Just a quick note before we get to today’s news that I’m still working my way through the backend stuff, so if you notice stuff broken or not how it used to be, I know! Should be back to normal next week, I hope.

The News

Two gross rich people are fighting in court

Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman and OpenAI and it's gotten to the point now where Musk and Altman have to give evidence in court, so everyone is starting to pay attention to the years long case involving two of the most shameless fuckwits on Earth. Musk wants the court to unwind OpenAI's for-profit restructure (Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI back when it was a not for profit), using the excuse that they're not focusing on AGI for the benefit of humanity as intended, when really, we all know he's just salty that OpenAI is valued immensely high, is about to IPO and he's left holding his tiny dick while Grok compliments him on it. I was very amused by the jury selection process reported by The Verge, where all the jurors admitted to hating Musk and the judge telling Musks lawyers who want any juror that dislikes Musk kicked out, "the reality is that people don't like him... Many people don't like him, but that doesn't mean that Americans nevertheless can't have integrity for the judicial process".

Ubiquiti adds memory surcharge to online orders of switches, routers and access points

Ubiquiti has slapped a "memory surcharge" on a range of products when buying from their online store. The surcharge is added when you put an item in your cart and seems vary from product to product, with a maximum surcharge of 5.8%. I don't think I need to explain to you why RAM is so expensive, but can someone explain to me why Ubiquiti would make up a weird surcharge instead of just increasing the price? They say transparency, but there's gotta be some accounting or marketing bullshit reason for it right? Meanwhile, CNX compared the prices of various single-board computers (Raspberry Pis, Radxa, Orange Pi etc) between 2024 -2026 and anything with a decent amount of RAM in it can be 100-200% more now. Remember when computers got faster and cheaper over time?

Claude gets a hook directly into popular creative software

Anthropic's Claude bot now has direct hooks into creative software like Abelton, Adobe Creative Cloud, Affinity, Autodesk Fusion, Blender, Sketchup and more. For example the connector for Ableton "grounds Claude's answers in official product documentation for Live and Push" and the connector for Blender "offers a natural-language interface to its Python API". In Affinity, Claude "automates repetitive production tasks across pro creative workflows - such as batch image adjustments, layer renaming, and file export - and generates custom features directly in the app". Anthropic even joined the Blender Development Fund (which costs €240,000 according to Blender's website) to support Blender improving its API.

Oh, Also

A wishlist of items academics want done to improve online journalism

A group of Australian journalism academics, industry leaders and digital platforms met up earlier this year to chat about what the hell is going on with news and information in the current online hellscape we find ourselves in. Because academics were involved, a report was generated and a layperson's version of that report was published on The Conversation for people like me at the bottom of the news food chain to regurgitate. They want the platforms to expose their algorithms (why do we see the content we see?) in greater detail, copyright reform so AI tools have to pay for the content they train on, more media & AI literacy education, a tax offset for journalism salaries and journalism training for "news influencers". Cool, good luck with that, I mean it.

Bargains

The End

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