tech

Jony Ive on Life After Apple

Jony Ive on Life After Apple – WSJ:

One surprising thing about Ive’s approach is that conversation, rather than sketches, is how he often begins a project. Thinking—and then speaking about that thinking—is the raw material he works with. “Language is so powerful,” Ive says. “If [I say] I’m going to design a chair, think how dangerous that is. Because you’ve just said chair, you’ve just said no to a thousand ideas.

“This is where it gets exciting,” he says. “You have an idea—which is unproven and isn’t resolved, since a resolved idea is a product—and the only tangible thing about the idea are the problems. When someone says it’s not possible, and all you are being shown is why it’s not possible, you have to think and behave in a different way. [You have to say], from a place of courage, I believe it is possible. 

“I love making things that are profoundly useful,” he adds. “I’m a very practical craftsperson.”

[I apologize for the paywall… but this particular bit registers so tightly with me. Thinking and discussing are so important to my design of anything. And not just the “saying no” part by using certain words and making choices. But the malleable, mutable nature of ideas as words is profound.]

Record-breaking chip can transmit entire internet’s traffic per second

Record-breaking chip can transmit entire internet’s traffic per second:

The speed record for data transmission using a single light source and optical chip has been shattered once again. Engineers have transmitted data at a blistering rate of 1.84 petabits per second (Pbit/s), almost twice the global internet traffic per second.

It’s hard to overstate just how fast 1.84 Pbit/s really is. Your home internet is probably getting a few hundred megabits per second, or if you’re really lucky, you might be on a 1-gigabit or even 10-gigabit connection – but 1 petabit is a million gigabits. It’s more than 20 times faster than ESnet6, the upcoming upgrade to the scientific network used by the likes of NASA.

[Cool. (Also, meh. My son’s gaming probably uses more bandwidth than that… 🤷🏼‍♂️ 🎈)]

Production Notes: making an iPhone Video in the Field – David Smith, Independent iOS Developer

Production Notes: making an iPhone Video in the Field – David Smith, Independent iOS Developer:

What I have found is that it is essential that the audio be recorded directly into the iPhone. While external recorders can be later synced up in Final Cut, this process is super cumbersome and means that you can’t easily check your footage in the field. It is also essential to have some kind of wind/weather screen on your microphone, otherwise you will constantly be ending up with unusable shots where all you hear is wind noise.

[On it. Kinda. Sorta.]

Run multiple Rails apps with Puma-dev

Run multiple Rails apps with Puma-dev:

Puma-dev presents a better way
By running a background process to manage all the Rails apps, starting them, and shutting them down when idle, we can avoid the tedium of managing multiple Rails servers in multiple terminal windows. We also get:
HTTPS support
.test TLD

So instead of http://localhost:3000 and http://localhost:3001 we get https://web.test and https://auth.test (or whatever name we like).

Here’s how you can use it.

[Sure enough…]

MTA to install 2 surveillance cameras on every subway car

MTA to install 2 surveillance cameras on every subway car:

The 13,000 cameras, which cost a total of $5.5 million, will be installed on 6,455 subway cars over the next three years.

Hochul said she hopes the surveillance will result in more people choosing to ride the subway, where ridership remains down 37% on weekdays – despite reaching a post-pandemic high just last week.

“You think Big Brother is watching you on the subways, you’re absolutely right. That is our intent,” Hochul said. “We are going to be having surveillance of activities on the subway trains and that is going to give people great peace of mind. If you’re concerned about this, best answer is don’t commit any crimes on the subways.”

The MTA already has 10,000 cameras in all 472 of its subway stations.

[I recently noted other privacy intrusions in the Subway system. Taking the Subway in NYC might be one of the most intrusive experiences ever soon enough.]

The CarPlay Settings Disconnect – 512 Pixels

The CarPlay Settings Disconnect – 512 Pixels:

While we’re here, I’d also like to officially complain about CarPlay’s insistence in treating each car as their own unique butterfly. In addition to CarPlay in my truck, we have it in my wife’s minivan. iOS treats them as individual connections, each with their own settings. That means if I switch podcast apps or change a setting, and want things to be the same between the two cars I drive, I have to adjust things a second time.1 CarPlay should have an option to let the phone drive the experience, so things can be consistent across vehicles.

[Yes, please.]

The MTA’s switch to OMNY machines is a privacy nightmare

The MTA’s switch to OMNY machines is a privacy nightmare:

Cards like the ones these new machines will be supplying are likely to follow the model of other Cubic Corp. cards, including San Francisco’s Clipper and London’s Oyster cards. The OMNY card will likely have a persistent identifier that makes tracking people throughout the city an easy task.

Tying those journeys to a real name and personal information becomes significantly easier if you link that card, or a phone or credit card, with an OMNY account. Accounts have users’ names, payment information, and every web tracker and cookie the OMNY account management site might decide to deploy—along with data scraped from social media—associated with their method of entry. 

While the MTA’s MetroCard is also run by Cubic, that system was deployed in 1991 and doesn’t have quite the same tracking capabilities. Transit justice organization TransitCenter reported that the MTA has stated OMNY will give the city “near-instantaneous” reporting on rider tap-ins and travel, an improvement from weeklong delays for MetroCard data. Tap-to-pay with a phone leverages near-field communication (NFC) technology, a system with its own issues that exacerbate the OMNY system’s existing privacy concerns. 

Who will they share this new trove of data with? The current legal landscape and previous experience with Cubic tells us that warrantless access to this data is both permitted and commonly exercised.

[It’s gettin’ so that you can’t do nothing in peace anymore…]

Apple taking 85% of Globalstar network for Emergency SOS

Apple taking 85% of Globalstar network for Emergency SOS:

The Form 8-K filing, published on September 7, 2022 from the Securities and Exchange Commission shows just how much network capacity Apple will use at 85%.

Globalstar will provide and maintain all resources, including personnel, software, satellite, gateways, satellite spectrum and regulatory rights necessary for the partnership. Apple will receive priority access to these resources.

In addition, Apple will fund 95% of Globalstar’s capital expenditures for it to grow and maintain its satellite network. Apple will also cover certain costs of Globalstar’s borrowings related to the new satellites, and other approved costs as necessary.

[Facinating]

4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything – ⌨️🤷🏻‍♂️📷

4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything – ⌨️🤷🏻‍♂️📷:

4.2 gigabytes.

4.2 gigabytes.

That’s the size of the model that has made this recent explosion possible.

4.2 gigabytes of floating points that somehow encode so much of what we know.

Yes, I’m waxing poetic here. No, I am not heralding the arrival of AGI, or our AI overlords. I am simply admiring the beauty of it, while it is fresh and new.

Because it won’t be fresh and new for long. This thing I’m feeling is not much different from how I felt using email for the first time – “Grandma got my message already? In Florida? In seconds?” It was the nearest thing to magic my child-self had ever seen. Now email is the most boring and mundane part of my day.

There is already much talk about practical uses. Malicious uses. Downplaying. Up playing. Biases. Monetization. Democratization – which is really just monetization with a more marketable name.

I’m not trying to get into any of that here. I’m just thinking about those 4.2 gigabytes. How small it seems, in today’s terms. Such a little bundle that holds so much.

How many images, both real photos and fictional art, were crammed through the auto-encoder, that narrower and narrower funnel of information, until some sort of meaning was distilled from them? How many times must a model be taught to de-noise an image until it understands what makes a tiger different from a leopard? I guess now we know.

And now I suppose we ride the wave until this new magic is both as widely used, and boring, as email. So it goes.

[I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff created with the new AI art tools. Remarkable stuff.]

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers – The Old New Thing

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers – The Old New Thing:

The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.

And I’m sure they put a digital version of a “Do not remove” sticker on that audio filter. (Though I’m worried that in the many years since the workaround was added, nobody remembers why it’s there. Hopefully, their laptops are not still carrying this audio filter to protect against damage to a model of hard drive they are no longer using.)

And of course, no story about natural resonant frequencies can pass without a reference to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.

[It’s not the only thing that Janet can crash.]