Month: November 2022

Enlarge / Generating AI images using "Draw Things" on the iPhone. (credit: Benj Edwards / Apple)

On Wednesday, a San Francisco-based developer named Liu Liu released Draw Things: AI Generation, a free app available in the App Store that lets iPhone owners run the popular Stable Diffusion AI image generator. Type in a description, and the app generates an image within several minutes. It's a notable step toward bringing image synthesis to a wider audience—with the added privacy of running it on your own hardware.

Introduced in August, Stable Diffusion (SD) is an AI image generator model that creates novel images from text descriptions (called "prompts"). Typically, people run SD through the commercial DreamStudio service, on a remote cloud machine with rented compute time, or locally on a PC using a custom open source implementation. When running locally, SD requires a fairly beefy GPU to generate images quickly, but some developers optimized the model to run on older GPUs with less VRAM (if you don't mind waiting longer to see results).

In the same vein, Liu Liu has managed to optimize Stable Diffusion to run on the iPhone, a somewhat difficult process that the developer described in a blog post. "The main challenge is to run the app on the 6GiB RAM iPhone devices," Liu Liu writes. "6GiB sounds a lot, but iOS will start to kill your app if you use more than 2.8GiB on a 6GiB device, and more than 2GiB on a 4GiB device."

Enlarge / The Reddit logo on a mobile device. (credit: Getty Images | stockcam)

In a post to /r/reddit, Reddit announced that it began rolling out a feature that will allow users to mute specific communities that contains content they don't want to see.

If you mute a subreddit using this feature, posts from it won't show up in your notifications, home feed recommendations, or Popular, Reddit's feed of the most upvoted content from across its various communities.

Later, Reddit plans to apply muting to other places like "All" and "Discover." Muting a community won't stop you from being able to visit or post it, though.

Enlarge / This child, who had been ill with measles, exhibited the characteristic rash on the fourth day of its evolution. Measles can cause hearing loss, brain damage, and be fatal to young children. (credit: CDC/NIP/ Barbara Rice)

Amid declining vaccination rates nationwide, an outbreak of measles has erupted this week among unvaccinated children at a childcare facility in Columbus, Ohio.

The outbreak has sickened at least four children so far, all of whom are unvaccinated with no history of travel, meaning they contracted the highly contagious virus locally, according to Columbus-area health officials. An investigation into the outbreak is ongoing. Health officials are notifying parents and tracing contacts. The childcare facility is cooperating and has temporarily closed.

Columbus CBS affiliate WBNS-TV reported that one of the four cases had been hospitalized in intensive care. Officials also told the outlet that they expect additional cases will be identified in the coming days.

Enlarge / Let's see, you landed on my "Google Ads" space, and with three houses... that will be $1,400. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Hasbro)

Google is slowly loosening its grip over billing on Google Play. In March, the company announced a pilot "User Choice Billing" plan, which would give users the option to buy things on Google Play through a third-party payment processor. In some countries, the pilot launched in September, with Google taking developer sign-ups in the European Economic Area, Australia, India, Indonesia, and Japan. Today the feature is finally coming to the US, with Google announcing expansion to the US, Brazil, and South Africa.

As announced in March, Google's first partner for this project is one of its biggest customers, Spotify, which has its own blog post announcing that the feature is rolling out this week. The Play Store has always required developers exclusively use Google Play Billing for app payments, but bigger companies like Spotify and Netflix ignored those rules for years, seemingly deciding they were too big to ban. For years, they were right, but Google announced it would really start enforcing its rules, even for the big companies, in 2022. When the March deadline arrived, though, it also came the announcement of User Choice Billing, with Spotify as the first partner, so it's not clear that Google was ever able to actually get Spotify to follow the rules.

Spotify first gives you options for "Spotify" or "Google Play," and tapping the "Spotify" button lets you type in a credit card or use PayPal.

Spotify has a picture of what its officially sanctioned User Choice Billing will look like, though, with payment buttons for "Google Play" and "Spotify" right next to each other on the subscription checkout page. Tapping the "Spotify" button brings up options to type in a credit card directly or use PayPal. Spotify says it is "the first to pilot" User Choice Billing with this launch, and Google says that the dating app Bumble is the second app to be approved for alternative billing.

Enlarge / Let's see, you landed on my "Google Ads" space, and with three houses... that will be $1,400. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Hasbro)

Google is slowly loosening its grip over billing on Google Play. In March, the company announced a pilot "User Choice Billing" plan, which would give users the option to buy things on Google Play through a third-party payment processor. In some countries, the pilot launched in September, with Google taking developer sign-ups in the European Economic Area, Australia, India, Indonesia, and Japan. Today the feature is finally coming to the US, with Google announcing expansion to the US, Brazil, and South Africa.

As announced in March, Google's first partner for this project is one of its biggest customers, Spotify, which has its own blog post announcing that the feature is rolling out this week. The Play Store has always required developers exclusively use Google Play Billing for app payments, but bigger companies like Spotify and Netflix ignored those rules for years, seemingly deciding they were too big to ban. For years, they were right, but Google announced it would really start enforcing its rules, even for the big companies, in 2022. When the March deadline arrived, though, it also came the announcement of User Choice Billing, with Spotify as the first partner, so it's not clear that Google was ever able to actually get Spotify to follow the rules.

Spotify first gives you options for "Spotify" or "Google Play," and tapping the "Spotify" button lets you type in a credit card or use PayPal.

Spotify has a picture of what its officially sanctioned User Choice Billing will look like, though, with payment buttons for "Google Play" and "Spotify" right next to each other on the subscription checkout page. Tapping the "Spotify" button brings up options to type in a credit card directly or use PayPal. Spotify says it is "the first to pilot" User Choice Billing with this launch, and Google says that the dating app Bumble is the second app to be approved for alternative billing.

Enlarge / Microsoft is testing a search bar for Windows 11's new Task Manager. (credit: Microsoft)

One of the Windows 11 22H2 update's improvements was a redesigned Task Manager with a reorganized user interface, an updated Windows 11-style look, and other features. Laying that foundation has apparently given Microsoft the latitude to work on other Task Manager improvements, some of which cropped up in this week's preview build for Windows Insiders in the Beta channel.

The most significant of these changes is a new search bar for running processes, so you can more easily bring up specific processes you're looking for while excluding the rest. This is useful for organizational and aesthetic purposes—it can find needles in haystacks while also clearing away the hay so that you don't drop the needle and lose it again.

The new Task Manager's dark mode support can also be toggled independently of the theme setting you're using for Windows. Those themes will be applied Task Manager as well as the pop-ups within it. And the toggle for Efficiency mode now includes a "don't ask me again" checkbox if you regularly switch individual processes into and out of Efficiency mode and you don't want to be asked for confirmation every time.

Enlarge / Microsoft is testing a search bar for Windows 11's new Task Manager. (credit: Microsoft)

One of the Windows 11 22H2 update's improvements was a redesigned Task Manager with a reorganized user interface, an updated Windows 11-style look, and other features. Laying that foundation has apparently given Microsoft the latitude to work on other Task Manager improvements, some of which cropped up in this week's preview build for Windows Insiders in the Beta channel.

The most significant of these changes is a new search bar for running processes, so you can more easily bring up specific processes you're looking for while excluding the rest. This is useful for organizational and aesthetic purposes—it can find needles in haystacks while also clearing away the hay so that you don't drop the needle and lose it again.

The new Task Manager's dark mode support can also be toggled independently of the theme setting you're using for Windows. Those themes will be applied Task Manager as well as the pop-ups within it. And the toggle for Efficiency mode now includes a "don't ask me again" checkbox if you regularly switch individual processes into and out of Efficiency mode and you don't want to be asked for confirmation every time.