Westpac has decided to start a trial of proactively blocking its customers from transferring money to cryptocurrency exchanges, "after its own data showed investment scams accounted for about half of all scam losses, and a third of all scam payments were transferred directly to cryptocurrency exchanges". One of the exchanges impacted is Binance, who can't accept or send AUD at the moment. Meanwhile, the ATO has sent out a fresh reminder to the public that "capital gains from the disposal of assets, including crypto assets, continues to be a priority this tax time" and that it uses a data-matching program to find out if you've made a capital gain - so don't be lying to the taxman, yeah?
The USA's Section 230 law is back in the news as their Supreme Court has "ducked difficult questions about the scope of the 1996 law", as two cases involving overseas terrorism, the death of an American and trying to blame Twitter and Google for that, were more or less dismissed by the Supreme Court - so Twitter and Google won't get to argue that it's not their problem as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act covers them from being responsible. Some people are bummed as they see Section 230 as giving companies like Meta and YouTube and Twitter and TikTok an easy way out of properly moderating these cesspools. Techdirt has a detailed take on these two cases if you're interested to learn more.
ChatGPT is now available as an iOS app. Apparently there were many imposters claiming their app is ChatGPT, but they're just providing access to it via the API. Now there's an official one that's a native app, not just a web wrapper either. Cool. Dunno when Android gets it. Over in Texas, a university professor failed an entire class because he put their essays into ChatGPT and ChatGPT claimed to have authored every single essay. This dumbarse believed the chatbot. Welcome to the future folks, more and more people are going to blindly trust this magic computer box to be correct all the time, fuck the consequences.
I don't know about you, but I think in dot points and short sentences. When someone pays me to write something for them (75c/word, I'll write anything! Email me your brief, I need the money), I start by dumping a bunch of ideas into dot point single sentences and then play around with it until I've got an outline. Bike Outliner from Hog Bay Software is a macOS app that I wish I found earlier in life as it's a fucking perfect text editor for how my brain outlines an idea. There's a 7-day free trial, give it a crack. It might be a game changer for you like it is for me.
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
On December 14th, 2006 Apple computer co-founder Steve Wozniak visited Ancient Oaks Farm for an interview by the Discovery Channel and for his first ever tour of the Digibarn Computer Museum (Digibarn Computer Museum)
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