The phrase green bubbles used to make me think of the beer some people add green food coloring to
on St. Patrick's Day and I don't know why because I don't think he would have stood for that.
Apple has finally added support for rich communication services or RCS to the iOS 18 beta
allowing both iPhone and Android users the opportunity to experience what it's like to
receive a photo that doesn't look like it was taken on a palm pilot. Yep, iMessage now graciously
lets both types of users send high-quality media, start group chats, see typing indicators, and
even read receipts. What it doesn't do is change Android messages from green to blue. So no, Gizmodo,
the green bubble nightmare is not over. Although now it is more like a fever dream.
Need to go to the hospital. While this is arguably one of the most impactful feature drops announced
at WWDC, Apple dedicated a single sentence to it in the press release mentioning a better
experience when messaging contacts who do not have an Apple device. You may know them by their
other name, most people. Now this is a beta so there are some quirks. For example, RCS isn't yet
supported if your iPhone is on an MVNO network like Google Fi. But can you blame Google for not
having this ready on their own network? They've been texting Apple to see if they want to come
over for years and then suddenly they show up at the door? How did it get so messy? One second.
YouTube has begun rolling out new features for premium users, including the jump ahead button
after a limited testing phase. Premium subscribers on Android in the US will see the button when
double tapping to skip forward in a video. YouTube says instead of doing that manually,
you can just tap the button and it'll take you right where you want to go. What's that?
How does the button know where you want to go? What are you, a free thinking individual with
your own preferences and opinions? Get out of here. YouTube's also bringing back its conversational AI
for premium users, which can answer questions about the content of a video like,
Hey, conversational AI, what was in that part that I skipped over? Ah, you weren't looking for
that. Don't worry about it. The YouTube app also now supports viewing shorts in picture in picture
mode for subway surfers fans and apparently more types of YouTube premium plans are on the way
with new ways to share your benefits with friends who don't have an AI to tell them the only parts
of a video that are worth watching. Those poor people. The CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleiman,
went a bit viral this week for calling web content freeware that AI companies are totally
fine to train their AI models on under the social contract of fair use that has been standard
since the nineties. And while calling what is in many cases copyrighted works, freeware
seems bad. His core argument there is defendable and really nothing new. That's how all the big
LLMs have been trained. But he also called it a gray area when websites explicitly tell web
crawlers not to scrape their sites for content. A quote I could easily work into a joke about consent,
but I won't because I told myself no. Suleiman said the gray stuff will work its way through
the courts. And he's right. The nonprofit behind Mother Jones and the reveal radio show,
the center for investigative reporting just sued Microsoft and open AI for copyright violations.
The same day open AI added Time Magazine to the list of outlets it's formed content partnerships
with. An acknowledgement of the grayness of the copyright question. But as for AI search company
Perplexity, well, given their recent plagiarism scandals, it seems like they don't care as much
which shade of gray the chips land on, which kind of tracks with the fact that its CEO told
Lex Friedman his company got its start by making fake academic accounts so they could
scrape Twitter's data to use in their product. I think it's well past time a trustworthy,
morally upstanding entity investigated these guys. Amazon. They'll let us know whether
Perplexity staff have access to enough fabric lined weeping booths. There aren't merely enough
people here peeing in bottles. You need to do something about this. Okay, now you're gonna
want to get in a more stable stance for when these quick bits come through, okay? And when they hit
shit, don't don't push back. Just let them go because you do not want to make these things angry.
Due to a glitch with Apple Pay, many Hungarian iPhone users found themselves
getting mistakenly charged for payments they never made. Thankfully, it seems that affected
customers will be reimbursed in the coming week. While typically these charges were only small
amounts, some users found themselves getting charged several times in a row, with one user
getting charged for nearly $1,500 across 74 transactions in the space of five minutes
before the bank blocked any further withdrawals. It's like your bank account deciding on your
behalf that you deserve a little treat. A little treat. A little treat. Oh, I see.
Intel has shown off a prototype optical interconnect chip that could allow server
processors to support up to four terabits per second interlinks. Interlinked. Interlinked,
sorry. It's still early days for the prototype, but Intel is apparently working with select
customers on incorporating it into SoC designs. Thomas Lielberg, a director on the project,
said that server needs are straining the capabilities of electrical IO designs, and that
servers also look super, super boring right now, so we need to get some laser action in their stat.
Oh no, servers are getting boring? Somebody play Sandstorm. OpenAI has announced a new AI model
intended to critique Chachi BT and help human trainers spot errors in its output.
They called it CriticGPT, so don't worry AI skeptics, AI can now do your job too.
The same day Google announced a partnership with Data Services giant Moody's, which should
help Google's enterprise customers to create AI chatbots grounded in facts instead of what they
were previously grounded in, 4chan green text stories. I for one celebrate our AI overlords
attempts to not blatantly make s**t up. The FCC has been inundated with complaints against
T-Mobile following the company's decision to raise prices for cellular customers to whom it
repeatedly and explicitly promised a lifetime price freeze. However, it turns out that in a
separate FAQ, the only real guarantee in the Uncarrier's Uncontract was to pay customers
final phone bill if they decided to cancel following their inevitable betrayal. It was
always a little fiscally dubious for T-Mobile to promise so many of its customers a lifetime
price freeze back in 2017, unless for some reason it thought that most of those customers were going
to die in a terrible plague only a few years later. I'm just saying T-Mobile are psychic.
And a computer comprised of plastic cubes which can change its pattern to represent data
without using any electricity has been developed by researchers at North Carolina State University.
Why? I don't know, seems weird. The design was inspired by the Japanese art of kirigami,
which I can only describe as origami remastered. Binary ones and zeros are represented in the
positions of the component cubes, which can be pushed up and down either manually or using magnets.
We've got a long way to go before we can use these to fight back against autonomous robot
dogs with guns, but hey, it's a good start. And even better start would be you coming back on
Monday for a talk linked episode I recorded with Jonathan Horst of Mac Address. We argue about
Apple and the safety of motorcycles. Go check it out.