Welcome to issue #23 of the Dithering Digest Weekly Tech News Roundup.
Yet more antitrust trouble for Apple, the first 3rd-party App Stores are starting to appear in the EU, more scary AI developments courtesy of the US Air Force and Boston Dynamics. To balance out the misery and doom, a delightful web tool to work out Mario Kart driver and kart combos.
Enjoy the links!
Apple fails to overturn UK antitrust probe
Apple have tried to get a lawsuit thrown out by the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal in relation to the 30% App Store tax but failed.
This could mean they might be forced to pay out over £785 million to developers in compensation.
AltStore now available in the EU
One of the first third-party App Store is now available to Apple users in the EU. AltStore was previously able to be sideloaded through various tricks onto an iOS device but now it is official using the new EU DMA rules that Apple was recently forced to implement.
The developer Riley Testus also makes a retro game emulator called Delta, which Apple have allowed onto the App Store worldwide, so you should check that out too!
GPT-4 can be used to generate software exploits from security advisories
This has potential to be serious in the near future. Four University of Illinois computer scientists have released a paper describing how they used publicly available descriptions of vulnerabilities to feed to GPT4 and they were able to get working code to exploit the CVE.
If this becomes easy to do, it will increase the ability of script kiddy hackers to take advantage of security flaws making things much more annoying at the least but potentially very disruptive.
US Air Force has AI piloted planes dogfighting with human pilots
AI news just seems to get more terrifying on a daily basis at this point. The USAF Test Pilot School and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have demonstrated that AI software can fly a modified F-16 fighter jet.
Boston Dynamics produces more nightmare robots
Boston Dynamics have released a video showing the newest breed of their Atlas robot. The previous version was very industrial looking and bulky. This new iteration is much more sleek and features rotating joints which enable it to move in the way it does.
Not sure if they understand product marketing. They literally could not have made the robot move in a more disturbing way for the promo video. Terrifying.
Pareto analysis of driver and kart combos in Mario Kart 8
This is just delightful. Antoine Mayerowitz has done extensive analysis of Mario Kart 8’s driver and kart system, and applied the Pareto Principle to it to help you find the best possible combo for your style of driving.
That alone is incredible work, but the way the page is laid out, the graphs, the interactive nature of the page. This thing is a work of art.
Go have a play!
🔗 Kottke
Computer Joke of the Week
There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary, those who don’t and those who didn’t expect this joke to be in ternary.
If you have any cool projects or tinkering you are doing, let us know and we will feature it in future issues of the digest. I would love to hear what you are all dithering on!
Until next week, happy dithering!
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