Apple’s stance on the right to repair has now become more accommodative, with the company now supporting used parts for iPhone 15 repairs that can include the camera, display, and battery.
While Apple’s move is welcome to many, it does answer a series of questions: If your iPhone breaks, should you have the right to fix it?
If you want to fix your iPhone, should you be able to do that yourself, or be forced to go to the manufacturer?
And if you are going to fix your iPhone yourself — or pay a third-party to help — should you be able to use whatever parts will work?
Apple pushed back vocally against criticism of parts pairing, and has recently backed laws in several states that enshrine consumer repair options.
Seso was founded five years ago to help streamline that process and now looks to expand into a one-stop-shop HR platform for the agriculture industry.
Michael Guirguis co-founded the startup after his cousin asked for his advice on whether or not her organic farm should expand.
Once he started talking to potential farm customers, he realized that farms could use a lot more help with their HR beyond just finding workers.
“When it comes to the back office, every farm we visited had thousands of filing cabinets,” Guirguis said.
“Your HR team is in the back office doing traditional HR work,” Guirguis said.
Earlier today, Sentry announced its AI Autofix feature for debugging production code and now, a few hours later, GitHub is launching the first beta of its code scanning autofix feature for finding and fixing security vulnerabilities during the coding process.
This new feature combines the real-time capabilities of GitHub’s Copilot with CodeQL, the company’s semantic code analysis engine.
The company also promises that code scanning autofix will cover more than 90% of alert types in the languages it supports, which are currently JavaScript, Typescript, Java, and Python.
“Just as GitHub Copilot relieves developers of tedious and repetitive tasks, code scanning autofix will help development teams reclaim time formerly spent on remediation,” GitHub writes in today’s announcement.
To generate the fixes and their explanations, GitHub uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.
Sentry has long helped developers monitor and debug their production code.
While it’s called Autofix, this isn’t a completely automated system, something very few developers would be comfortable with.
In the process, Autofix will provide developers with a diff that explains the changes and then, if everything looks good, create a pull request to merge those changes.
Autofix supports all major languages, though Elser acknowledged that the team did most of its testing with JavaScript and Python code.
That also means that users must opt in to send their data to these third-party services to use Autofix.
Google is hopeful it will soon be able to ‘unpause’ the ability of its multimodal generative AI tool, Gemini, to depict people, per DeepMind founder, Demis Hassabis.
The capability to respond to prompts for images of humans should be back online in the “next few weeks”, he said today.
Asked by moderator, Wired’s Steven Levy, to explain what went wrong with the image generation feature, Hassabis sidestepped a detailed technical explanation.
Instead he suggested the issue was caused by Google failing to identify instances when users are basically after what he described as a “universal depiction”.
The issue is “very complex”, he suggested — likely demanding a whole-of-society mobilization and response to determine and enforce limits.
For example, the MTA transit system in New York collected more than 18,000 lost items from 2018 to 2023 — and that time includes when people were sheltering in place for the pandemic.
Boomerang thinks AI can fix lost and found.
The Miami-based startup built software that uses machine learning to match pictures and descriptions of lost items.
Customers, which can range from gyms to theme parks, upload pictures and descriptions of their lost and found while consumers do the same for the item they’ve lost.
If there is a match, consumers can choose to pick up their items or have them shipped.
Tesla’s fix for its Autopilot recall of more than 2 million vehicles is being called “insufficient” by Consumer Reports, following preliminary tests.
While the testing isn’t comprehensive, it shows questions remain unanswered about Tesla’s approach to driver monitoring — the tech at the heart of the recall.
It focused heavily on the Autosteer feature, which is designed to keep a car centered in a lane on controlled-access highways, even around curves.
But NHTSA said in documents released last week that it viewed those checks as “insufficient to prevent misuse.”Tesla does not restrict the use of Autosteer to controlled-access highways, though.
“None of this is very prescriptive or explicit in terms of what it is they’re going to [change],” Funkhouser says.
Beeper, the app that brings iMessage to Android users, is implementing a fix that it says will allow users to once again access the service after Apple blocked it.
However, the fix requires you to have access to a Mac computer, or have a friend on Beeper with a Mac.
“This 1:1 mapping of registration data to individual user—in our testing—makes the connection very reliable,” the post reads.
“If you use Beeper Mini, you can use your Mac registration data with it as well, and Beeper Mini will start to work again.
Beeper says that in its testing, it found that 10-20 iMessage users can safely use the same registration data.
Beeper Cloud users were also impacted, the company’s post said, referring to its original messaging app aggregator, but said those users could contact Beeper Help for a fix as well.
Apple appears to be deliberately blocking iMessages from being delivered to ~5% of Beeper Mini users.
Uninstalling and reinstalling Beeper Mini fixes the issue.
But although Beeper believed Apple would not be able to shut its service down, as Beeper Mini users communicated directly with Apple’s servers, just as iPhones do, Apple quickly reacted on Friday to put an end to Beeper Mini’s operation.
As a result of Apple’s meddling, leading to Beeper Mini’s instability, the startup made its new app free for Android users for the time being.
It’s not clear how much of the layoffs were due to customer habits changing in a post-COVID world, and how much was due to remote work complexities. Regardless, it’s clear…
