The entire Mac lineup may get the M4 chip in late 2024 and early 2025. The chip will start appearing in the iMac, MacBook Pros, and Mac mini machines first before being implemented into the MacBook Air, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro. The M4 processor is expected to come in at least three varieties. It will feature an improved Neural Engine with an increased number of cores for AI tasks.
While the Humane AI Pin could be the future of wearables, it doesn't currently have enough consistency or connectivity. This article reviews the device and describes what it is like using it. There is still a lot of room for improvement, for example, the laser display can be hard to read and the interface can be difficult to navigate. The device also overheats after a few minutes of use.
The European Space Agency will launch a mission later this year to demonstrate precision formation flying in orbit to create artificial solar eclipses. The mission will involve a pair of spacecraft that will fly about 144 meters apart, with one spacecraft acting as a disc to block out the sun from the other spacecraft. This will allow the ESA to study the Sun's highly ionized atmosphere. The formation flying technology could be used for other future missions as well.
Endosymbiosis is a process in which a once free-living organism is incorporated into a cell. This can result in the organism becoming an organelle, a compartment within cells surrounded by membranes that performs specialized functions. Researchers may have found a new case of the extremely rare event. An organelle devoted to fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere is being observed in the process of specialization. Called a nitroplast, the organelle is limited to a single lineage of algae, likely due to its relatively recent origin, with the relationship between the nitroplast and its host cell only dating back about 100 million years.
The things that slow devs down depend on the company size, culture, the nature of the product, and the composition of the team. This article looks at what engineers from big tech companies think is slowing them down. Many devs say that build, compile, and deployment times are the main things slowing them down. Other factors include dependency bugs, complicated codebases, development processes, tests, and reviews.
Computer architecture design has evolved towards adding various levels of caching between compute units and the main memory to hide latency. These caches are partially shared among the CPUs, so perfect performance isolation of co-hosted containers is not possible. Netflix's team was able to meaningfully improve both the predictability and performance of its containers by taking some of the CPU isolation responsibility away from the operating system and moving towards a data-driven solution involving combinatorial optimization and machine learning. This post explains the process in detail.
Apple has opened its iPhone repair process to include used components for the iPhone 15. Customers and independent repair shops will be able to fix iPhones starting this fall using compatible components, including the battery, display, and camera. Face ID will not be available when the feature first rolls out but will be implemented later. Apple has no plans to sell refurbished parts for user repairs.
In his annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy laid out a vision for how generative AI could become the company's next pillar of growth. The company has invested $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic and added prominent computer scientist and AI expert Dr. Andrew Ng to its board. Amazon is taking a three-pronged approach to AI innovation: it will focus on AI models, applications built on top of the models, and the chips that power the technology. The company is optimistic that a lot of world-changing AI will be built on top of AWS.
High capacity drives are seeing high demand in AI-powered servers and data centers - small capacity drives (2 TB or less) are seeing a decline in price.
The software development culture shift towards more dependencies is creating more products and companies that rely on closed-source software or APIs for their full functionality - this could have future negative implications.
The interview discusses Kurian's keynote at the Google Cloud Next conference, Google Cloud's strategy, why AI offers a reset in competition, and how Google can win in the enterprise space broadly.
This article details several improvements to UUIDs that enhance their usability and efficiency in applications, providing a better experience for both users and developers.