I am taking a small break and going on a road trip to Adelaide until the 6th of September! Josh and Joel will handle The Sizzle while I am gone. I'll be back on the 7th of September.
Nvidia told investors today that the US government now requires them to have a licence for "any future export to China (including Hong Kong) and Russia of the Company's A100 and forthcoming H100 integrated circuits" as well as "any future NVIDIA integrated circuit achieving both peak performance and chip-to-chip I/O performance equal to or greater than thresholds that are roughly equivalent to the A100". The A100 (Ampere) and H100 (Hopper) are Nvidia's server GPUs designed to crunch through AI-related tasks. AMD is also impacted, but it's Nvidia's that lead the industry and who will take the biggest financial hit. I figure the USA decided they can't let the enemy get their hands on this advanced tech, just like they don't let them have ASML's fancy EUV lithography machines crucial to manufacturing the latest semiconductors.
One idea to handle the immense need for aged care is the use of "cameras and AI to aid monitoring of residents under care, with a view to making the lives of staff easier". Two facilities in South Australia gave it a shot and it didn't go well. The software was programmed to detect four key incident types, defined as "falls, assist, call for help and/or screams". It was so poor at its job that it generated over 12,000 false alerts during the 12 month trial. By the end of the trial "staff were no longer able to respond to every alert" and "at least one instance where staff did not respond to an alert that turned out to be a true resident fall event". The report ultimately determined that the trial was "ultimately inconclusive as to whether the technology made any material difference to the quality and safety of aged care".
Cloudflare has responded to growing demands that they stop offering service to Kiwi Farms with a blog post saying they are not going to do anything about it and despite cutting off shitty sites in the past, will never do it again (unless you're an adult site, which are banned from Cloudflare). CEO Matthew Prince wrote that despite choosing not offering service to Nazi club The Daily Stormer and general shitshow 8chan previously, they've since "concluded that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold. Not because the content of those sites wasn't abhorrent — it was — but because security services most closely resemble Internet utilities". Interesting he compares Cloudflare to a utility. Maybe they should be regulated like one and then the ambiguity goes away.
SonoBus is the app to use if you need to get audio from one network location to another with as little latency as possible. It works on local networks and the internet. The main use case I can think of is recording a podcast with a remote guest. Get them to install SonoBus on their computer, set up a link between you and them and you'll get lower latency and vastly superior audio quality than a typical VOIP/audio chat application. You can even use it for music collaboration if you're keen, but due to the laws of physics it won't be that shit hot for trans-Pacific jam sessions - but people in the same city? Absolutely.
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