### Issue 1863 - Thursday 8th June, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- Wall Street Journal & academic researchers find kiddie porn way too easily on Instagram
- Apple's Game Porting Toolkit makes it "easy" to bring Windows DirectX games to the Mac
- Victoria quietly scraps $3,000 EV purchase subsidy
- Stack Overflow moderators on strike, disagree with management's decision to allow AI-generated posts
- Cheap Samsung S22 smartphone, Crucial & Samsung SSDs, Boost Mobile, Apple TV, AirPods Pro, 8bitdo Arcade Stick

## The News

### Wall Street Journal & academic researchers find kiddie porn way too easily on Instagram

An investigation by the Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that "Instagram enabled people to search explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex and connected them to accounts that used the terms to advertise child-sex material for sale". It's not just pics for sale, but videos of "children harming themselves", "imagery of the minor performing sexual acts with animals" and for the "right price" kids are made available for in-person "meet ups". How the fuck is this still a thing getting published on an open service like Instagram? Forget Meta's legal obligations, why don't they have a hit squad made up of well paid investigators working 24/7 to snuff out this crap from their platform?!

### Apple's Game Porting Toolkit makes it "easy" to bring Windows DirectX games to the Mac

You know how Valve has a thing called Proton that takes games made for Windows and makes it easy to port over to Linux, without a huge performance hit? Apple has done the same thing, but for Windows games and macOS Sonoma. It's part of the Game Porting Toolkit and was demonstrated at WWDC this week. The kit uses CodeWeavers' open source code for CrossOver, which itself uses the Wine open-source project to translate rather than emulate the unique GPU instructions games need to work. Someone on Reddit has shown off a crude port of Cyberpunk 2077 (a relatively graphics intensive game) from Windows to Mac. It appears to be running at a smooth 30fps on the M2 Max SoC at 1080p - very impressive considering it's also running on Rosetta to translate x86 to ARM!

### Victoria quietly scraps $3,000 EV purchase subsidy

Victoria's $3,000 electric car purchase subsidy ends June 30th as the state government cuts costs in order to pay back huge amounts of debt it racked up during the pandemic. So not only do Victorians not get any discount on the purchase price of an EV like other states, we gotta pay 2.6c/km too. Ugh. Ultimately Victorians will buy EVs anyways as they're superior cars and depending on your driving habits, cheaper to run and own, but there will be way fewer of them on the road here compared to places like NSW and QLD with generous incentives. Those states will enjoy quieter streets, cleaner air and cheaper motoring, whereas Victorians will be saddled with expensive old tech and polluting cars for a few years longer.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Stack Overflow moderators on strike, disagree with management's decision to allow AI-generated posts

Moderators at Stack Overflow have been on strike since June 5th, upset that they've been told not to remove a flood of AI-generated content on the platform. Stack Overflow's management has justified this decision by saying "AI-generated content is not being properly identified across the network, and that the potential for false-positives is very high". The moderators reckon the quality of most AI-generated submissions is so bad, it's bringing the entire community down and their hands are tied to do anything about it. They're also upset they were not consulted or included in the decision, with the company "focusing on business pivots at the expense of its own Community Managers, with many community requests for improved tooling and improving the user experience being left on the back burner". Enshittification!

## Bargains

- Samsung Galaxy S22 5G 128GB - $692.05 from Allphones eBay store
- Crucial 4TB P3 Plus PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD - $311.22 from Computer Alliance's eBay store
- Samsung 870 EVO 4TB 2.5" SATA SSD - $326.82 from Computer Alliance's eBay store
- Boost Mobile 365-day SIM, 140GB data, unlimited calls & SMS - $150 after Cashrewards cashback
- Apple TV 4K (2022) WiFi 64GB - $162.98 from Allphones eBay store
- Apple AirPods Pro (2nd-gen) - $318.59 from Allphones eBay store
- Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB PCIe 3.0 M.2 SSD - $148.03 from Amazon UK
- 8bitdo Arcade Stick - $129 from JB Hi-Fi

## Image Of The Day

Nimrod Thomas watches a PC being built at Nimrod Computer Services in Victoria Park, 9 June 1989 (State Library of Western Australia)

## The End

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