Inside iPhone Camera lab 📱, X payments 💸, Trust in software 🔐

Apple's iPhone 16 brings parity between regular videos and slow motion in terms of image quality and dynamic range and introduces a new feature ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR TLDR 2025-01-01 📱 Big Tech & Startups A Billion Pixels a Second: I Got a Rare Look Inside Apple's Secret iPhone 16 Camera Labs (14 minute read) Apple's iPhone 16 brings parity between regular videos and slow motion in terms of image quality and dynamic range. It also introduces a new feature that allows users to adjust the quality of the audio on videos they record by moving around a few sliders in the Photos app. This article looks into how Apple designed these features. It takes a tour through Apple's labs to see how the company tests and calibrates its technology. X CEO Yaccarino: X Money Payment System Will Launch In 2025 (2 minute read) X is launching a platform payment system called X Money this year. The platform will have its own currency. It is unknown how it will tie into fiat currency. Elon Musk's influence means that the platform may involve crypto integration. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology o3, Oh My (53 minute read) OpenAI presented o3 the Friday before Christmas. o3 improves on some of the most challenging benchmarks and represents substantial progress in general-domain reasoning with reinforcement learning. It potentially ranks as one of the best competitive programmers in the world. This article looks at o3, its strengths and weaknesses, how o3 impacts the AI industry, and much more. In 2025, People Will Try Living in This Underwater Habitat (7 minute read) Ocean exploration organization Deep has embarked on a multiyear quest to enable scientists to live on the seafloor at depths of up to 200 meters. It aims to develop and test a small modular habitat called Vanguard this year. The underwater shelter is capable of housing up to three divers for up to a week. It is a stepping stone to a more permanent modular habitat system called Sentinel set to launch in 2027. Deep aims to have a permanent human presence in the ocean by 2030. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 (37 minute read) The GPT-4 barrier was comprehensively broken in 2024 - some of those models can run on consumer laptops. Last year saw prices crash thanks to competition and increased efficiency, with models developing more capabilities. A lot happened in the world of large language models last year - this article provides a review of the things researchers figured out in the last twelve months. Why it's hard to trust software, but you mostly have to anyway (42 minute read) Most people who use software have to just trust that the manufacturer is honest. There is no practical way to determine whether software really does what the manufacturer says it does, even if it is open source. While there are some technologies that have the potential to reduce the amount of trust required, there isn't any plausible way to reduce things down to the level where there aren't a number of single points of trust. This problem isn't likely to be solved anytime soon. 🎁 Miscellaneous The Collapse of Mid-Range Smartphones (2 minute read) The mid-range smartphone segment, which includes devices between $200 to $600, will plummet to a projected 23% in 2027 from 35% in 2021. The demand for the range has declined due to a lack of revolutionary technology upgrades and a more conservative consumption of middle class amid macro challenges. Premium devices are expected to account for 74% of industry revenues by 2027, up from 56% in 2021. The used and refurbished phone markets have grown. US Treasury Is Latest Victim of Most 'Persistent' Hacking Threat (7 minute read) The US Treasury Department disclosed on Monday that Chinese state-sponsored hackers had breached its network via a third-party provider. Details of the hack remain scant, but it is known that the hackers accessed some unclassified documents. Chinese officials have denied the state's involvement in the attack. China's hacking capabilities have increased over the last decade as the country built up its talent. ⚡ Quick Links Will Smith eating spaghetti and other weird AI benchmarks that took off in 2024 (3 minute read) A look at the weird AI benchmarks the internet has invented, like Connect 4, Minecraft, and Will Smith eating spaghetti. My 25-year adventure in AI and ML (6 minute read) A look over the major AI/ML projects that Austin Z. Henley, Associate Teaching Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, worked on during his 25-year career. 10 Big Predictions for 2025 (6 minute read) 10 big things that could happen this year according to M.G. Siegler, a writer and investor from London. Tech pace layers (2 minute read) The Pace Layering framework is great for thinking about how different ecosystems and emergent forces interact. Glue work considered harmful (3 minute read) 'Glue work' is the large amount of unglamorous work that every team needs in order to be efficient. 'Squid Game' Season 2 Premiere Breaks Several Netflix Records With 68 Million Views (1 minute read) The second season of 'Squid Game' ranked as the number one most-watched show on Netflix in 92 countries. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/7c97ce4b/ Track your referrals here. 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