Apple just released a weirdly interesting coding language model

A couple notable things: first is that you can do this at all, (left to right model -> out of order diffusion via finetuning) which is really interesting. Second, the final version beats original by a small margin on some benchmarks. Third is that it’s in the ballpark of Gemini diffusion, although not competitive — to be expected for any 7B parameter model.

A diffusion model comes with a lot of benefits in terms of parallelization and therefore speed; to my mind the architecture is a better fit for coding than strict left to right generation.

Overall, interesting. At some point these local models will get good enough for ‘real work’ and they will be slotted in at API providers rapidly. Apple’s game is on-device; I think we’ll see descendants of these start shipping with Xcode in the next year as just part of the coding experience.

Why can’t I backup an iOS device to a local NAS in the way I can use Time Machine, for example? (Rhetorical question; the answer is obviously that they want to sell more iCloud storage for that all-important services revenue).

When I connect my iPhone to my iMac it does to a local backup to a file, which then gets backed up via Time Machine (and SuperDuper/CarbonCopyCloner).

"How to back up your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch with your Mac":

* https://support.apple.com/en-ca/108796

There's also a checkbox for 'Wifi syncing' so a cable isn't necessarily needed.

iOS natively supports SMB over any network connection including wired Ethernet, mounting encrypted APFS volumes on USB storage devices at 10 Gbps etc.

It’s Apples explicit vision that an iPad Pro can replace a Mac even for some professional users. Why don’t these deserve local backups?

Apple already provides first party software to handle iDevice backups on Windows or Mac.

Backing up an Android device to a PC using adb is significantly more difficult, especially for the less technically minded.