«According to a lawsuit filed Friday, Liu departed with three things: a company-issued MacBook he never returned, a close relationship with an Apple employee who continued sharing internal information, and, most significantly, knowledge of a software bug that gave him ongoing access to internal file servers.
“LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny,” Liu wrote to his former Apple colleague, Alyssa Peng. He then, Apple alleges, used that access to download presentations, hardware designs, manufacturing details and testing procedures — all while already working at OpenAI.»
You can really get into this article and enjoy it. The text includes lots of interesting source mentions without resorting to footnotes. The red flags I see are a nod to a little-known German chip design startup at the very end, and the fact that this is the author’s very first blog post. Coincidentally, the owner of the website is also from Germany, and their university is just about an hour’s drive from the startup’s headquarters.
Excerpt:
«Which, to me, is the actual answer to this post’s title question. The M1 did not feel huge because of any single trick. It felt huge because Apple moved every lever at once: the widest core in the industry, on the best process node in the industry, with memory in the package, efficiency cores doing the housekeeping, an OS scheduler that knows about all of it, and a translation layer with dedicated silicon support so that nobody had to wait for the ecosystem to catch up. Any single one of these would have made a nice bullet point in a keynote. Together, and only together, they made a laptop that felt like a different kind of machine. That is what ten years of building phone chips on a merciless power budget teaches you.»
Author here - thanks for actually reading the whole thing, very glad you enjoyed it!
Fair question: I have no affiliation with Ubitium - no stake, no payment, no involvement in the company. The mention at the end comes from genuine interest in the bet against specialization.
Don’t let suspicious people like me keep you from doing good work. Based on your first post, I will very likely devour the information you put up about programmable chips, even if it is coming through the lens of one specific (future) vendor.
As a long-time reader of Daring Fireball I learned to be highly skeptical of the things that are promoted there. In the case of Wavelength, I thought and still think it’s a solid app, but as a product it’s ultimately hindered in its growth by the invite-only nature of the group chats it offered.
To be clear, these group chats are actually hidden from the public. You join by entering an invitation code or receiving a link. There is no way to discover group chats by browsing or searching for them.
So I was completely surprised by Daring Fireball recently hinting at [0] Wavelength’s goal of becoming a breakout hit as a social platform.
Say what?
Without a large marketing rocket to pull you into orbit, I’m not sure how you can achieve any kind of success as a social platform with unlisted and private group chats. In the case of WhatsApp the boost came from a gazillion people having the common pain point that sending text sucked and/or was expensive.
It’s also worrying that they only had enough gas in the tank to keep the lights on for little more than a year. A year less than their previous endeavor.
But my questions in the hope of learning from this situation are:
Why not make some groups more visible than others? Example: The Dithering podcast has a group. [1] Why not show that it exists and inform about the ways to get in?
Was there any work done towards tools to help group owners handle high volumes of user influx and chat moderation? Are those the pro features hinted at in the TechCrunch article? [2]
Every time we tested any of the child protection features as adults the software failed basic tests. It did so ages ago with Mac OS X when we only had nieces to worry about, and more recently on macOS and iOS when we wanted to setup something for our own kids.
In a way, I’m glad that I’m being forced to sit down with my kids, set a timer, and be present and watchful. But as they grow up this model will no longer be feasible and I dread the day when after reevaluating Apple’s progress in this area, there’s still going to be unacceptable bugs.
«According to a lawsuit filed Friday, Liu departed with three things: a company-issued MacBook he never returned, a close relationship with an Apple employee who continued sharing internal information, and, most significantly, knowledge of a software bug that gave him ongoing access to internal file servers.
“LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny,” Liu wrote to his former Apple colleague, Alyssa Peng. He then, Apple alleges, used that access to download presentations, hardware designs, manufacturing details and testing procedures — all while already working at OpenAI.»