### Issue 1834 - Friday 28th April, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- Dropbox sacks 16% of workforce in company wide AI focus
- CATL announce 500Wh/kg battery for mass production this year
- Anything Elon says that gets him in trouble is the act of a deepfake your honour
- Give an old 5K iMac a second life as an external monitor
- Friday Forum Update
- Cheap Garmin smartwatch, Apple Pencil, Ultimate gift cards, AudioTechnica USB mic, ex-mining RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards, Google Nest Doorbell

## The News

### Dropbox sacks 16% of workforce in company wide AI focus

Dropbox announced it's gonna sack 500 employees, roughly 16% of its workforce. The CEO claims that they are "determined to ensure that Dropbox is at the forefront of the AI era, just as we were at the forefront of the shift to mobile and the cloud. We'll need all hands on deck as machine intelligence gives us the tools to reimagine our existing businesses and invent new ones". Despite letting 500 people go Dropbox is still going after new hires in the "AI and early-stage product development" space. Gotta get your snout in the AI trough, right? At least it's more useful than cryptocurrency and blockchain. What a load of shit that was.

### CATL announce 500Wh/kg battery for mass production this year

This is kinda old news, but I sat on it for a little while as so many battery announcements end up being vaporware - but CATL's announcement of an "up to" 500Wh/kg battery could be a legitimate game changer. The best batteries in EVs at the moment hover around 200-220Wh/kg, so in theory an EV could get double the range with the same physical sized battery pack. A top of the range EV that gets ~600km of range could now get well over 1,000km of range. There's still issues like reliability, degradation and cost, but it's an exciting development. Unlike most battery startups, CATL a massive company that already has incredible manufacturing scale. They are not here to fuck spiders and claims they'll start mass production of these batteries later this year.

### Anything Elon says that gets him in trouble is the act of a deepfake your honour

Here's some classic Elon Musk bullshit for your Friday arvo - apparently his lawyers are trying to argue that Elon can't remember every saying "a Model S and Model X, at this point, can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person" (which he did say in 2016 at a public conference!) and that any instances where people think he said something to that effect are actually deepfakes. Yes, anything Musk said that will get him in trouble is a deepfake. Luckily, the judge isn't buying that absolute fucking nonsense, stating any relatively famous person could "simply say whatever they like in the public domain, then hide behind the potential for their recorded statements being a deep fake to avoid taking ownership of what they did actually say and do".

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Give an old 5K iMac a second life as an external monitor

It always pained me that there's so many glorious 27" 5K LCD panels going to waste in "old" iMacs going as far back as 2014 that are still state of the art displays. Sure, you can drop $2500 and buy an Apple Studio Display, but if you have a 5K iMac sitting around idle or can buy a 5K iMac on the cheap (they sell for less than $500 2nd hand!), you might be interested to learn how you can turn that iMac into an excellent external monitor. Oh My Pizza (lol) has a great post explaining how to rip the guts out, pop in a cheap-ish display driver board and re-use what would otherwise be e-waste. I reckon there could be a nice cottage industry of 5K iMac to monitor conversions that sell for ~$1000 each. Would be a great little business. Thanks Benny for sending me the link!

## Friday Forum Update

Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.

- taybenlor has discovered that Afterpay's process for "closing" an account is very bad
- I need a new pair of glasses and have questions about the various upsells
- warkolm is after a service that can send recurring SMS via an API
- chendo wants to sell prints of their photos online via some sort of platform
- gurgle wants to build a QR code that pings you when someone scans it

## Bargains

- Garmin Forerunner 745 fitness smartwatch - $449 from Amazon
- Apple Pencil (2nd Gen) - $158 from Officeworks
- Get 10% bonus credit (i.e: buy $100 card, get $110 loaded onto it) on Ultimate Gift cards (i.e: JB Hi-Fi, Good Guys, Officeworks, EB Games) at Coles
- Audio Technica AT2020USB+ Microphone - $109 + delivery from Scorptec
- Used ex-cryptomining Colorful GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GAMING 8GB graphics card - $386.32 from MetroCom's eBay store
- Google Nest Doorbell (Battery) - $229 from Optus

## Image Of The Day

Blue boxes allowed people to make free, illegal, long-distance phone calls. They mimicked the same 2600 Hz 'switching' tone used by telephone operators to connect people, tricking automated systems. In the 1960s, notorious 'phone phreakers' infiltrated the telephone network; their actions were comparable to modern-day hackers. Built by Steve Wozniak, this box predates Apple Computer Inc. by four years. (The Henry Ford)

## The End

📻 Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Rich

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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.