Do you enjoy watching the best sport in the world, also known as Australian Rules Football? You might like to join The Sizzle's footy tipping competition! Thanks Josh for starting it up.
Samsung is gonna spend 300 trillion Korean won (~A$345b) over 20 years to make South Korea the semiconductor capital of the world. It'll be focused around a huge new campus near Seoul and "in addition to logic and memory chip production facilities, the new mega cluster will also house Samsung's semiconductor ecosystem partners, including suppliers of raw materials, parts, and even fabless chip designers, a total of 150 companies". The South Korean government will feed this huge manufacturing complex by investing almost a billion dollars into 10 fabless semiconductor design firms. I found it an interesting contrast to Australia, who just announced a similar level of money for nuclear submarines. I'd much rather Australia spent it on semiconductor manufacturing than nuclear subs and I even think nuclear subs are cool.
Epic got slapped with a US$245m fine by the USA's FTC. From the press release: "Epic deployed a variety of design tricks known as dark patterns aimed at getting consumers of all ages to make unintended in-game purchases. Fortnite's counterintuitive, inconsistent, and confusing button configuration led players to incur unwanted charges based on the press of a single button. The company also made it easy for children to make purchases while playing Fortnite without requiring any parental consent". "Epic also locked the accounts of customers who disputed unauthorized charges with their credit card companies". Will it stop a fresh pack of arseholes deploying deliberately misleading interfaces again in a new digital marketplace? Probably not, but let's enjoy this small win.
Someone on Reddit discovered that their fancy new Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra's photos of the Moon were way too good than what the little sensor in the phone should theoretically be capable of. They ran a few tests and ultimately discovered that phone is doing some sort of AI trickery to enhance crappy blurry photos of the Moon when it thinks a photo of the Moon has been taken. A few days later Samsung has confirmed "Scene Optimizer" AI enhancement in a blog post and went some detail on what's going on. The Moon is a "specific object" Scene Optimizer can detect and apply "detail enhancement". I don't know what other objects Samsung is automatically "enhancing", but at what point do we start to doubt the images coming out of the cameras on our smartphones are real? At the very least it would be nice if companies doing this stuff were way more transparent about what exactly is happening in the background.
It's Afterpay Day again and eBay is taking 15% off everything as long as you use AfterPay to pay. Some of the good stuff:
Bank One ATM Screen Displaying Y2K Readiness Disclosure, December 28, 1999 (Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation)
📻 Like the Sun - Tanukichan
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