Now, in the wake of fake news and other troubles at tech companies, universities that helped produce some of Silicon Valley’s top technologists are hustling to bring a more medicine-like morality to computer science.
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The idea is to train the next generation of technologists and policymakers to consider the ramifications of innovations — like autonomous weapons or self-driving cars — before those products go on sale.
Cook opened the section by sharing that the iPhone X (drum roll please) has 99% customer satisfaction. There’s always that pesky one percent! Cook recently said that iPhone X has outsold other models since it launched in November. He also disclosed that Apple has nearly 1 billion subscribers (to services including iCloud and Apple Music) so there’s an upcoming milestone to watch for.
Regarding Apple Watch and other wearables, Cook said the category is approaching the size of a Fortune 300 company; Cook previously said that what it calls wearables (Watch, AirPods, Beats, etc.) collectively was the size of a Fortune 500 company last summer.
The Apple HomePod generally sounds better than any other smart speaker—but only somewhat, and only in direct A/B/C/D tests. If you listened to the HomePod, Sonos, and Google Home an hour apart, you’d never be able to declare one a clear winner.
Overall, despite much carping over details here, I found the iPad surprisingly usable and likeable. After almost a decade, it's still early days. Remember that despite the version numbering, we're at the version 1.0 stage of the iPad Pro as a professional mobile platform.
I don’t consider the term blogger an insult, but I don’t really consider my online writing “blogging” anymore, either. And MarsEdit 4 can more aptly be called a content-management system’s content managing system: it shaves off the rough edges of web-based interfaces, letting you focus on composing messages and shaping their appearance.
Karl Traunmueller has released Compositor 1.0, a new Mac app that brings WYSIWYG [what you see is what you get] features to the LaTeX document preparation system widely used in academia for preparation of scientific and technical publications.
For the junior devs out there, it’s going to be hard to land your first job. You might have to do things I really hate recommending, like working for free on various projects. if you do pick a really great open source project that you can stick on your resume. I’m less inclined to recommend working for a “startup” for free.
Also you’re going to have to hunt for your own mentors. In-person meetups are the best place, though I understand it’s not an option for everyone, so you might try private subject-related Slacks and Discords. And it’s going to suck about as much as dating does. You’re going to get rejected a lot. And you’re going to be on projects that suck or completely fail, because people working for free tend to be a bit more flaky than in business. Like one junior dev told me they stopped going to a particular meetup because the project they were on fell through. I had to tell them they need to keep going and picking projects up, knowing a lot of them are flake city.
Do you think Apple is working on HomePod's Siri to make it understand different langauges? Can I 'Hey-Siri' in English, but specify a Mandarin song title using Mandarin? Or 'Hey-Siri' in English, but specifying a Cantonese song title using Mandarin?
(I just tried all these combinations on my iPhone X. Didn't work.)
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Thanks for reading.