Chris Taylor writing for Mashable (Apple News) But there’s another reason why the advertising options are self-defeating: Because they bring up another troubling question for users who are sick of the site’s lack of content moderation. If Twitter/X can identify and filter out content such as hate speech “with a 99% efficacy rate,” according to the company’s blog, why only offer that service to advertisers? Plenty of users would also prefer a version of Twitter that is 99% Nazi free, too.

Tim Wilson and Alice Hancock writing for Ars Technical (Apple News) US government scientists have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time, a result that is set to fuel optimism that progress is being made toward the dream of limitless, zero-carbon power. Wouldn’t that be amazing, limitless, zero-carbon power.

Saw this on Mastodon, great way to understand the different sizes of data.

Timothy B. Lee and Sean Trott writing for Ars Technical (Apple News) Why use such a baroque notation? Here’s an analogy. Washington, DC, is located at 38.9 degrees north and 77 degrees west. We can represent this using a vector notation: Washington, DC, is at [38.9, 77] New York is at [40.7, 74] London is at [51.5, 0.1] Paris is at [48.9, -2.4] This is useful for reasoning about spatial relationships.

Jon Brodkin writing for Ars Technica Hwang is still on Twitter with the new handle of @x12345678998765. “Alls well that ends well,” he tweeted last night. He told Ars that @x12345678998765 is the handle Twitter moved him to temporarily before he picks a new name.

Jonathan M. Gitlin writing for ArsTechnica Since the Bolt, GM has gone on to develop a new battery platform called Ultium, with much lower costs per kWh than the LG cells that power the Bolt. And it will use those cells in the next Bolt, although GM says we need to wait until a later date for anything more specific.

Greg Morris writing on his blog The biggest update to Apple Notes is linking between notes easily, and it’s not an exaggeration to say Apple absolutely nailed the implementation. You can tap link and just type out the name of the note you want to link to, there’s no double bracket or back linking bandwagon joining, it’s simple, elegant and exactly what is needed. I’m really looking forward to this update to Notes.

Met some friends at breakfast this morning.

Magic Kingdom fireworks always impress! 🎇

Some thoughts on Apple’s new Vision Pro I’m surprised the FaceTime avatar isn’t your Memoji. I’m assuming it’ll be an option, but the 3D digital face thing has some room to improve. The hardware they’ve put into this thing is amazing! The screens, the cameras, the eye tracking, the M2 and R1 chips, just 🤯 When I saw the R1 I immediately thought car. I think Eye Sight (the outward facing screen showing the wearer’s eyes) is really well done and a key component to making this something you can wear and still interact with other people.

Will Knight writing at Ars Technica (Apple News) The Nvidia team, which included Anima Anandkumar, the company’s director of machine learning and a professor at Caltech, created a Minecraft bot called Voyager that uses GPT-4 to solve problems inside the game. The language model generates objectives that help the agent explore the game, and code that improves the bot’s skill at the game over time. Voyager doesn’t play the game like a person, but it can read the state of the game directly, via an API.

OMG Cayde is back!!!

Dan Goodin writing for Ars Technica (Apple News) The ability of BrutePrint to successfully hijack fingerprints stored on Android devices but not iPhones is the result of one simple design difference: iOS encrypts the data, and Android does not. Hopefully this is an easy fix for Google to implement, but then as usual, it would require that fix to roll out to all these phones.

Talyor Kerns writing for Android Police What’s more, when the tablet isn’t attached, the dock doesn’t do anything. On its own, it can’t take Google Assistant commands or play audio — all that is handled by the tablet. At the very least, Google should give the dock the electronics to put it on par functionally with something like a Nest Mini. I think this is the reason why the dock doesn’t make sense to me.

Saw this over on Daring Fireball. Windows has lost a lot of market share over the last decade, very clearly to mobile (Android & iOS). The US chart was interesting as well, so I decided to check out Canada’s: Pretty similar to the US chart in that iOS has greater market share than Android (vs the global numbers). You can also clearly see iOS’s market share increasing while Android’s is decreasing.

Allison Parshall writing for Scientific Americanican (Apple News) Now researchers have taken a step forward by combining fMRI’s ability to monitor neural activity with the predictive power of artificial intelligence language models. The hybrid technology has resulted in a decoder that can reproduce, with a surprising level of accuracy, the stories that a person listened to or imagined telling in the scanner. The decoder could even guess the story behind a short film that someone watched in the scanner, though with less accuracy.

Umar Shakir writing for The Verge (Apple News) The devices in question usually include the XIM, Cronus Zen, and ReaSnow S1. The third-party mouse and keyboard interfaces emulate a controller input, enabling users to reap the benefits controllers players have, like aim assist, but with the added precision and movement abilities you could otherwise only get with a keyboard and mouse. They can also execute scripts that enhance aim, fire rapidly, or add other unfair advantages.