The News

Softbank sells its entire Nvidia stake so it can invest more in OpenAI

SoftBank sold all of its Nvidia holdings (US$5.3b) and a big chunk of its T-Mobile shares (US$9.17b) so it can go all-in on OpenAI to the tune of US$22.5b. Softbank's CFO said that "Arm and OpenAI are powering SoftBank Group toward our goal of becoming the No.1 platform provider for the Artificial Super Intelligence era". On the same day, JP Morgan released a report saying "to drive a 10% return on our modeled AI investments through 2030 would require ~$650 billion of annual revenue into perpetuity... which equates to $34.72/month from every current iPhone user". The only question in my mind is will the AI bubble pop, leaving behind a horrible mess on the wider economy impacting us all for a decade, or will AI hype slowly deflate and we allow the shysters to save face while they move on to the next grift?

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The line between journalist and influencer has never been thinner

Shannon Grixti got busted by Mediawatch running affiliate links and taking money from brands like Asus and Lenovo to promote gaming devices on his personal social media channels as well as acting as a paid brand ambassador in the media, while at the same time writing about those devices and products in other media outlets without disclosing those relationships. I could write thousands of words about the sordid consumer electronics "journalism" industry, so I'll stick to saying that what Shannon's doing is basically the status quo now. I can't name an Australian impartial full-time professional technology reviewer and we, as technology enthusiasts and consumers, are all worse off because of it.

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New submarine cable will fix trains between Geelong and Melbourne

SUBCO has begun work on SMAP, "a new transcontinental submarine cable system connecting Sydney, Melbourne (Torquay), Adelaide and Perth". It'll connect Equinix SY4/5 in Sydney, NextDC M3 in Melbourne, NextDC A1 in Adelaide and Equinix PE3 in Perth across 16 pairs of fibre optic cable and will be the "world's first zero carbon long-haul subsea cable system". Good stuff, but what interested me is the Victorian state government taking credit, saying it "secured" the cable. What did the state government do? Was SUBCO gonna build this and just skip Victoria? The press release also says that SUBCO & VicTrack are going to build an unrelated to SMAP fibre network between Melbourne and Geelong, "boosting V/Line’s operational capacity and delivering benefits for commuters" - pardon me? Am I missing something here or is the Victorian government talking shit?

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Oh, Also

It’s never been easier to share files thanks to Copyparty

Copyparty is self-hosted "portable file server with accelerated resumable uploads, dedup, WebDAV, FTP, TFTP, zeroconf, media indexer, thumbnails++ all in one file" - what the fuck does this mean? You install this on a computer and it makes it easy for other people to access and take/give/view files to/from/on it. The beauty of it is that it runs on any old piece of shit computer, it can even run on a really low power SBC (e.g: Raspberry Pi) off a battery or solar, or a $10/yr VPS behind NAT in a country not known for giving a damn about copyright. I bet someone cooler and with more friends than me could do something very interesting with this piece of software.

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Bargains

The End

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