Amazon's got a bunch of new hardware devices to sell ya. Go read the article to see everything, but there's now an Echo Hub - "a wall-mounted control panel for your smart home devices that's reminiscent of custom automation systems like Control4". The 4K Fire TV Sticks got updates, with the 4K Max getting support for Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision and HDR10+, as well as Wi-Fi 6E. There's now a Wi-Fi 7 version of Amazon's Eero range of mesh wi-fi access points that also includes four high speed Ethernet ports (2x 10Gbit & 2x 2.5Gbit). Probably the most useful and popular of the Echo Show devices, the 8, got a large upgrade that brings a better quality camera, spatial audio, improved background noise filtering, a built-in "smart home hub" that supports Zigbee, Sidewalk, Thread, Bluetooth, and Matter and a feature called "Adaptive Content" that changes what's on the screen based on how close you are to it.
OpenAI has announced DALL-E 3, a big update to its image generator service. Going by the examples, it's probably a serious competitor to Midjourney, which is regarded as the current industry leader for turning text into images as a service. The killer feature for it would be integration with ChatGPT so you can tweak the image as you go, rather than having to come up with a new prompt each time. DALL-E 3 is still a "research preview", but will be available for ChatGPT Plus customers in October. Meanwhile, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, George RR Martin and 17 other authors are suing OpenAI for ripping off their work with ChatGPT. The lawsuit has specific ChatGPT queries that generates texts that use the same characters developed by the authors, which infringe on their copyrights. Oh and finally in AI-land, GitHub Copilot Chat is now available directly in VS Code for all users, for GitHub Copilot subscribers.
Some Apple related news:
If you've ignored passkeys until now, it's time to pay attention because 1Password now has passkey support, finally providing a non-platform specific way to store and sync your passkeys. This is important because up until now, if you did decide to use passkeys to log into something it was stored on that device, or on the cloud service of that device - iCloud for Apple gear, Google for Android/ChromeOS and Microsoft 365 for Windows. There are half-arsed attempts at syncing passkeys between platforms and devices (see Apple's iCloud Passwords Chrome extension - too bad if you use Firefox or some other browser), but if you store your passkey in 1Password instead, you can use it anywhere 1Password is supported - which is practically everywhere these days.
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