OpenAI's got a new thing - Sora. It is "able to generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background. The model understands not only what the user has asked for in the prompt, but also how those things exist in the physical world". It's not yet available for public use but it is "available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks" and they've "granted" access to "a number of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals". Some demos are on the OpenAI website. It's not as shit as I thought, makes me ponder what it will be capable of in 2-5 years time, how people will abuse it and if it'll outweigh any good uses it may enable, if any.
Jake Moffatt asked Air Canada's chatbot about the airline's bereavement rates and was told he could get a refund for the difference up to 90-days after the ticket was issued. When he tried to do that Air Canada said no, that the bot has provided "misleading words" and that "it could not be held liable for information provided by the bot". Jake took Air Canada to a civil tribunal where the airline persisted with this dumb argument. The tribunal member saw through it and said "there is no reason why Mr. Moffatt should know that one section of Air Canada's webpage is accurate, and another is not", awarding Jake the money he asked for in the first place plus costs. It's only a small potatoes Canadian tribunal, but maybe the companies implementing these shitty chatbots will think twice before letting them loose on the public, lest they be actually liable for what they say.
Nginx is a pretty popular web server, used by 34% of websites according to W3Techs, and despite being open source, is "owned" by F5 Networks. One of the core developers, Maxim Dounin, has forked the project, dubbed Freenginx, because he opposed assigning a CVE to a bug in Nginx's QUIC-related code. That seems like a weird hill to die on, but whatever the reason, this creates a problem as a few contributors in Russia already forked Nginx out to a new project called Angie after F5 abandoned Russia for invading Ukraine. Now that Maxim isn't contributing to Nginx and those in Russia aren't either, there's not a lot of people left working on Nginx at the level Maxim was, despite F5's stewardship/ownership of this tool that's very important to the internet.
As someone that finds in-ear earbuds painful regardless of the material or size, suffers frequent ear infections and generally has a bad time with anything ear related, Bose's new Ultra Open Earbuds have captured my attention. They're wireless and kinda hang off your ear like an earring, sitting just outside your ear to blast sound into it. The sound isn't as good as proper in-ears and you hear more of the outside world than with in-ears as there's no seal and don't have noise cancellation obviously. But they're not as big as bone-conducting headphones, don't leak as much audio as neck speakers and shouldn't pop out of your ears like non-in-ear earbuds. Colour me intrigued.
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.
Launched on July 10, 1962, Telstar 1, developed by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), was the world's first active communications satellite. AT&T used the satellite to test basic features of communications via space. Soon after launch, Telstar enabled the first transatlantic television transmission, linking the United States and France. In November 1962, Telstar's electronics became compromised through exposure to Van Allen Belt radiation, resulting in the satellite's deactivation in February 1963. Telstar was one of the most significant communications satellites of the early space age. It raised an important policy question: Should communications satellites be operated and controlled by private corporations or under government auspices? The United States chose government direction and created two new institutions, COMSAT and INTELSAT, to develop satellite communications, an arrangement that lasted for more than two decades. (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum)
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