Publisher of pretty good content, Conde Nast, sells out to OpenAI

Conde Nast did a deal with the devil, giving OpenAI access to all their content from publications like Wired, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and even Arstechnica. An "immediate effect of the deal will be that users of ChatGPT or SearchGPT will now be able to see information from Conde Nast publications pulled from those assistants' live views of the web". In the longer term, "OpenAI can openly and officially utilize Conde Nast articles to train future AI language models". Feels wrong to co-operate with thieves, but maybe Conde Nast figures they better take OpenAI's money now, before the ponzi scheme implodes.

NFSA survey finds everyone is struggling with video game preservation

The National Film & Sound Archive recently published results of an international survey they did with other similar organisations and found that a "lack of established resource, barriers to access, lack of international collaboration and low levels of recognition of the importance of video games as cultural heritage threaten the ongoing viability of collection and long-term preservation" - i.e: if we don't take preserving video games seriously, this "pre-eminent cultural artefact of our time" will end up like the early days of film, where 90% of everything made pre-1929 no longer exists.

Medibank will spend $126m cleaning up data breach, Apple Podcasts is now on the web, Midjourney also gets a website

• Medibank's full year financial statement for 2024 says that the cost of their big fat data breach will hit $126m by June 2025. Almost $40m of that is "non-recurring cybercrime costs" and another $40m in "further IT security uplift and legal and other costs related to regulatory investigations and litigation". Dunno what the other $40m will be spent on.
• You can use Apple Podcasts on the web now. Syncs with your iOS built-in podcast app so you can pick up where you left off easily. Apple also updated their web version of Maps so it works in Firefox. Handy if you don't want Google logging whatever you look up.
• Midjourney has long been one of the best AI image generators but to use it you had to join their Discord server and give it your prompts via a chat channel. Now you can use it on the web, no Discord required. Unfortunately you need either a Discord or Google account to sign up and there's still no API.

rsrsrs, mdr, kkkk, lol

Dunno why this didn't occur to me, but different languages laugh differently online. While English writers might use ahahah, hehehe or lol, but "askfhsjkd" is a "popular way to indicate amusement among young Turkish speakers, as if they’ve been overcome by laughter and are unable to type complete words". Brazilians might use "kkkk" as it "imitates the sound of a laugh" or "rsrsrs" as an abbreviation of the Portuguese word for laughter "riso". Estonians use "h6h6h6" as an "ironic laugh" where tne number 6 is pronounced as "oh". French use "mdr" as an acronym for "mort de rire" meaning "dead from laughter" and "ptdr" as an abbreviation of "pété de rire" or "exploded from laughter".