The News

Big Tech lays off staff for AI, but not for the reason you might think

Microsoft is the latest tech giant to cut thousands of staff supposedly as a result of AI (Reuters). It joins Amazon (WSJ, $), Google (Reuters) and Microsoft (Reuters) — that’s not a typo, this is the second round of cuts in a month — as Big Tech companies who’ve announced or forecasted redundancies in the past month or so. Previous Sizzles have covered the disappearing early career and grad jobs, but this is different. Part of me suspects that AI is a convenient excuse to cut staff without admitting to over-hiring. But don’t ignore these sentences popping up in articles: “Microsoft has planned a capital expenditure of $80 billion this fiscal year, with most of it aimed at expanding data centers to ease capacity bottlenecks for AI services.” Jobs are going because of AI. Not because Microsoft Copilot is making the sales calls, but because everyone in Silicon Valley needs all the money they can get their hands on to shovel into the AI furnace.

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What are you doing with your old phones?

A Canadian software engineer wrote a fun blog about how he turned his iPhone 8 into a solar-powered, locally-run OCR tool (Terminal Bytes). It’s a delightful little walkthrough that inspired me because, well, I personally act like the distracted boyfriend meme whenever I upgrade to a new phone even though the old one still works well. I have an iPhone 13 Pro that sits on my desk that I use to show notifications for email accounts that I only care about when working, has a burner eSIM and is used as an incredibly overpowered microphone when I need to record a conversation — but now I’m scheming about other ways to use it. I would love to hear how you use your old phones!

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Facial analysis won’t stop teens from getting on social media

Sorry to write on it two days in a row but friend of the Sizzle Ange Lavoipierre has got her hands on the data from the government’s age assurance tech trial and, surprise surprise, it’s got problems (ABC News). Facial analysis, touted as one of the most promising tech to figure out someone’s age, came out as just 85% accurate within an 18 month range. Other methods “struggle with the same accuracy issues”, the report says.

This gets at the really big question that will drastically change how the teen social media ban plays out: how strictly will the government expect the platforms to enforce the teen social media ban? Is the government happy for one in six kids — that’s like 4-5 kids in every class — to bypass the teen social media ban? Because that’s a situation where both pro-ban and anti-ban people won’t be happy.

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Leftovers

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Oh, Also

How many yurts are there in Mongolia?

I’m sure this has been bugging you but I was not aware that there was limited data on how the number of yurts — the little, sturdy tent-like structures — in Mongolia. But thankfully, a man, Monroe Clinton, was inspired by a history podcast to figure out the answer by building a machine learning algorithm on Google Maps data (Monroe Clinton). I won’t spoil the answer for you but it was worthwhile reading how he did it. May this inspire you to find and solve your own Mongolian yurt mystery.

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Bargains

Electronics & electrical

Computing

Mobile

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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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.