### Issue 1986 - Friday 1st December, 2023

It's the 1st of December and that means Christmas soon and what better way to celebrate the birth of our lord and saviour Jesus Christ, than buying a gift subscription to The Sizzle! Find out more at https://thesizzle.com.au/gift

They're perfect as a workplace perk, with a few businesses buying a couple and giving them to all their employees so they can spend more time on their tasks instead of trying to keep up to date with tech news. If you want to give your underlings The Sizzle, let me know and I can give you a nice discount on a bulk purchase (i.e more than 5x). I can even send you an invoice and you can pay like that instead of via credit card if that's how your workplace does things.

## In Today's Issue

- Senate report recommends a new Big Tech regulator and a right to delete personal data
- Cybertruck enters production, pricing starts at $100k, first 10 vehicles delivered
- Google deleting inactive Gmail accounts, pays Canadian media extortion fee & made an animal noise ML model
- Loongson's latest CPU and Chinese semiconductor manufacturing in general is closing in on the west
- Friday Forum Update
- Cheap Alienware mech keeb, Jabra earbuds, Intel A380 GPU, SVS subwoofer, Letterboxd Pro, Sony headphones

## The News

### Senate report recommends a new Big Tech regulator and a right to delete personal data

The Senate's "Final Report on the Inquiry into the Influence of International Digital Platforms" has been made public today and it makes some spicy recommendations. The big one is a "new standalone watchdog that would coordinate 'collaboration efforts, common responsibilities and tasks' between the existing regulators and would give consumers and digital platforms a central place to turn to". More interesting is "legislating an individual's right to delete personal data in order to give users more control" and "laws and mandatory reporting in cases where big tech companies self-preference on their platforms, by giving their own content prominence over competitors". Dunno how many of these recommendations will come to fruition, lets see what happens in 2024. Check out the full report on Parliament's website.

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### Cybertruck enters production, pricing starts at $100k, first 10 vehicles delivered

Tesla's Cybertruck electric ute/pickup is now officially for sale, with Elon Musk presenting the first 10 production vehicles to hand picked owners that put an initial deposit on the car back at its unveiling in 2019 - that memorable event where Elon threw a ball bearing at the glass to demonstrate how tough it is and the glass broke (that they're now selling decals of). The base RWD Cybertruck has a range of around 400km and will set you back US$60,990 (almost A$100k) when deliveries start in 2025. A far cry from the US$39,990 promised in 2019. No word if this monstrosity will ever be sold outside the USA, but going by the unfortunate popularity of the Dodge RAM and Ford F-150 in Australia I wouldn't count it out. On Telsa's website there's a brief mention of a "range extender" battery that can plonk into the Cybertruck's bed for "up to 470mi of total range". That's interesting. The full "delivery event" can be viewed on X if you feel like cringing your way through a Friday afternoon.

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### Google deleting inactive Gmail accounts, pays Canadian media extortion fee & made an animal noise ML model

- Starting today, Google will be deleting inactive Gmail accounts, taking your Photos, Calendar, Docs and other Google related stuff with it. So if you haven't used a Google account under your control in the last 2 years but still want to keep it active, log in and use it for something ASAP.
- You know how Australia convinced Google & Meta to pay our bloated media companies a fee for the privilege of linking to their content? Canada managed to do the same thing, with Google giving CA$100m/yr to "a wide range of news businesses across the country, including independent news businesses and those from Indigenous and official-language minority communities".
- In partnership with QUT and the Australian Acoustics Observatory, Google has developed a machine learning model that lets you upload an audio clip of a wildlife sound and see if it matches anything in the "millions of hours of Australian wildlife audio collected by the Australian Acoustics Observatory" - they call it A2O Search. See, computers aren't totally evil, they let us do cool stuff like this!

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Loongson's latest CPU and Chinese semiconductor manufacturing in general is closing in on the west

Chinese chip designer Loongson has shown off its latest x86-64 compatible CPU, the 3A6000, which they claim performs around the same as the Intel Core i3-10100 CPU in various benchmarks. Now this might not sound impressive as the i3-10100 isn't exactly cutting edge, but it's impressive when put into context. This is a pure Loongsoon design, nobody's IP (well, legally) is used here and it's fabricated in China using a 12nm process. No western technology involved, it's all homegrown Chinese stuff. Combined with SIMC & Huawei's 7nm process SoCs in the Mate 60 Pro and YMTC's quite good NAND chips going in SSDs like the Fanxiang S770 and S880, it feels like it's only a matter of time Chinese semiconductor manufacturing is on-par with Intel/TSMC/Samsung. The USA's sanctions on high end semiconductor manufacturing may have had the opposite desired effect.

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## Friday Forum Update

Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.

- zuccs is after a portable TV stand that'll let them move a 50" display from room to room with ease
- Jusrus got a new iPhone and is wondering if it's still worth doing a clean install or just transfer everything over from the old one
- Kagenzo is mucking around with Azure Container Instances and wants to know if they're doing it right
- andyb wants to get their cat a smart feeder and wants one that doesn't suck
- daft009 came across an open source security platform called Wazuh and is after opinions on it

## Bargains

- Alienware AW410K mechanical keyboard with RGB lighting (Cherry MX Brown) - $88 from Dell
- Jabra Elite 8 Active wireless earbuds - $235.45 from The Good Guys eBay store
- Sparkle SA380E-6G Intel Arc A380 6GB graphics card - $189 from Amazon USA
- SVS PB-1000 Classic subwoofer - $899 from WestCoast Hifi
- 20% off Letterboxd Pro or Patron annual subscriptions - $22/$57.20 from Letterboxd
- Sony WH-1000XM4 or WH-1000XM5 wireless headphones - $320.45/$420.75 from The Good Guys eBay store

## Image Of The Day

Personal Care Connect: devices such as the blood pressure cuff (left) and pill boxes (right) send data to the mobile phone via Bluetooth. The mobile hub software integrated into the mobile phone (center) forwards the data to a care center for monitoring (screen in the back) and returning reminders or alarms in an emergency. (IBM Research / Flickr)

## 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 both past and present.