OpenAI boss Sam Altman has wrapped up his bizarre "please regulate us" world tour in Melbourne late last week. It got very little coverage in the media, but here's an exclusive interview he gave with The Australian. Not much in there that we haven't heard already and doesn't give any specifics on how to regulate AI, but just that it's something that should be regulated based on how "risky" the AI is. Altman did however score a 40-minute meeting with federal Industry and Science minister Ed Husic, who claims to have "secured a commitment that OpenAI's models would be made available to Australian scientists and researchers", "ensuring there is early involvement in the pre-release of new generations". I'd love more detail on this so-called commitment from OpenAI.
Meta has decided it no longer needs to enforce a site-wide misinformation policy regarding COVID, saying that "our Covid-19 misinformation rules will no longer be in effect globally as the global public health emergency declaration that triggered those rules has been lifted". It will instead tailor its rules by region. I don't know why making up bullshit about COVID is acceptable in one region but isn't in another, but I'm also not responsible for creating the biggest bullshit machine history has ever seen. Meanwhile, Joe Rogan's Spotify hosted podcast is on a fresh anti-vaccine streak, interviewing Robert F. Kennedy Jr and letting him spew all kinds of nonsense about vaccines unchallenged. Spotify has removed Rogan's podcasts in the past for similar crap spewing, but this one remains untouched.
In 2021 St. Margaret's Health in the US state of Illinois, "required a complete shutdown of the organization's computer network" after a ransomware attack. Over 2 years later and that hospital is now shutting down permanently, citing the ransomware attack as a factor in its demise. Hospital management claims the ransomware attack "halted the hospital's ability to submit claims to insurers, Medicare or Medicaid for months, sending it into a financial spiral". When compounded with a shortage of staff the hospital just couldn't continue. Yeah, the hospital should have had better security and yeah, the American health care system is fucked, but also how shit is it that a bunch of low-grade hackers can take a community's hospital away?
SerenityOS is an operating system Andreas Kling and dozens of contributors have been working on that's a "love letter to '90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core" that's got a nice community of people hacking away at it. Ladybird is its web browser, also designed from scratch and isn't based off WebKit or Blink or Gecko like every other web browser. Over the weekend Ladybird received two separate US$100,000 anonymous donations. We don't know who these donors are, but it'll help chip away at the dominance of Apple and Google in what is in my opinion, the most important computing platform - the world wide web.
Latrobe Valley Computer Users Group Newsletter - September 1991 (abeckett / Internet Archive)
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