Linked List: January 17, 2023

Tuesday, 17 January 2023

Simon Fraser on the Joy of the Fahrenheit Scale 

Whole bit is spot-on, but the thing about the thermostat is chef’s kiss.

Apple Announces M2 Pro and M2 Max-Powered MacBook Pros and Mac Minis 

Dan Moren has a good summary of today’s announcements at Six Colors:

As expected, Apple on Tuesday took the wraps off updates to its MacBook Pro and Mac mini lines, featuring as their centerpiece the new M2 Pro and M2 Max processors.

The MacBook Pro update is basically a speed bump: the base level $1999 14-inch model moves to a M2 Pro 10-core CPU/16-core GPU configuration, with build to configure options for M2 Pro 12-core with a 19-core GPU, or to M2 Max with 12 cores and either 30 or 38 cores of GPU. Options at $2499 and $3099 come with the higher M2 Pro and the M2 Max, respectively. Meanwhile, the 16-inch model’s base configuration, at $2499, starts with a 12-core CPU/19-core GPU M2 Pro, while the $2699 and $3499 models feature the 12-core/19-core M2 Pro and 12-core/38-core M2 Max options.[...]

On the Mac mini side, Apple has finally axed the Intel Mac model and now offers three configurations of mini, starting with the same 8-core CPU/10-core GPU M2 configuration in the MacBook Air at $599 — $100 less than its M1-powered predecessor. While a $799 model features more storage with the same chip configuration, there’s also for the first time an option for Apple’s more powerful M2 Pro chip, in a $1299 10-core CPU/16-core GPU option, with a build to order configuration also offering a bump to a 12-core/19-core GPU M2 Pro. The M2 Pro configuration also offers four Thunderbolt 4 ports on the back, up over just two on the M2 configurations.

Announcements from Apple’s Newsroom:

Apple released a 20-minute video announcing these products, hosted by John Ternus. It’s linked from Apple’s home page, but isn’t listed on their Events page, so I’m not sure if the URL is a permalink. (I wouldn’t read too much into it, but I did notice that the URL for the video has “/2022/” in the path, which makes me wonder if this was all originally intended to be announced a month ago.)

One purely cosmetic surprise to me: the Mac Mini is still only available in silver, no space gray. I would have bet (and lost) that the regular M2 models would remain silver, but the M2 Pro and Max models would have been space gray. That’s how the lower-end and higher-end Intel Mac Mini models were colored.

Tesla Video Promoting Self-Driving Was Staged, Engineer Testifies 

Hyunjoo Jin, reporting for Reuters:

A 2016 video that Tesla used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer. The video, which remains archived on Tesla’s website, was released in October 2016 and promoted on Twitter by Chief Executive Elon Musk as evidence that “Tesla drives itself.”

But the Model X was not driving itself with technology Tesla had deployed, Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, said in the transcript of a July deposition taken as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla for a 2018 fatal crash involving a former Apple engineer. [...]

To create the video, the Tesla used 3D mapping on a predetermined route from a house in Menlo Park, California, to Tesla’s then-headquarters in Palo Alto, he said. Drivers intervened to take control in test runs, he said. When trying to show the Model X could park itself with no driver, a test car crashed into a fence in Tesla’s parking lot, he said. “The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system,” Elluswamy said, according to a transcript of his testimony seen by Reuters.

When Tesla released the video, Musk tweeted, “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.”

Shocker.

There’s Weak Sauce, and Then There’s Weak Sauce 

The @TwitterDev account, three hours ago:

Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules. That may result in some apps not working.

That’s the entirety of the tweet, and that tweet is the only comment the company has made. Give them a point for brevity, I suppose, but there’s literally no one on the planet who believes a word of this. Third-party clients weren’t violating any existing rules, and there’s no “may” about the fact that they stopped working because Twitter revoked their authorization credentials. If there was some way they could show even less respect for third-party client developers and users, they found it.