I was invited along to the Brolosophy podcast a few weeks ago for a chat about all kinds of technology related stuff. First half is about me (why I like tech, growing up as a nerd, MacTalk/One More Thing/The Sizzle), then lots of random questions the host threw at me about artificial intelligence and technology’s deepening role in society. Enjoy!
Telstra stops selling NBN plans faster than 50mbit to FTTN, FTTB, FTTC premises
NTSB blames Tesla’s lack of attention monitoring in yet another fatal Autopilot crash
DNS-over-HTTPS via Cloudflare & NextDNS now default resolver for USA Firefox users
Use these mute filter keywords to block all the annoying official Twitter app “features” nobody ever asked for
Cheap Hisense 65" 4K TV, Doom 1 2 & 3 for Switch, Kogan mechanical keyboard, Fitbit smart scale
The NBN is so bad that Telstra has stopped offering customers not hooked up via FTTP any plans faster than 50mbit. If you're on FTTN, FTTB or FTTC and want some Telstra NBN the fastest they'll sell ya is 50mbit, even if your connection can go faster. The sad fact is that there's so much variability in the quality of these connections, it's less hassle for Telstra to just not sell anything faster than 50mbit than deal with people complaining that they're paying for 100mbit and they're only getting 60-70-80mbit and having to explain the intricacies of the NBN's woeful technology choices. The ACCC also loves slapping ISPs selling people plans that don't need advertised speeds so this is one way to avoid it.
The USA's National Transportation Safety Board has completed an investigation into the cause of a fatal accident that involved a Tesla Model X in 2018. The car didn't realise a lane was ending and slammed into a dividing barrier at almost 100km/h. They determined that the driver, who was playing a game on his phone whilst the car was in Autopilot mode at the time of the crash, did so because he trusted the Autopilot system way beyond its capabilities. They blame Tesla's "ineffective monitoring of driver engagement" as a large contributing factor. Tesla haven't responded via a bitchy blog post (yet) like they normally do and haven't formally contacted the NTSB about their multiple reports in almost 3 years.
Mozilla has turned on DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) by default for those in the USA using the latest version of Firefox. Cloudflare and NextDNS are the providers that all of Firefox's DNS requests will now go through, bypassing an ISPs server. Why do this? ISPs in the USA love selling off the browsing activity of their users (probably happens in Australia too) and by encrypting the DNS requests it's little a bit harder for ISPs to figure out what you're doing on the web. Some people don't like it because it centralises all the DNS requests with a smaller number of people (i.e: Cloudflare and NextDNS instead of dozens/hundreds of ISPs). In Australia using encrypted DNS (along with SNI encryption) also makes it slightly more obtuse in an ISP's mandatory data retention dossier on you.
Someone's found a bunch of keywords you can mute on Twitter that also end up muting certain categories of tweets. For example, if you add "suggest_who_to_follow" to your mute list, you won't see those annoying "follow these people!" tweets in your timeline. There's loads of others like "suggest_activity", "generic_activity_momentsbreaking", "suggest_ranked_organic_tweet" that I don't quite 100% know what will be blocked, but it all sounds like bullshit I don't want on Twitter. Not so much of an issue if you use Tweetbot or some other 3rd party Twitter client, but if you need to persist with the official Twitter apps/website, this mute list makes Twitter a much better place.
Hisense 65R6 65” 4K TV - $760 + delivery from VideoPro’s eBay store using the code PRETZEL10
Doom, Doom 2 and Doom 3 are on sale at the Nintendo eShop - $2.27/$2.27/$4.49
Kogan full RGB mechanical keyboard (blue switches) - $32.99 + delivery
Fitbit Aria Air Bluetooth smart scale - $69 at Big W/Officeworks/Amazon AU
🎶 A Girl Like Me - Desert Sessions
😁 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Join us on Slack and chat with other Sizzle subscribers.
The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.