Today is Microsoft's turn to dump a bunch of new announcements on the world. Hardware wise, there's a Surface Laptop Studio 2, Surface Laptop Go 3, Surface Go 4 and Surface Hub 3. Basically the same laptops and tablets as before but with better CPUs and GPUs. On the software side of things, they're gonna shove Copilot everywhere. Windows 11, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Edge, Bing - you name it, it's gonna get "your everyday AI companion". It'll come as part of Windows 11 22H2 on September 26th and also includes an update to the Photos app to do background blur, the Snipping Tool will be able to detect text and copy it (like macOS's Preview), an updated File Explorer UI, an updated Windows Backup, Notepad will auto-save session states, a new version of Outlook for Windows and more.
In a submission to a senate inquiry on the "influence of international digital platforms", Optus continues ranting that "some streaming services charge customers extra for improved stream quality, streamers do not contribute financially to the costs associated with the traffic carried by telecommunications providers on their behalf", claiming that "up to 80 percent of peak period traffic" was streaming services (i.e: Netflix, Amazon, Apple, etc). Some brain farts Optus came up with include: "a fee, managed by the ACCC", a "negotiated settlement of costs" like the Media Bargaining Code, or a "levy where streamers pay into a central infrastructure fund that's then divided up among telcos".
It's no secret I'm a big fan of the Kagi search engine, having made it my primary search engine on all my devices for a few months now and loving it. Whenever I mentioned it to someone they'd be open to the idea for paying for a not-shit search engine, but freaked out at the concept of a certain number of searches per month and going over it. The vast majority of those people wildly overestimated how many searches they did a month (I rarely did more than 800/m, went over 1,000/m once), but now Kagi has a new plan that gives you unlimited searches for US$10/m or US$108/yr. They also have a US$5/m plan with 300 searches a month and a Family/Duo plan if there's other people close to you that also want to use Kagi. There's never been a better time to see what's out there besides stupid old Google.
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
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