Marcin Wichary:

Keyboards fascinated me for years. But it occurred to me that a
good, comprehensive, and human story of keyboards — starting with
typewriters and ending with modern computers and phones — has
never been written. How did we get from then to now? What were the
steps along the way? And how on earth does QWERTY still look the
same now as it did 150 years ago?

I wanted a book like this for years. So I wrote it.

If this rings a bell, that’s because Glenn Fleishman — who is the editor and print production manager for the book — mentioned this project on The Talk Show a few weeks ago. I’ve been looking forward to supporting it on Kickstarter ever since.

 ★ 

Marcin Wichary:

Keyboards fascinated me for years. But it occurred to me that a
good, comprehensive, and human story of keyboards — starting with
typewriters and ending with modern computers and phones — has
never been written. How did we get from then to now? What were the
steps along the way? And how on earth does QWERTY still look the
same now as it did 150 years ago?

I wanted a book like this for years. So I wrote it.

If this rings a bell, that’s because Glenn Fleishman — who is the editor and print production manager for the book — mentioned this project on The Talk Show a few weeks ago. I’ve been looking forward to supporting it on Kickstarter ever since.

Read More 

Sarah Perez, reporting for TechCrunch:

Q&A platform Quora has opened up public access to its new
AI chatbot app, Poe, which lets users ask questions and
get answers from a range of AI chatbots, including those from
ChatGPT maker, OpenAI, and other companies like
Anthropic. Beyond allowing users to experiment with new AI
technologies, Poe’s content will ultimately help to evolve Quora
itself, the company says.

Quora first announced Poe’s mobile app in December, but at
the time, it required an invite to try it out. With the public
launch on Friday, anyone can now use Poe’s app. For now, it’s
available only to iOS users, but Quora says the service will
arrive on other platforms in a few months.

Impressive results, I must say.

 ★ 

Sarah Perez, reporting for TechCrunch:

Q&A platform Quora has opened up public access to its new
AI chatbot app, Poe, which lets users ask questions and
get answers from a range of AI chatbots, including those from
ChatGPT maker, OpenAI, and other companies like
Anthropic. Beyond allowing users to experiment with new AI
technologies, Poe’s content will ultimately help to evolve Quora
itself, the company says.

Quora first announced Poe’s mobile app in December, but at
the time, it required an invite to try it out. With the public
launch on Friday, anyone can now use Poe’s app. For now, it’s
available only to iOS users, but Quora says the service will
arrive on other platforms in a few months.

Impressive results, I must say.

Read More 

Matthew Panzarino, writing at TechCrunch:

The M1 whacked a big old reset button on those restrictions,
putting portable back into the power computing lexicon. And with
M2, Millet says, Apple did not want to milk a few percentage
points of gains out of each generation in perpetuity.

“The M2 family was really now about maintaining that leadership
position by pushing, again, to the limits of technology. We don’t
leave things on the table,” says Millet. “We don’t take a 20% bump
and figure out how to spread it over three years…figure out how to
eke out incremental gains. We take it all in one year; we just hit
it really hard. That’s not what happens in the rest of the
industry or historically.”

The conversation turns to gaming:

Millet also is unconvinced that the game dev universe has adapted
to the unique architecture of the M-series chips quite yet,
especially the unified memory pool.

“Game developers have never seen 96 gigabytes of graphics memory
available to them now, on the M2 Max. I think they’re trying to
get their heads around it, because the possibilities are unusual.
They’re used to working in much smaller footprints of video
memory. So I think that’s another place where we’re going to have
an interesting opportunity to inspire developers to go beyond what
they’ve been able to do before.”

 ★ 

Matthew Panzarino, writing at TechCrunch:

The M1 whacked a big old reset button on those restrictions,
putting portable back into the power computing lexicon. And with
M2, Millet says, Apple did not want to milk a few percentage
points of gains out of each generation in perpetuity.

“The M2 family was really now about maintaining that leadership
position by pushing, again, to the limits of technology. We don’t
leave things on the table,” says Millet. “We don’t take a 20% bump
and figure out how to spread it over three years…figure out how to
eke out incremental gains. We take it all in one year; we just hit
it really hard. That’s not what happens in the rest of the
industry or historically.”

The conversation turns to gaming:

Millet also is unconvinced that the game dev universe has adapted
to the unique architecture of the M-series chips quite yet,
especially the unified memory pool.

“Game developers have never seen 96 gigabytes of graphics memory
available to them now, on the M2 Max. I think they’re trying to
get their heads around it, because the possibilities are unusual.
They’re used to working in much smaller footprints of video
memory. So I think that’s another place where we’re going to have
an interesting opportunity to inspire developers to go beyond what
they’ve been able to do before.”

Read More 

Sundar Pichai, writing for Google’s blog:

We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service,
powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard. And today, we’re taking
another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of
making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.

Bard is still in very private beta testing, but at the moment, I’d be hesitant to describe this as Google “playing catchup” to ChatGPT, etc. For all we know, Google is way out ahead of them, but have been playing their cards close to their vest.

Update: On the other hand, Google has announced a lot of AI vaporware in recent years. Ship a real product or shut up.

 ★ 

Sundar Pichai, writing for Google’s blog:

We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service,
powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard. And today, we’re taking
another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of
making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.

Bard is still in very private beta testing, but at the moment, I’d be hesitant to describe this as Google “playing catchup” to ChatGPT, etc. For all we know, Google is way out ahead of them, but have been playing their cards close to their vest.

Update: On the other hand, Google has announced a lot of AI vaporware in recent years. Ship a real product or shut up.

Read More 

James Vincent, reporting for The Verge:

Getty Images has filed a lawsuit in the US against Stability AI,
creators of open-source AI art generator Stable Diffusion,
escalating its legal battle against the firm.

The stock photography company is accusing Stability AI of “brazen
infringement of Getty Images’ intellectual property on a
staggering scale.” It claims that Stability AI copied more than 12
million images from its database “without permission … or
compensation … as part of its efforts to build a competing
business,” and that the startup has infringed on both the
company’s copyright and trademark protections.

The fact that Stable Diffusion occasionally produces output with Getty Image’s watermark makes this about as open-and-shut a case of copyright infringement as I can imagine. It’s like a plagiarist who copies the byline of the piece they’re stealing from.

 ★ 

James Vincent, reporting for The Verge:

Getty Images has filed a lawsuit in the US against Stability AI,
creators of open-source AI art generator Stable Diffusion,
escalating its legal battle against the firm.

The stock photography company is accusing Stability AI of “brazen
infringement of Getty Images’ intellectual property on a
staggering scale.” It claims that Stability AI copied more than 12
million images from its database “without permission … or
compensation … as part of its efforts to build a competing
business,” and that the startup has infringed on both the
company’s copyright and trademark protections.

The fact that Stable Diffusion occasionally produces output with Getty Image’s watermark makes this about as open-and-shut a case of copyright infringement as I can imagine. It’s like a plagiarist who copies the byline of the piece they’re stealing from.

Read More 

Noah Kalina and Adam Lisagor are back for season 2 of their delightful podcast All Consuming. This season they’re doing a topic per episode, and for “computers”, they had me on. Somehow it isn’t 10 hours long.

Lisagor:

It feels good to get excited about technology with others.

Yes, it did.

Listen in your favorite podcast app here.

 ★ 

Noah Kalina and Adam Lisagor are back for season 2 of their delightful podcast All Consuming. This season they’re doing a topic per episode, and for “computers”, they had me on. Somehow it isn’t 10 hours long.

Lisagor:

It feels good to get excited about technology with others.

Yes, it did.

Listen in your favorite podcast app here.

Read More 

Erin Woo, reporting for The Information:

Around 180,000 people in the U.S. were paying for subscriptions to
Twitter, including Twitter Blue, as of mid-January, or less than
0.2% of monthly active users, according to a document viewed by
The Information. The tiny number signals the challenge Elon Musk
faces in turning the subscription product into a major source of
revenue.

The U.S. number is about 62% of Twitter’s global subscriber total,
the document says, which implies Twitter has 290,000 global
subscribers. Twitter is charging $8 a month for Blue Verified on
the web and $11 a month for those who sign up via Apple’s iOS,
although Apple keeps 30% of that fee.

All together, the global number of subscribers would equate to
around $28 million in annual revenue — less than 1% of the $3
billion Musk has said Twitter aims to make in revenue this year.
In November, days after assuming control of Twitter, Musk told his
new employees he wanted half the company’s revenue to come from
subscriptions.

Hard to believe people aren’t jumping at the chance to pay $8/month for a website that is crumbling before our eyes. Lucky for Musk, advertising is down too, so maybe if ad revenue keeps dropping, subscriptions will account for half of Twitter’s revenue.

 ★ 

Erin Woo, reporting for The Information:

Around 180,000 people in the U.S. were paying for subscriptions to
Twitter, including Twitter Blue, as of mid-January, or less than
0.2% of monthly active users, according to a document viewed by
The Information. The tiny number signals the challenge Elon Musk
faces in turning the subscription product into a major source of
revenue.

The U.S. number is about 62% of Twitter’s global subscriber total,
the document says, which implies Twitter has 290,000 global
subscribers. Twitter is charging $8 a month for Blue Verified on
the web and $11 a month for those who sign up via Apple’s iOS,
although Apple keeps 30% of that fee.

All together, the global number of subscribers would equate to
around $28 million in annual revenue — less than 1% of the $3
billion Musk has said Twitter aims to make in revenue this year.
In November, days after assuming control of Twitter, Musk told his
new employees he wanted half the company’s revenue to come from
subscriptions.

Hard to believe people aren’t jumping at the chance to pay $8/month for a website that is crumbling before our eyes. Lucky for Musk, advertising is down too, so maybe if ad revenue keeps dropping, subscriptions will account for half of Twitter’s revenue.

Read More