### Issue 1801 - Wednesday 8th March, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- ChatGPT is the new easy win for product managers and executives looking to prove how in touch and with it they are
- Sonos Era 100 and Era 300 speakers are better versions of the great One and Five speakers
- Elon Musk ridicules Twitter employee in public, backtracks when realises they have golden handcuffs
- The Mac App Store is so tedious to get approval for not even Untitled Goose Game is on there
- Cheap Seagate 16TB HDDs, Ultimate eGift Card for Him, 1TB SanDisk microSD, Good Guys gift card & Telstra 24m plan, HP 40" ultrawide monitor, Crumpler laptop bag

## The News

### ChatGPT is the new easy win for product managers and executives looking to prove how in touch and with it they are

ChatGPT is getting shoved in so many places lately. Just in the last 24 hours we've had:

- News Corp has an "AI Working Group that would explore 10 new high-value opportunity areas for AI", with executive chairman Michael Miller emailing staff telling them "if you haven't already, I encourage you to try ChatGPT for yourself". ChatGPT might actually be an improvement over the total slop News Corp's newspapers serve up.
- Slack is jamming ChatGPT right into the app. It can generate "conversation summaries help users quickly catch up on what's happening", "instantly find answers on any project or topic" and "draft messages in seconds to communicate with customers and teams". It's currently in beta, you gotta go on a waitlist if if you wanna see it for yourself.
- Even fucken Kmart is considering implementing it, with their CIO telling a Microsoft webinar "if they're [customers] ringing up to find a product or to get some more information or to ask us a [challenging] question, is [ChatGPT] now an option?" and "even on-boarding staff and helping staff navigate their day-to-day tasks, is ChatGPT an option to basically train our staff?".

Shitty, half arsed content is going to be absolutely everywhere thanks to ChatGPT.

### Sonos Era 100 and Era 300 speakers are better versions of the great One and Five speakers

Sonos has new speakers - the Era 100 ($399) and Era 300 ($749). The Era 100 is like the Sonos One, but better. The Era 300 is like the Five, but better. They both support Bluetooth now (so you can connect any device to it without needing the Sonos app) and ditched the Ethernet port in favour of a USB-C port that lets you plug in either a Line-in Adapter (for 3.5mm) or a Combo Adapter (3.5mm & Ethernet). They also ditched Google Assistant support. Probably because of the ongoing Google & Sonos lawsuit. The Era 300 supports Dolby Atmos - which to me seems like a total gimmick when only using a single speaker, but that's what Sonos reckons. One of the best things about Sonos speakers, Trueplay tuning, is still iOS only but Android users will get "quick tuning" support. Better than nothing I guess? Both speakers can be orded now and will go on sale March 28th.

### Elon Musk ridicules Twitter employee in public, backtracks when realises they have golden handcuffs

Elon stepped in Twitter related dog shit again. This one's too long to explain here in detail, but if anyone asks you, Elon was forced to apologise to Iceland's 2019 person of the year, Haraldur Thorleifsson, for sacking him and belittling him in public, after Haraldur had the tenacity to ask this pissant of a human if he still has a job because Twitter's HR department didn't respond. The kicker - Haraldur's contract says Twitter has to pay him out a fat stack of cash if he's sacked, as he chose to be paid a salary instead of stock options or a lump sum when Twitter acquired his business, Ueno. I'm sure Elon's apology is heartfelt and not walletfelt. Someone's saved the conversation as images, just in case Elon decides to delete evidence.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### The Mac App Store is so tedious to get approval for not even Untitled Goose Game is on there

Ever wondered why Untitled Goose Game isn't on the Mac App Store? It's published by legendary Mac developers Panic, so you'd think they'd pop it up on the Mac App Store and reduce the friction for non-gamers without Steam wanting to plonk down a few bucks to play this delightful game, right? According to Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser: "we once submitted Untitled Goose Game to the Mac App Store. It was rejected by the reviewer because they thought you couldn't skip the credits. (?!?) We explained that you could skip the credits by holding space. It was then rejected for something else and at that point we just gave up and never bothered to resubmit". Embarrassing for Apple really.

## Bargains

- 2x Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB NAS 3.5" HDDs - $732 from Amazon USA
- 5% off Ultimate eGift Card for Him (EB Games, JB Hi-Fi & others) from Ultimate Gift Cards
- SanDisk Ultra 1TB microSDXC Memory Card - $179.60 from Amazon
- $600 Good Guys gift card if you go on a 24m Telstra contract for $69/m with 100GB/m of data at The Good Guys
- HP Z40c G3 39.7" IPS ultrawide 5120 x 2160 monitor with Thunderbolt 3 - $1249 + delivery from Mwave
- Crumpler Mantra laptop backpack (navy) - $150 from Crumpler

## Image Of The Day

Stella Brennan's stitch-per-pixel embroidery of her iMac OS 8 desktop took over a year to do, and she needed help. A sewing circle of friends and family helped her complete it. By the time it was done, it was obsolete. Brennan had a new computer, running OS X. Translating the digital into the pre-industrial, the work yokes opposing values: the computer's currency and speed with craft's traditionalism and laboriousness. The woven computer screen can be read as daft, like an expressionist painting converted into paint-by-numbers. It becomes deft when it prompts us to consider more subtle historical connections, like the use of punch cards to control Jacquard weaving looms during the industrial revolution, and Ada Lovelace's proposal to use them to programme Charles Babbage's analytical engine, the 19th century proto-computer. While its title suggests an instant, the piece enfolds time: the time taken to make it, the time taken to view it, and the stretch of technological, economic and social history from the Bayeux Tapestry through the industrial revolution to the Macintosh. (Auckland Art Gallery)

## The End

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