Sony had one of its Showcase events this morning (full vid on YouTube) and besides the usual line up of new games I'm mildly interested in but will probably never play because I'm an adult with responsibilities and guilt, dropped a new portable console they've code named Project Q. They pretty much sliced a PS5 controller in half and glued each end to an 8" LCD, grinned and said you can buy it later this year. Looks cool in the photos but the bad news is that you need a PS5 to use it as Project Q is a streaming device, the damn thing doesn't play the game itself. Anyway, also at this showcase was a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3, a sequel to Alan Wake, Street Fighter 6 (they're still going!?), Beat Saber for PSVR2 and Bungie remaking the classic Marathon in the style of a slightly more adult Fortnite.
OpenAI's slippery Sam Altman is on a speaking tour of Europe and unlike in the USA where he was begging Congress to "regulate" the AI industry, he's having a big old whinge about the EU's proposed AI Act. He said that "if we can comply, we will, and if we can't, we'll cease operating... We will try. But there are technical limits to what's possible" and that his preference for regulation was "something between the traditional European approach and the traditional U.S. approach". His main beef is that under the EU's law, GPT-4 would be classed as a "high risk" system - that is an AI system that could "harm people's health, safety, fundamental rights or the environment" - bringing with it way more red tape for it to be allowed to operate. Ideally he'd like no regulation so OpenAI can do whatever they like, but it's so clear he's trying to set up a regulatory moat that's high (with the pretense it's to protect society) but not too high (to actually protect society) that it gets in their way.
Sending mass amounts of email is a mother fucking pain in the goddamn cunting arse. Trust me, I know all about the ways your email can get added to a blocklist (I'm looking at you Microsoft). For those of you in a similar situation as me where emails not arriving in people's inboxes means you lose money, I found this handy list of tips and tricks from Hello Inbox you can work through to ensure your emails are of a high quality. I've done all the practical ones (including a dedicated IP now) and The Sizzle gets to everyone's inboxes on a more or less consistent basis these days, unless you use Hotmail or Outlook.com.
The CSIRO Observatory Dish (Parkes, Central West New South Wales) 2018 (Buddy Patrick / Flickr)
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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.