### Issue 1820 - Wednesday 5th April, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- Australian class action against Apple & Google's unfair app store payment policies
- NSW to ban smartphones in all public schools as of term 4
- Bloomberg makes their own LLM AI chat bot thingy
- Tesla finds a new innovative way to make other people loathe Tesla owners
- Cheap Blizzard games, Crucial P5 Plus SSDs, Blue Yeti X USB mic

## The News

### Australian class action against Apple & Google's unfair app store payment policies

Law firms Maurice Blackburn and Phi Finney McDonald have kicked off class action lawsuits against Apple and Google in Australia. They already had a class action open in the Federal Court on behalf of consumers, alleging that " Google and Apple breached Australian Consumer Law and forced up prices by not allowing competitors to offer alternate, better value payment systems", but now app developers "who may have suffered loss or damage due the conduct of Apple and Google" by blocking competing in-app purchase mechanisms can get involved. There's further detail on the class action claims on Phi Finney McDonald's website (Apple's here - Google's here), along with info on how developers can take part in the class action.

### NSW to ban smartphones in all public schools as of term 4

Probably not news for those living in NSW, but one of the newly elected ALP's governments acts of power is to ban mobile phones in public high schools in classrooms and during recess and lunchtimes. The ban will begin in term 4. There's no prescribed way to ban the phones, but Premier Minns said "there are low-cost and no-cost options" and "may be as simple as making sure mobile phones are in a student's bag and can't be taken out during the school day". Maybe it is my age showing, but it was crazy they were ever allowed in classrooms in the first place! Kids will still find ways to fuck around in class, but at least smartphones won't one of them.

### Bloomberg makes their own LLM AI chat bot thingy

Financial media and data company Bloomberg has cooked up their own LLM "AI" setup called BloombergGPT. They trained it on 700 billion tokens/word fragments, much more than GPT-3 (dunno how many GPT-4 has, OpenAI is keeping that a secret), which Bloomberg claims is the "largest domain-specific dataset yet". In that training set are "a range of English financial documents including news, filings, press releases, web-scraped financial documents, and social media drawn from the Bloomberg archives" along with "SEC filings, Bloomberg TV transcripts, Fed data, and other data relevant to the financial markets" plus "non-Bloomberg news sources". The research paper didn't say what Bloomberg plans to use it for, but it apparently vastly exceeds "general" LLMs for any finance related tasks.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Tesla finds a new innovative way to make other people loathe Tesla owners

There's an official Tesla Github project called "Tesla Light Show xLights" that lets you create a "light show" in sync with music on your Tesla car using the xLights app that's typically used for DMX and other light controllers (i.e: concerts, stage shows, Christmas lights etc). Yes, you can load up an MP3 or WAV file and sequence all the lights in the vehicle in any way you wish. Flash the headlights, indicators, brake lights, flip the mirrors, etc, put it on a USB stick, plug it in to the car and let it rip. It's absolutely not a feature anyone asked for let alone needs and it's quite obnoxious IMHO, but I can't help but appreciate the fact it exists. No, I have not used it on my Model 3 and never will.

## Bargains

- Heaps of Blizzard games on sale at the moment on Battle.net (Starcrafts, Diablos, Warcrafts, etc)
- Crucial P5 Plus PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD 500GB/1TB/2TB - $79/$129/$216 from Amazon
- Blue Yeti X USB Microphone - $179 from EB Games

## Image Of The Day

This March 19, 1999 file photo shows Jonathan Ive, left, Apple Computer's vice president of design, and Jon Rubinstein, Apple's senior vice president of engineering, posing behind five iMac personal computers at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. On Thursday, June 27, 2019, Apple said that Ive, chief design officer, will be leaving after more than two decades at the company to start his own firm. (AP Photo / Susan Ragan)

## The End

📻 Everything Means Nothing To Me - Elliot Smith

😎 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon.

💬 Checked out the paid subscriber only forum? It's a tidy little place to discuss tech with like minded Aussies.

👋 Forums not your thing? The Sizzle has a Slack group you can procrastinate in and chat with other nerds bored at work.

💳 Paid subscriber looking to manage your billing info, change email address or cancel your subscription? Visit the customer portal.

🎁 Make someone's day and buy them a 12 month gift subscription to The Sizzle.

📚 Browse The Sizzle Archive. A few issues are missing and it's not searchable, but it's better than nothing.

🫂 Friends of The Sizzle is a small group of businesses or organisations operated by Sizzle subscribers. Support your fellow Sizzler!

💔 Tired of my bullshit? Unsubscribe and I'll never speak to you again.

## Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land

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 both past and present.