The problem with hardware design at Apple is not the lack of capable individuals who would like to join and participate in the teams.

The problem is that, after dozens of product variations in core categories, there really is little design innovation that can occur that will actually be favorable to customers.

I mean do you really want another / different iPhone / iPad / MacBook design or have these devices really reached an optimal design and the only meaningful change is now in terms of dimensions? If so, designers would not get to create anything iconic unless they work on new products and those are very rare at Apple.

This is a dumb article. Apple is working on Siri II. Making the trigger ‘Siri’ is just a tiny part of the experience change.

The broader goal is to make Siri conversational and a knowledge agent ( like GPT-4 ).

This statement is not true at all: “Virtually all multimedia-related companies rely on ffmpeg to do their heavy lifting.“. These are the services that most companies that don’t do in-house / hardware encoding rely on.

Neither AWS Media Convert or Bitmovin use ffmpeg for encoding or packaging. ( Although it is used for decoding various input files. )

By that logic all the Teslasâ(TM)s are ticking time bombs.

Your argument is that technology is bad because a government can abuse it?

You do understand most people have always on/always connected mobile devices that governments can track and many now drive electric cars with remote access, right? Also this is slashdot.

Agree. If you donâ(TM)t believe Apple is not safeguarding your day, then you canâ(TM)t believe anyone else.

Your only options are to roll your own or use a fully open source and audited solution

I am surprised Rust is not on this list. Itâ(TM)s such a great language.

Please donâ(TM)t think me insensitive. I was touched by this and I mourn his passing.

This being Slashdot though I am curious if all his content could be fed into GPT-3 to create a sort of digital version of him, and if this would be of value to others.

Itâ(TM)s a first version. The rich lunatics are paying to help their fellow man obtain a more affordable car in the future, and virtue signaling.

In fairness these could not be retrofitted to many cities like LA. Firstly the residents who park their cars on these streets would never go for it and second it would cause gridlock because the volume of vehicles that can travel through the city would be dramatically reduced.

VTOL drone aircraft have their problems but they impact existing modes of transport the least which is why they are these have such high interest.

Totally BS. Any reasonably smart software development org will devote a chunk of its time to addressing technical debt and make general improvements.

We spend 35% of our eng resources on this. It amounts to tens of millions of dollars every year.

This has little experience with the broader software industry. These OMG TEH BLOAT statements pop up every few years.

First, software requires more computing power today that it has in the past because it has more functionality that it did in the past. You might argue that much of that functionality is not needed and that may be fair but thatâ(TM)s a very different type of bloat.

Second, we now use tooling ( including languages ) that are more cpu and memory intensive. These tools make development easier ( cheaper, more robust ) but they do use up more resources.

Itâ(TM)s also totally rubbish that companies canâ(TM)t make efficient software. I work for one of the mentioned media companies and we actually build apps on c/c++ that fly on 600 mips with 30mb. We also build apps for high end Apple TVâ(TM)s with expansive animations and online video that use 200+ mb just sitting there. Every time we sit customers down and ask which they prefer they always choose the prettier / more feature rich applications, even when their slower.

An infant is âprogrammedâ(TM) to emit loud noises when it is hungry / cold / uncomfortable.

I dare say it would be trivial to train a neural network to monitor sensor and make equivalent noises. Would that make it intelligent?

The whole world will adopt this, if the EU makes it a requirement.

*which will alone give Steam Deck the largest launch library of any console, ever*

PS5 and Xbox X had a MUCH larger library of pre-existing PS4 and Xbox games. These Steam Deck games are not unique to the steam deck, their just verified to work on it.