Daily Tech News 3 October 2023

• Elon Musk (boo! hiss!) is being sued for $1 million for falsely claiming a man was a Neo-Nazi. (Tech Crunch)
  
  What? Just a neo? Not even a real one? Pfft, what are you even doing here, Elon?
  
  So what did he say?

  Very odd

  Yes, that's literally it. That's what he's being sued over.
  
  Ars Technica has an even more unhinged report on events and their commentariat takes it to the next level.

• What big captchas you have, grandma. (Ars Technica)
  
  Now Bing can read captchas. Which gives us a simple solution: Only allow people to comment if they can't read the captcha.
  
  
  
• Kenya's parliament is recommending that the country ban Sam Altman-Fried's Worldcoin project. (Reuters)
  
  This plot from a third-rate Bond film, probably one of Timothy Dalton ones nobody remembers, seeks to scan the retinas of entire third-world nations in exchange for a pot of message.
  
  (This is the weasel in charge of OpenAI, not the weasel in charge of FTX.)
  
  
  
• The debug table for Google Chrome is over 4GB. (Random ASCII)
  
  That used to be a lot. It still is a lot. Ugh.
  
  
  
• The absolute minimum any developer needs to know about Unicode. (Tonsky)
  
  We peaked with SIXBIT and it's been downhill ever since.
  
  Unicode is designed to let you represent every human language, ever, with a single character set.
  
  The problem is that it is impossible to consistently and unambiguously represent every human language, ever, with a single character set, so Unicode is the semantic equivalent of a typhoid epidemic where the only plumber in town is the first victim.
  
  

• As above, so below:
  
  

  The independent @RBAInfo's decision to keep interest rates on hold at 4.1% is a relief for many already doing it tough. The @AlboMP Govt is rolling out billions of dollars of relief to take the edge off cost-of-living pressures without making inflation worse. #auspol#ausecon

  — Jim Chalmers MP (@JEChalmers) October 3, 2023

  
  
  Yes, Australia now has its very own catastrophic inflation reduction act.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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