iOS 16 and watchOS 9 are out now. Macstories has a good article outlining all the stuff in iOS 16 - customised lock screens, editing and unsending iOS messages, notifications now pop up from the bottom, the battery percentage indicator is back and loads more. Apple mentioned a new iOS 16 feature coming soon called Clean Energy Charging that will "decrease the carbon footprint of the iPhone by optimizing charging times for when the grid is using cleaner energy sources". Wired goes through all the new things in watchOS 9. Lots of fitness and health stuff. iOS 15 and macOS 12 got patches, mostly security updates. tvOS 16 is a thing for the Apple TV and HomePod. The "buddy controller" feature for games sounds cool. iPad OS 16 and macOS 13 are due in October.
Art websites are starting to get sick of AI-generated images. Fur Affinity bans them because it "lacks artistic merit" (apparently "one AI furry porn generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds before it was banned", lol). Newgrounds banned "using tools such as Midjourney, Dall-E, and Craiyon" as well as ArtBreeder, but allows "an AI-generated background". DeviantArt hasn't banned it but "one of the most popular threads in their forums right now asks the staff to 'combat AI art' by limiting daily uploads, either by segregating it under a special category or to ban it entirely". If you've got an Apple Silicon Mac and want to dip your toes in the AI generated art space, check out Diffusion Bee. It packages up all the bits and pieces you need to run Stable Diffusion into a single binary.
It's getting so hot in California that Twitter had to shut down its Sacramento data centre because the cooling system couldn't cope. As a result, Twitter advised its staff in an internal memo that it is in a "non-redundant state". There's data centers in Atlanta and Portland, but "if we lose one of those remaining datacenters, we may not be able to serve traffic to all Twitter's users". They're pausing "non-critical updates to Twitter's product" until the Sacramento data centre is online. If you aren't adding climate change to your list of business risks, you're a fool.
Ken Shirriff's blog is lots of fun, but this post from early 2021 is one of my favourites. He got his hands on a German IBM display box from 1986. It's a suitcase stuffed with a range of technology IBM manufactured over the years between the 1940s to 1986 when this box was made. It has contains a vacuum tubes, semiconductors, disk platters, ferrite core memory and other random bits and pieces from IBM's computers that as Ken puts it "marks the peak of IBM's success and influence, right before microcomputers decimated the mainframe market and IBM's dominance".
📻 Atopos - Björk
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