Google is proudly proclaiming a quantum computing milestone on their blog - "we tested ever-larger arrays of physical qubits, scaling up from a grid of 3x3 encoded qubits, to a grid of 5x5, to a grid of 7x7 — and each time, using our latest advances in quantum error correction, we were able to cut the error rate in half", achieving what's known in quantum computing as "below threshold". This enabled "one of the first compelling examples of real-time error correction on a superconducting quantum system", an important thing if you want your quantum computer to do anything useful. Google published a research paper about the Willow quantum computing chip in Nature if you wanna know more. I hope I'm well and truly retired from anything to do with technology before quantum computing becomes a thing because I honestly do not understand how this shit works compared to trusty old 1s and 0s.
OpenAI released Sora Turbo, a cut down version of Sora (that isn't public yet) that can "generate videos up to 1080p resolution, up to 20 sec long, and in widescreen, vertical or square aspect ratios". You can BYO assets like music, images and clips to "extend, remix, and blend" or generate something new via a text prompt. It's only available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and you can only make 50 videos at 480p or "fewer" at 720p and they only go for 5 seconds. If you want 1080p videos you gotta upgrade to ChatGPT Pro for US$200/m. Also, "all Sora-generated videos come with C2PA metadata, which will identify a video as coming from Sora to provide transparency, and can be used to verify origin". Technically interesting, socially disturbing IMHO. Marques Brownlee had access to it for a week and made a video showing off what it can and can't do.
The First Nations Digital Inclusion Roadmap is now a thing. It's a document made by the First Nations Digital Inclusion Advisory Group (FNDIAG) and outlines ways the government can try and meet Outcome 17 of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap - "by 2026, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have equal levels of digital inclusion". There's 30 recommendations all up and the government put a press release saying they've committed $68m to some of them like "free community Wi-Fi initiative for remote communities, a First Nations Digital Support Hub, and network of digital mentors" and "additional funding to RMIT University to improve national data collection on First Nations digital inclusion to better track progress, and target future initiatives, as part of the Australian Digital Inclusion Index".
MacStories has handed out a bunch of awards - like physical trophies! - to their favourite apps of 2024. The winner of Best New App for 2024 is Croissant, a genuinely useful app for iOS that makes it easy to post to multiple social networks at once. I use it to post on Bluesky and Mastodon and it's great. I also use Moom 4, which was awarded Best Mac App. It's "just" a window tiling app but it's by far the nicest one on any platform and I miss it whenever I use Windows and Linux despite there being good window tiling apps for those platforms too. It's fantastic to see MacStories still paying attention to quality Mac & iOS apps. We use these things every day yet there seems to be very little critical consideration given to app software in 2024.
Draftsman Tony Saunders at work in the Microelectronic Systems Design Centre in Adelaide. Telecom Australia Annual Report 1978/79 (National Library of Australia)
📻 Tumbleweed - When We Were Young
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