Mentioned in today’s edition: Oracle, Canva, MrBeast, Clawdbot, Larry Ellison, AirTag 2, Chanel Contos, WhatsApp, Nvidia and Windows 11. Plus, deals on Sony shooting grips, Razer gaming mice and Coles Mobile recharges.

The News

Is the new TikTok US being censored or just struggling under Oracle incompetence?

The TikTok US deal finally closed last week (Business Insider). The new domestic app was immediately struck with outages and errors (The Verge). Over the weekend, US users were unable to access the app, had videos stuck under review, couldn't see new content uploaded by non-US users and had their personalised feeds revert to the default one. These errors, which happened at the same time as the ICE shooting of Alex Pretti, led people to believe that the platform was being censored but a TikTok US spokesperson said the errors were caused by a power outage (Ars Technica). 

The Sizzle: I know it's easy to draw the lines between TikTok US -> Oracle -> Larry Ellison -> Trump, but I do buy the excuse that TikTok US just fucked up. In a sick way — as in, I'm a sicko for enjoying this — TikTok US is going to be a great natural experiment. Content MAGAoderation will be one thing, but I'm also curious to see how TikTok US will fare separated from the clearly very talented ByteDance engineering team. Like with Twitter-X transition backend stuff is invisible... until it breaks. Then it's suddenly a big issue. I've got the popcorn ready to see how it goes.

Further reading: Some TikTok users are decamping to another video app founded by a Palestinian-Australian who lives in Sydney 👀 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Google trusts DrBeast more than the CDC

Google's AI mode is primarily getting its health information from the most trustworthy source of medical info, YouTube (Guardian). A study looking at 50,000 answers to health questions found that Google's AI generated answered preferred the platform of M̶r̶ DrBeast over the CDC or Mayo Clinic. Meanwhile, Google is also prioritising YouTube and X posts over media outlets on its mobile Discover feed (Press Gazette). Google's prioritisation of the big, free platforms is not great because it means that the info that's going to be available to most people isn't what's highest quality.

Related reading: The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free (2020) 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Everyone loves Clawdbot, the AI assistant that is exposing your entire life to the internet

The latest buzzy app among the AI-LinkedIn-hustlebro posters is Clawdbot (GitHub), an open-source, locally-run AI personal assistant that plugs into a bunch of different apps (MacStories). Its main innovation is using messaging apps like WhatsApp as an interface to prompt the AI to do call restaurants for a booking (X), run OnlyFans accounts (X), even control your oven (X). Two teensy downsides: people are leaving their Clawdbots exposed on the internet (LinkedIn) and are chewing through hundreds of dollars of cloud AI to do basic automation (Hacker News) lol. 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Oh, Also

Pauline Hanson song is #1 on "music loved by people who don't know how to stream"

An Australia Day song sung by former Australian one-hit-wonder-turned-conservative darling Holly Valance and released by Pauline Hanson has topped the charts (7NEWS). 

Now, you might ask, "which charts?" Well, the song topped the iTunes best-selling chart. As in, music that people purchased for $2.19 on iTunes. This might prompt you to say "hmm, I don't know how many people are buying music these days, how many sales do you need to hit number one?". 

iTunes doesn't publish purchase numbers publicly. But, thanks to Scott who wrote to me, we have an answer: a Digital Sales Data tool calculates that the Hanson-Valance song was able to top the charts after being bought just 376 times. Of course, take this number with a pinch of salt - but that sounds about right to me!

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Bargains

Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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

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