If you’ve been looking forward to injecting a little intelligence in your Apple devices, the time is now. Apple on Monday rolled out developer beta releases of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, which include access to several—but notably, not all—of the company’s previously announced AI-powered features.
Apple relied on chips designed by Alphabet's Google rather than industry leader Nvidia to build its new artificial-intelligence software infrastructure that will power its forthcoming suite of AI tools and features, according to an Apple research paper it published on Monday.
[...]
Unlike Nvidia, which sells its chips and systems as standalone products, Google sells access to the TPUs through its Google Cloud Platform. Customers interested in buying access must build software through Google's cloud platform in order to use the chips.
So far, the system is largely holding up to the Olympic stress. There are some obvious reasons for that—locals are on vacation, new stations opened on time, many more trains are running than during a typical summer. To direct travelers, the regional transportation network has mobilized 19,000 purple-vested helpers, a ubiquitous presence in the stations and on platforms.
And then there’s a reason that’s quite unusual. Paris is working with navigation apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps to direct travelers away from the fastest routes.
AppleVis is shutting down. The site has been a crucial resource for blind and visually-impaired Apple users since iOS accessibility was new, though it’s always covered all Apple platforms. It’s a news site, an informed but opinionated blog, a place to track OS releases and their accessibility features, an accessible app directory, and a lively community forum. AppleVis has long served newer Apple users along with those of us who own the moniker “power user.”
In a post on the site on Saturday, AppleVis founder David Goodwin said he is no longer able to keep the all-volunteer project going.
Whether I'm working, imagining, or even crocheting, Freeform has me covered with everything I need to focus on and manage my ideas.
Unread by Golden Hill Software has long been an excellent and elegant RSS client for iOS and iPadOS. Today, it arrives on macOS with version 4.0. While I have been exploring new ways to keep up with my favorite feeds as the web enters its federated era, using Unread on the Mac hasn’t felt like a step backwards. Unread 4.0 is a fully native, fully-featured app built using AppKit and SwiftUI that feels modern and performs incredibly quickly.
The BeeStation’s best feature is how it makes good backup habits automatic. Within a couple of weeks of setting it up, I had both my and my spouse’s Drive and Dropbox accounts synced and regularly backed up; my older music, movie, and miscellaneous files stashed away; and our photos regularly backed up from our phones. All this was then backed up to Synology’s cloud servers every week (for an add-on cost), and everything was accessible remotely and on the local network.
South Korea is the only country where Find My does not work, which has led online petitioners to accuse the US firm of discrimination against the country.
[...]
“There are no regulations restricting the Find My service under the current Location Information Act,” a Korea Communications Commission official said. “Similar services are already available here, as the operators have completed the registration process with the agency.”
The film’s scenes were given a sepia tint in post-production, seemingly to depict Thailand as it was 30-50 years ago.
[...]
Critics pointed out other negative portrayals, such as an airport depicted in poor condition, with outdated luggage carousels and buildings, and a taxi driver with long hair in an untidy uniform.
Hundreds of websites trying to block the AI company Anthropic from scraping their content are blocking the wrong bots, seemingly because they are copy/pasting outdated instructions to their robots.txt files, and because companies are constantly launching new AI crawler bots with different names that will only be blocked if website owners update their robots.txt.
In particular, these sites are blocking two bots no longer used by the company, while unknowingly leaving Anthropic’s real (and new) scraper bot unblocked.
I like the idea of being more ruthless. I could start to be intentional about my digital archive. I could prune and delete. I could dump data into a so-called “second-brain app” designed as external memory for everything from texts to to-do lists. But Note, the archivist, assured me that I was not an idiot for failing to find a good way to organize my digital attic; as of now, there isn’t one. For institutions, there are powerful preservation solutions, “but it requires a lot of labor and a lot of resources”, she said. “It just hasn’t trickled down to personal digital archiving. I think eventually it will, but right now there’s not some solution out there that exists that people just aren’t aware of.”
Today I learnt a new iOS gesture that is probably around since iPhone X: to quickly get back to the first page of your home screen while you are at some other pages further to the right, swipe up from the bottom as if you are in an app and are trying to get back to the home screen.
~
Thanks for reading.