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.
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.
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.
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!
Transit Conference - a modern push button telephone introduced during 183-84. Telecom Australian Annual Report 1983/84. (National Library of Australia)
📻 The Beatles - The Long And Winding Road - Remastered 2009
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