Ben Sandofsky (Hacker News):
The latest Halide update was rejected because, after seven years, a random reviewer decided our permission prompt wasn’t descriptive enough.
I don’t know how to explain why a camera app needs camera permissions.
If you think the reviewer was correct because “The camera will be used to take photographs” is a circular description, note that:
It took the better part of a decade for Apple to catch this.
ProCamera’s description is “Usage of the camera is needed to take photos and videos.”
Final Cut Camera’s description is “Allow camera access to record video.”
Ben Lovejoy:
Halide may have been featured during the iPhone 16 keynote, but it seems that wasn’t enough to protect it from an over-zealous App Store reviewer.
[…]
Halide’s Sebastiaan de Wish says the company received a call from Apple informing them that this was a mistake.
Do they do any postmortems for these erroneous rejections? Why isn’t there some sort of warning to the reviewer: did you really mean to reject this app for metadata that was already accepted 100 times in a row and hasn’t changed?
Ben Sandofsky:
Apple followed up to let us know what happened. Normally they don’t do this for camera apps, when it’s obvious why the camera is used.
So the goof was that the reviewer didn’t know it was a camera app?
Robert Bye:
My image editing app got rejected because Apple didn’t know why an image editing app needed access to photos to edit their photos…
Previously:
App Store App Store Rejection Halide iOS iOS 18 iOS App
Paul Sawers:
Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.”
Mullenweg criticized the company — which has been commercializing the open source WordPress project since 2010 — for profiteering without giving much back, while also disabling key features that make WordPress such a powerful platform in the first place.
[…]
It’s worth noting that Automattic has a history in backing WordPress-hosting companies, having invested in WP Engine itself way back in 2011, while Mullenweg also spoke at WP Engine’s conference just last year. Moreover, Automattic also bought a majority stake in WordPress-hosting company Pressable back in 2016, and later invested in GridPane too.
[…]
In response to the brouhaha that followed the talk, Mullenweg published a follow-up blog post, where he calls WP Engine a “cancer” to WordPress. “It’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread,” he wrote.
WP Engine has responded with a cease and desist letter (via Hacker News, Slashdot):
During calls on September 17th and 19th, for instance, Automattic CFO Mark Davies told a WP
Engine board member that Automattic would “go to war” if WP Engine did not agree to pay its
competitor Automattic a significant percentage of its gross revenues – tens of millions of dollars
in fact – on an ongoing basis.
[…]
Mr. Mullenweg further stated that he had already created slides for his keynote speech,
taking aim at WP Engine and its investor, and would present them to WordCamp attendees – and
to millions of others via livestream on YouTube – if his financial demands were not met.
Rodrigo Ghedin (via Hacker News):
Notably, WP Engine was a sponsor of the event.
[…]
What I find deeply ironic in this situation is his accusation that WP Engine “confused even his own mother,” while he’s the owner of Automattic, which has a hosting service literally called WordPress.com, distinct from the FOSS project WordPress.org — an intentional yet obvious confusion that everyone who interacts with WordPress struggles to understand and has benefited Automattic immensely since ever.
Last year, Matt leveraged the FOSS project and his for-profit endeavor resemblance (and his position in both) to redirect web searches pointed at WordPress.org plugin directory to a mirror hosted in WordPress.com.
pluc:
There’s a widget on the default WordPress dashboard that displays a RSS feed of WordPress.org, where Matt posted his rant, making it show up everywhere.
Daniel Jalkut:
I respect @photomatt’s opinion that consumers of open source should “give back”, but to my mind that’s antithetical to the notion of it being free. Free things do not come with conditions. Giving back is an option, and always welcome. That’s open source.
Matt @photomatt has SO MUCH goodwill in the WordPress community and I fear he’s squandering it in this WPEngine fight. Whatever the details it’s not coming off well in public. I hope they resolve things soon.
Previously:
Automattic Business Legal Open-source Software Web WordPress WP Engine
Tim Hardwick:
Former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive has officially confirmed his involvement in an artificial intelligence hardware project with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The confirmation appeared in a profile of the designer by The New York Times, putting to rest speculation that began nearly a year ago about a potential collaboration between the two figures.
The AI hardware venture is reportedly being funded by Ive and the Emerson Collective, a company founded by Laurene Powell Jobs. According to the report, the project could secure up to $1 billion in funding by the end of the year, signaling significant investor interest in the endeavor.
[…]
While specific details about the AI product and its release timeline remain under wraps, the team has already established a significant presence in San Francisco, working out of a 32,000-square-foot office building, part of a $90 million real estate acquisition by Ive on a single city block.
John Gruber (Mastodon):
But an OpenAI-powered personal electronic device, with longtime Apple all-stars Evans Hankey and Tang Tan leading the small team? That’s interesting. That’s competing against Apple. That’s complicated given Ive’s legendary history with Apple. It’s further complicated by the fact that most of LoveFrom’s designers came with Ive from Apple. It’s complicated even further by Powell Jobs’s backing of the startup.
[…]
And the whole thing is made even stranger given OpenAI’s partnership with Apple to provide “world knowledge” generative AI by the end of this year. Can’t help but think of then-Google-CEO Eric Schmidt being an Apple board member when the iPhone debuted — with built-in system apps for Google Maps and YouTube — while Google was simultaneously building Android to compete.
Ed Zitron (via Hacker News):
I ultimately believe that OpenAI in its current form is untenable. There is no path to profitability, the burn rate is too high, and generative AI as a technology requires too much energy for the power grid to sustain it, and training these models is equally untenable, both as a result of ongoing legal issues (as a result of theft) and the amount of training data necessary to develop them.
And, quite simply, any technology requiring hundreds of billions of dollars to prove itself is built upon bad architecture. There is no historical precedent for anything that OpenAI needs to happen. Nobody has ever raised the amount of money it will need, nor has a piece of technology required such an incredible financial and systemic force — such as rebuilding the American power grid — to survive, let alone prove itself as a technology worthy of such investment.
Ate-a-Pi.
Sam is insane. He managed to seal a chatgpt distribution deal with Apple while collaborating on an iPhone killer with Apple’s top designers.
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Business Hardware Jonathan Ive OpenAI
Nilay Patel:
It’s also notable what isn’t present on the iPhone this year: there’s no generative AI wackiness at all. There’s no video boost or face-swapping, no adding yourself to group photos, no drawing to add stuff with AI like on the Pixel or Galaxy phones — really, none of it. I asked Apple’s VP of camera software engineering Jon McCormack about Google’s view that the Pixel camera now captures “memories” instead of photos, and he told me that Apple has a strong point of view about what a photograph is — that it’s something that actually happened. It was a long and thoughtful answer, so I’m just going to print the whole thing[…]
John Gruber has quoted the relevant section, and it’s getting rave reviews. Maybe I’m just too dumb to see the profundity, but I don’t think there’s any there there. These are pleasant sounding words along the lines of “music is in our DNA,” but what is the connection to what the Camera app actually does? Reports are that the photos by default look more processed than before. And Apple, like Samsung and Google, has been including features for years that make the photos not what actually happened.
Federico Viticci:
“Something that really, actually happened” is a great baseline compared to Samsung’s nihilistic definition (nothing is real) and Google’s relativistic one (everyone has their own memories). […] But I have to wonder how malleable that definition will retroactively become to make room for Clean Up and future generative features of Apple Intelligence.
What McCormack said is that a photo is a “celebration of something that really, actually happened,” not that the image in the photo actually happened.
Google lets you celebrate a moment where two people were actually standing next to each other by creating such an image from two separate captures where they were standing alone. Apple lets you take a photo of multiple people and objects and remove some of them. What is the distinction here that amounts to a strong point of view? It just seems like a difference in degree. Arguably, the Google example is more truthful in that it’s helping you recreate an actual moment, whereas the Apple one is letting you tune it up to be more what you remembered or wished for than the reality.
If we were talking about this last year, people would say that there’s a big philosophical difference because—although they both combine multiple exposures, add fake bokeh, and use AI to adjust colors and focus, etc.—Android phones let you remove objects and iPhones don’t. But now Apple is adding that, too. If there’s a bright line distinction, I think that was it. Apple crossed it, and I don’t think they’ll stop there. This is fine. It’s a popular feature, and I know people who were considering switching to Android because of it.
Nick Heer:
In my testing of Clean Up on an image on the latest iOS 18.1 beta build, Apple adds EXIF tags to the image to mark it as being edited with generative A.I. tools. EXIF tags can be erased, though, and I do not see any other indicators.
Previously:
Apple Intelligence Artificial Intelligence Camera Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) Google High Dynamic Range (HDR) iOS iOS 18 iPhone 16 iPhone 16 Pro Photography Samsung
