### Issue 1960 - Wednesday 25th October, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- California cancels Cruise's robotaxi permit after too many safety incidents
- Qualcomm announces desktop class ARM CPU & Apple announce "scary fast" event for next week
- Automattic buys Texts all-in-one IM app, 1Password detected unusual Okta activity, Americans do not trust Big Tech
- Stick a Pi in your backyard to detect birds
- Cheap Jabra conference speakerphone, Codeacademy Pro, Elgato Key Light Mini, 18.5" USB-C monitor, Motorola G54 smartphone, lots of headphones, Lenovo ThinkPad E15 Gen5, Sony turntable, AirTags & loads of TVs

## The News

### California cancels Cruise's robotaxi permit after too many safety incidents

The Californian DMV has told General Motors' Cruise to cease operating driverless taxi services in the state immediately, declaring "based upon the performance of the vehicles, the Department determines the manufacturer's vehicles are not safe for the public's operation" and that "the manufacturer has misrepresented any information related to safety of the autonomous technology of its vehicles". Big claims for along with Waymo, were considered the gold standard of autonomous driving. Vice reckons Cruise tried to cover up a rather nasty pedestrian incident, on top of campaigning from San Francisco emergency services who are sick of dealing with the bullshit these cars create on public roads.

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### Qualcomm announces desktop class ARM CPU & Apple announce "scary fast" event for next week

Qualcomm has finally announced a product based on their acquisition of Nuvia, the CPU startup co-founded by a bunch of senior Apple engineers. The Snapdragon X Elite is an ARM SoC designed for laptops running Windows, probably manufactured by TSMC on their N4P process, has 12x "Oryon" cores running at 3.8GHz (can boost up to 4.3GHz on 2x cores), supports rather speedy LPDDR5x-8533 RAM and everything else you'd expect from a modern SoC. No performance figures but Qualcomm claims it is "up to 2x faster than the competition" while using a third of the power - dunno what they're comparing it against (Intel laptop CPUs? Apple Silicon SoCs??) but we will find out more in mid-2024 when the Snapdragon X Elite hits the market. Oh and Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC too, coming to an Android phone near you early next year. Meanwhile, Apple announced an event for the 30th of October dubbed "Scary Fast" where the rumour mill reckons there will be new iMacs, potentially packing a M3 SoC.

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### Automattic buys Texts all-in-one IM app, 1Password detected unusual Okta activity, Americans do not trust Big Tech

- Automattic has acquired a company called Texts, who have a neat little app that "lets you send and receive messages from all major messaging platforms". iMessages, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Slack and Discord DMs all in one place. Automattic is building a nice little portfolio of software outside of the Wordpress ecosystem lately - PocketCasts, Tumblr, Simplenote and now Texts.
- 1Password "detected suspicious activity on our Okta instance that we use to manage our employee-facing apps" a month ago and "immediately terminated the activity, investigated, and found no compromise of user data or other sensitive systems, either employee-facing or user-facing". Okta, if you don't know, is an "identity and authentication service" used by loads of businesses to make single-sign-on possible (and many other things) and itself was recently popped.
- A study by the Brookings Institution has found that Americans trust Google, Amazon and Facebook way less in 2021 than they did in 2018, with "the youngest 20% of our sample lost confidence at a much greater rate than any other age group". That said, they found Americans trust basically every institution significantly less than they did in 2018 - its just that tech companies took the biggest hit by a wide margin, Facebook in particular. Who the hell was trusting Facebook in the first place??

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Stick a Pi in your backyard to detect birds

Agg over at OCAU (hello if you're still reading The Sizzle!) made a forum post over there about his experience setting up BirdNET - "you get a Raspberry Pi with a USB microphone, and stick it somewhere where it can hear the outside world. It listens for birdsong, then identifies the birds it hears and serves up a website with the recordings, stats and info on the birds. You can even listen live to the audio feed and watch a spectrogram of it if you like". I should really set this up on the side of my backyard shed. A nice little enclosure, battery and solar panel would let it live outside and not need to be near a power outlet.

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## Bargains

- Jabra Speak 510 conference call speakerphone - $119 from Amazon
- Codecademy Pro Annual Student 1-Year Subscription - US$75 from Codeacademy
- Elgato Key Light Mini - $88 from Amazon
- HGFRTEE 18.5" 1080p IPS 100Hz portable USB-C monitor - $193 from Aliexpress
- Motorola G54 5G 8GB RAM/128GB Storage - $269.10 from JB Hi-Fi
- Refurb Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones - $378 from Sony's eBay store
- Sennheiser HD600/HD660S2 headphones or, IE200/IE600 in-ear monitors - $359.10/$638, $161/$719 from Sennheiser
- Sennheiser HD800S over-ear headphones - $1679 from Sennheiser's eBay store
- Hifiman HE400se Over Ear Planar Magnetic Headphones - $126 from Aliexpress
- Sony WF-1000XM5 Noise Cancelling Earbuds - $335.20 from The Good Guys
- Sony LX-310 Turntable with Bluetooth Connectivity - $236 from The Good Guys
- Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 5 (Ryzen 7530U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 14" 1920x1200) - $888 from Lenovo, eligible for 11% cashback too
- Apple AirTag 4-pack - $129 from MyDeal
- 2023 Sony Bravia 4K TVs are cheap at JB Hi-Fi, various sizes, both OLED & LED
- TCL 98" C745 TV - $4710.40 from Harvey Norman, $3710.40 after TCL cashback
- Hisense 100" 100U7KAU TV - $4796 from Harvey Norman
- Hisense 85" U7KAU TV - $2396 at JB Hi-Fi
- LG OLED65C3PSA.AAU 65" OLED TV - $2956 at The Good Guys
- TCL 65P745 65" TV & bonus $100 JB gift card - $796 at JB Hi-Fi
- TCL 65" C845 Mini-LED TV - $1596 at The Good Guys

## Image Of The Day

Public telephone in Osaka, Japan (Andrew Leu/Unsplash)

## 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.