### Issue 2205 - Tuesday 29th October, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- Day 1 of Apple's week of Mac love - iMac speed bump
- 35 Victorian police stations have safe exchange sites for online marketplace transactions
- Medical transcription tool powered by OpenAI Whisper just made up shit for 1% of cases
- Five YouTube videos I think you might like
- Cheap Hynix external SSD, refurb Dell laptop, Samsung Q990D soundbar

## The News

### Day 1 of Apple's week of Mac love - iMac speed bump

Apple kicked off its week of Mac announcements with an M4 iMac. Still 24", but an M4 SoC, a minimum of 16GB of RAM at last, Thunderbolt 4, the choice of a nano-texture matte display and some new colours. The press release specifically mentions that the M4 iMac "enables a smoother gameplay experience in titles like the upcoming Civilization VII". Apple also spat out software updates to everything, including iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1. Apple Intelligence is now a thing you can use (MacRumors has a nice rundown of what it's capable of at the moment) and you can use the hearing test and hearing aid features on your AirPods Pro 2 once you've upgraded them to the latest firmware. Totally unrelated, but Nvidia overtook Apple for a minute as the world's most valuable company with the two megacorps worth between A$5.2t and A$5.4t each, depending which way the wind blows.

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### 35 Victorian police stations have safe exchange sites for online marketplace transactions

If you're a Victorian doing a deal on Facebook Marketplace or Gumtree, there's now 35 police stations across the state designed to be "Safer Exchange Sites". The locations have "clear signage", "CCTV coverage" and "lighting". It's a good alternative to meeting people at your house, or in a car park and a good filter for anyone dodgy. If they're uncomfortable meeting a police station you know they've got something to hide. I've done loads of deals on Facebook/Gumtree with no problems over the years, but there was a dude once who refused to get out of his car to look at an iPhone I was selling. I didn't let him hold the phone and he got very pissed off and drove away. Thanks to the half a dozen people who sent this to me! Didn't know so many of you follow the cops on social media.

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### Medical transcription tool powered by OpenAI Whisper just made up shit for 1% of cases

Another day, another incident of an AI system making shit up where it shouldn't be. This time it's OpenAI's Whisper API, used in a product called Nabla for medical transcription. Doctors use transcription tools regularly to save them time when writing up patient notes and they're often checked by other medical staff for errors, but with Nabla around 1% of transcriptions made "up entire sentences with sometimes violent sentiments or nonsensical phrases during silences in recordings", as well as "invented medical conditions or phrases you might expect from a YouTube video, such as thank you for watching". OpenAI said "our usage policies prohibit use in certain high-stakes decision-making contexts", yet Nabla was able to use it anyways. What's the point of a usage policy if it's not enforced before the damage is done?

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Five YouTube videos I think you might like

- Serve The Home got invited by Supermicro to tour Elon Musk's giant cluster of 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs in Minneapolis, used to train xAI's Grok.
- Linus and Marques got their hands on the Huawei Mate XT tri-folding smartphone. They both like it and wish it was sold outside China.
- Here's a tour of Krix's factory in Adelaide. Excellent locally made home theater speakers. It's easy to forget Australia actually makes stuff that's worth buying.
- TPG's GM of Technology Strategy & Innovation gave an interesting talk at AusNOG 2024 about Australia's "fastest 5G network rollout".
- A 30 minute documentary about the music in Wipeout 2097, one of the first video games I remember playing and going "this soundtrack rules".

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## Bargains

- Hynix Beetle X31 1TB Portable SSD - $106.99 from Amazon
- Refurb Dell Latitude 5300 laptop (i5-8365U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 1080p touch screen, brand new battery) - $259 from Metrocom
- Samsung HW-Q990D/XY Soundbar - $1320 + delivery from Appliance Central (free delivery to most metro areas)

## Image Of The Day

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang joined the king of Denmark to launch the country’s largest sovereign AI supercomputer, aimed at breakthroughs in quantum computing, clean energy, biotechnology and other areas serving Danish society and the world. (NVIDIA)

## The End

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