Rexfeng

One interesting sidenote from Farsace’s review: She attempted to shoot 4K/60 ProRes video, recording directly to an external SSD over USB, but she inadvertently did so using a USB-C cable that doesn’t support USB 3 data transfer speeds, so the footage was captured at a terribly low frame rate. The first problem is that USB-C cables are a confusing mess when it comes to data transfer and high speed charging capabilities. The second problem: the Camera app gave her no warning or indication that the connection to the SSD wasn’t fast enough.

Modeled after the thousands of other “Open Streets” or “Ciclovia” events that have been organized around the world and across the United States, 626 Golden Streets temporarily opens stretches of roadway for people to walk, jog, skate, bike and more in the San Gabriel Valley. The event series is organized by ActiveSGV, an SGV-based non-profit organization dedicated to realizing a safer, more sustainable and equitable San Gabriel Valley. Join us on October 29, 2023! To learn more, click here.

Released earlier this month, Starfield is Bethesda’s long-in-development and much-hyped open-world space RPG. And while the hundreds of planets and spaceship building are cool and all, I particularly enjoy Starfield’s fantastic lockpicking minigame. Apparently I’m not alone, because someone out there has taken the…

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Here's the real secret of "the secret": Those who believe that "manifesting" can "cosmically attract" success are more likely to "be drawn to risky investments, have experienced bankruptcy, and to believe they could achieve an unlikely level of success more quickly," according to a new scientific study. — Read the rest

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Cristina Criddle, Anna Gross, and John Aglionby, reporting from London for The Financial Times (paywall-circumventing Twitter link):

The UK government has conceded it will not use controversial powers in the online safety bill to scan messaging apps for harmful content until it is “technically feasible” to do so, postponing measures that critics say threaten users’ privacy.

In a statement to the House of Lords on Wednesday afternoon, junior arts and heritage minister Lord Stephen Parkinson sought to mark an eleventh-hour effort to end a stand-off with tech companies, including WhatsApp, that have threatened to pull their services from the UK over what they claimed was an intolerable threat to millions of users’ privacy and security.

Parkinson said that Ofcom, the tech regulator, would only require companies to scan their networks when a technology is developed that is capable of doing so. Many security experts believe it could be years before any such technology is developed, if ever.

No, Thursday’s out. How about never — is never good for you?

WhatsApp, owned by Facebook’s parent Meta, and Signal, another popular encrypted messaging app, are among those that have threatened to exit the UK market should they be ordered to weaken encryption, a widely used security technology that allows only the sender and recipient of messages to view a message’s contents. [...]

Officials have privately acknowledged to tech companies that there is no current technology able to scan end-to-end encrypted messages that would not also undermine users’ privacy, according to several people briefed on the government’s thinking.

This isn’t the worst reporting on encryption and lawmakers’ fantasies about “backdoors only accessible by the good guys”, but it’s fundamentally misleading. End-to-end encryption’s meaning is right there in its name. There’s no dial that can be adjusted from “weak” to “strong”. There’s no option for content inspection between end points. It’s not about choosing not to allow eavesdroppers, it’s about implementing protocols where it’s technically impossible to inspect content between sender and receiver.

The actual math is far more complex, but ultimately this boils down to the U.K. acknowledging that 2 + 2 can only equal 4.

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Wing, Alphabet’s aviation subsidiary, is partnering with Walmart to kick off drone deliveries from the retail chain in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metro area. The flights will begin taking off “in the coming weeks” from a Walmart Supercenter in Frisco, TX, and the companies plan to expand to a second DFW location before the end of the year. The companies say the coverage area from both stores will cover 60,000 homes.

The service will be available to homes within about six miles of the supported stores. Residents in those areas can order things like quick meals, groceries, essentials and over-the-counter medicines. The drones can fly up to 65 mph, and Wing says you’ll get your items in under 30 minutes. They use a retractable tether to “gently deliver even delicate items” — including challenging products like eggs and frozen treats.

Wing’s drones are largely automated and monitored remotely. “Wing’s technology allows operators to oversee the system from a remote location, which means pilots won’t need to be stationed at stores or customer homes,” Alphabet’s company wrote in an announcement blog post. “The aircraft essentially fly themselves, so each operator is approved to safely oversee many drones at the same time.”

Wing has already partnered with Walgreens for drone deliveries in the DFW region. Meanwhile, Walmart said in 2022 that its own DroneUp delivery service had covered around four million households in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Utah and Virginia. However, the retailer reportedly laid off 418 DroneUp employees earlier this year.

If you live in the DFW metroplex, you can check eligibility by installing the Wing Drone Delivery app from the App Store or Google Play. You’ll need to create an account and enter your address to view the results. A “coming soon” message means you’ll be covered as soon as deliveries begin. If the app tells you you’re not eligible, Wing says it will add new DFW neighborhoods soon.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wing-and-walmart-will-offer-six-mile-drone-deliveries-over-dallas-204501938.html?src=rss

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Katelyn Polantz, reporting for CNN:

The special counsel’s investigation into Donald Trump and the aftermath of the 2020 election sought the former president’s Twitter direct messages, of which there were many, federal prosecutors and lawyers for Twitter revealed in newly unsealed transcripts from February court hearings about the search warrant. [...]

A lawyer representing Twitter, now called “X,” similarly confirmed in court that Trump’s account had several private messages between users on the platform. “X” was able to find both the sent direct messages and deleted messages for prosecutors, according to the transcripts.

“We were able to determine that there was some volume in that for this account. There are confidential communications,” a lawyer for Twitter said about @realDonaldTrump’s direct messages.

Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman, reporting for The New York Times:

While it remained unclear what sorts of information the messages contained and who exactly may have written them, it was a revelation that there were private messages associated with the Twitter account of Mr. Trump, who has famously been cautious about using written forms of communications in his dealings with aides and allies.

The papers included transcripts of hearings in Federal District Court in Washington in February during which Judge Beryl A. Howell asserted that Mr. Smith’s office had sought Mr. Trump’s direct messages — or DMs — from Twitter as part of a search warrant it executed on the account in January.

In one of the transcripts, a lawyer for Twitter, answering questions from Judge Howell, confirmed that the company had turned over to the special counsel’s office “all direct messages, the DMs” from Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, including those sent, received and “stored in draft form.”

The lawyer for Twitter told Judge Howell that the company had found both “deleted” and “nondeleted” direct messages associated with Mr. Trump’s account.

I am not at all surprised that “deleted” DMs are not in fact deleted, but rather hidden. I am slightly surprised that Trump — famously averse not just to using email and text messages, but even to his own lawyers taking written notes in meetings, so as not to leave a chain of evidence for his lifelong criminal activity — would use, of all things, the infamously unencrypted direct messaging feature on Twitter. To be clear, this is a pleasant surprise.

Kyle Cheney, reporting for Politico, “Special Counsel Obtained Trump DMs Despite ‘Momentous’ Bid by Twitter to Delay, Unsealed Filings Show”:

Among the data the search warrant commanded Twitter to produce:

• Accounts associated with @realdonaldtrump that the former president might have used in the same device.
• Devices used to log into the @realdonaldtrump account.
• IP addresses used to log into the account between October 2020 and January 2021.
• Privacy settings and history.
• All tweets “created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by @realdonaldtrump, including any subsequently deleted.
• All direct messages “sent from, received by, stored in draft form in, or otherwise associated with” @realdonaldtrump.
• All records of searches from October 2020 to January 2021.
• Location information for the user of @realdonaldtrump from October 2020 to January 2021.

As I speculated last week, nothing you do on Twitter is private. Not your DMs, not your “deleted” DMs, not your searches, not your location (if you’re foolish enough to grant Twitter/X access to it), not your draft posts.

Elon Musk comes out of this looking like he’d happily fellate Trump:

Ultimately, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell held Twitter in contempt of court in February, fining the company $350,000 for missing a court-ordered deadline to comply with Smith’s search warrant. But the newly unsealed transcripts of the proceedings in her courtroom show that the fine was the least of the punishment. Howell lit into Twitter for taking “extraordinary” and apparently unprecedented steps to give Trump advance notice about the search warrant — despite prosecutors’ warnings, backed by unspecified evidence, that notifying Trump could cause grave damage to their investigation.

“Is this to make Donald Trump feel like he is a particularly welcomed new renewed user of Twitter?” Howell asked.

“Twitter has no interest other than litigation its constitutional rights,” replied attorney George Varghese of WilmerHale, the firm Twitter deploys for much of its litigation.

But Howell returned to the theme repeatedly during the proceedings, wondering why the company was taking “momentous” steps to protect Trump that it had never taken for other users. In the hearing on Feb. 7, 2023, Howell referenced Musk, asking: “Is it because the new CEO wants to cozy up with the former president?”

The unsealed court filing (PDF) is here, for your reading enjoyment. Hope you stocked up on popcorn, like I did, for indictment season.

From a Business Insider report last July:

The House committee investigating the Capitol riot on Tuesday revealed a draft tweet in which President Donald Trump called on his supporters to go to the US Capitol after his speech on January 6, 2021.

“I will be making a Big Speech at 10AM on January 6th at the Ellipse (South of the White House). Please arrive early, massive crowds expected. March to the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!!” Trump wrote in the draft tweet, which is undated.

Trump never sent the tweet, but its existence, along with other messages exchanged between rally organizers, offer proof that the march to the Capitol was premeditated, the January 6 committee said.

Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida presented the evidence during Tuesday’s hearing, and said: “The evidence confirms that this was not a spontaneous call to action, but rather it was a deliberate strategy decided upon in advance by the president.”

Unsent draft tweets seem among the most likely targets of the January 6 special counsel subpoena — and it’s possible that Twitter saves everything each user has ever typed in the tweet-editing field.

In the course of researching that previous item, wherein then-NYT restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton accompanied Colonel Sanders to a Manhattan KFC in 1976, I learned that she died just a few months ago, at age 97. Truly a groundbreaking career:

An adventurer with a passion for offbeat experiences, an eclectic taste for foods and the independence to defy pressures from restaurateurs and advertisers, Ms. Sheraton was the first woman to review restaurants for The Times. She pioneered reviewing-in-disguise, dining in wigs and tinted glasses and using aliases for reservations, mostly in high-end places where people would have otherwise known her from repeat visits and lavished their attentions on her.

“The longer I reviewed restaurants, the more I became convinced that the unknown customer has a completely different experience from either a valued patron or a recognized food critic,” she wrote in her 2004 memoir, “Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life.” “For all practical purposes, they might as well be in different restaurants.”

Knowing what I know about the restaurant industry, it’s hard to believe reviews were ever conducted not in disguise. That regular patrons (and recognized critics) get better service and food couldn’t be more obvious, which is the reason it’s such a joy to find your favorite spots and become a valued regular at them.

Colleagues and other restaurant critics described her reviews as tough but fair and scrupulously researched. The Times required three visits to a restaurant before publishing a review; she dined six to eight times before passing judgment. For an article on deli sandwiches, she collected 104 corned beef and pastrami samples in one day to evaluate the meat and sandwich-building techniques. [...]

Another of her reviews, based on blind tastings by several Times staff members, favored private-label liquors over popular brand names of Scotch, bourbon, rye, vodka and gin. The review ran weeks before Christmas, the busy liquor-selling season.

“I heard that two million dollars’ worth of advertising had been canceled,” Ms. Sheraton recalled in her memoir. She approached the executive editor. “I asked Abe Rosenthal if that was true. He said, ‘That’s none of your business. It was a great story.’”

Chefs and restaurant owners are using a multiplicity of ingredients and tastes to reflect Taiwan’s roots, shaping a distinct culinary culture.

Characterized by elongated noses and tiny, punched eyes and mouths, Marc Bourlier’s expressive figures gather in a perpetual state of curiosity and surprise. The artist scours the beaches near his home in Normandy for driftwood, gathering an incredible variety of sizes and shapes to take back to the studio. He complements the weathered grain with carefully whittled heads and long, limbless bodies, packing the individuals tightly together on platforms or organizing them into compartments.

The nuances of color play a role in Bourlier’s work, as he explores the relationship between naturally occurring tones and subtle background hues. Recently, the artist has composed tree motifs grounded by warm, brown surfaces filled edge-to-edge with drawn linear patterns and hundreds of faces. Figures stand around the trunks and balance in the boughs, captured in an enigmatic narrative.

See more of Bourlier’s work on his website and Instagram.

 

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Countless Astonished Faces Emerge from Driftwood in Expressive Sculptures by Marc Bourlier appeared first on Colossal.

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Starfield is the latest Xbox Series X/S exclusive to support Xbox Play Anywhere, the feature that lets players buy the game once and then access it on both console and PC. No, it doesn’t count for Steam versions of the game, but in a world where the biggest console blockbusters are increasingly getting ported to PC, St…

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Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel, reporting last week for The New York Times:

In the papers, researchers from the University of Texas, New York University, Princeton and other institutions found that removing some key functions of the social platforms’ algorithms had “no measurable effects” on people’s political beliefs. In one experiment on Facebook’s algorithm, people’s knowledge of political news declined when their ability to reshare posts was removed, the researchers said.

At the same time, the consumption of political news on Facebook and Instagram was highly segregated by ideology, according to another study. More than 97 percent of the links to news stories rated as false by fact checkers on the apps during the 2020 election drew more conservative readers than liberal readers, the research found. [...] Still, the proportion of false news articles that Facebook users read was low compared with all news articles viewed, researchers said.

False news articles were low overall, but the articles deemed false were overwhelming consumed by conservatives. That’s no surprise, but to me, gets to the heart of the controversy. A hypothetical social media algorithm that promotes true stories and suppresses false ones, with perfect accuracy, is going to be accused by conservatives of being biased against conservatives, because conservatives are drawn to false stories.

Jeff Horwitz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link), on Facebook overstating the degree to which these new studies exonerate its platforms’ influence:

Science warned Meta earlier this week that it would publicly dispute an assertion that the published studies should be read as largely exonerating Meta of a contributing role in societal divisions, said Meagan Phelan, who oversees the communication of Science’s findings.

“The findings of the research suggest Meta algorithms are an important part of what is keeping people divided,” Phelan told Meta’s communications team on Monday, according to an excerpt of her message she shared with The Wall Street Journal. She added that one of the studies found that “compared to liberals, politically conservative users were far more siloed in their news sources, driven in part by algorithmic processes, and especially apparent on Facebook’s Pages and Groups.”

Update: Kai Kupferschmidt’s summary of the four studies for Science.

Meta’s consumer-facing generative AI tools based on its new Llama 2 model may not be far off. The company appears to be working on several new generative AI features for Instagram, including labels that allow creators to identify images “generated by Meta AI.”

That’s according to screenshots shared by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi who often teases unreleased features from Meta’s apps. Paluzzi recently posted a screenshot that shows an in-app message detailing how posts created with generative AI tools may soon be labeled within Instagram. “The creator or Meta said that this content was created or edited with AI,” the message explains. Additional labels indicate it was “generated by Meta AI” and that “content created with AI is typically labeled so that it can be easily detected.”

A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment. But the screenshot suggests the company, like Google and others in the AI space, is interested in helping users discern when AI was used to create content. As generative AI tools have become more widely used, researchers and policymakers have raised concerns about how the technology could be used to aid the spread of misinformation or otherwise mislead people. Earlier this month, seven AI companies — including Meta — pledged to adopt a series of AI safety measures, like watermarks for AI-generated content.

While Meta so far hasn’t disclosed many details about its consumer-facing generative AI plans, Mark Zuckerberg has dropped several hints. “We're also building a number of new products ourselves using Llama that will work across our services,” the CEO said in a quarterly earnings call last week. “You can imagine lots of ways AI could help people connect and express themselves in our apps: creative tools that make it easier and more fun to share content, agents that act as assistants, coaches, or that can help you interact with businesses and creators, and more.”

Elsewhere, Paluzzi has spotted signs of other generative AI-powered tools for Instagram, including a “message summary” feature for summarizing long DMs, and new artistic tools for editing Stories.

Update, July 31st, 2023, 11:06 AM PT: This story has been updated to note that Meta declined to comment.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/instagram-seems-to-be-working-on-labels-for-posts-generated-by-meta-ai-173427549.html?src=rss

'Twitters swift rebrand to X is generating yet another issue. As reported by Bleeping Computer, the social media platform is causing Microsoft's Edge browser to throw up a warning, indicating some sort of security problem.

It seems to be related to how Edge and other Chromium-based web browsers deal with favicons (or 'Progressive Web App Icon Change', if you want to get super technical about it). With the Twitter rebrand being so sudden, Edge likely thinks X is a scam. The security alert prompts users to review the icon update and reads, "If this web app is trying to trick you into thinking it's a different app, uninstall it."

But as Bleeping Computer points out, PWA is working as intended. It is supposed to alert you when a website suddenly changes its favicon as that could indicate a potential redirect to a scam website. Presumably, this is temporary and will be fixed quickly. We've reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update this story once we've heard back. 

Florian / X

This is similar to an incident earlier this week, where X was blocked in Indonesia as it has laws forbidding gambling or porn. The X.com domain's previous owners broke the country's content laws.

Still, this is yet another indicator of how sudden the Twitter-to-X transition was. Other companies such as Meta and Microsoft already own trademarks on variations of X, which could land Musk's company some lawsuits. X even ran into trouble when attempting to change its signage at its San Francisco headquarters, as it didn't have the required permits. The company had to abandon its would-be facelift and leave the old bird logo and the letters "er" intact for a day or so.

The sudden name change is part of a larger plan to turn Twitter into a "super app" that's similar to China's popular WeChat. The platform could theoretically be used for payments, messaging and calls in the future.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitters-rebrand-to-x-is-causing-scam-alerts-on-microsoft-edge-203531493.html?src=rss

Any normal company planning a product name change would have everything sorted out with the iOS App Store and Android Play Store ahead of time. Needless to say, X Corp is not a normal company and so of course they didn’t have anything sorted out. Yesterday an update to the Twitter app appeared in Google’s Play Store, with a new icon and new app name: “X”.

Today, an update to the Twitter app finally appeared on Apple’s App Store. It has the new icon, but the app’s name in the store is still “Twitter”. The app’s description calls it X, though:

The X app is the trusted digital town square for everyone.

And the name of the app installed on your device is “X”. What gives? On Twitter X, Nick Sheriff points to a rule I heretofore wasn’t aware of. Apple doesn’t allow single-character app names:

On iOS, the situation is distinct as Apple does not permit any app to have a single character as their app name.

If they manage to obtain approval, it would mark the first instance since the inception of the iOS App Store that such a permission has been granted.

The rule Sheriff is referencing is about an app’s title in the App Store, not the name of the app as it appears on your device. So who’s going to budge? Will Apple grant a unique exemption allowing X Corp to have the first and only single-character app name in the entire App Store, or will X name the iOS app something longer (X App? X: Everything? X 69? XXX? 𝕏 (💦✊🍆)?)

Update: I’ve rewritten this post significantly. I was confused, at first, by the different rules for app names (on device) and app titles (listed on the App Store). It’s the App Store listing that must be two or more characters.

Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu, reporting for Reuters:

Tesla years ago began exaggerating its vehicles’ potential driving distance — by rigging their range-estimating software. The company decided about a decade ago, for marketing purposes, to write algorithms for its range meter that would show drivers “rosy” projections for the distance it could travel on a full battery, according to a person familiar with an early design of the software for its in-dash readouts.

Then, when the battery fell below 50% of its maximum charge, the algorithm would show drivers more realistic projections for their remaining driving range, this person said. To prevent drivers from getting stranded as their predicted range started declining more quickly, Teslas were designed with a “safety buffer,” allowing about 15 miles (24 km) of additional range even after the dash readout showed an empty battery, the source said.

The directive to present the optimistic range estimates came from Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, this person said. “Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged,” the person said, adding: “When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.”

This is not an “everyone does” situation:

Jonathan Elfalan, vehicle testing director for the automotive website Edmunds.com, reached a similar conclusion to Pannone after an extensive examination of vehicles from Tesla and other major automakers, including Ford, General Motors, Hyundai and Porsche. All five Tesla models tested by Edmunds failed to achieve their advertised range, the website reported in February 2021. All but one of 10 other models from other manufacturers exceeded their advertised range.

Starting to pick up a pattern with this guy Musk.

Long-time Slashdot reader maxcelcat writes: A fleet of some 500 drives were performing a display over Melbourne's Docklands in the lead up to the FIFA Women's World Cup. About 350 of them didn't come back and are now being fished out of the Yarra River, no doubt somewhat worse for wear. According to the operators, the drones experienced some kind of malfunction or loss of signal, which triggered a fail safe — an automated landing. So hundreds of drones landed safely... on the surface of a river! One local newscaster called it "a spectacular malfunction" (in a report with a brief clip of the drones gently lowering themselves into the water). The report also notes another drone company also once lost 50 drones in a river — worth tens of thousands of dollars — during a Christmas show.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This new mostly automated spot is both bewildering and delightful

There’s a Blade Runner vibe as you depart the 7 train at Queensboro Plaza, cross over an arching walkway, then plunge into a nest of modernistic condos, all funny angles and jutting balconies. In a neighborhood that looks like the NYC of the future, the Instant Noodle Factory at 24-11 41st Avenue near Crescent Street, looms into view, with little in the way of signage other than a window decal of a dog and cat bobbing eagerly in a tub among waves of noodles.

Inside the restaurant that opened around two weeks ago, bright white walls seem more like an art gallery than a factory; no employees were visible when I first arrived. A mural shows playful cartoons of ramen being assembled into soups. Other art reminiscent of Joseph Cornell feature ramen packages arrayed in a wall-mounted matrix. A row of solitary customers sit along a counter, working on their bowls of noodles, fishing with chopsticks, and quietly slurping. A couple of tables accommodate larger parties.

At the end of the room an order screen flickers across from four computerized stations, each centered on an induction burner. Each station also has a nozzle through which a measured quantity of boiling water squirts, depending on which numbered button is pushed. The button also controls the length of the boil. After you order a certain type of noodles along with free and paid add-ins, 35 in number, you wait for your meal to be delivered in deconstructed form. It comes on a tray that fits precisely into a mortise in the counter in front of each boiling station.

Whether this is a participatory art gallery, automated restaurant, or even a grocery store (you can buy all noodles in six packs and take them home) is up to you. When you enter, you are advised to study the ramen matrix, which consists of 85 packages of dried noodles, mainly from Japan, China, and Korea, though a few originate in Thailand, Singapore, and other locations.

Yet, this is a factory and you are the worker responsible for preparing your own meal. I was entirely bewildered when I first walked in, wondering how to approach the place. But this bewilderment was delightful — because perplexed is not a bad way to feel at the start of a meal. My advice is to select one of the preset noodle combinations, eight in number, which include type of ramen; added objects like sausages, herbs, fish balls, and boiled eggs; and condiments. If you don’t pick a preset combo, you could spend hours considering your million or so options.

I ordered duck duck noods ($9), which consisted of a pair of packets of Mama noodles from Thailand, which includes a pulled duck leg, a gooey soft-boiled egg, and scallions. At the touch screen, I was offered all sorts of add-ins from which I (perhaps foolishly) selected an extra dose of duck ($6) and a pair of Japanese kurobata sausages ($2.50). I thought their smoky flavor might go well with the duck, and they did. From the free selection of add-ins, I picked kimchi. Are we crossing too many cultural barriers here? Instant Noodle Factory knows no borders, and even traipses out of Asia by offering Parmesan, birria, and ghost peppers.

My order ferried by a human attendant appeared almost instantly through a door covered with a white sheet. The server placed my neatly arranged tray of two empty packets of Mama noodles, and multiple other ingredients, some already in the paper bowl, others not. She took my bowl and placed it under a nozzle and pushed button number one. A stream of boiling water cascaded into the bowl and then the timer counted down the minutes till my ramen would be ready.

Once it was bubbling, I removed the bowl to the counter and began working on the noodles. The broth was rich, brown, and silky and intensely duck flavored in a way that was almost artificial. Really, every bite was a pleasure. And much of the pleasure came from knowing I’d customized my ramen exactly as I’d wanted it at that moment.

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg, “Apple Tests ‘Apple GPT,’ Develops Generative AI Tools to Catch OpenAI”:

The iPhone maker has built its own framework to create large language models — the AI-based systems at the heart of new offerings like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard — according to people with knowledge of the efforts. With that foundation, known as “Ajax”, Apple also has created a chatbot service that some engineers call “Apple GPT”.

In recent months, the AI push has become a major effort for Apple, with several teams collaborating on the project, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The work includes trying to address potential privacy concerns related to the technology.

It’s not surprising that Apple has a project like this underway. It would be rather shocking if they didn’t. And it shouldn’t be surprising that Apple is a latecomer to shipping software that exposes AI chatbot-type features. Apple is seldom first to adopt new technology, especially something with the privacy ramifications of AI chat.

I was banging this drum before WWDC, but one app that needs this sort of functionality is Xcode. Xcode is the only major developer IDE I’m aware of that doesn’t offer AI code generation and analysis. I’ve seen some demos from readers who use Microsoft’s VS Code and they’re amazing.

Next paragraph:

Apple shares gained as much as 2.3% to a record high of $198.23 after Bloomberg reported on the AI effort Wednesday, rebounding from earlier losses. Microsoft Corp., OpenAI’s partner and main backer, slipped about 1% on the news.

If you ever notice, Bloomberg news stories always contain updates like this. It’s an obsession unique to Bloomberg. My understanding is that this decade-old Business Insider story remains true: Bloomberg reporters are evaluated and receive bonuses tied to reporting market-moving news. They’re incentivized financially to make mountains out of molehills, and craters out of divots, to maximize the immediate effect of their reporting on stock prices. And Bloomberg appends these stock price movements right there in their reports, to drive home the notion that Bloomberg publishes market-moving news, so maybe you too should spend over $2,000 per month on a Bloomberg Terminal so that you can receive news reports from Bloomberg minutes before the general public, and buy, sell, and short stocks based on that news. No other news organization I’m aware of has an incentive system like this for reporters — but no other news organization has a business like the Bloomberg Terminal.

Here’s the graph of Apple’s share price today. Gurman’s report was published at 12:03pm, and boom, Apple’s stock price jumped at exactly 12:04pm. It then mostly came back down to where it was, presumably after everyone realized there really wasn’t any news here other than the fact that Apple is working on something we all presumed they were working on. Apple’s stock finished up 0.7 percent for the day.

Microsoft’s stock graph for today doesn’t show as dramatic a downward spike as Apple’s jump, but they were trading at $359.35 at 12:01, and dropped to $356.84 at exactly 12:04, one minute after Gurman’s report hit Bloomberg Terminals. The “this is bad news for Microsoft” line of thinking, presumably, is that if OpenAI has a long-term moat around LLM AI technology, Microsoft is likely to acquire them or otherwise maintain their position as an exclusive partner, and Apple might eventually need to pay through the nose to license OpenAI/Microsoft technology. But if there is no moat, and even Apple is developing its own LLM systems, then maybe Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI isn’t worth much long-term.

Apple’s brief 2.7 percent jump and Microsoft’s smaller but still-significant drop, both at 12:04pm, were clearly caused by Gurman’s report. Bloomberg Terminal subscribers get such reports before anyone else. (Bloomberg employees, of course, know such information before it’s published, but I’m sure never do anything untoward with it.) Once you view Bloomberg’s original reporting through this prism — that most of their original reporting is delivered with the goal of moving the stock prices of the companies they’re reporting on, for the purpose of proving the value of a Bloomberg Terminal’s hefty subscription fee¹ to day-trading gamblers — a lot of their seemingly inexplicable stylistic quirks don’t seem so inexplicable any more. They just seem a little gross.

Good luck attempting to travel internationally without a passport. You'll likely be stopped by airport staff before you leave your home country. Even if you manage to reach another nation, trying to slip past border control will result in grave consequences. — Read the rest

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For more than 800 years, the volcanic system on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula sat dormant. That is, until March 2021, when a fissure vent appeared south of Fagradalsfjall mountain. A throng of scientists, photographers, and tourists descended on the area to capture the long-awaited eruption, with the first event continuing for six months, followed by a second—and very similar one—that ran for less than three weeks in August 2022.

Two days ago, a new eruption began spewing dramatic currents of lava in an area north of Fagradalsfjall, near Litli-Hrútur. Drone pilot Isak Finnbogaso captured stunning footage of the remarkable landscape as it churned molten earth to the surface. You can see more of his footage of Iceland on YouTube and Instagram. (via Kottke)

 

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