Archive for August 20, 2025

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Base 3.0

The app has had a major overhaul to all areas while keeping a familiar UI.

[…]

Highlights of this version include:

Working with multiple attached databases

Support for more SQLite features like:

WITHOUT ROWID & STRICT tables

Partial indexes (with WHERE clauses)

Named table constraints

Generated columns

Better syntax highlighting & autocomplete in the SQL editor

There are a bunch of these Mac SQLite apps, and Base is my favorite. I was worried that it was abandoned, as it didn’t seem to be getting many updates, and I was hitting some errors and UI glitches on newer versions of macOS. These seem to be fixed in 3.0. It’s $40.66 direct or $36 in the Mac App Store, with no upgrade pricing.

Previously:

Base Database Developer Tool Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia SQLite

Comments

AI Deployment and Job Displacement

Sheryl Estrada (Reddit):

The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, a new report published by MIT’s NANDA initiative, reveals that while generative AI holds promise for enterprises, most initiatives to drive rapid revenue growth are falling flat.
Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L. The research—based on 150 interviews with leaders, a survey of 350 employees, and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments—paints a clear divide between success stories and stalled projects.

Thomas Claburn:

As an unidentified CIO put it in an interview with the authors, “We’ve seen dozens of demos this year. Maybe one or two are genuinely useful. The rest are wrappers or science projects.”
One thing that is changing is the employment landscape, at least in affected industries. In the Technology and Media sectors, the report notes, “[more than] 80 percent of executives anticipate reduced hiring volumes within 24 months.”
According to the authors, the GenAI-driven workforce reductions have been occurring in non-core business activities that often get outsourced, such as customer support operations, administrative processing, and standardized development tasks.

Madison Mills (via Hacker News):

“There doesn’t seem to be any layoffs. … Jobs most impacted were already low priority or outsourced,” Aditya Challapally, research contributor to project NANDA at MIT, tells Axios.
Instead of replacing workers, organizations are finding real gains from “replacing BPOs [business process outsourcing] and external agencies, not cutting internal staff,” according to the report.
[…]
For now, companies aren’t firing employees but just canceling contracts that involve outsourced labor, a strategy that’s leading to financial gains.
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95% of organizations investing in generative AI are getting zero return on that investment.

Slashdot:

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addressed growing internal unease at the company Thursday morning in a company-wide memo that acknowledged the “uncertainty and seeming incongruence” of conducting layoffs while achieving record profits and AI investments. The tech giant has eliminated more than 15,000 positions in 2025, including 9,000 cuts in early July alone, marking one of the most aggressive periods of job reductions in Microsoft’s history.
Nadella described this as the “enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value,” noting that Microsoft is thriving by “every objective measure” with strong market performance and record capital investments. “Progress isn’t linear. It’s dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding. But it’s also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before,” he added. Microsoft President Brad Smith said that an estimated $80 billion in capital expenditures over the past year created pressure to reduce operating costs.

Dan Gooding (Reddit):

In the weeks that followed those layoff announcements, claims began circulated on X that the company had also applied for upwards of 6,000 high-skilled work visas, or H-1Bs, since October, the start of the current fiscal year. While that number could not be independently confirmed, during the last fiscal year, Microsoft applied for 9,491 H-1B visas. All were approved.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan (via Hacker News):

This afternoon, we reported our Q2 2025 results. We delivered revenue above the high end of our guidance, reflecting solid demand and execution across the business.
[…]
We are implementing a plan to reduce our headcount by approximately 15%, and we plan to end the year with a global workforce of about 75,000 employees as a result of workforce reductions and attrition. We completed a significant amount of our workforce reductions in Q2, streamlining the number of management layers by about 50% in the process.
[…]
We will focus our AI efforts on developing a cohesive silicon, system and software stack strategy. In the past, we have approached AI with a traditional, silicon- and training-centric mindset. This needs to change – and we have already started incubating new capabilities while attracting new talent.

Previously:

Artificial Intelligence Business Hiring Intel Layoffs Microsoft

2 Comments

The Business of ChatGPT

Sarah Perez:

Since launching in May 2023, ChatGPT’s app for iOS and Android devices has reached $2 billion in global consumer spending, according to a new analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures. That figure is approximately 30x the combined lifetime spending of ChatGPT’s rivals on mobile, including Claude, Copilot, and Grok, the analysis indicates.
So far this year, ChatGPT’s mobile app has made $1.35 billion, up 673% year-over-year from the $174 million it made during the same period (January-July) in 2024, per the data. On average, the app is generating close to $193 million per month, up from $25 million last year.
[…]
In the U.S., ChatGPT’s spending per download to date is even higher, at $10, leading the market to account for 38% of the app’s revenue to date. Germany is the second-largest market, accounting for 5.3% of ChatGPT’s lifetime total spending.
[…]
In 2025 so far, ChatGPT’s app has been downloaded 318 million times, or 2.8x more than the 113 million it saw during the same period last year. By the number of installs, however, India is the top market, accounting for 13.7% of lifetime downloads, compared with second place, the U.S., which accounted for 10.3% of all downloads.

Hamza Shaban (Slashdot):

OpenAI researcher Yann Dubois asked the model to create an app to help his partner learn French. And in a few minutes GPT-5 churned out several iterations, with flashcards, a progress tracker, and even a simple snake-style game with a French twist, a mouse and cheese variation to learn new vocab.
The GPT-5 debut instantly wiped out a big chunk of Duolingo’s progress, cutting the 30% gains in half. And the downward momentum continued Friday, with the stock sinking 5% to end the week.

Dare Obasanjo:

People have argued that AI is in a bubble because it costs too much to provide AI services. However the current cost of training or inference is not a law of physics. GPT-5 prices are significantly cheaper than GPT-4 and this is just one release worth of optimizations. They definitely are opportunities to bring costs down further. The current prices won’t last forever.

Nick Turley (via John Gruber):

This week, ChatGPT is on track to reach 700M weekly active users — up from 500M at the end of March and 4× since last year.

Previously:

Artificial Intelligence Business ChatGPT Duolingo iOS iOS 18 iOS App OpenAI Web

1 Comment

macOS 15.6.1

Juli Clover (no release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW):

Apple today released new iOS 18.6.2, iPadOS 18.6.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.6.1 updates, and the software addresses a security vulnerability that is known to have been actively exploited.
According to Apple’s security support documents, memory corruption could result from devices that were sent a malicious image file.

Previously: