News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

dwaite

Re:US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears on Friday October 30, 2026 @02:19PM (#50308043)
It seems to basically one-shot off of the top X search results. If you ask it a spec I would expect it to be quite reliable. If you try to use it for anything with nuance it will typically fall on its face.

It has at least improved with the second category recently that it seems to be more right than wrong. But it still tends to work your query into whatever results it got, which makes it downright dangerous for when people are doing searches on health-related information.

Re:Formlabs Studio 1 $699 Resin Printer on Thursday October 29, 2026 @07:00AM (#50287139)
I thought FauxHammer's review was pretty good. He also talks about his interactions with Formlabs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJxnWQdjIyk
Re:Apple introduces the new 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6 on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @05:20AM (#50270956)
I suspect it has depended a bit on whether a new process has lower output or higher defects. High defects, they'll focus on smaller baseline chips to get better yields. Low output, they'll launch pro models first because those are lower volume. Neither problem, they'll roll out updates pretty quickly across multiple product lines.

And that should change going forward with smaller chiplets being integrated in package, vs huge Ultra chips.

Re:Apple introduces the new 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6 on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @09:33PM (#50268294)
encrypted by both a boot password and a secure enclave held key
Re:The new iPad mini on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @06:16AM (#50256887)
It is just over a third of the starting price of the Duo
Re:The new iPad mini on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @06:10AM (#50256837)
Not questioning your motivations, but that seems like a tough exclusion to make. Do you exclude every product with an Intel chip?
Re:The new iPad mini on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @05:28AM (#50256515)
> And the most popular resolution on PC is not 4k, but rather 1080p and 1440p.

Because that market, in aggregate, only spends extra on monitors for gaming.

Re:Anthropic S-1 on Monday October 26, 2026 @12:49PM (#50246899)
Are you speaking specifically to Apple's 6th CEO?
Re:Apple Keynote now showing ads in its UI on Sunday October 18, 2026 @02:40AM (#50138489)
I suspect it won't help - that option controls how Apple surfaces ads. The ads you are speaking to are most likely surfaced by the news sources themselves as part of the articles.
Re:Apple Keynote now showing ads in its UI on Sunday October 18, 2026 @02:39AM (#50138481)
> How much revenue are they producing relative to my subscription fees? Why can't I pay an extra $1/month to turn them off completely.

None. Those ads are additional revenue for the "publishers". Apple doesn't restrict ads in all content.

If an article has those ads, I just block the source in News. There's got to be some other source that both covers the topic and has self respect.

Re:JDK 28 on Saturday October 17, 2026 @10:42PM (#50137368)
So far nobody has tried to get trailing commas into the standard AFAIK.

Comments were explicitly disallowed from JSON since the beginning, because they could be used as a side-channel for vendor-specific extension mechanisms and harm interoperability.

Re:Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio on Saturday October 17, 2026 @10:36PM (#50137336)
> The Mac Pro could have fit that niche, but Tim Cook chose to depreciate it instead of letting the PCIe connectors be used with Nvidia cards. He cut off Apple's nose to spite Nvidia's face.

Apple Silicon only has support for 16k pages via DART, rather than the 4k pages typically used by AMD/Nvidia. The requirement to coordinate a major change of drivers to understand 16k pages is why both PCIe GPU and eGPU do not work (or rather, did not work - TinyGPU is a compatibility layer that adds eGPU support and is used for AI workflows).

The Mac Pro's biggest redeeming feature for a data center was that it was rack-mountable. The ARM version was still mostly an empty case. It remained mostly for its ability to support PCIe cards for video and audio production use cases, such as live broadcasting.

> especially since they're crawling back to Nvidia to license their interconnect

Licensing the interconnect for broader compatibility. They support other interconnects as well.

Re:Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio on Saturday October 17, 2026 @10:21PM (#50137255)
They went with several open weight models. Presumably they did that because they wanted their research to be reproducible (once the 512 GB M5 Ultra actually hits the market). Using say a Gemini model they have access to only due to their partnership with Google would not be as useful for people to understand what Apple did.
Re:Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio on Saturday October 17, 2026 @10:18PM (#50137230)
If you think of it as API access vs temporary hosting running the same open model, it makes sense to run the hardware yourself whenever you are sure it can be fully utilized.
Re:Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio on Saturday October 17, 2026 @10:13PM (#50137200)
I believe you will still be able to use Rosetta 2 from VMs, if local builds using linux (say via a devcontainer) are acceptable.
Re:Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio on Saturday October 17, 2026 @10:09PM (#50137174)
Apple sells a Mac minis to companies though - to the point that they were supposedly asked to avoid redesigns when possible so that new models could slot into existing rack solutions.
Re:Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio on Saturday October 17, 2026 @10:04PM (#50137147)
> If you ask anyone, what's one company that'll stand up to government requests, most reasonable people would say Apple. Yet, Apple is extremely strategic when it comes to China. It thrives in that country, without being associated with CCP.

You can stand up to government requests when it is legal to do so. Eventually you have to decide to abide by the law or leave the market.

Until html5 it wasn't forgiving - it was ambiguous. Different browsers could (and did) interpret different malformed html in different ways.

Once there was a standardized interpretation for malformed html, there was a chance that we could have treated that as a transparent conversion layer to xhtml. That isn't how WHATWG went, however.

Even for enthusiastic Android vendors who saw it as a differentiating feature from iPhone, Flash still took three years from the iPhone launch to have its first release. Adobe was really in poor shape to port Flash to a new platform. Waiting for them as a vendor to bump their proprietary platform vs integrating support for the features into the browser would have cost years for mobile adoption.
Re:An Apology on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:51AM (#50100156)
I've heard one of the more significant concerns is escape from domestic abuse situations. In that case, people are often told to abandon their technology since it may be used to track them - but they might not know about the tracker tile/airtag hidden within a jacket.
Re:An Apology on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:45AM (#50100107)
The audible tone can interfere with other stalking-adjacent use cases - for instance use for pet tags, for tracking children's backpacks, and so on.

It actually doesn't help as much for anti-theft, because a thief still might be smart enough at this point to check their phone for AirTag notifications. The audible tone may not even hit in a theft instance.

Re:An Apology on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:41AM (#50100077)
> In particular I'm guessing you can't use it to track your kid's backpack either; for that, you should instead buy your 7yo their own iPhone.

You can - there will be spurious phone notifications and audible notifications.

Re:An Apology on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:38AM (#50100055)
It stops the audible notifications for people who aren't looking at a phone screen.
Re:Apple HomeView on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @01:22PM (#50091319)
your example of how easy it would be is the device without an App Store
Re:Apple HomeView on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @01:21PM (#50091290)
Sure. It does depend on how you invoke it, however.
Re:Apple HomeView on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @01:16PM (#50091211)
That is because even though multi-user support exists, the third-party apps with content don't care. They do not map Apple Accounts to their own profiles, or persist profile selection against an active user account.

But many also haven't updated their custom input code to support the current remote design either.

Re:Passkeys Are Not a Trap on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @01:01PM (#50090942)
I think Firefox had system integration with the password/passkey provider framework since 122.

If you do not have access to your personal Apple account on your work laptop, you would need to find some other passkey provider with native integration.

Under Settings > Privacy and Security, look to see that Firefox is listed and has access under "Passkeys access for Web Browsers". Unlike a native app which only needs passkeys for its own services, Firefox needs access for every potential service you might hit over the internet.

Then under General -> Autofill and Passwords, you'll see any apps which are registered as system password managers. Unfortunately this is a subset of the ones which register on iOS and I'm not familiar who has done integration yet in their Mac release - Chrome (with GPM) for instance is not listed even though it is available on iOS.

Re:Passkeys Are Not a Trap on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @12:39PM (#50090570)
Generally, if you want to restrict the user to use a particular authenticator, you need to own that authenticator. At that point you can have the attestation you are looking for. If you want Yubikey policy and behavior, you're gonna have to get your user a Yubikey.

The passkey provider vendors are motivated to serve their customer's needs (the end users, and secondarily enterprise deployments) over non-customer needs.

So Apple platform support (for example) will only send an attestation when one is configured via MDM. Your provisioned work device can indicate to work systems that it is in policy.

The compatibility-limiting risk, if it exists, is more likely from regulators putting their hands on the scale and pushing for security policies that would prevent synchronization and backup, and requiring attestations to make sure those policies are in effect.

Re:Passkeys Are Not a Trap on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @12:31PM (#50090407)
That isn't what is being discussed by the issue. The issue was pertaining to an unencrypted export.
Re:Passkeys Are Not a Trap on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @12:30PM (#50090397)
Which changed to KeepassXC looking to support the standarization work to allow passkeys to be moved between user-controlled software products.

The complaint wasn't in allowing credentials to move (that is the point of the CXF and CXP work). The complaint was in having sensitive data in a plaintext file live long-term without any protections. That is also why one of Tim's early recommendations was to require encrypting the file via a passphrase.

Older »