There's no doubt that Microsoft reckons AI is the future of computing, as they've invested 2 billion euro into Mistral, the European equivalent of OpenAI. In return for their 2 billion euros, "Mistral's open and commercial language models available on Microsoft's Azure AI platform" and gives Microsoft a minor stake in the company. Mistral also released Mistral Large, their "flagship" text generation model that competes with GPT-4 and is available not only as an API, but as a chatbot called Le Chat (because they're French) that's currently available as a beta to show off the API.
The US Supreme Court is hearing a case right now to decide if "social platforms akin to newspapers, which have First Amendment protections that give them editorial control over content—or are they common carriers, like phone providers or telegraph companies, that are required to transmit protected speech without interference". This is in response to laws in Texas and Florida that make it a crime to moderate online platforms, which happened because of the perception that "conservative" voices are being "unfairly" censored. Tech companies argue those state's laws infringe on the First Amendment and hamper their "ability to decide for themselves what speech they will publish and how they will present it to users".
The Verge has a story about people distributing music on floppy disks in the year of our lord 2024. It's basically a of a song compressed down enough to fit in 1.44MB and sold on the retro medium for shits and giggles, but I like it. According to Discogs there's over 2,000 floppy disk music releases, many of them from the 90s, before MP3s were really a thing, containing MIDI files. I remember avidly collecting MIDIs back in the day! Used to turn them into ringtones and give em to kids at school. There's a label in Hungary called Floppy Kick that sells disks containg music on Bandcamp for a couple of euro. A album is just a bunch of floppies, a song per track!
Macworld December 1984 (gui-dos / The Internet Archive)
📻 Dirty Magic - The Offspring
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