Titanium iPhone, increasing sales with the "IKEA effect", coding with AI, and more native Mac code editors

Apple’s new iPhone launch event is scheduled for the 13th September, where they’re expected to release a new iPhone 15 with a USB-C port and a new Apple watch. They may also switch to titanium for the shell for both.

Apple Events

Watch the latest Apple event stream, and check out the archive of special event announcements for our products and services.

Apple (Australia)
Apple Events

Lamborghini has unveiled an all-electric concept car:

Lamborghini unveils concept car Lanzador at Monterey Car Week

Lamborghini is presenting its electric concept car Lanzador at The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering

Lamborghini.com
Lamborghini unveils concept car Lanzador at Monterey Car Week

The co-founder of Adobe, John Warnock, has died of pancreatic cancer at 82. Together with Charles Geschke, they created technology such as the PDF format, PostScript, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

And it has been revealed that Silicon Valley VCs, including Marc Andreessen and Laurene Powell Jobs (Steve Jobs’ wife), have purchased $800M of land near San Francisco to develop a new city. Bloomberg has done an excellent write-up on the project and other similar efforts to reimagine cities by tech billionaires:

VCs Keep Trying to Build a Utopia. Can It Happen in California?

Today we’ll look at tech’s obsession with creating the perfect metropolis. But first…

Bloomberg
VCs Keep Trying to Build a Utopia. Can It Happen in California?

I came across this interesting product strategy this week, where if you offer customers the ability to customise a product, they place much more value on it:

It’s always interesting to see how the government fights against malware. In this example, they hacked computers in order to remove malware:

Qakbot Malware Disrupted in International Cyber Takedown

The Justice Department today announced a multinational operation involving actions in the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Romania, and Latvia to disrupt the botnet and malware known as Qakbot and take down its infrastructure.

DOJ USAO Logo Central District of California
Qakbot Malware Disrupted in International Cyber Takedown

AI

I discovered a website that has existed since 2019 that creates fake profile pictures using AI to use for testing. They look uncannily real:

ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com uses AI to generate endless fake faces

Hit refresh to lock eyes with another imaginary stranger

The Verge
ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com uses AI to generate endless fake faces

I’ve previously covered watermarking AI-generated audio—here’s what Google is doing to watermark AI-generated imagery:

Google DeepMind has launched a watermarking tool for AI-generated images

It’s the first Big Tech firm to publicly launch one, after a group of them pledged to develop them at the White House in July.

MIT Technology Review
Google DeepMind has launched a watermarking tool for AI-generated images

AI-assisted coding is rapidly advancing. Here are some examples users have shared of what you can do now using the AI-focused (and VSCode-based) IDE, Cursor:

AWS also now has AI coding tools:

AI Code Generator - Amazon CodeWhisperer - AWS

Amazon CodeWhisperer is an AI coding companion that generates whole line and full function code suggestions in your IDE to help you get more done faster.

Amazon Web Services, Inc.
AI Code Generator - Amazon CodeWhisperer - AWS

And developers are using Vercel’s AI SDK to build some really interesting products, such as AI chat for YouTube videos and Yelp.

Although not AI-related (yet) (also a great example of X’s user-submitted context), it’s pretty amazing to see what robotic tools are available to surgeons these days:

Dev

A handy little autocomplete for Terminal extension called Fig has been acquired by AWS. Fig was started by Brendan Falk, who I went to school with—great to see entrepreneurs from Canberra doing well!

Fig has joined AWS!

Amazon acquires Fig’s technology and the Fig team joins Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Download for free
Fig has joined AWS!

Netflix have written a post about an automated tool they’ve developed to choose what artwork to feature for the preview thumbnails for TV shows and movies. There are lots of factors involved such as what resonates most for viewers and avoiding sensitive content that features violence, nudity, or gore.

AVA Discovery View: Surfacing Authentic Moments

By: Hamid Shahid, Laura Johnson, Tiffany Low

Netflix TechBlog
AVA Discovery View: Surfacing Authentic Moments

A few weeks back I mentioned Nova, a new, native macOS code editor. I have been using it every day for work and I’m loving it! Interestingly enough, it seems there is a whole bunch of native macOS code editors out now:

My favourite is CodeEdit, which has heavily copied the Xcode and Apple Developer design:

CodeEdit – A native code editor for macOS

A lightweight, natively built editor. Open source. Free forever.

CodeEdit – A native code editor for macOS

Some of these are open source, and have less features than apps like Nova and VSCode; nevertheless, it’s great to have choice! It’s interesting that there are a lot focused on being native to Mac and not supporting other platforms—I guess others felt similar to me that there was a gap in the market on Mac after getting sick of Electron-based experiments like Atom…

That’s all for now—have a great weekend!