Law firms Maurice Blackburn and Phi Finney McDonald have kicked off class action lawsuits against Apple and Google in Australia. They already had a class action open in the Federal Court on behalf of consumers, alleging that " Google and Apple breached Australian Consumer Law and forced up prices by not allowing competitors to offer alternate, better value payment systems", but now app developers "who may have suffered loss or damage due the conduct of Apple and Google" by blocking competing in-app purchase mechanisms can get involved. There's further detail on the class action claims on Phi Finney McDonald's website (Apple's here - Google's here), along with info on how developers can take part in the class action.
Probably not news for those living in NSW, but one of the newly elected ALP's governments acts of power is to ban mobile phones in public high schools in classrooms and during recess and lunchtimes. The ban will begin in term 4. There's no prescribed way to ban the phones, but Premier Minns said "there are low-cost and no-cost options" and "may be as simple as making sure mobile phones are in a student's bag and can't be taken out during the school day". Maybe it is my age showing, but it was crazy they were ever allowed in classrooms in the first place! Kids will still find ways to fuck around in class, but at least smartphones won't one of them.
Financial media and data company Bloomberg has cooked up their own LLM "AI" setup called BloombergGPT. They trained it on 700 billion tokens/word fragments, much more than GPT-3 (dunno how many GPT-4 has, OpenAI is keeping that a secret), which Bloomberg claims is the "largest domain-specific dataset yet". In that training set are "a range of English financial documents including news, filings, press releases, web-scraped financial documents, and social media drawn from the Bloomberg archives" along with "SEC filings, Bloomberg TV transcripts, Fed data, and other data relevant to the financial markets" plus "non-Bloomberg news sources". The research paper didn't say what Bloomberg plans to use it for, but it apparently vastly exceeds "general" LLMs for any finance related tasks.
There's an official Tesla Github project called "Tesla Light Show xLights" that lets you create a "light show" in sync with music on your Tesla car using the xLights app that's typically used for DMX and other light controllers (i.e: concerts, stage shows, Christmas lights etc). Yes, you can load up an MP3 or WAV file and sequence all the lights in the vehicle in any way you wish. Flash the headlights, indicators, brake lights, flip the mirrors, etc, put it on a USB stick, plug it in to the car and let it rip. It's absolutely not a feature anyone asked for let alone needs and it's quite obnoxious IMHO, but I can't help but appreciate the fact it exists. No, I have not used it on my Model 3 and never will.
This March 19, 1999 file photo shows Jonathan Ive, left, Apple Computer's vice president of design, and Jon Rubinstein, Apple's senior vice president of engineering, posing behind five iMac personal computers at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. On Thursday, June 27, 2019, Apple said that Ive, chief design officer, will be leaving after more than two decades at the company to start his own firm. (AP Photo / Susan Ragan)
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