April 28, 2026 | Read online
# Issue 2551
can i please eat in the computer room tonight explores the positive and transformative view of tech from a preteens perspective growing up in the early aughts. this installation is a memorial to this fever dream of a time period where you could only access the internet in a specifically designated computer room, often decorated in brown hues and overstuffed with knickknacks and office supplies. this space, an escape to another part of your life, often felt like an oasis to explore who you were becoming for the first time without the microscope and confinements of adults and societal expectations. swapping sandboxes for CD-ROM games and mixed tapes. inside jokes with friends in chat rooms and staying up until way too late messaging your crush in your own secret language. taking selfies on the front facing camera and looking at yourself in a slightly different way for the first time. learning about yourself and the world all from the glow of a little square box in the middle of a little square room - Nicole Nikolich
# The News
### News Bargaining Incentive forces tech companies to pay up even if they remove “news” from their platform
Remember the News Media Bargaining Code and how the media companies lost their shit when Meta decided that instead of participating in this blatant bribe triangle, they'll remove news from Facebook instead? Back then Meta eventually coughed up the cash, but the Code is up for renegotiation and the Aussie government is keen to avoid what happened in Canada, so they cooked up News Bargaining Incentive. Basically, if Google or Meta decide to remove news instead of doing a deal with Nine/News Corp/Seven West Media, the government will force them to "pay a charge as a proportion of their revenue, with any charges collected to be distributed back to the news media sector". The draft legislation is open for consultation if anyone cares. It’s not like they’re going to listen to any of our feedback.
### Ubuntu joins the AI bandwagon, but tastefully & carefully, they promise
Canonical, the stewards of Ubuntu, are gonna shove some AI into the popular Linux distro, as outlined in a blog/forum post from VP of engineering Jon Seager. There's no product announcements here, but lots of thinking out loud about the types of AI features may appear in Ubuntu soon. As most things AI, I wonder to myself, who is asking for this? Why is it so important for the foundations of our computers, the operating system, to have feature upon feature upon feature crammed into it? Isn't the whole point of an operating system to allow applications to "operate" and let the developer community and the userbase decide what things they want to do?
### Open letter from EV charging industry asks government to give DNSPs a kick up the arse
Fifteen EV charging related groups, including Evie, Tesla, Amber, AGL and others, have published an open letter begging the government to give them some regulatory support in boosting the number of public EV chargers across the country as EV sales exponentially grow. They want to stop DNSPs (i.e: the pole & wire owners) also owning public charging infrastructure, force DNSPs to get off their arse when it comes to connecting EV chargers to the grid and come up with fairer tariffs. You can check out the full letter on the Tech Council of Australia's website. As someone that's dipped their toe in public EV charging infrastructure, I agree with all of it.
# Oh, Also
### Old people aren’t alwasy bad with computers, the computers can be bad too
This story in The Age is a good reminder about how it sucks for the elderly when everything relies on the internet or a smartphone, and that sucking is compounded that people my age are now burdened with supporting them. Not only is it a pain in the arse for everyone involved, it's embarrassing and demoralising. Intelligent people are made to feel worthless when they can't deal with the cognitive overload in many of the poorly designed technology systems you kinda need for everyday life. Granted, some of the folk in the story are kinda pushing my limits for sympathy (a 73-yo who has "never used an ATM in my life", wtf?) but the point remains - the systems we take for granted are often bad at dealing with people that don't fit in the narrow band of whoever designed it's ideal user.
# Bargains
15% cashback, uncapped, at Lenovo’s online store via TopCashback Wolfbox Electric Air Duster DF200 - $88 from Wolfbox’s eBay store Reolink Smart 2K Video Doorbell (Battery) - $152.99 from Reolink’s online store
# The End
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The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong 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 past and present.
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