An investigation by the Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that "Instagram enabled people to search explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex and connected them to accounts that used the terms to advertise child-sex material for sale". It's not just pics for sale, but videos of "children harming themselves", "imagery of the minor performing sexual acts with animals" and for the "right price" kids are made available for in-person "meet ups". How the fuck is this still a thing getting published on an open service like Instagram? Forget Meta's legal obligations, why don't they have a hit squad made up of well paid investigators working 24/7 to snuff out this crap from their platform?!
You know how Valve has a thing called Proton that takes games made for Windows and makes it easy to port over to Linux, without a huge performance hit? Apple has done the same thing, but for Windows games and macOS Sonoma. It's part of the Game Porting Toolkit and was demonstrated at WWDC this week. The kit uses CodeWeavers' open source code for CrossOver, which itself uses the Wine open-source project to translate rather than emulate the unique GPU instructions games need to work. Someone on Reddit has shown off a crude port of Cyberpunk 2077 (a relatively graphics intensive game) from Windows to Mac. It appears to be running at a smooth 30fps on the M2 Max SoC at 1080p - very impressive considering it's also running on Rosetta to translate x86 to ARM!
Victoria's $3,000 electric car purchase subsidy ends June 30th as the state government cuts costs in order to pay back huge amounts of debt it racked up during the pandemic. So not only do Victorians not get any discount on the purchase price of an EV like other states, we gotta pay 2.6c/km too. Ugh. Ultimately Victorians will buy EVs anyways as they're superior cars and depending on your driving habits, cheaper to run and own, but there will be way fewer of them on the road here compared to places like NSW and QLD with generous incentives. Those states will enjoy quieter streets, cleaner air and cheaper motoring, whereas Victorians will be saddled with expensive old tech and polluting cars for a few years longer.
Moderators at Stack Overflow have been on strike since June 5th, upset that they've been told not to remove a flood of AI-generated content on the platform. Stack Overflow's management has justified this decision by saying "AI-generated content is not being properly identified across the network, and that the potential for false-positives is very high". The moderators reckon the quality of most AI-generated submissions is so bad, it's bringing the entire community down and their hands are tied to do anything about it. They're also upset they were not consulted or included in the decision, with the company "focusing on business pivots at the expense of its own Community Managers, with many community requests for improved tooling and improving the user experience being left on the back burner". Enshittification!
Nimrod Thomas watches a PC being built at Nimrod Computer Services in Victoria Park, 9 June 1989 (State Library of Western Australia)
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