This article explicitly mentions 3 apps running on Android. The headline creates the assumption it involves iOS as well, as well as other Android apps, but this does not appear in the article at all.
It's interesting tech but none of the musical pieces impressed me (I play multiple instruments and have written and arranged music), most sounded too repetitive and not very imaginative. This is also an issue with diffusion based art AI in general, its good at a limited set of things but gets rather repetitive after a while. I could see using this as background music where quality is not important, like in games, though I doubt you could run the AI generator inside a game, you could generate it as a asset. People like Hans Zimmer and Ludwig Göransson have nothing to worry about.
Singing would an interesting experiment, but I don't see that here.
What would be fascinting is to combine City Skylines 2 (if it had some kind of API which it doesn't) with a model generator like this. CS2 already has all of the necessary graphic elements and positioning, just not the automated design logic.
It's like old reddit vs new reddit, old is plain but easy to see a lot of content. New is pathetic. HN is much better to look at. Make a science HN just like HN and you have a winner.
Despite the hype about LLMs, many of the answers are pretty terrible. The 12-bar blues progressions seem mostly clueless. The question is will any of these ever get significantly better with time, or are they mostly going to stagnate?
200,000 Windows PCs in the US among the 600,000 total worldwide. Are there really that many Windows PCs still running vulnerable old OS versions, or were they zero-days in more modern OS versions? These articles never say much about the details.
Any sufficiently stupid law is indistinguishable from madness. Politicians who want laws that actually make no sense don't care if they make sense, they want some end result regardless of whether it is possible. Like the infamous quote from Australia "in Australia we obey the laws of Australia, not the laws of math". Reality eventually wins, but not before people or countries are damaged forever.
I worked with Quinn at Apple during my brief stay in the mid-90s. He's amazingly knowledgeable about almost everything in the Apple world, which is why he is so valuable at answering questions.
It's like Expedia owning many of the familiar travel brands: in reality they are all serving up the same content, but with different marketing, yet many people think it's a different company. You might think a brand is different and it might appeal to a different clientele but underneath its the same entity making all the decisions. It allows the brand to target different people without confusing everyone with a single brand saying different things; yet still allow for economies of scale. Great business for them, may seriously suck to be a customer since the alternatives are potentially no better if you don't like one.
I learned C in 1984 when it still primitive, played with Forth because it was cool, but used Pascal at work. Add to that the APL I briefly played with in graduate school. In those days the choice of languages was almost small enough to try all of them. Today it's impossible.
I learned PostScript in 1988 by studying the Illustrator file format (which eventually became the basis of PDF). It seemed like something from the future given how unavailable high-resolution graphics were at the time. Without Pagemaker + PostScript Apple would have gone under much sooner, and never would have become what it is now. At the same time learning PostScript with reams of paper and basically no tools was a giant pain in the ass.
The F-16 back when I started my career at General Dynamics was slated to use implementations of Mil Std 1750A, with the Z8002 as an interim processor for the fighter's next generation computers (F-16C/D in the early/mid 80s). I wrote some of the Jovial runtime that was intended to be used for both processors. No idea what happened to that code since I left in 1984. The 1750A had a math coprocessor which made things a little easier than the Z8002.
I worked at a consulting firm (dot com era) with a sales person who told me his job was to lie to customers, and that my job (programmer) was to make him look good. At least he was truthful...
I had about 15 jobs over 40 years, not including 9 years at the two companies I started. But some were short term contracts, and several (in a row, sadly) ended in my employer going out of business, mass layoffs, etc. I always found doing something new was revitalizing. Also found that sometimes something new was awful. Being comfortable changing what technologies you are expected to use helps, taking advantage of new tech being new, and not many people knowing it, is good too. At my last job before retiring I stayed for 5.5 years, and could still be working there today, except it was enough of a career.
There ain't no short-handle shovels
No axes, saws or picks
I'm a-goin' to stay where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk that invented work
In The Big Rock Candy Mountains
I worked for an OTA (currently a brand owned by Expedia, like most of them, but a real company back then) and we always had issues with airline bookings, as the airlines did not want to expose all of their offerings to us so they could make extra money later. We always got yelled at by people who booked Spirit, as their "price" in our system was always the lowest, but after booking, the airline would add on fees for so many things that the flight was no longer cheap, but it was somehow our fault.
Airlines also give up almost no commission to anyone, local travel agencies or online, so it's generally profitless to book them for someone other than hoping you get to book a hotel as well, which is negotiated to provide profit. Airlines also hate comparison shopping; they want you to book on their website so you can't see what someone else might charge for the same flight. Southwest was/is the king of that; they allowed no sales elsewhere, so you could never tell if they were cheaper/cost more. It's like insisting that a monopoly view on prices is best for the customer.
It's missing everything necessary to make it for you and your interests; instead, you get what Zuck wants you to see. No hashtags (needed to build an audience if you want to post about things or find interesting people to follow), and it's not on the web (given how completely shitty the Instagram web interface is, they could care less about the web). I think they released it to capitalize on Elon's stupidity but with something that barely works. I'm not interested in some generic stream of celebrities and influencers I could care less about.
Building an entire application is way beyond what any LLM can do today and probably for years, if ever. Writing a method is basically all they can do, and even that is often unreliable. Maybe some companies will try to replace junior engineers with AI, but will learn really quickly that it doesn't work. The bad thing is that companies will do it anyway, meaning the juniors being replaced will never learn all the skills necessary to build applications or lead teams, so in the future getting anything built will become less and less likely.
I've always said that if AI had to deal with some of the executives and product teams I have, with constant insane changes and shipping demands, the AI will more likely figure out how to eliminate people than deal with them.
Most people still think Hotels.com, Vrbo, Travelocity, Hotwire.com, Orbitz, Ebookers, CheapTickets, CarRentals.com, Wotif, and Trivago are separate companies, yet they are just Expedia brands and sell Expedia inventory. For the most part, all of them exist only as marketing brands and use the Expedia backend. I used to work for one of those brands and when we were all laid off during the transition, we were not allowed to tell our customers the brand was becoming Expedia.
My last employer required us to do project-long estimates based on whatever they asked for up front. However, they then felt like changing everything on a daily basis, making the estimate pointless.
This is the basis of all Medicare Advantage Plans, where the physician or their employer gets X$ a month per MAP patient and must pay for most of the cost of care. The insurance company gets to keep most of its share of what Medicare pays. Nice profit ensues for the insurance company.
Mastodon seems like nice people, but it's not well designed. So far, it seems people are posting stuff in the void and creating little conversation because everything rolls past you unless you are looking continuously. Even notifications are poorly designed as it keeps posting your content repeatedly for favorites, etc., so you have little overview of your interactions. I think it could be designed better but apparently, few changes are made to make it more usable.
They are missing substantial features like hashtags and follows, leaving you at their mercy to show you content. That would imply it's just a WIP shipped to nearly 100M people. It's doubtful it will ever shrink, given how much is missing, unless it's in there but not production quality. My guess is they shipped it in a hurry, and now there is enormous pressure on them to add all the missing features quickly, never a good plan.