As Twitter continues to step on rakes - Tweetdeck is now only available to blue ticks, failing to detect a mass re-posting of video from the Christchurch terrorist attack and no longer appearing in Google search results properly - Instagram is gearing up to pounce on this opportunity to launch Threads. It's effectively a Twitter clone by Meta and all of Meta's grubbiness, but you log-in using your Instagram credentials in a new app and you can add your Instagram followers immediately. That solves a big problem Mastodon and Bluesky have where you're starting fresh and have no idea where your mates are. Threads is already on the iOS App Store and set to launch July 6th. Of all the Twitter alternatives I've seen, Threads probably has the best chance of ripping the normies away from Twitter and may even get a bunch of Instagram users who never thought they'd use Twitter to post too.
Valve has officially banned selling games on Steam that use AI-generated content, unless the developer can prove that the content generated didn't come from an AI model trained on data that doesn't "infringe on existing copyrights". Valve said that they do not want to "discourage the use of [AI-generated content] on Steam", but "our review process is a reflection of current copyright law and policies, not an added layer of our opinion. As these laws and policies evolve over time, so will our process". Makes sense as there's a huge grey area around these AI-systems sucking up data off the internet and using it without permission - just because something is public online, doesn't mean you have the right to do whatever you like with it.
Geek Girl Academy has made a submission to the Federal Government's Diversity in STEM review. Titled "Enough Talk", they want to see the discussion move from how do we get women and girls interested in technology to how do we make it so women already interested actually stay there. At school, girls frequently have their passion for STEM crushed out of them, get poor career advice and have a lack of role models. Once employed, there's intolerable sexual harassment, then discrimination, unfair sacrifices and a lack of flexibility when it comes to having children. It's no surprise then that many girls and women are simply exhausted of all the nonsense in tech and move to more accommodating industries. The report is well designed and very easy to read if you want to learn more.
There's still people out there using floppy disks and Tom Persky's floppydisk.com is one of the few places still around that sells the plastic storage squares. In this interview, he says he has around 500,000 floppies, a mix of 3.5", 5.25" and even 8" disks. His main customers are unsurprisingly, industries like airlines who have planes that still use floppies in their avionics systems, medical devices that use floppies to get information in and out of the otherwise perfectly good equipment and embroidery machines, who are his biggest customer segment. Nobody's making new disks these days, so his stock is mostly old unopened stuff someone's found in a warehouse or recycled disks people send him. God speed to Tom.
Dick Smith Electronics promotional sticker from the 1980s (Jongleur / Internet Archive)
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