«According to a lawsuit filed Friday, Liu departed with three things: a company-issued MacBook he never returned, a close relationship with an Apple employee who continued sharing internal information, and, most significantly, knowledge of a software bug that gave him ongoing access to internal file servers.
“LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny,” Liu wrote to his former Apple colleague, Alyssa Peng. He then, Apple alleges, used that access to download presentations, hardware designs, manufacturing details and testing procedures — all while already working at OpenAI.»
You can really get into this article and enjoy it. The text includes lots of interesting source mentions without resorting to footnotes. The red flags I see are a nod to a little-known German chip design startup at the very end, and the fact that this is the author’s very first blog post. Coincidentally, the owner of the website is also from Germany, and their university is just about an hour’s drive from the startup’s headquarters.
Excerpt:
«Which, to me, is the actual answer to this post’s title question. The M1 did not feel huge because of any single trick. It felt huge because Apple moved every lever at once: the widest core in the industry, on the best process node in the industry, with memory in the package, efficiency cores doing the housekeeping, an OS scheduler that knows about all of it, and a translation layer with dedicated silicon support so that nobody had to wait for the ecosystem to catch up. Any single one of these would have made a nice bullet point in a keynote. Together, and only together, they made a laptop that felt like a different kind of machine. That is what ten years of building phone chips on a merciless power budget teaches you.»
As a long-time reader of Daring Fireball I learned to be highly skeptical of the things that are promoted there. In the case of Wavelength, I thought and still think it’s a solid app, but as a product it’s ultimately hindered in its growth by the invite-only nature of the group chats it offered.
To be clear, these group chats are actually hidden from the public. You join by entering an invitation code or receiving a link. There is no way to discover group chats by browsing or searching for them.
So I was completely surprised by Daring Fireball recently hinting at [0] Wavelength’s goal of becoming a breakout hit as a social platform.
Say what?
Without a large marketing rocket to pull you into orbit, I’m not sure how you can achieve any kind of success as a social platform with unlisted and private group chats. In the case of WhatsApp the boost came from a gazillion people having the common pain point that sending text sucked and/or was expensive.
It’s also worrying that they only had enough gas in the tank to keep the lights on for little more than a year. A year less than their previous endeavor.
But my questions in the hope of learning from this situation are:
Why not make some groups more visible than others? Example: The Dithering podcast has a group. [1] Why not show that it exists and inform about the ways to get in?
Was there any work done towards tools to help group owners handle high volumes of user influx and chat moderation? Are those the pro features hinted at in the TechCrunch article? [2]
Every time we tested any of the child protection features as adults the software failed basic tests. It did so ages ago with Mac OS X when we only had nieces to worry about, and more recently on macOS and iOS when we wanted to setup something for our own kids.
In a way, I’m glad that I’m being forced to sit down with my kids, set a timer, and be present and watchful. But as they grow up this model will no longer be feasible and I dread the day when after reevaluating Apple’s progress in this area, there’s still going to be unacceptable bugs.
Interesting. This -szer suffix seems to be used a lot. Attached to hajtó, it turns driver to fuel. Attached to autó, it turns car to car service. Attached to pàra, it tuns vapor to vaporizer. Attached to fékező, it turns braking into brake fluid.
Seems like adding -szer turns the meaning of the word into its enabler.
Yes, please don’t assume that most people who speak German call it a revolution either.
Wende means turnaround and that’s good enough for the rest of us.
But today I learned that Hungarian is a Uralic not a Slavic language and so of course I had no chance discerning which word in «rendszerváltás» stood for system or change, which made me mad enough to want to look it up:
Wende is the term that most Germans use without thinking twice.
It’s been a common word, which existed long before 1989, and while it is since then strongly linked to the events around the time when the Berlin wall fell, you’ll have a hard time finding a German who knows of how this word was used by the East-German political party (SED).
Spoiler: It was used to mean the opposite of what actually happened (i.e. more power to the party).
The parent comment’s link brings you to the transcript of an interview with a former German law professor who, knowing the SED’s usage of the word, made sure to always describe what happened in 1989 as a revolution.
This is actually one person begging other German speakers to start using what he thinks is the correct word.
Ain’t gonna happen.
If East-Germans stood up for themselves in the required numbers to overthrow their leaders, I guess Germans would use the word revolution.
But that’s not what transpired.
In 1989 a system collapsed. Communism. While that may also always qualify as a revolution in academic circles, German people chose Wende, which simply means turnaround.
The Macintosh version of the FlightStick had an ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) plug that had a port on the other end so you could plug in another device. It’s been 30 years. Do you think I might misremember? Maybe it was a FlightStick and a Saitek joystick? If you are running the original game on period hardware and tell me that the software wouldn’t know how to tell two different joysticks apart regardless of which type, then I guess I’d have to admit that there’s something fishy with my memory.
That’s the way I started but eventually used two FlightSticks. Banking movement with one hand (forward, backward, sideways), rotating around two axis with the other (barrel roll, pitch), and the thumb sticks I used for up/down and left/right. Although I might misremember some details. There was a time when I really wanted to add a pair of pedals, too. Ah, to have that much time to spare again.
«I am the CEO of Orbital Design Studios, and am the designer behind the canceled "Descent IV" project in 2002. This game is a thing I thought I'd never see, aside from prototypes in my company's archives.
A very warm welcome back to Matt & Mike and all of the old crew of Parallax and Outrage Entertainment who have returned to create this long dreamed of and hoped for creation. Thank you for putting my regrets that D4 couldn't get made, to rest. Overload will stand for all time in its place.»
«According to a lawsuit filed Friday, Liu departed with three things: a company-issued MacBook he never returned, a close relationship with an Apple employee who continued sharing internal information, and, most significantly, knowledge of a software bug that gave him ongoing access to internal file servers.
“LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny,” Liu wrote to his former Apple colleague, Alyssa Peng. He then, Apple alleges, used that access to download presentations, hardware designs, manufacturing details and testing procedures — all while already working at OpenAI.»