Linked List: September 18, 2024

Wednesday, 18 September 2024

Apple Intelligence Will Come to More Languages, Including German and Italian, Next Year (But Don’t Hold Your Breath for iPhones and iPads) 

Allison Johnson, The Verge:

Apple Intelligence’s list of forthcoming supported languages just got a little longer. After an October launch in US English, Apple says its AI feature set will be available in German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Vietnamese, “and others” in the coming year. The company drops this news just days before the iPhone 16’s arrival — the phone built for AI that won’t have any AI features at launch.

Apple’s AI feature set will expand to include localized English in the UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand in December, with India and Singapore joining the mix next year. The company already announced plans to support Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish next year as well.

Apple shared this news with me last night too, and my first thought was, “German and Italian? Does that mean they’ve gotten the OK that Apple Intelligence is, in fact, compliant with the DMA?” But that’s not what they’re announcing. This is just for Apple Intelligence on the Mac — which already offers Apple Intelligence in the EU in MacOS 15.1 Sequoia betas, because the Mac is not a designated “gatekeeping” platform. The standoff over Apple Intelligence on iOS and iPadOS remains.

Voyager 1 Just Fired Up Thrusters It Hasn’t Used in Decades 

Ashley Strickland, reporting for CNN:

Engineers at NASA have successfully fired up a set of thrusters Voyager 1 hasn’t used in decades to solve an issue that could keep the 47-year-old spacecraft from communicating with Earth from billions of miles away. [...]

As a result of its exceptionally long-lived mission, Voyager 1 experiences issues as its parts age in the frigid outer reaches beyond our solar system. When an issue crops up, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have to get creative while still being careful of how the spacecraft will react to any changes.

Currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth, Voyager 1 is about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away. The probe operates beyond the heliosphere — the sun’s bubble of magnetic fields and particles that extends well beyond Pluto’s orbit — where its instruments directly sample interstellar space.

Michael Chabon, on Threads:

I find the continuing mission of Voyager 1 so moving, for the way its name alone evokes a time of promise, for the thought of that tiny contraption way out there in the vastness at the edge of the heliosphere — perhaps the farthest any human-made thing may ever travel — a bit battered, swiftly aging, still doing the work it was purposed to do.

An amazing feat of engineering five decades ago, kept going by amazing feats of engineering today.