Month: March 2023

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A new report in the Financial Times claims that Apple CEO Tim Cook and COO Jeff Williams overrode design team objections to move forward with a new mixed-reality headset before designers believed the technology was ready. That said, the report isn't detailed enough to provide a nuanced picture of what's going on inside the company.

Here's the picture it does paint: A once-influential industrial design team is losing agency as executive departures and other factors have led to the team reporting to the company's operations chief instead of a top-level design executive.

We've written quite a bit about the gradual departure of famed design chief Jony Ive, who was a close collaborator with former CEO Steve Jobs. In addition to Ive, though, Apple also lost Ive's successor, Evans Hankey.

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A new report in the Financial Times claims that Apple CEO Tim Cook and COO Jeff Williams overrode design team objections to move forward with a new mixed-reality headset before designers believed the technology was ready. That said, the report isn't detailed enough to provide a nuanced picture of what's going on inside the company.

Here's the picture it does paint: A once-influential industrial design team is losing agency as executive departures and other factors have led to the team reporting to the company's operations chief instead of a top-level design executive.

We've written quite a bit about the gradual departure of famed design chief Jony Ive, who was a close collaborator with former CEO Steve Jobs. In addition to Ive, though, Apple also lost Ive's successor, Evans Hankey.

Enlarge / Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo speaks at a press conference in Rockledge, Florida, on August 3, 2022. (credit: Getty | SOPA Images)

At the height of the pandemic, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis repeatedly promoted COVID-19 vaccines, saying correctly that "they're safe, they're effective," and they "are saving lives." With hundreds of millions of shots given worldwide at this point, the extensive international data on the vaccines' safety and efficacy have strongly and consistently backed DeSantis' statements. The vaccines are estimated to have saved over 14 million lives in 185 countries just in the pandemic's first two years.

But amid growing rumors of a 2024 presidential bid, DeSantis reversed his stance on the life-saving shots, abruptly questioning their efficacy and making unfounded claims about their safety. In December, his about-face culminated in a call for a grand jury to investigate any alleged "crimes and wrongdoing" related to the vaccines.

Though the swing appears more aimed at scoring political points than protecting Floridians' health, DeSantis' hand-picked surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, has hewed closely to the governor's anti-vaccine rhetoric and health misinformation. Since his appointment as Florida's top doctor in late 2021, Ladapo has made false claims about vaccines, encouraged vaccine hesitancy, opposed masks, downplayed the health effects of COVID-19, and promoted ineffective COVID-19 treatments, such as ivermectin.

Enlarge / The 1982 TV series Knight Rider featured a car called KITT that a character played by David Hasselhoff (pictured) could talk to. (credit: Getty Images)

In the 1982 TV series Knight Rider, the main character can have a full conversation with his futuristic car. Once science fiction, this type of language interface may soon be one step closer to reality because General Motors is working on bringing a ChatGPT-style AI assistant to its automobiles, according to Semafor and Reuters.

While GM won't be adding Knight Rider-style turbojet engines or crime-fighting weaponry to its vehicles, its cars may eventually talk back to you in an intelligent-sounding way, thanks to a collaboration with Microsoft.

Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT. Now, they're looking for ways to apply chatbot technology to many different fields.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Backblaze, a San Mateo, California-based backup and cloud storage firm, on Thursday shared data giving us a unique look at the reliability of SSDs over up to four years of use. Looking at the 2,906 SSDs in its possession, the company tracked the failure rates of mostly consumer-grade SSDs, which it started using as boot drives at the start of Q4 2018.

Backblaze has long shared data on the reliability of hard disk drives (HDDs), but this latest report provides fresh perspective on HDDs' speedier, pricier cousins. As detailed by Backblaze's blog post, the company uses SSDs for booting storage servers, as well as reading, writing, and deleting log and temporary files made by said storage servers. Backblaze said all SSDs analyzed have "similar" workloads.

Before we get into Backblaze's first table, which depicts annualized failure rates (AFRs) for 13 different SSDs models, it's important to note the limited sample size of 2,906 drives and differing number of drives for each model. Some drives have seen way more active use than others, with active days ranging from 104 days up to 724,240. So while these aren't apples-to-apples comparisons of SSD models, the table provides a broad glimpse at SSD reliability that the average person can't replicate on their own.

Enlarge / Aerial view/solar panel floating in the dam. (credit: SONGPHOL THESAKIT)

The cost of solar power has dropped dramatically over the past decade, making it the cheapest source of electricity in much of the world. Clearly, that can mean cheaper power. But it also means that we can potentially install panels in places that would otherwise be too expensive and still produce power profitably.

One of the more intriguing options is to place the panels above artificial bodies of water, either floating or suspended on cables. While more expensive than land-based installs, this creates a win-win: the panels limit the evaporation of water, and the water cools the panels, allowing them to operate more efficiently in warm climates.

While the potential of floating solar has been examined in a number of places, a group of researchers has now done a global analysis and find that it's huge. Even if we limit installs to a fraction of the surface of existing reservoirs, floating panels could generate nearly 10,000 TeraWatt-hours per year, while keeping over 100 cubic kilometers of water from evaporating.

Enlarge (credit: Marvel)

Marvel is seeking the identities of Reddit and Google users involved in the leak of dialogue from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Marvel says that before the Ant-Man film's release, movie dialogue was leaked in a Google Docs file and that the link to the document was posted in a Reddit thread.

Marvel on Friday asked a federal court to issue Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) subpoenas to both Reddit and Google demanding the identities of people allegedly involved in the pre-release dialogue reveal, including Reddit moderators whom Marvel suspects of being behind the leak. The requests were filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The Google document was deleted after Marvel owner Disney filed a copyright complaint to Google. The link to the Google document was also deleted from the Reddit thread. But Marvel still wants to find out who posted the Google Doc and who shared it to Reddit.