Artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz have sued Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt over their AI art generation tools. The trio reckon that these companies are ripping off their work by feeding it "millions—and possibly billions—of copyrighted images", "without the knowledge or consent of the artists". While the images they spit out " may or may not outwardly resemble the training images", "they are derived from copies of the training images, and compete with them in the marketplace. At minimum, Stable Diffusion's ability to flood the market with an essentially unlimited number of infringing images will inflict permanent damage on the market for art and artists". Good luck to them.
Geelong might be getting Australia's first battery "gigafactory" (i.e: a factory than can pump out more than 1 GWh of batteries a year). A mob by the name of Recharge Industries has "already secured the equipment for the first 2GWh production line and that it will produce batteries for both electric vehicle and the stationary storage market". They'll start off with 2GWh, ramp up to 6GWh by 2026 and if all goes well the factory could handle up to 30GWh of production a year. It plans to use the skills and factories left behind by the auto industry in Geelong to build "state-of-the-art lithium-ion battery cells" with Australian minerals. They've also engaged "Accenture's engineering and capital projects expertise", which I guess is good if you need to lobby government for some grants.
Probably the best MVNO in Australia, Boost Mobile, has added 5G support to their plans. It's by far the cheapest way to get access to Telstra's full 5G network (unlike every other Telstra MVNO) when you consider you can get a 12 month SIM for around $150 or less. Unfortunately they've added a speed cap of 150Mbps on most of their plans, with only the most expensive getting uncapped speeds. Honestly, 150MBps is not that bad, but could be a deal breaker for some people. There's unfortunately no eSIM (handy for people with a work SIM & personal SIM) and still no Apple Watch/One Number support.
It's the 20 year anniversary of a classic email Bill Gates sent to his crew after trying to download and install Microsoft Movie Maker on his computer and experiencing the same frustration we do whenever we try to use a Microsoft product. There's some fantastic, evergreen quotes in his rant:
At its Goulash Programming Night in May, Chaos Computer Club ran a pop-up, high-capacity network to meet 800 hackers' bandwidth needs, while mammoth drums of stew filled their bellies. (Antoine Bruy / Bloomberg)
📻 Los Ageless - St. Vincent
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