Apple Is the One Big Tech Company Without a Clear ChatGPT Strategy
AI in Apple products today is like irrigation for its walled garden, essential and helpful for an increasing number of functions, but ultimately it’s the hardware fruit that Apple sells. Generative AI could come in like a tidal wave. Apple, by all appearances, squandered the lead it established since becoming the first big tech company to make an AI-powered voice assistant. Siri was clearly flawed from the start, but it looks ancient by the standards of ChatGPT. To compete in this new AI race, companies need massive, bespoke computational clusters that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Cloud services are not Apple’s strongest suit right now, as its chief for that division is leaving, and iCloud has been the subject of lament in this very newsletter. The company is investing significant resources in the augmented-reality headset we expect to debut in June and the long-mooted, capital-intensive automotive initiative.
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Apple’s VR Headset Might Run Tweaked Versions of iPad Apps
– Apple is working on “optimized” versions of apps like Safari and many of the core apps you might already be familiar with from an iPhone, including “Apple’s services for calendars, contacts, files, home control, mail, maps, messaging, notes, photos and reminders, as well as its music, news, stocks and weather apps.”
– There will be headset versions of FaceTime and Apple TV with features that “will look similar to their iPad counterparts.”
– Apple is apparently testing a camera app, which could let you take pictures using its many rumored cameras.
– You’ll be able to read books in VR with Apple Books and meditate with an app.
– A headset-compatible version of its new Freeform app could let you collaborate with others in mixed reality.
– Freeform won’t be the only productivity app: the headset will also apparently support Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iMovie, and GarageBand.
– Apple wants to make watching sports a “richer experience,” which could utilize technology it acquired when it bought NextVR.
– Gaming will “be a central piece of the device’s appeal.” (That feels like a smart decision.)
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Collapsed Turkish Crypto Exchange Thodex’s CEO Faruk Ozer Extradited, Arrested In Istanbul
The events surrounding Thodex had created a stir in Turkey where crypto has been used as a hedge against inflation. Ozer’s brother, sister and four other senior employees were jailed, and at least 83 people were detained as part of the investigation.
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Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky App Is Now On Android
At launch, however, Bluesky remains a pared-down version of Twitter without many of the features that make the social network what it is today, including basic tools for tracking likes or bookmarks, editing tweets, quote-tweeting, DM’s, using hashtags and more. It’s also building in decentralization with its own protocol — the AT Protocol — instead of contributing to the existing work around ActivityPub, the protocol powering the open source Twitter alternative Mastodon and a range of other decentralized apps in the wider “Fediverse” — the name for these interconnected servers running open software used for web publishing. That puts Bluesky on the outside of where a lot of the current activity is taking place around decentralized social networking. You can download Bluesky on the Google Play Store here.
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New York’s First Offshore Wind Farms To Launch This Year
“Right now, Long Island is powered about 80% by fossil fuels. And when we go to 2040 it will be 0% for New York. Off shore wind will probably provide 25% of the state’s electricity within the next 10 to 15 years. So it’s a massive, renewable clean source of energy at affordable prices. And it’s located right near where all the electricity demand is,” CEO of LIPA Tom Falcone said. “We need to transition downstate from fossil fuels to renewables. And that’s a great challenge for New York, because we can’t really build anything on the land because there isn’t land. So we have to share the ocean,” said Adrienne Esposito from Citizens Campaign for the Environment.
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The Rise of DOOM Chronicled on Retro Site for ‘Shareware Heroes’ Book
The book promises to explore “a hidden games publishing market” that for several years “had no powerful giants,” with games instead distributed “across the nascent internet for anyone to enjoy (and, if they liked it enough, pay for).”
And the site features a free excerpt from the chapter about DOOM:
It seemed there was no stopping id Software. Commander Keen had given them their freedom, and Wolfenstein 3D’s mega-success had earned them the financial cushion to do anything. But all they wanted was to beat the last game — to outdo both themselves and everyone else. And at the centre of that drive was a push for ever-better technology. By the time Wolfenstein 3D’s commercial prequel Spear of Destiny hit retail shelves, John Carmack had already built a new engine.
This one had texture-mapped floors and ceilings — not just walls. It supported diminished lighting, which meant things far away could recede into the shadows, disappearing into the distance. And it had variable-height rooms, allowing for elevated platforms where projectile-throwing enemies could hang out, and most exciting of all it allowed for non-orthogonal walls — which meant that rooms could be odd-shaped, with walls jutting out at any arbitrary angle from each other, rather than the traditional rectangular boxed design that had defined first-person-perspective games up until then.
It ran at half the speed of Wolfenstein 3D’s engine, but they were thinking about doing a 3D Keen game next — so that wouldn’t matter. At least not until they saw it in action. Everyone but Tom Hall suddenly got excited about doing another shooter, which meant Carmack would have to optimise the hell out of his engine to restore that sense of speed. Briefly they considered a proposal from 20th Century Fox to do a licensed Aliens shooter, but they didn’t like the idea of giving up their creative independence, so they considered how they could follow up Wolfenstein 3D with something new. Fighting aliens in space is old hat. This time it could be about fighting demons in space. This time it could be called DOOM.
The book’s title is Shareware Heroes: The Renegades Who Redefined Gaming at the Dawn of the Internet — here’s a page listing the people interviewed, as well as the book’s table of contents.
And this chapter culminates with what happened when the first version of DOOM was finally released. “BBSs and FTP servers around America crashed under the immense load of hundreds of thousands of people clamouring to download the game on day one.
“Worse for universities around the country, people were jumping straight into the multiplayer once they had the game — and they kept crashing the university networks…”
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Nintendo ‘Hacker’ Gary Bowser Released From Federal Prison
What his life will look like in Canada remains uncertain. However, in federal prison, Bowser has shown that he doesn’t shy away from putting in work and helping other people in need. Aside from his prison job, he spent several nightly hours on suicide watch. The prison job brought in some meager income, a large part of which went to pay for the outstanding restitution he has to pay, which is $14.5 million in total. Thus far, less than $200 has been paid off. “I’ve been making payments of $25 per month, which they’ve been taking from my income because I had a job in federal prison. So far I paid $175,” Bowser tells Nick Moses.
If Bowser manages to find a stable source of income in Canada, Nintendo will get a chunk of that as well. As part of a consent judgment, he agreed to pay $10 million to Nintendo, which is the main restitution priority. “The agreement with them is that the maximum they can take is 25 to 30 percent of your gross monthly income. And I have up to six months before I have to start making payments,” Bowser notes. At that rate, it is unlikely that Nintendo will ever see the full amount. Or put differently, Bowser will carry the financial consequences of his Team-Xecuter involvement for the rest of his life.
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What Happens When You Put 25 ChatGPT-Backed Agents Into an RPG Town?
“Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day,” write the researchers in their paper… To pull this off, the researchers relied heavily on a large language model for social interaction, specifically the ChatGPT API. In addition, they created an architecture that simulates minds with memories and experiences, then let the agents loose in the world to interact…. To study the group of AI agents, the researchers set up a virtual town called “Smallville,” which includes houses, a cafe, a park, and a grocery store…. Interestingly, when the characters in the sandbox world encounter each other, they often speak to each other using natural language provided by ChatGPT. In this way, they exchange information and form memories about their daily lives.
When the researchers combined these basic ingredients together and ran the simulation, interesting things began to happen. In the paper, the researchers list three emergent behaviors resulting from the simulation. None of these were pre-programmed but rather resulted from the interactions between the agents. These included “information diffusion” (agents telling each other information and having it spread socially among the town), “relationship memory” (memory of past interactions between agents and mentioning those earlier events later), and “coordination” (planning and attending a Valentine’s Day party together with other agents)…. “Starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine’s Day party,” the researchers write, “the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time….”
To get a look at Smallville, the researchers have posted an interactive demo online through a special website, but it’s a “pre-computed replay of a simulation” described in the paper and not a real-time simulation. Still, it gives a good illustration of the richness of social interactions that can emerge from an apparently simple virtual world running in a computer sandbox.
Interstingly, the researchers hired human evaluators to gauge how well the AI agents produced believable responses — and discovered they were more believable than when supplied their own responses.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam for sharing the article.
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Netflix Password Sharing Crackdown To Expand To US In Q2 2023
In Canada, paid sharing resulted in a larger Netflix membership base and an acceleration in revenue growth, which has given Netflix the confidence to expand it to the United States. When Netflix brings its paid sharing rules to the United States, multi-household account use will no longer be permitted. Netflix subscribers who share an account with those who do not live with them will need to pay for an additional member. In Canada, Netflix charges $7.99 CAD for an extra member, which is around $6. […] Netflix claims that more than 100 million households are sharing accounts, which is impacting its ability to “invest in and improve Netflix” for paying members.
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