In This Issue

News

Apple is still rich, still pumping out face shields and plans to open its Australian stores in early May

Few bits of interesting info in Apple's Q2 2020 financial results that came out last night. For what I think is the first time, Apple's revenue from everything non-iPhone was more than the iPhone itself (barely). Apple also said they've made and shipped over 7.5m face shields and can pump out around 1m shields a week. When asked in an interview with Bloomberg about the financial results when Apple Stores might re-open, Tim Cook said that store in South Korea will open first, but second would be Australian and Austrian stores in "early May". I don't know why Australia and Austria have been lumped together (a dumb American's lack of geograpic knowledge?) but when they do open you'll get health screened and a temp check at the door, need to wear a mask at all times and the amount of customers in the store will be limited.

Victorian lawyer to get $40k off Google because they kept linking to an article that made him look bad

George Defteros has won $40,000 from Google in the Victorian Supreme Court for defamation (here’s an alternative link if that’s paywalled), after suing them for linking to an article in The Age that "implied (he) crossed a line from professional lawyer for, to confidant and friend of, criminal elements" whenever someone searched for his name. Weirdly though, Defteros never contacted The Age to get the article removed, despite suing the authors of the article about a book they wrote and winning that. I don't know about the validity of this case in paritcular, but it's quite interesting that there's now precedent for suing Google if they bring up a result in a search you don't like.

Putting humans back on the moon is a step closer with Blue Origin & SpaceX winning NASA contracts

NASA has handed out three contracts to build the Human Landing System for Artemis - the mission to put a man and a woman on the moon again by 2024. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is the prime contractor on a consortium consisting of Lockheed Martin & Northrop Grumman to build a lunar lander (aka The Eagle from Apollo) using its New Glenn rocket. SpaceX got some cash to continue work on its Super Heavy and Starship rockets. What's most interesting here is that Boeing put in a bid to build some bits of the HLS, but didn't get anything. Talk about a shit couple of months for Boeing (737 Max, Starliner explosion, COVID-19 killing the travel industry). Kinda wild that it's full steam ahead to put people back on the moon with the goal of making a long term base there and it gets little media coverage. If you wanna know more about Artemis, check out the wikipedia page. Space nerds have filled it in nicely.

Not News

OpenAI releases 7,000+ machine generated songs influenced by popular artists

OpenAI has turned their silicon brain towards machine generating music with a neural net called Jukebox. From what I can gather, they fed their machine learning model loads of music and lyrics, had some humans write fresh lyrics, then told the computer to make a new song based on a certain style to match the lyrics humans wrote. The results are... interesting. The examples on the Jukebox website are cool, but very cherry picked, as when you go to the full list of songs it made most of them are pure crap. This Queens of the Stone Age interpretation is gibberish (but does kinda sounds like them) and this sounds absolutely nothing like Nirvana. Musicians probably shouldn't fear their jobs getting stolen by a robot any time soon.

Bargains

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😁 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.​