### Issue 2060 - Thursday 4th April, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- Elon Musk plans to sue eSafety Commissioner
- CSIRO finds that ChatGPT gets worse with health info the more evidence you give it
- TSMC is okay after Taiwan earthquake, Cloudflare R2 gets updates, Discord starts placing ads in app
- First look at a 3rd party iOS app store
- Cheap electric cars, Samsung SSDs, Steelcase chairs, Seagate HDDs, Steam Decks, Dell micro PC, PS5, Pixel 8 Pro

## The News

### Elon Musk plans to sue eSafety Commissioner

A massive arsehole called Chris Elston hates transgender people and uses X as their soapbox to spew hate. To their credit, the eSafety Commissioner noticed a targeted campaign against Australian trans rights activist Teddy Cook and told X to remove those posts. X did the bare minimum, not removing the posts but hiding them from Australian users, which made things worse as it put even more attention on the abuse because it was hidden, not deleted - a classic Streisand Effect. Now Elon Musk/X is going to sue the eSafety Commissioner to "protect its users' right to free speech". Cool, so it's free speech when you want to harass trans people, but not free speech to expose neo-Nazi behaviour, or researchers investigating right-wing influencers. Understood.

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### CSIRO finds that ChatGPT gets worse with health info the more evidence you give it

CSIRO and the University of Queensland have studied how ChatGPT handles health information. From the press release: "The study looked at two question formats. The first was a question only. The second was a question biased with supporting or contrary evidence. Results revealed that ChatGPT was quite good at giving accurate answers in a question-only format, with an 80% accuracy in this scenario. However, when the language model was given an evidence-biased prompt, accuracy reduces to 63%. Accuracy was reduced again to 28% when an 'unsure' answer was allowed. This finding is contrary to popular belief that prompting with evidence improves accuracy". You can check out the full research paper if you'd like to learn more.

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### TSMC is okay after Taiwan earthquake, Cloudflare R2 gets updates, Discord starts placing ads in app

- Taiwan was hit with a 7.2 magnitude earthquake yesterday and the first question on my mind was "oh shit, TSMC's fabs!". While they paused work and evacuated, less than 24 hours after the quake TSMC announced that "there is no damage to our critical tools including all of our extreme ultraviolet lithography tools". Good stuff.
- Cloudflare's announced a new Infrequent Access storage class on R2, their S3 competitor. US$0.01/GB per month, $9/million writes, $0.90/million reads, $0.01/GB for "data retrieval" (I think moving data from Standard Access to Infrequent Access?) and of course, $0 egress. Backblaze B2 is still way cheaper (US$6/1TB vs US$10/1TB, lower read/write costs) unless you really need Cloudflare's additional goodies.
- Discord is getting ads despite saying previously that "ads would be too intrusive". These are called "Sponsored Quests" (lol) and " will incentivise PC players to stream games to their friends through Discord for predetermined periods in order to receive special in-game unlocks. Ads will be targeted and served according to user age, location, and gameplay".

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### First look at a 3rd party iOS app store

The Verge got a sneak peek at AltStore, the first non-Apple app store to go live in the EU. It'll launch with only two apps - Delta, a game emulator and Clip, a clipboard manager - both apps that Apple forbids on the App Store but many people would find pretty useful. Delta, the NES/SNES/N64 emulator is apparently very good. The Verge also shows what the process is like to install a 3rd party app store on your device. Lots of scary warnings and confirmations to make really, really sure you want to leave Apple's rotting walled garden. I would love for 3rd party stores to be available world wide. It could spur a renaissance in smartphone apps.

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## Bargains

- Tesla Model Y and GWM Ora EV price cuts
- Samsung 870 EVO 2.5" SATA 500GB SSD - $55.84 from Amazon USA
- Samsung 870 EVO 2.5" SATA 2TB SSD - $488.68 for 3x of em from Amazon USA
- 20% off Steelcase office chairs & free delivery to VIC/NSW/ACT
- Recertified Seagate 14TB 3.5" SATA HDDs - $209 + delivery from Pongobyte Computers
- Refurbished 128GB iPhone 12 - $428.22 from Green Gadgets eBay store
- Valve Steam Deck 512GB LCD, Steam Deck 512GB OLED or ASUS ROG Ally - $715.33, $1022.33, $952.33 from Kogan's eBay store
- Refurb Dell Optiplex 3070 Micro PC (i3-9100T, 16GB RAM, 128GB SSD) - $194.22 from UN Tech's eBay store
- PlayStation 5 Console (Slim) - $675 from The Gamesmen's eBay store
- Google Pixel 8 Pro 128GB or 256GB - $1249/$1349 at JB Hi-Fi

## Image Of The Day

Plug-in Hybrid System (Toyota)

## The End

📻 The Diamond Sea - Sonic Youth

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