Apple releases iOS 18.1 developer beta with the first ‘Apple Intelligence' iPhone features (2 minute read)
Apple's newly released developer betas for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 contain the company's first set of AI features, including a Siri with an updated design and ability to maintain context across multiple requests, new Mail features like smart replay and email summaries, and natural language search in Photos. The features will likely not be rolled out to general users until well into 2025. They will only work on the iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max or on iPads and Macs with Apple Silicon chips. Beta testers will need to join a waitlist for access to the features.
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YouTube's war on ad blockers continues, now making ads truly unskippable (2 minute read)
Multiple YouTube users are reporting that the site is serving them with blank ads or black screens before a video when they are using an ad-blocker extension. The change makes users wait for their content, partially defeating the purpose of using an ad blocker. YouTube began testing server-side ad injection last month to further render ad blockers obsolete. The solution inserts ads directly into the main YouTube video feed so that ad blockers can no longer distinguish the two pieces of media.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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SpaceX moving Dragon splashdowns to Pacific to solve falling debris problem (8 minute read)
SpaceX will begin returning its Dragon crew and cargo capsules to splashdowns in the Pacific Ocean sometime next year and end recoveries of the spacecraft off the coast of Florida. This will eliminate the tiny risk that a piece of debris from the ship's trunk section might fall on someone and cause damage, injury, or death. Debris from several Dragon missions have been discovered on properties over the past couple of years. SpaceX is unaware of any structure damage or injuries caused by this debris.
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How LG and Samsung Are Making TV Screens Disappear (9 minute read)
Both LG and Samsung demonstrated transparent television screens at CES 2024. The companies have very different approaches to the technology - Samsung is betting on microLED screens while LG is pursuing OLED displays. Neither technology is ready yet. This article takes a deep dive into each of these display technologies. It looks at how they work, the problems they face, and the applications of transparent screens.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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tea-tasting (GitHub Repo)
tea-tasting is a Python package for the statistical analysis of A/B tests. It features an extensible API, confidence intervals for both absolute and percentage change, power analysis, and Student's t-test, Z-test, Bootstrap, and quantile metrics out of the box. tea-tasting calculates statistics directly within data backends. It eliminates the need to import granular data into a Python environment.
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FastHTML (GitHub Repo)
FastHTML is a framework for fast scalable web applications with minimal compact code. Its apps are just Python code, so developers can use the framework with the full power of the Python language and ecosystem. FastHTML is powerful and expressive enough to build advanced interactive web apps and it features an intuitive syntax that makes it easy to build complex apps quickly.
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Ghostery's CEO says regulation won't save us from ad trackers (12 minute read)
Ghostery was launched in 2009 to help people understand and block all the ways that advertisers were tracking them. The world of online advertising has changed dramatically since then. 15 years later, Ghostery has been downloaded more than 100 million times and has 7 million monthly active users. This article contains an interview with the company's CEO, Jean-Paul Schmetz, where he discusses the company's strategy, the state of ad tracking, and why regulation isn't the most effective path to protecting online privacy.
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Amazon Paid Almost $1 Billion for Twitch in 2014. It's Still Losing Money (11 minute read)
Twitch remains unprofitable despite periods of explosive popularity. Its biggest users are paying less and growth in new users and engagement has slowed. Staff are concerned about potential upcoming layoffs this fall following an annual operational review. Investors are worried that Twitch is at risk of becoming a 'zombie brand'. Amazon remains confident in Twitch's potential.
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GPT-5: Everything You Need to Know (73 minute read)
This article looks at GPT-5, what we can expect from next-gen models, new features that are appearing on the horizon, business pressures on OpenAI, and the technical constraints the company's engineers are facing.
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