Sidhartha Shukla, reporting for Bloomberg:

Trading volumes in nonfungible tokens — digital art and collectibles recorded on blockchains — have tumbled 97% from a record high in January this year. They slid to just $466 million in September from $17 billion at the start of 2022, according to data from Dune Analytics. The fading NFT mania is part of a wider, $2 trillion wipeout in the crypto sector as rapidly tightening monetary policy starves speculative assets of investment flows.

I’m tempted to say this is the least surprising market collapse in memory, but it’s obviously coming as an unpleasant surprise to some people.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple tonight made history after “CODA” landed three Academy Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with wins for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Troy Kotsur, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Siân Heder. The winners were revealed this evening at the 94th Annual Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles.

“CODA” is the first motion picture starring a predominantly Deaf cast in leading roles to win Best Picture; Troy Kotsur is the first Deaf male actor to win Best Supporting Actor; and writer-director Siân Heder earned her first-ever Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

I didn’t watch the show, but I’ll bet this is all anyone is talking about regarding the Oscars today.

Reuters:

The U.S. Senate voted unanimously on Tuesday to make Daylight Savings Time permanent, a move supporters say would make winter afternoons brighter and end the twice changing of clocks.

The measure still needs approval from the U.S. House of Representatives and the backing of President Joe Biden. On Sunday, most of the United States resumed Daylight Savings Time, moving ahead one hour. The United States will resume standard time in November 2022.

Finally.

(Grammar note: Pluralizing the “saving” in “daylight saving time” is so common that it’s now accepted (and apparently either house style at Reuters or the mistake slipped past their copy desk), but formally, it’s singular. My mnemonic: there’s only one “s” in “DST”.)

“Maple Cocaine”, in a now famous tweet over two years ago:

Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.

Twitter is a machine for directing self-righteous anger, and it fires all day, every day, whether the targets are deserving or not.

Matthew Panzarino, writing for TechCrunch:

Apple is adding two new voices to Siri’s English offerings, and eliminating the default “female voice” selection in the latest beta version of iOS. This means that every person setting up Siri will choose a voice for themselves and it will no longer default to the voice assistant being female, a topic that has come up quite a bit with regards to bias in voice interfaces over the past few years.

As Panzarino notes, in some countries, like the U.K., Siri’s default voice is male, not female. So “Why is Siri’s default voice female?” is not applicable worldwide. And my hunch has always been that the defaults in each country were selected by perceived quality. But making this an explicit choice during setup is the right answer — take the question of cultural bias out of the equation.

I believe that this is the first of these assistants to make the choice completely agnostic with no default selection made. This is a positive step forward as it allows people to choose the voice that they prefer without the defaults bias coming into play. The two new voices also bring some much needed variety to the voices of Siri, offering more diversity in speech sound and pattern to a user picking a voice that speaks to them. […]

“We’re excited to introduce two new Siri voices for English speakers and the option for Siri users to select the voice they want when they set up their device,” a statement from Apple reads. “This is a continuation of Apple’s long-standing commitment to diversity and inclusion, and products and services that are designed to better reflect the diversity of the world we live in.”

Here’s a screen recording I made of the new lineup of voices. Both new voices are very good. Interestingly, in addition to adding the two new voices, the Siri preferences no longer label any of the voices as “male” or “female” — they’re just “Voice 1” … “Voice 4”. That makes it harder to remember which one is which, but, it opens the door to nonbinary voices in a future update. There’s no reason Siri’s voice needs to be decidedly male or female. The “diverseness” of the two new voices is subtle, but they don’t label them as such. You either hear it or don’t. The same could be true for the gender of future new voices.

(I wonder too if the order is randomized? There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to how mine are ordered, and randomizing the order would further eliminate bias before each user makes their choice.)