You know those scam ads on Facebook with David Koch or Richard Wilkins's face poorly photoshopped on a bloke getting dragged by the cops, above a headline like "you won't believe what Richard Wilkins said to get arrested!", as boomer bait for them to click through and get sucked into some cryptocurrency pyramid scheme? Yeah well Andrew Forrest (the second richest person in Australia) had his face put on over 1000 of these bullshit posts that sucked "millions of dollars" out of people lured in by the posts and decided to do something about it, suing Meta in the USA. Meta tried to dismiss it under Section 230, but the judge wasn't buying that and the case is going ahead. Forrest said he will "spend whatever it takes to hold Facebook's directors and its leaders responsible" and that "I don't care what it costs. I want to see them in the witness stand explaining their actions". Me too mate, me too.
In more positive Meta related news, Threads finally has an API! You are now able to "publish posts via the API, fetch their own content, and leverage our reply management capabilities to set reply and quote controls, retrieve replies to their posts, hide, unhide or respond to specific replies". Unlike X, Meta has made the API free to use, with what seems to be no limits. Check out the documentation. I hope this means that sooner rather than later, I can get a website and iOS app that lets me use Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon all in the one spot and possibly even X (which stubbornly still exists despite being ratshit) for a few extra bucks to cover the massive API fees.
Maccas in the USA was testing the use of AI-powered ordering at 100 drive-thrus. Instead of yelling your order at a person, you could yell at an AI-bot instead. They've stopped doing that for now, ending a contract for "automated order taking" with IBM. Unsure if it's because the bot sucked, but McDonalds said "our work with IBM has given us the confidence that a voice-ordering solution for drive-thru will be part of our restaurants' future". It's obvious why McDonalds and other fast food joints are keen for this to work better than the current reality (bot could be cheaper than a human! duh), but it does seem like something that an LLM should be able to be pretty good at eventually, even when dealing with dumb people that don't know how to order.
Signal's president Meredith Whittaker is in Australia and in an interview with Nine/SMH/The Age, gave a good summary of why trying to backdoor encrypted messaging is futile - encryption is "an easy scapegoat, and the scapegoat that many in law enforcement have wanted to target for a very long time. It is much easier to demonise encryption than it is to look at the really difficult issues, the fact that most abuse happens in the family, the fact that incest is one of the most common forms of child sexual abuse, the fact that we live in a world where we may want desperately to help children". That's what shits me about things like the EU's Chat Control and our own local push to ban kids under 16 from social media. They force us give up significant freedoms while barely touching the sides of solving the problem. Or even more succinctly, the squeeze ain't worth the juice.
Brochure describing the Apple IIc (vintagetech / The Internet Archive)
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