### Issue 2235 - Wednesday 11th December, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- Open letter from musicians supporting the Internet Archive
- GM ends Cruise robotaxi service
- AI powered robot shutting down, kids are sad
- 2025 IMAX Film Festival
- Cheap Kings & UGreen battery packs, Apple gift cards, Telstra & Boost Mobile SIMs, Minisforum mini PC, 5% off computers & phones and 10% off evertthing else at JB

## The News

### Open letter from musicians supporting the Internet Archive

500 musicians have published an open letter supporting the Internet Archive in it's latest fight against tyrannical copyright leeches (aka record labels). If you're not familiar, the IA is being sued by Universal Music Group and Sony Music for the Great 78 Project that's attempting to digitise old 78rpm records from the 40s and 50s. Rolling Stone has a good article about that battle if you want to learn more. The 500 musicians reckon the IA isn't doing anything wrong and is actually helping the music industry by preserving this stuff - something the labels themselves do an appalling job of - then going on to explain how greedy and exploitative the labels are.

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### GM ends Cruise robotaxi service

General Motors is closing down Cruise, a robotaxi service like Waymo in the USA. GM said that "consistent with GM's capital allocation priorities, GM will no longer fund Cruise's robotaxi development work given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market". I'm sure having your operating licence cancelled after lying to regulators about dragging a woman 6 meters down the road didn't help either. This only leaves one active robotaxi businesses in the USA - Google's Waymo. Uber shitcanned theirs a while ago after it killed a pedestrian and Tesla's is currently at the "demo in a movie set" stage and hard to take seriously.

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### AI powered robot shutting down, kids are sad

John McLain sent me a link to this story about kids getting upset when their AI infused robot friend dies. Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror, it's happening because Embodied, who make Moxie the friendly robot, can't afford to pay their API bills to whatever LLM they're using. Moxie was designed to aid neurodivergent kids with socialising and used LLMs to talk back. Unsurprisingly, these kids got attached to the damn thing and parents are posting videos to TikTok of them telling the kids that Moxie is dying in the next few days.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### 2025 IMAX Film Festival

IMAX Melbourne is one of the few places on Earth with a commercially operating 1570 film projector that shows those films in the beautiful 1.43:1 aspect ratio. As of January 11th, they're going to be showing practically every modern 1.43:1 film as part of their IMAX Film Festival for 2025. The entire Dark Knight trilogy, both the Denis Villeneuve versions of Dune, Top Gun Maverick plus most of Christopher Nolan films all take advantage of the full IMAX screen. If you like these films but have never seen them the way the director designed them to be viewed, book tickets ASAP!

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## Bargains

- Kings 24Ah @ 12V USB-C portable power pack - $149 from 4WD Supa Centre's eBay store
- 8% off Apple gift cards (only 1 per customer) at Card.Gift
- Boost Mobile 365-day pre-paid SIM with 170GB data, unlimited calls & SMS - $179.45 from Lucky Mobile's eBay store
- Minisforum UM890 Pro mini PC (Ryzen 9 8945HS, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD) - $1,119.99 from Amazon
- 5% off computers & smartphones (not Apple) and 10% off everything else (some exclusions) at JB Hi-Fi for Perks members
- Bose QuietComfort SC headphones - $198 (even cheaper with the above Perks deal) at JB Hi-Fi
- Telstra pre-paid SIM with 6 month-expiry, 390MB, 110min Talk, 140 SMS & MMS (good for burner phones) - $13 from Telstra
- UGREEN 25Ah power bank with 200W total output - $140 from Amazon

## Image Of The Day

Transit Conference - a modern push button telephone introduced during 183-84. Telecom Australian Annual Report 1983/84. (National Library of Australia)

## The End

📻 The Beatles - The Long And Winding Road - Remastered 2009

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