posts

Graham Fraser at the BBC:

This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.

A spokesperson from the BBC said the corporation had contacted Apple “to raise this concern and fix the problem”.

Apple declined to comment.

I used notification summaries during the beta of iOS 18.2, but ended up turning them off. I felt like I was reading everything twice, and saw summarization errors all over the place. None of them were as spicy as this Mangione example, thankfully.

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This week’s Conduit had a pretty mediocre guest:

Jay is gone away again, so Kathy brings in Stephen Hackett as a guest host and they can actually talk about Yearly Themes!

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This week: Myke shares some news, Federico covers iOS 18.2, and I launch a new awards program.

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iOS 18.2 is rolling out today, bringing the next wave of Apple Intelligence features with it.¹

The splashiest feature is Image Playgrounds, which allows users to create images based on photos in their image libraries:

(Don’t look too closely at my hand in the image on the right.)

Apple’s system will not create realistic images, and is instead limited to two styles: “Animation” and “Illustration,” as you can see here:

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In November 1996, Apple released the Power Macintosh 4400 with a starting price of $1,725. Also sold as the Power Macintosh 7220, it’d be easy to write this machine off as just another grain of sand on the beige beach that was Apple’s product line in the 1990s. I mean, just look at this thing, pictured here with an Apple-branded CRT:

If you were around the Mac line in the late 1990s, your blood probably ran cold when you saw the 4400’s name in the above headline.

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Unite 5 for macOS takes your web experience to the next level, transforming websites into feature-rich Mac apps. Powered by a completely redesigned WebKit browser, Unite 5 offers a more immersive and customizable browsing experience.

What sets Unite 5 apart? We’ve gone beyond just app conversion. Our new intricate link-forwarding rules give you unparalleled control over web interactions, making your web apps smarter and more integrated than ever before.

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It’s that time of year again: when relatives come to the family get-together armed with tech questions. On this episode, David and I tackle some of the most common issues asked around the dinner table.

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For years, Apple fans have looked at the Surface Studio longingly, wondering what a version of a tilting Mac desktop could look like. Many wondered if Apple would ever do anything like this machine, adding Apple Pencil and touch support to macOS, or doing some wild Mac/iPad hybrid.

I fear Apple won’t ever get that weird with its products, and it seems like Microsoft is backing out as well, according to Zac Bowden:

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This week on Connected:

With Myke out this week, Stephen and Federico bravely carry on, discussing the future of web browsers, how iOS 18.2 is shaping up, and a Kickstarter that seems a bit unusual.

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Simon B. Støvring has launched a new app:

Festivitas automatically adds festive lights to your menu bar and dock upon launch and you can tweak their appearance to match your preferences.

I love this, and not just because it reminds me of the old Holiday Lights app.

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Thomas Kleine Buening, Aadirupa Saha, Christos Dimitrakakis, Haifeng Xu, on Apple’s “Machine Learning Research” blog:

Motivated by the phenomenon of strategic agents gaming a recommendation system to maximize the number of times they are recommended to users, we study a strategic variant of the linear contextual bandit problem, where the arms strategically misreport privately observed contexts to the learner. % under strategic context manipulation. We treat the algorithm design problem as one of \emph{mechanism design} under uncertainty and propose the Optimistic Grim Trigger Mechanism (OptGTM) that minimizes regret while simultaneously incentivizing the agents to be approximately truthful. We show that OptGTM achieves sublinear regret despite the agents being unrestricted in their ability to game the learning algorithm by misreporting contexts. We then also show that failing to account for the strategic nature of the agents results in linear regret. However, a trade-off between incentive-compatibility and regret minimization is shown to be unavoidable. More broadly, this work provides insight into the intersection of online learning and mechanism design.

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In my week of guesting on other people’s Relay podcasts, I’m on today’s episode of Focused, talking about my recent sabbatical. I found the topic surprisingly weird to talk about, but David and Mike helped make it much more comfortable to do so.

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