### Issue 2041 - Tuesday 5th March, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- NBN to increase FTTP & HFC speed at no cost by end of year if ISPs agree
- Apple cops first fine from the EU, has a big whinge about it, releases new M3 MacBook Air
- Anthropic's new flagship LLM, Yuzu folds to Nintendo's demands, Aussie telcos fight ACCC SMS regulation
- Today I learnt that risography exists
- Cheap TCL TV, Boost Mobile & Telstra pre-paid SIMs, Creative desktop soundbar, Shokz bone conduction headset, Valve Steam Deck OLED, Meta Quest+

## The News

### NBN to increase FTTP & HFC speed at no cost by end of year if ISPs agree

NBN has run it up the flagpole with ISPs that it wants to change the Home Fast (100/20), Home Superfast (250/25) and Home Ultrafast (1000/50) speed tiers available to HFC and FTTP connections. Instead of 100/20, you'll get 500/50. Instead of 250/25, you'll get 750/50 and instead of 1000/50, you'll get 1000/100 - all without a price increase. So that means the 100/20 plans you see now for like $70-90/m will actually be 250/25 for the same price. The 50/20 plan will still be there, but there will be a 450mbit gap between it and the next speed up (500/20). What I'm excited about is 1000/100. That bump in upload speed for the same as what I'm paying now would be welcome. It's not symmetrical gigabit for $100/m like in NZ, but I'll take it. ETA for the change is around the end of 2024/early 2025.

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### Apple cops first fine from the EU, has a big whinge about it, releases new M3 MacBook Air

Apple got slapped with a 1.8 billion euro fine by the EU because "Apple bans music streaming app developers from fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services available outside of the app and from providing any instructions about how to subscribe to such offers". Apple had an epic whinge about it in this press release, painting Spotify as a music streaming juggernaut that freeloads on Apple's hard work. Cut the shit Apple - you make giant sums of money selling iPhones and iPads and a big chunk of it is because of 3rd party apps like Spotify. They provide Apple with just as much value as Apple provides them with an SDK and a store to sell on. Leave some crumbs for the rest of us! Also Apple related, the MacBook Air got a spec bump to the M3 SoC and can now run dual monitors if the lid is closed.

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### Anthropic's new flagship LLM, Yuzu folds to Nintendo's demands, Aussie telcos fight ACCC SMS regulation

- Another day, another LLM that claims to have "near-human" capabilities. This time it's Anthropic's Claude 3 range of models - Haiku, Sonnet and its flagship (but also most compute intensive) Opus. Anthropic reckon Optus is better than GPT-4 at basically everything. Lots of choice for LLMs out there now. Which one is the best for code these days?
- Yuzu, the Switch emulator that got Nintendo's attention when they launched a Patreon to fund further development, settled with Nintendo pretty quickly for US$2.4m and a promise of "the destruction by deletion of all circumvention devices, including all copies of Yuzu". Good luck with that Nintendo.
- Telstra, Optus and TPG have joined forces to complain that if the ACCC's plan for a "must-carry" obligation as well as regulated pricing on mass SMS broadcasts takes place, it'll be a scammer's delight as they won't be able to ban the naughty senders like they do now. Cool that the ACCC is trying to the cost of bulk SMS down, but this ain't it chief.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Today I learnt that risography exists

As I was doing my post-dinner routine of mindlessly scrolling Facebook Marketplace on the iPad last night, I stumbled across a "riso machine" for $550 - a thing I have never heard of. It looks like a photocopier but instead of using toner and fusing it to the paper with heat or spraying microscopic droplets of ink onto paper, it uses a technique called risography. It's like a mini version of offset printing used for newspapers and other high volume print runs where the paper passes over a drum of ink that lays the desired contents onto the paper. The process is super quick, reliable, cheap and I had no idea it existed until last night. Riso printers are pretty niche but I like that they exist and would love to try one out.

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## Bargains

- TCL 65" C845 Mini LED 4K Google TV (2023) - $1399 + delivery from Powerland
- $17 cashback on Boost Mobile $17 35GB 28-day pre-paid SIM via Shopback
- Creative Stage Air V2 Soundbar - $69.95 from Creative or $66 from MSY + delivery
- Shokz OpenComm 2 UC bone conduction headset - $281.15 from Crooze
- Telstra pre-paid 365-day SIM with 230GB data, unlimited calls & SMS - $258 from Telco Biz Traders
- Valve Steam Deck OLED 512GB - $1099 from My-Phonez eBay store
- Subscribe to Meta Quest+ for 1 year for $99.95 and get $38 Meta Store credit

## Image Of The Day

A Risograph is a digital duplicator from Japan manufactured by the Riso Kagaku Corporation. It was launched in Japan in 1986 and was designed for high-volume photocopying and printing, however in recent years it has become a medium in its own right. (peacock & the worm)

## The End

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