### Issue 2002 - Tuesday 9th January, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- Apple Vision Pro goes on sale in USA Feb 2nd, pre-orders Jan 19th
- By not kicking them out, Substack is sympathetic to Nazis
- OpenAI claims it can't do what it does without copyrighted materials, public S3 bucket full of scanned passports from Melb travel agency leaked, new stuff from AMD Intel & Nvidia
- iPhone fell of sky and works fine, 13yo kid first person to beat NES version of Tetris
- Cheap TP-Link switches, Brother laser MFC, WD M.2 2230 SSD, Apple gift cards, Firewatch game

## The News

### Apple Vision Pro goes on sale in USA Feb 2nd, pre-orders Jan 19th

We have a release date for the Apple Vision Pro headset - Feb 2nd, USA only, pre-orders start Jan 19th. It'll be available online and in-store, pricing starts at US$3,499 for one with 256GB of storage. If you have shitty eyes like me, you'll need to spend US$99 for "reader" optical inserts or US$149 for "prescription" ones. Apple doesn't say how that process works so I assume you go online, give them your prescription, they ship them to you in a fancy box and they slide or clip in to the headset. As the Vision Pro be available in store, it'll be interesting how Apple lets people try them out, particularly someone with a prescription. If I rock up to an Apple store reasonably wanting to try the A$5,700 device before I buy one, am I just going to be told tough shit because I wear glasses, like 50% of Australians? Not like that's a problem I'll face any time soon, as Apple hasn't given any hints when they'll sell the Vision Pro outside the USA.

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### By not kicking them out, Substack is sympathetic to Nazis

Over the break, Hamish McKenzie, Substack's "chief writing officer", famous for being the tech bro who keeps putting his foot in his mouth whenever he's asked a straight forward morality related question, posted the naive as hell view that when it comes to Nazis, "subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power". A laughable view in 2023 akin to phrenology or astrology. As a result, some Substack users threatened to move their paying audiences to competitors (Buttondown & Beehiiv to name a few), which obviously scared Substack as they provided a statement to Platformer that "if and when we become aware of other content that violates our guidelines, we will take appropriate action". That's it? The absolute bare minimum?? Have you seen their Content Guidelines? I don't think Nazi content even falls under that unless the Nazi specifically posts a mass shooting manifesto or something similar. Platformer is spinning this as a win???

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### OpenAI claims it can't do what it does without copyrighted materials, public S3 bucket full of scanned passports from Melb travel agency leaked, new stuff from AMD Intel & Nvidia

- Yesterday I mentioned that the New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement and that it has a solid case. Today, OpenAI's submission responding to the NYT's claims literally says, "it would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials" and that "legally, copyright law does not forbid training". Legally, sure, morally, yeah nah. My friend Colin and I had a bit of rant about this on Mastodon if you want to see my point of view in more detail.
- David Swan over at SMH/The Age found out that Melbourne based travel agency Inspiring Vacations had a publicly exposed S3 bucket containing "112,000 records totaling 26.8 gigabytes" of "high-resolution passport images, travel visa certificates and itinerary or ticket files, as well as an estimated 24,000 itinerary and e-ticket PDF documents, some of which include partial credit card numbers". Passport scans stored in an unsecured S3 bucket? Fuck me dead, it doesn't much more careless than that. Put whoever did that into jail.
- Nvidia has given its RTX 4000 series cards the SUPER treatment, juicing GPU clock speeds and adding more VRAM. AMD has a new RX 7600 XT graphics card that's designed to be a 1080p gaming workhorse, along with Ryzen 8000G APUs that features the latest Zen 4 architecture combined with Radeon RDNA3 graphics - the Ryzen 7 8700G is basically a desktop version of the Ryzen 7 7840HS mobile APU. Intel has new 14th-gen desktop CPUs and announced 14th-gen HX series mobile CPUs featuring Thunderbolt 5.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### iPhone fell of sky and works fine, 13yo kid first person to beat NES version of Tetris

You've probably heard about Alaska Airlines flight 1282 that had an entire panel pop off while in the air leading to a scary cabin depressurisation. Nobody was hurt, but as the NTSB was searching around the flight path in Portland for debris, they also found an iPhone, still in airplane mode, still with the screen unlocked, in perfect working order despite a fall of over 4,800m. No cracks, but did have a case and screen protector and it did fall "in a forested area with soft ground cover". Also in feel good news, a 13 year old kid managed to clock the classic NES version of Tetris - apparently the first person to do it! NBC news got the kid in touch with the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov to congratulate Willis too, who dedicated the achievement to his recently passed father. Legend.

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## Bargains

- TP-Link LiteWave 5-port or 8-port gigabit switch - $13.60/$21.25 from Amazon
- Brother MFC-1810 mono laser MFC - $138.15 from Amazon
- Western Digital SN740 2TB M.2 2230 SSD (good for Steam Deck, other handheld gaming PCs) - $167 from Aliexpress
- 20x Everyday Rewards Points on Apple gift cards at Woolworths
- Firewatch - $2.95 on Steam

## Image Of The Day

Designed from the inside out, Surface Headphones provide a comfortable, balanced design to help get you in your flow and focus. (Microsoft)

## The End

📻 Repeater - Fugazi

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