Issue 2060 - Thursday 4th April, 2024

In Today's Issue

The News

Elon Musk plans to sue eSafety Commissioner

A massive arsehole called Chris Elston hates transgender people and uses X as their soapbox to spew hate. To their credit, the eSafety Commissioner noticed a targeted campaign against Australian trans rights activist Teddy Cook and told X to remove those posts. X did the bare minimum, not removing the posts but hiding them from Australian users, which made things worse as it put even more attention on the abuse because it was hidden, not deleted - a classic Streisand Effect. Now Elon Musk/X is going to sue the eSafety Commissioner to "protect its users' right to free speech". Cool, so it's free speech when you want to harass trans people, but not free speech to expose neo-Nazi behaviour, or researchers investigating right-wing influencers. Understood.

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CSIRO finds that ChatGPT gets worse with health info the more evidence you give it

CSIRO and the University of Queensland have studied how ChatGPT handles health information. From the press release: "The study looked at two question formats. The first was a question only. The second was a question biased with supporting or contrary evidence. Results revealed that ChatGPT was quite good at giving accurate answers in a question-only format, with an 80% accuracy in this scenario. However, when the language model was given an evidence-biased prompt, accuracy reduces to 63%. Accuracy was reduced again to 28% when an 'unsure' answer was allowed. This finding is contrary to popular belief that prompting with evidence improves accuracy". You can check out the full research paper if you'd like to learn more.

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TSMC is okay after Taiwan earthquake, Cloudflare R2 gets updates, Discord starts placing ads in app

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Something I Saw On The Internet

First look at a 3rd party iOS app store

The Verge got a sneak peek at AltStore, the first non-Apple app store to go live in the EU. It'll launch with only two apps - Delta, a game emulator and Clip, a clipboard manager - both apps that Apple forbids on the App Store but many people would find pretty useful. Delta, the NES/SNES/N64 emulator is apparently very good. The Verge also shows what the process is like to install a 3rd party app store on your device. Lots of scary warnings and confirmations to make really, really sure you want to leave Apple's rotting walled garden. I would love for 3rd party stores to be available world wide. It could spur a renaissance in smartphone apps.

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Bargains

Image Of The Day

Plug-in Hybrid System (Toyota)

The End

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