Let's try this again.
The last one got fucked up as I abuse Mailchimp's CSS Inliner website to put the CSS that styles this email into the HTML so that all the dumb email clients actually read the CSS and render the email properly. I don't actually use the website, but pretend to be the website and send data to its form endpoint directly.
I've been doing this for hundreds of issues now with no problems, but today Mailchimp told me to fuck off and the error message was the output, not issue 1940 of The Sizzle with the CSS inlined with the HTML, so that's what was sent by my script! Fucking computers.
Amazon is plowing up to US$4b into AI/LLM company Anthropic, with AWS to "become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, providing our team with access to leading compute infrastructure in the form of AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, which will be used in addition to existing solutions for model training and deployment". Which is interesting as earlier this year Anthropic announced they're "leverage Google Cloud's cutting-edge GPU and TPU clusters to train, scale, and deploy its AI systems" so it seems like Anthropic's compute needs are so massive that they need AWS and GCP. Maybe they'll hit up Microsoft for some cash in a few months and possibly Oracle, because why the hell not. Amazon also gets a "minor stake" in Anthropic for its $4b investment.
ChatGPT now has the ability to "see, hear, and speak" according to a new blog post from OpenAI. The demo videos are worth a watch to get a better understanding of what it can do with images. It's almost like you can point at something and ChatGPT will try to grasp the context if it, even mid-conversation. The voice feature is pretty cool too, allowing for "back-and-forth conversation with your assistant" - it's what Siri should have been. I've been using ChatGPT a fair bit the last 2 weeks to help me with some scripting/automation stuff and it is amazing for this kinda thing. I've got a longer blog post in the works explaining how I've used it but I've found it incredibly useful and will happily keep paying the ~$30/m for access to this kinda thing, be it OpenAI, Anthropic or whoever comes up with the best LLM for code.
Also in AI/LLM land today (didn't plan to make all of today's news AI related, but here we are!), Spotify is testing out AI-generated translations of its popular English podcasts into various languages, using a synthesised version of the podcasters' own voice. They've got three demo episodes, all translating English to Spanish. I don't understand Spanish but it sounds convincing to me. Meanwhile, Getty, the world's largest photo agency, has teamed up with Nvidia to offer a new "artificial intelligence image-generating tool" that has been legally trained on over 135 million of its copyrighted images. Getty will also offer "uncapped indemnification tied to the product, meaning the agency will assume full legal and financial responsibility on behalf of its business customers for any potential copyright disputes".
Cloudflare has made their own version of Google Fonts, but better. Not only does Cloudflare claim their offering is faster than Google's in loading fonts on your website, but "our pro-privacy approach means your end user's IP address and other data are not sent to another domain. All that information stays within your control, within your domain. In addition, because Cloudflare Fonts eliminates data transmission to third-party servers like Google's, this can enhance your ability to comply with any potential data localization requirements". It will be available in October. Cloudflare also launched a beta of Low-Latency HTTP Live Streaming. It allows live video streaming with as little as 3 seconds of delay. Someone tell Kayo about this.
Press Photos of the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (Wilhelm4 / Internet Archive)
📻 O.K. With My Decay - Grandaddy
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