The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA) fronted a Senate Select Committee hearing on Adopting Artificial Intelligence on this morning. The MEAA reckons "we're seeing the biggest corporate swindle in history" and "for the big Silicon Valley tech companies that own these machines, their business model is built on taking others' work and selling it as their own". If we do nothing about it there will be "mass job losses and the end of intellectual property as we know it", as well as "the erosion of our news and information to the point where the community cannot tell fact from fiction". The MEAA wants to see "updates to workplace laws to ensure workers are consulted on the intended use of AI in the workplace, as well as a tax on businesses that replace human workers with AI tools".
For the last few months, Mitsubishi Australia has been touring a little electric kei car called the eK that it wanted to bring here as a cheap runabout. Despite interest from dealers and customers, it isn't going to happen because of Australian Design Rules. It would be too expensive and take too long to make the eK compliant. They haven't said what exactly would need to change, but it's not the first time this has happened to an EV, with Nissan's Ariya hitting the same barrier. Mitsubishi said it would "support an Australian Government reform program, and suggests consideration of a process where vehicles type approved in established global markets, such as Japan, the EU and the UK, be accepted into Australia without needing additional unique modifications and approvals".
The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) put up a Request for Information regarding a Public Safety Mobile Broadband (PSMB) network. This is a "national interoperable 4G communication network that supports data, video and voice services" for "critical applications and data services such as real-time mapping, weather updates and situational awareness tools" that'll be accessed by emergency services so that their data gets priority. It might be a totally separate network or run on existing infrastructure and they could be convinced to go 5G instead of 4G if it's worth it (that's how long they've been piss farting around to get to this stage! 5G is a no-brainer). After this request for info, a tender will kick off in 2025-2026 to actually build the network.
Wesley Moore wrote a detailed blog post about his experience with a laptop containing of those new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite ARM CPUs. He got a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x and everything about the physical design seems great, battery life is as expected, no overheating and overall, no complaints. When it comes to software, the Windows x86 emulation is seamless, but most of the software they use on a daily basis (Obsidian, 1Password, Firefox, etc.) is already native ARM. Wesley also tried to install Linux, but it doesn't work at this point as there's not enough support for the new SoC, even in the latest Linux kernel. Great review overall and much more insightful than any of the useless ones I've seen on YouTube.
Mondo 2000, Issue 08, 1992 (Famicoman / Internet Archive)
📻 Blonde Redhead - Melody Experiment
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