is scrapping all 24 of its Tritium DC fast chargers in Victoria and replacing them with Kempower units. That's a few million bucks down the drain as they've only been in service for less than 5 years.

Tim Cook hints at AI-related announcement soon & Zuck reckons opening an EU iOS app store is too hard

Apple and Meta released their financial results last week and while they're still richer than God and making more money than they ever have, that's not the interesting news. What's actually interesting is Tim Cook saying in an earnings call when talking about AI, "we're excited to share the details of our ongoing work in that space later this year". Apple rarely gives a hint on future products, so this is meaningful. I'd be surprised if WWDC 2024 didn't have a large portion of it dedicated to generative AI. Meanwhile, Zuck said at Meta's earnings call when asked if they'll open an iOS app store in the EU "(Apple) made it so onerous, and I think so at odds with the intent of what the EU regulation was, that I think it's just going to be very difficult for anyone, including ourselves, to really seriously entertain what they're doing there". Not that I want a Meta app store or that a Meta app store would be any good, but it's a shame we can't even see what an iPhone with alternative app stores looks like.

NBN commissioned report reckons NBN is awesome, also tens of thousands of premises leaving NBN

NBN commissioned a report by Accenture and that report says NBN "will improve Australia's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by a total of around $400 billion over the eight years from 2023 to 2030". It goes on to say that for every 1 Mbps increase in average broadband speeds in remote areas, there's a 16x "GDP uplift", and a 2x uplift in regional and major cities. All sounds amazing, but as David Swan over at Nine discovered, hidden in the details are 15,000 premises dropping out of the NBN in brownfields areas, with 2023 seeing "tens of thousands" of premises ditching NBN-based internet connections for cheaper alternatives like 4G/5G, more reliable ones like Starlink, or simply nothing at all. NBN connections cost too much for most people who are weighing up if they should pay for a month of internet or groceries, or medicine, or fuel for their car to get to work. Why the ALP haven't introduced concession card pricing for a $30/m 50mbit NBN plan is beyond me.

Uni students are using LLM/AI on assignments unaware that it often makes stuff up

A survey of over 1,000 UK uni students found that "found 53% were using AI to generate material for work they would be marked on", "1 in 4 are using applications such as Google Bard or ChatGPT to suggest topics" and "1 in 8 are using them to create content". Only 5% admitted to "copying and pasting unedited AI-generated text into their assessments". That doesn't sound too bad to be honest - kids are using an LLM to tease out a topic then writing it themselves. The problem however, is "1 in 3 students using AI did not know how often it hallucinates". We've got a decent chunk of students asking AI for help with their assignments and a decent chunk of those students don't know enough about the topic (they're students after all!) to determine if what they're being fed is bullshit. We better hope the academic assessment systems unis have in place are working properly, otherwise a non-insignificant number of students trained on hallucinating AI are gonna slip through the cracks and end up in the real world doing real jobs and creating real chaos.