Issue 2265 - Thursday 6 February, 2025.

In Today’s Issue

The News

Australia’s startup scene is doing… fine?

Australian startups got more money in 2024, a report has found (The State of Australian Startup Funding), but the spoils are going to fewer companies. There’s a fair bit in this annual report that you can slice in a few different ways, here’s some key takes.

TLDR: Things are going OK in Australia’s startup scene even if there’s an uptick in busts — we shouldn’t expect every or even most startups to survive — but there are a few troubling trends like funding concentration and diversity issues.

Government to pass anti-scam law but stops short of loss refund requirement

Australian romantic scam victims lost close to $12,000 on average, according to a report released by Norton. I think it’s easy to giggle a little bit at people being swindled by a fake Brad Pitt (BBC) asking for money but, like many scams, it’s really sad to think that this is the price of loneliness and technological illiteracy. Parliament is sitting over the next few weeks, perhaps for the last time before the election, and one of the bills on the slate is a law putting the onus on companies like banks to take steps to stop scams (law at APH, a good run-down by law firm Ashurst). There was a push to adopt the UK requirement that banks quickly refund losses except for when there’s gross negligence but a Labor-led committee reviewing the bill ended up waving it through without it (Yahoo). Honestly, I feel like we don’t consider the psychic damage that we’re all getting from constant scam emails, texts, phone calls, etc, and always having to question: is this real? Or am I being fucked.

Schools banning phones doesn’t help kids

Well! It turns out banning phones at school — The Common Sense Thing To Do Of Course We Should Do This Why Wouldn’t We Do This — doesn’t actually help kids’ wellbeing or grades (The Guardian). Researchers compared UK kids from schools which banned phones with those which didn’t and found no difference (Lancet). What they found was that spending more time on smartphones for kids was linked to “lower grades, poor sleep, disruptive behaviour and a lack of exercise”. This finding contradicts SA Premier Peter Malinauskas, also a key promoter of the social media ban, who last year said the “evidence was in” on his state’s ban (ABC News).

I’m sick of puritanical approaches to technology that assume that BANNING and RESTRICTING will fix all the problems. They just don’t work! We should be teaching children to use technology in helpful and healthy ways so they can learn good habits for their adult life. I find it extremely annoying because we’re wasting time on this bullshit rather than actually addressing problems that are making life hard for kids.

Oh, Also

What kind of bug is that?

Do you ever look at a bug and think, What the hell is that? Well, Iowa State University has launched this charming website — yes, not even an app — called InsectID that can identify bugs from images you upload. Apparently it is 96% accurate at predicting 2,500 different kinds of creepy-crawlies and was trained on 12 million images, mostly collected by citizen scientists (Phys).

Give it a whirl and tell me how it goes! I did try it on a picture of a Sydney funnel web spider (very venomous) which it identified as a California Bee Assassin (not that venomous) but, in fairness, it did say it had a “very low certainty” for the image so I can’t blame it.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile Phones

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday afternoon. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land

The Sizzle is created on Gadigal 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.