 | Edition 2446 |
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The News |
Telcos have 30 days to figure out how to stop ripping off punters |
The telco watchdog has rejected the industry’s pitch for a new rules, saying that they won’t do enough to protect people from being ripped off (ACMA). ACMA’s acting chair Adam Suckling said that industry-drafted Australian Telecommunications Alliance’s proposed code was better than the 2019 rules but still not good enough. The key deficiencies, ACMA said, are around the protections for “responsible selling, credit assessments, disconnection and the provision of mobile coverage information to consumers.” Now, telcos have 30 days to come up with improved rules or ACMA can just write its own. |
The Sizzle: Regulations are vvvv important when you have highly concentrated markets, like, say when we have only 3 mobile network providers. There’s been a fair bit of reporting over the past few years about dodgy business practices by telcos, and there’s also been a lot of work on how companies should care for people in family violence situations. The industry says the codes address this, the regulator thinks they can do more. |
We see the self-regulation model used in a lot of tech/digital industries (also, notably, the internet safety codes) and I can’t think of a time when it’s reached the point that a regulator actually says “fuck this, I’m just going to write the rules now”. The sicko in me wants to see it happen. |
Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum. |
This e-bike is making me feel things… |
A spin-off from electric car-maker Rivian has released its first (pretty sweet looking) modular e-bike. The company, ALSO, has announced the TM-B e-bike, along with a commercial and consumer four wheeler (Verge). The Verge has a nice profile of ALSO’s first products which highlight cool things, like: |
It has a “pedal-by-wire-system”. Instead of the traditional mechanical connection between the pedals and the wheels, the rider pedals to charge a battery, and there’s a separate motor for the wheels. Riders can either use a fixed mode for pedalling (that feels constant pressure) or it has an emulated fixed-ratio bike mode too. It can swap between a normal seat, a broader “utility” seat, and the motorbike-style bench seat. Plenty of other bells and whistles like remote unlocking and adaptive riding profiles based on whose phone it’s connected to.
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The launch model of the two-wheeler costs just under $7,000 Australian, but there will be a cheaper model sold eventually. |
 | It’s probably a pretty divisive look but I rate it |
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The Sizzle: I feel drawn to e-bikes. I’ve always loved riding a bike, but it’s obviously not practical to ride a traditional bicycle around Sydney to do a lot of things that are instead done by a car. The safety thing is chief among them, but I don’t think any bike design is going to fix that. The price also makes it hard. Nice e-bikes are not as expensive as a car, but they’re also not cheap enough that you could justify buying it on top of — and not instead of — another car. |
 | RJ Scaringe & Chris Yu Introduce the TM-B |
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If you ride (or are thinking about riding) an e-bike: I’d love to hear from you! |
Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum. |
The Sizzler Say: why are people falling for the AI bubble? Pub measurements and a cool word birthday doodad |
As always, if you wanna get involved (or even be able to read what’s on Slack) you can join the Slack server and forum via these links. |
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Multi cloud is annoying because you can’t really take advantage of AWS or google specific services, you end up with a lowest common denominator of the two. Also you need to be running simultaneously in both or have a failover plan
Being in a single cloud provider, you can be in multiple regions, this is best practice for high availability systems, but it’s also roughly double the cost and requires careful planning to make sure you aren’t still reliant on something that breaks anyway when us-east-1 goes down
You could self host or use a smaller hosting provider but then you miss out on some of the higher level cloud goodies, a simple example is Aurora, an AWS specific hosted version of MySQL or Postgres, which is just much nicer and easier to operate.
Customers do definitely get sad when cloud outages take you out, mostly in b2b, but commercially you’d need to charge them a decent premium to subside the complexity and cloud costs to offer them multi region. | | | | Daniel based on his experience working at B2C and B2B companies |
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Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum. |
Leftovers |
Australia: |
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Rest of the world: |
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 | Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex |  |
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Absolutely brilliant detail from the new Reddit AI copyright lawsuit vs. Perplexity. They set a trap for Perplexity - a test post only crawlable by Google, existing nowhere else on the internet. Within hours, it was on Perplexity 😳 nytimes.com/2025/10/22/tec… | |  | | | 12:56 PM • Oct 23, 2025 | | | | | | 2.78K Likes 377 Retweets | 38 Replies |
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Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum. |
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Oh, Also |
I told you! I called it, I did |
I told you. I. told. you. Microsoft has released an animated avatar for its AI product Copilot (The Verge). It’s a kind of warmy, blobby, thing. It’s fine. |
But wait, you say, weren’t you just crowing about being right? Yes I was, dear reader, and I will continue to: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted a video showing that if you click Mico a bunch of times, Clippy appears. |
 | Satya Nadella @satyanadella | |
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Clippy is back!! | |  | | | 9:04 PM • Oct 23, 2025 | | | | | | 3.49K Likes 184 Retweets | 155 Replies |
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I’m counting that as a ✅ for the Sizzle. |
Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum. |
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Bargains |
Electrical & Electronics |
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Computing |
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Mobile |
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The End |
😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius. |
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Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land |
The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present. |
