Today is the day Optus and Telstra are turning off their 3G networks. They aren't shutting the entire thing down at once across the entire country, but the shutdown starts today. Telstra said on its Exchange blog that they're starting with Tasmania first and that the rest of Australia will be void of 3G by November 4th. No similar info from Optus. Both telcos have added to their websites that "if you have a device that is not able to make Triple Zero (000) calls, Optus/Telstra is legally required to stop these mobile phones from accessing the Optus/Telstra mobile network". The main impact here are phones from overseas that don't support LTE on Band 28 (700MHz) or don't have the correct VoLTE profile - like on phones running custom Android ROMs or simply never got a firmware update from their OEM to support VoLTE.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is about to release their Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) so users have a way of knowing if these "open source" LLMs and AI systems are actually open source. From the v1.0 definition draft, for an LLM/AI to call itself open source, it's not enough just to use an open source licence, slap up some code and call it a day. The project must include "source code for training and running the system, model parameters such as weights or other configuration settings, as well as sufficiently detailed information about the data used to train the system so that a skilled person can build a substantially equivalent system". There's still debate if the actual training data itself should be open source too, but that doesn't seem to be in the latest draft.
The USA's Copyright Office "denied a request from video game preservationists to let libraries, archives and museums temporarily lend individuals some virtual, remotely accessible copies of those works". One argument against this, pushed by the Entertainment Software Association, is that if libraries did this "people would take advantage of libraries to play games for free, that they would damage the market for classic video games, and that preservationists didn't have appropriately tailored restrictions to ensure that uses would be limited to teaching, research, or scholarship uses". Fucken grubs. I swear if libraries were pitched now, they'd never exist, despite the immense benefit they bring to society.
Helen Mirren is obsessed with the fact that Kurt Cobain died before all the tech we take for granted today kicked off. Across multiple interviews she's said "it's so sad that Kurt Cobain died when he did, because he never saw GPS", "Look at Kurt Cobain — he hardly even saw a computer! The digital stuff that's going on is so exciting", "I was thinking about Kurt Cobain the other day and he died without knowing the internet, and I'm totally blown away by that". As weird as it is, Helen says it as a way of being fascinated with technology and in awe of it. Who knew Helen Mirren is a geek??
weird computer games (Internet Archive / Sketch the Cow)
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