Mozilla's got a temporary CEO to hold down the fort while the old CEO leaves and they find a new CEO. Relatively boring, don't care, CEOs gonna CEO. What I do care about is Firefox and sadly, the first thing the new (temporary) CEO has done is sack 5% of its workforce, cut or scale back a bunch of projects (some deserving) and vomit out a company memo that doesn't mention Firefox as a web browser anywhere except to say they're going to shove generative AI into it. What I would love to see Mozilla do is stop being so reliant on their main competitor for income (80% of their income is from Google) and focus on making the fastest, most kick arse web browser for power users they can, on every platform, while trying to claw back some market share before they slide into irrelevance.
In a small victory for those fighting to keep end-to-end encryption actually end-to-end, the European Court of Human Rights, said in a case presented before it that the "confidentiality of communications is an essential element of the right to respect for private life and correspondence" and requiring messages to be decrypted by law enforcement "cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society". This opinion came about because of a Russian attempt all the way back in 2017 requiring Telegram to "disclose technical information which would facilitate the decryption of communications". I don't know if it changes the government's and law enforcement's desire to have a peek inside E2E messages, but at least it's nice to have on the record from the court of human rights that doing so is a bad thing.
Apple's research team has been busy the past week publishing some of their prototype AI/LLM projects on GitHub. Last week it was MGIE - MLLM-Guided Image Editing - to "interpret user requests and perform pixel-level manipulations", like resizing, brightness/contrast, shapes, cropping and more. Today we have Keyframer, that can stake SVG files and "generate CSS code to animate the image based on a text prompt". Interesting to see Apple publish this kind of research in the first place and the very specific tasks they have focused on. You can easily see these two things being features in iOS 18 or whatever. Meanwhile, Andrej Karpathy (formerly director of AI at Tesla then a co-founder of OpenAI) has left OpenAI and posted on X that his "immediate plan is to work on my personal projects and see what happens".
Old mate Josh Withers has a great blog post dumping his brain about podcasts. Unlike most "podcasters", he actually has real world radio experience and unlike most nerds, knows how to talk and relate to people in a way that I'm envious of. The post explains a bunch of ideas he has around a podcast network that when you read it seem like common sense but are rarely implemented by the mainstream media companies. I'd love to see Josh try to implement this podcast network concept, someone give him a fat stack of cash!
IBM Invented a Nobel-prize Winning Microscope to Store Data on a Single Atom. Scanning Tunneling Microscope photographed at IBM Research Almaden campus in San Jose, California, on February 28, 2017. (IBM Research / Flickr)
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