Codex is a descendant of GPT-3 – its training data contains both natural language and billions of lines of source code from publicly available sources, including code in public GitHub repositories.

“We see this as a tool to multiply programmers,” OpenAI’s CTO and co-founder Greg Brockman told The Verge. “Programming has two parts to it: you have ‘think hard about a problem and try to understand it,’ and ‘map those small pieces to existing code, whether it’s a library, a function, or an API.’” The second part is tedious, he says, but it’s what Codex is best at. “It takes people who are already programmers and removes the drudge work.”

Colin Lecher reporting for The Verge:

Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 730, which makes it a crime to distribute audio or video that gives a false, damaging impression of a politician’s words or actions.

While the word “deepfake” doesn’t appear in the legislation, the bill clearly takes aim at doctored works. Lawmakers have raised concerns recently that distorted deepfake videos, like a slowed video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that appeared over the summer, could be used to influence elections in the future.

This is the first (but likely not the last) piece of legislation aimed at fighting the potential impact of GANs Gone Wild.

It’ll be interesting to watch this game play out. I think the only long-term, sustainable solution will emerge from the same arena where the problem began: technological advances.

Good news fellow Slack users, your productivity just got bumped by the perf gods of Slack thanks to their continued efforts and focus on the desktop app’s performance.

Slack is unveiling a new version of its desktop app for Windows and macOS today that promises big performance improvements. Slack has rebuilt its desktop app to focus on speed, and the company claims Slack will now launch 33 percent faster than before. The Slack app will even use 50 percent less RAM than before, according to the company.

Slack has been working on this overhaul for two years, slowly modernizing parts of its code along the way. While the desktop apps still run on Electron, all of the UI parts have been rebuilt using React to fix some of the shortcomings of the existing Slack app.

Apple launched a new section to their website for the App Store. According to The Verge, this new page titled “Principles and Practices” is believed to be a defensive response to recent criticism of the App Store.

Chris Welch writing for The Verge:

Apple’s new site puts a big spotlight on the App Store’s unrivaled success and reach, but in some ways, it also brings more attention to how difficult it can be to compete against Apple.”

Apple from “Principles and Practices”:

Since the launch of the App Store, an entire industry has been built around app design and development, generating over 1,500,000 U.S. jobs and over 1,570,000 jobs across Europe.

We’re proud that, to date, developers have earned more than $120 billion worldwide from selling digital goods and services in apps distributed by the App Store.

84% of apps are free, and developers pay nothing to Apple.

Microsoft is launching a new command line app for Windows, dubbed Windows Terminal. It’s designed to be the central location for access to environments like PowerShell, Cmd, and the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Microsoft is adding multiple tab support alongside theming and customization for developers who want to tweak the Terminal app.

It officially launches in June, but the source code is already up on GitHub so you build it yourself today.

If you’ve been wondering how Microsoft’s mix of Chrome and Edge would look, then check this out. Tom Warren writing for The Verge:

Most of the user interface of the browser is a mix of Chrome and Edge, and Microsoft has clearly tried to add its own little touches here and there. There’s a read aloud accessibility option, and it simply reads the page out loud like it does in existing versions of Edge. Some features that you’d expect from Edge are missing, though. Microsoft hasn’t implemented its set aside tabs feature just yet, and write on the web with a stylus isn’t available. A dark mode is only available via a testing flag right now.

Eventually Artificial Intelligence will take over the human powered content moderation jobs for Facebook. Until then, this small population of humans employed by Cognizant (on behalf of Facebook) in Phoenix, Arizona accept the job of subjecting themselves to the worst of humankind to provide “a better Facebook experience.”

Casey Newton writes for The Verge:

The video depicts a man being murdered. Someone is stabbing him, dozens of times, while he screams and begs for his life. Chloe’s job is to tell the room whether this post should be removed. She knows that section 13 of the Facebook community standards prohibits videos that depict the murder of one or more people. When Chloe explains this to the class, she hears her voice shaking.

Returning to her seat, Chloe feels an overpowering urge to sob. Another trainee has gone up to review the next post, but Chloe cannot concentrate. She leaves the room, and begins to cry so hard that she has trouble breathing.

No one tries to comfort her. This is the job she was hired to do…

Tom Warren writing for The Verge:

Microsoft is testing a warning for Windows 10 users not to install Chrome or Firefox. The software giant is in the final stages of testing its Windows 10 October 2018 Update, and testers have spotted a new change that appears when you try to install a rival web browser. “You already have Microsoft Edge – the safer, faster browser for Windows 10” says a prompt that appears when you run the Chrome or Firefox installers on the latest Windows 10 October 2018 Update.

Yes, the update in the article makes it clear that this is only being tested, but to me, that doesn’t excuse this type of shady behavior. Why is this being tested in the first place?

Unfortunately for Microsoft, invasive and creepy conduct like this will only make people steer clear of its browser and other products.

Ok, so I’m equally excited and concerned by this AI demo.

James Vincent writes for The Verge:

The most impressive demo at Google I/O was a phone call to book a haircut. This call wasn’t made by a human, but by the Google Assistant, which did an uncannily good job of asking the right questions, pausing in the right places, and even throwing in the odd “mmhmm” for realism.

You have to hear this AI phone call for yourself! There’s a video of the demo embedded in this post.

Paul Miller with a good breakdown of what’s new (and what’s not) in the latest Raspberry Pi:

The new board has a slightly faster 1.4 GHz quad-core processor, Bluetooth 4.2 (an upgrade from 4.1), and dual-band Wi-Fi.

Sounds like an incremental upgrade, but progress nonetheless. It never ceases to amaze me how much value they cram in to these things for just $35. And so cute!

Paul Miller:

There are two major reasons I can think of to hack a game console. The first one is obvious: so you can play cracked copies of games. That’s why modern consoles are so difficult to hack, because millions of dollars are on the line. But some people just want to run any software they choose on the hardware they own. And for those people, Linux on the Switch is a huge achievement.

This hack boasts touchscreen support, a fully operational death star web browser, and a GPU-powered demo app. Sadly, there are no details out on how you can do it yourself, but Twitter user fail0verlow has a nice video of it in action embedded in a tweet.