Issue 1749 - Tuesday 6th December, 2022

In Today's Issue

The News

Stack Overflow full of garbage quality ChatGPT generated answers to questions, bans them

Stack Overflow has already banned answers generated with ChatGPT. If you're unfamiliar with ChatGPT, it's like Stable Diffusion but with words. It takes a complicated artificial intelligence software package and makes it a piece of piss for regular people to use. Just give it a prompt on the OpenAI website and it generates what I've heard some people call "fluent bullshit". Stack Overflow agrees, finding that ChatGPT's answers have a "high rate of being incorrect", but because they "look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce", Stack Overflow is getting flooded with junk responses to user questions that has "effectively swamped our volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure". Stack Overflow say the ban is temporary, but don't seem to mention what criteria they'll use to lift the ban.

New Zealand to get its own News Media Bargaining Code, Facebook threatens to "remove news" if USA does it

NZ wants its own version of our News Media Bargaining Code. Their Broadcasting and Media Minister said that "New Zealand news media, particularly small regional and community newspapers, are struggling to remain financially viable as more advertising moves online. So it is critical that those benefiting from their news content actually pay for it" - the same argument our government used at the time to justify the code. Related, Meta told Congress that if a similar law is passed in the US, "we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether" because governments "fail to recognize the key fact: publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves because it benefits their bottom line — not the other way around" - the same argument they used in Australia against the code. Who said Australia is no longer innovative? We are leading the world in rent-seeking legislation!

2nd-gen Starlink satellites get FCC approval, TikTok & Twitter might join News Media Bargaining Code, full sized Square Kilometer Array construction begins

Something I Saw On The Internet

Calling random phone numbers to see what's on the other end sounds fun

A Finnish security researcher "used wardialing to call a bunch of numbers and recorded the first 60 seconds of audio received while staying quiet myself. This produced call recordings I could analyze to learn more about systems in the telephone network". After excluding number ranges they didn't want (premium numbers, private individuals, etc), they made 56874 calls in 40 days, only 74 of which were "interesting". I don't think they're very interesting myself, but I liked the project. Calling every number to find out what's on the other end for no reason than curiosity is worth it, even if the outcome was more or less "yeah there's not much happening".

Bargains

Image Of The Day

Submarine Cable Map 2022. This new edition depicts 486 cable systems and 1,306 landings that are currently active or under construction. (TeleGeography)

The End

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Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land

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.