Tomorrow is the National Day of Mourning and Friday is the AFL Grand Final public holiday in Victoria. That means no Sizzle until Monday the 27th of September! Thanks for the long weekend Lizzy.
Nvidia officially announced its new flagship graphics cards - the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080. They use the new Ada Lovelace GPU, manufactured on the cutting edge TSMC 4N process. I won't bore ya with all the technical stuff. There's no 3rd party benchmarks yet, but Nvidia reckon the RTX 4090 is "2x" faster in games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Microsoft Flight Simulator than the RTX 3090 Ti. The Ada GPUs support hardware AV1 video encoding and DLSS 3, "an AI-powered performance multiplier" that if the game supports it, can improve performance and image quality significantly. They'll go on sale October 12th with an eye watering $2959 price tag for the RTX 4090, $2219 for the 16GB RTX 4080 and $1659 for the 12GB RTX 4080.
The results of Mozilla's "Does This Button Work? Investigating YouTube's ineffective user controls" research project have been published. Their two findings were "people feel that using YouTube's user controls does not change their recommendations at all" and "YouTube's user control mechanisms are inadequate for preventing unwanted recommendations". Simply put, using the "dislike" and "don't recommend channel" features don't properly prevent the recommendation videos of certain genres you don't want to see - for example, "one participant asked YouTube to stop recommending firearm videos — but was shortly after recommended more gun content. Another person asked YouTube to stop recommending cryptocurrency get-rich-quick videos, but then was recommended another crypto video". All those big brains at Google and this is the best they can do.
Microsoft has released the Windows 11 2022 update. It contains "Start menu folders, improvements to Snap Layouts, Live Captions across the entire OS, better touch gestures, and even a new Xbox controller bar". Microsoft also made "subtle design changes in the Windows 11 2022 Update, improving animations, icons, and more. Even dark mode has improved, with the Task Manager now sporting a new interface and a dark theme". Unfortunately, "Microsoft now requires internet connectivity during the initial device setup for the Pro edition, and if you're using a device for personal use, a Microsoft account will also be required for setup". As usual, Microsoft is doing a slow roll of this update over the next few weeks so don't panic if you can't see it in Windows Update right away.
PrivacyTests.org is a handy site that compares browser privacy features to answer the questions "what data is each web browser leaking? Which web browsers offer the best privacy protections?". It is probably not a surprise that Chrome and Edge suck. The only browsers that get a tick in almost every column are Brave and Librewolf. Safari goes alright out of the box too. I like that they compare iOS and Android browsers, not just desktop. Brave on Android seems to be the most private. Probably breaks the most sites too.
📻 Stevie - Spiderbait
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