Optus aiming for 100% signal coverage in Australia with Starlink partnership

Optus has one-upped Telstra's Starlink announcement from last week, announcing they are going to use Starlink to offer a direct to mobile service that'll give Optus 100% coverage of the mainland Australia landmass (except the Australian Radio Quiet Zone, for obvious reasons) in open sky (so not indoors). Starting in late-2024 you'll get SMS availability all over the continent, with voice and data to follow in late 2025. I assume Optus is doing the same kinda thing as what T-Mobile is doing with SpaceX in the USA and what Apple does with Globalstar for their Emergency SOS via Satellite feature, which I think is LTE band 53/54 (aka S-Band/L-Band) - but T-Mobile says "vast majority of smartphones already on T‑Mobile’s network" will work with these satellites and the "vast majority" of smartphones do not have band 53/54 support, so I think they're using an existing LTE band re-broadcast from the satellite. Either way, very cool.

Google's NotebookLM uses your data to create an AI chatbot

What was previously shown off as Project Tailwind at Google I/O is now called NotebookLM. It's an "experimental product designed to use the power and promise of language models paired with your existing content to gain critical insights, faster". You add stuff to it from Google Docs and you can ask NotebookLM questions about the documents you've uploaded to it. Some examples Google provides are a YouTuber uploading "their ideas for new videos" asking NotebookLM to "generate a script for a short video on this topic" or an author working on a biography might upload their research and ask it to summarise interactions between certain people. Not sure which LLM it is using (probably Bard?) and it's not available for public use yet, but select users are getting access.

Elon starts new AI research outfit, xAI, to "understand reality"

On the topic of AI, Elon Musk has started yet another company to dick around with it. This one is called xAI, which Musk wants to use to "understand reality" according to a tweet. They do say that necessity is the mother of invention. On the xAI website there's a list of former employees and researchers (all blokes, no women, hmm) from joints like DeepMind, OpenAI, Google, Tesla, Microsoft and the University of Toronto. They also say xAI is a "separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission". What that mission is, well besides from making Elon Musk even wealthier, who the fuck knows as all the website says is "understand the true nature of the universe".

Apple & Volkswagen trivia for the next time you need to bore someone to death

Here's a little bit of Apple trivia I did not know until now - the font Apple used to place on their keyboards between 1999 to 2015 is VAG Rounded. This font was made in the late 70s by Volkswagen as a rebranding effort when they took over Audi. The font was made public domain and freely available so Volkswagen's huge dealer network around the world could use it in their marketing materials. Someone at Apple liked it enough to put on the keyboards in the 90s and the rest is history.