 | Edition 2377 |
| | The News | Australia ain’t buying Meta’s pitch to trade privacy for Aussie AI | Australian government bigwigs have hit back at Meta’s claim that Australia’s “overly broad” privacy laws are stopping AI from knowing “Australian concepts, realities and figures (The Australian, $). The privacy commissioner Carly Kind said “nothing [in Australia’s privacy rules] should prevent Meta from developing AI that reflects the experience of Australian users” (LinkedIn). Attorney-General Michelle Rowland chimed in to give Meta a whack and reiterate the government’s support for its further, promised privacy reforms (The Australian, $) | The Sizzle: Giving big tech a kick is politically popular so it’s not surprising to see a politician stick the boot in. The good thing that came from both Kind and Rowland is a firm rejection of the idea that privacy protections are at odds with productivity, even purely from a business perspective. Actually, privacy breaches or infringements are really bad for business. Just ask Qantas what it’s going to cost to deal with a breach affecting 5.7 million customers. | Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum. | The new hot AI trend is letting your computer click around your browser for you | OpenAI has released its new “agent” feature (OpenAI). In non jargon terms, the feature combines the LLM with a virtual machine and integrations with services like Google Calendar to let AI click around the web on your behalf. It’s not the first major agentic AI product — there’s competitors like Manus, and even OpenAI had a previous version — but ChatGPT’s Agent is the first, serious attempt to bring it into the mainstream. |  | ChatGPT agent Customization |
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| The Sizzle: “Agentic AI” has been one of the buzzy trends in tech for a while. But up to this point it’s been mostly a promise or a fringe product. Zooming out, what this means is an even greater level of abstraction through technology. Rather than asking ChatGPT how to do something online, you can now ask it to do it for you.
I’m sure a lot of people are going to use it — and I bet there’s going to be a lot of really annoying uses — but the questions that will be key to its success is: What tasks are you willing to trust to a robot, particularly one that makes up things 15% of the time? And What access to your life (i.e. data) are you willing to give it to act on your behalf? | Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum. | What Sizzlers are saying: | On another story about how Meta accidentally deleted someone’s business account (ABC News), rossb on Slack said “What’s really ridiculous is tying your business so tightly to the platforms that you have no recourse if/when something goes wrong”. The Sizzle-father Anthony made the case that people are tied to these platforms because “internet discoverability is a huge problem, not just for businesses, but for practically everything” On Bunnings’ pitch for facial recognition, Barry emailed me to say that facial recognition may still help identify a masked person: “A half-decent system would be able to match previous footage of the same person based on face shape and body, which you can use to correlate with card receipts (if they're making purchases at the same time - a lot of shoplifting involves stuffing small, expensive items inside larger, cheap items) or correlate with car park security / number plate scanning.“ There were a few suggestions for valid reasons to use crypto: Donna spoke on Slack about stablecoins used in developing countries and for group savings, Amy posted on Mastodon about it being used to pay for gender affirming surgery, and Jackie pointed at Steam’s censorship that I wrote about yesterday. There was plenty of suggestions for my mini-PC plans, and a separate forum discussion specifically about self-hosting platforms. Also let me use this opportunity to answer a question asked on the forum: when I said “I’m all for the state cracking down on gaming”, it was a joke (…mostly).
| Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum. | Leftovers | Home Affairs revamps security to tackle cyber and critical infrastructure threats (ARN) Tesla reveals FSD demo in streets of Sydney (The Driven) EV mapping tool and one-stop shop launched to identify charging locations and help buyers (The Driven) Rugby League 26 – the NRL’s epic gaming fail (EFTM) Cloudflare makes changes to avoid repeat of 1.1.1.1 DNS outage (IT News) Roblox will require a facial scan or government ID to have unfiltered chats (The Verge) 2025 Crypto Crime Mid-year Update: Stolen Funds Surge as DPRK Sets New Records (Chainalysis) Dictionary.com “devastated” paid users by abruptly deleting saved words lists (Ars Technica) News publishers take paywall-blocker 12ft.io offline (The Verge) AI smart glasses are a game-changer for the blind and low-vision community (The Verge) House sends bill regulating stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency, to Trump (CNBC) New Russian law criminalizes online searches for controversial content (Washington Post, $) Twitch starts testing vertical video streams (TechCrunch) Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code – without telling users (TechCrunch) Inside ICE’s Supercharged Facial Recognition App of 200 Million Images (404 Media, $) Podcast networks are being flooded with fake AI-made podcasts, mostly using Google’s NotebookLM (Kaggle) Grok 4 disappointment is evidence that benchmarks are meaningless (Reddit) How I Use Kagi (Flamed Fury) How I Became the First Linux User in India (Medium)
| Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum. | | Oh, Also | Androids can detect and warn you about earthquakes before you even feel them | Turns out one of the unexpected benefits of having a global network of interconnected devices with a bunch of sensors is that you can use it to pretty safely predict and warn people about earthquakes. Since 2020, Android phones have had a feature that allows Google to detect earthquakes by getting readings from the devices’ accelerometers when they experience the tremors (Ars Technica). Once a threshold is hit, Google’s software will automatically send alerts to devices in areas that it predicts will experience the earthquake, telling people to “be aware” or “take action” often before the earthquake has even hit them. And they’re pretty accurate! Google says it has only had 3 false positives out of 1300 times that the alerts have been sent out over the past few years (Science). Pretty nifty, IMO. | | Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum. | | Bargains | Electrical & electronics | | Computing | NETGEAR Nighthawk MK73S AX3000 Dual-Band Mesh WiFi 6 at JB Hi-Fi 2-Pack for $149 3-Pack for $169
Teclast T50 Mini (8.7" 120Hz, 8GB/128GB, Helio G99, 4G, Widevine L1) - ~$154 at Teclast Official AliExpress Super Flower Zillion FG Gold PSU 1250W - $179 at PC Case Gear Dell Optiplex 7070 Micro: Intel i5-9600, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Win11 Pro - $288 at Computer and Laptop Sales (Refurb) Ubiquiti U7-Pro-XG Ceiling-Mounted 6-Stream Wi-Fi 7 AP, 10GbE (No PoE Injector) - $399 at Device Deal Dell Latitude 5420 14" FHD Laptop i5-1145G7 32GB 512GB SSD Win11P (used) - $424 at Max Direct Apple iPad Air 11" M3 Wi-Fi 128GB - $835 at Centre Com NetGear Orbi RBRKE962 Wi-Fi 6E Quad-Band Mesh Router 2-Pack - $899 at Centre Com Gaming PCs at TechFast R5-7500F, RTX 5070, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD for $1388 R7-9800X3D, RTX 5090, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD for $4999
Apple MacBook Air 13-inch with M4 Chip, 256GB SSD, 16GB RAM - $1478 at JB Hi-Fi
| Mobile | | | The End | 😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius. | 🤖 We love robots at the Sizzle but this newsletter has always been and will always be written by humans for humans. | 🗣️ Have any feedback, a tip or just want to chat? Send me an email or Signal message. I promise to reply! | 💬 Want to hang out with other Sizzlers? There’s a subscriber-only Slack server and forum if you want to procrastinate and chat about tech-related news. | 🌐 The Sizzle is on Bluesky, Mastodon and LinkedIn if you’re feeling social. | 💳 Paid subscriber looking to manage your billing info, change email address or cancel your subscription? Visit the Beehiiv customer portal. | 🎁 Make someone's day and gift them a 12 month gift subscription to The Sizzle. | 💔 Don’t want this any more? I won’t take it personally. There’s a unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email or here’s a guide. | 🦺 The Sizzle has been tested to meet and exceed ISO 3533 standards. | 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. |
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