Tuesday, 30th July 2024
Here Are All of the Apple Intelligence Features in the iOS 18.1 Developer Beta (via) Useful rundown from Juli Clover at MacRumors of the Apple Intelligence features that are available in the brand new iOS 18.1 beta, available to developer account holders with an iPhone 15 or iPhone 15 Pro Max or Apple Silicon iPad.
I've been trying this out today. It's still clearly very early, and the on-device model that powers Siri is significantly weaker than more powerful models that I've become used to over the past two years. Similar to old Siri I find myself trying to figure out the sparse, undocumented incantations that reliably work for the things I might want my voice assistant to do for me.
My early Siri AI experience has just underlined the fact that, while there is a lot of practical, useful things that can be done with small models, they really lack the horsepower to do anything super interesting.
AWS CodeCommit quietly deprecated (via) CodeCommit is AWS's Git hosting service. In a reply from an AWS employee to this forum thread:
Beginning on 06 June 2024, AWS CodeCommit ceased onboarding new customers. Going forward, only customers who have an existing repository in AWS CodeCommit will be able to create additional repositories.
[...] If you would like to use AWS CodeCommit in a new AWS account that is part of your AWS Organization, please let us know so that we can evaluate the request for allowlisting the new account. If you would like to use an alternative to AWS CodeCommit given this news, we recommend using GitLab, GitHub, or another third party source provider of your choice.
What's weird about this is that, as far as I can tell, this is the first official public acknowledgement from AWS that CodeCommit is no longer accepting customers. The CodeCommit landing page continues to promote the product, though it does link to the How to migrate your AWS CodeCommit repository to another Git provider blog post from July 25th, which gives no direct indication that CodeCommit is being quietly sunset.
I wonder how long they'll continue to support their existing customers?
Amazon QLDB too
It looks like AWS may be having a bit of a clear-out. Amazon QLDB - Quantum Ledger Database (a blockchain-adjacent immutable ledger, launched in 2019) - quietly put out a deprecation announcement in their release history on July 18th (again, no official announcement elsewhere):
End of support notice: Existing customers will be able to use Amazon QLDB until end of support on 07/31/2025. For more details, see Migrate an Amazon QLDB Ledger to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.
This one is more surprising, because migrating to a different Git host is massively less work than entirely re-writing a system to use a fundamentally different database.
It turns out there's an infrequently updated community GitHub repo called SummitRoute/aws_breaking_changes which tracks these kinds of changes. Other services listed there include CodeStar, Cloud9, CloudSearch, OpsWorks, Workdocs and Snowmobile, and they cleverly (ab)use the GitHub releases mechanism to provide an Atom feed.
What we got wrong about HTTP imports (via) HTTP imports are one of the most interesting design features of Deno:
import { assertEquals } from "https://deno.land/std@0.224.0/assert/mod.ts";
Six years after their introduction, Ryan Dahl reviews their disadvantages:
- Lengthy (non-memorable) URLs littering the codebase
- A slightly cumbersome
import { concat } from "../../deps.ts";pattern for managing dependencies in one place - Large projects can end up using multiple slightly different versions of the same dependencies
- If a website becomes unavailable, new builds will fail (existing builds will continue to use their cached version)
Deno 2 - due in September - will continue to support them, but will lean much more on the combination of import maps (design borrowed from modern browsers) and the Deno project's JSR npm competitor. An import map like this:
{
"imports": {
"@std/assert": "jsr:@std/assert@1"
}
}
Will then enable import statements that look like this:
import { assertEquals } from "@std/assert";
GPT-4o Long Output (via) "OpenAI is offering an experimental version of GPT-4o with a maximum of 64K output tokens per request."
It's a new model (for alpha testers only) called gpt-4o-64k-output-alpha that costs $6/million input tokens and $18/million output tokens.
That's a little bit more than GPT-4o ($5/$15) and a LOT more than GPT-4o mini ($0.15/$0.60).
Long output is primarily useful for data transformation use-cases - things like translating documents from one language into another, or extracting structured data from documents where almost every input token is needed in the output JSON.
Prior to this the longest output model I knew of was GPT-4o mini, at 16,000 tokens. Most of OpenAI's competitors still cap out at around 4,000 or 8,000.
Making Machines Move. Another deep technical dive into Fly.io infrastructure from Thomas Ptacek, this time describing how they can quickly boot up an instance with a persistent volume on a new host (for things like zero-downtime deploys) using a block-level cloning operation, so the new instance gets a volume that becomes accessible instantly, serving proxied blocks of data until the new volume has been completely migrated from the old host.
Ralph Sheldon’s Portrait of Henry VIII Reidentified (via) Here's a delightful two part story on art historian Adam Busiakiewicz's blog. Adam was browsing Twitter when he spotted this tweet by Tim Cox, Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire, celebrating a reception.
He noticed a curve-framed painting mounted on a wall in the top left of the photo:
Adam had previously researched a similar painting while working at Sotheby's:
Seeing this round topped portrait immediately reminded me of a famous set of likenesses commissioned by the local politician and tapestry maker Ralph Sheldon (c. 1537--1613) for his home Weston House, Warwickshire, during the 1590s. Consisting of twenty-two portraits, mostly images of Kings, Queens and significant contemporary international figures, only a handful are known today.
Adam contacted Warwickshire County Council and was invited to Shire Hall. In his follow-up post he describes his first-hand observations from the visit.
It turns out the painting really was one of those 22 portraits made for tapestry maker Ralph Sheldon in the 1590s, long thought lost. The discovery has now made international news: