مک-بوک

MacStadium’s VMWare virtualization replacement now available at AWS

Developers seeking a replacement for VMWare’s vSphere environment for virtualized Macs can now access MacStadium’s Orka Platform at the AWS Marketplace.

Reflecting the growing popularity of the Mac platform, Mac cloud and SaaS provider MacStadium’s Orka Platform is now available to purchase at the AWS Marketplace, a move that brings Orka to Amazon EC2 Mac instances.

Mac my devs up

Orka Workspace is a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution that delivers Mac desktops through the browser. Making this available via AWS should be a big boost to Mac teams that already use hyperscale cloud providers for non-Mac development.

It follows VMware’s decision to abandon support of Mac in its popular vSphere virtualization environment.

The technology provides a software layer that eliminates demanding manual configuration and maintenance on repetitive processes.

This could be of particular use to enterprise developers attempting to build support for Macs through their own proprietary business systems, given the rapid evolution of Macs-in-enterprise use.

It means they can access as much Mac power as they need to accelerate tasks, without making huge investments in on-premises hardware that may spend the majority of its time unused.

What is Orka Platform?

Orka Platform enables enterprise-grade Mac development in virtualized environments. To achieve this, it uses Kubernetes to create a scalable macOS solution that lets developers access virtual Macs as they need them.

It can scale to handle anything from Xcode builds to fully integrated and complex CI/CD pipelines. The solution can handle Continuous Integration (CI) build runners such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab, TeamCity and others.

With more than 10 years’ experience in Macs and servers, MacStadium also provides expert support for Orka Platform users.

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OpenAI launches APIs for ChatGPT and Whisper

The speech-to-text offering Whisper and AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT could now cost 10 times lower, according to OpenAI.

OpenAI has made available APIs for ChatGPT and the company’s AI-powered transcription and translation service Whisper. These APIs will help businesses to integrate ChatGPT and Whisper into their conversation platforms and will be substantially cheaper than using the company’s existing language model.

“Through a series of system-wide optimizations, we’ve achieved 90% cost reduction for ChatGPT since December; we’re now passing through those savings to API users,” the company said in a blog post.

OpenAI launched Whisper in September and ChatGPT in November. Now with this API offering, ChatGPT and Whisper can now be officially integrated into third party software.

“ChatGPT and Whisper models are now available on our API, giving developers access to cutting-edge language (not just chat!) and speech-to-text capabilities,” the company said.

Speech-to-text with Whisper

Whisper enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages to English.

Whisper has garnered massive praise from the developer community but can also be “hard to run”, OpenAI admitted. The company has “now made the large-v2 model available through our API, which gives convenient on-demand access priced at $0.006 / minute (of audio input),” it said.

Whisper’s large-v2 model in the API provides much faster and cost-effective results, OpenAI said.

Whisper accepts files in multiple formats including M4A, MP3, MP4, MPEG, MPGA, WAV and WEBM. It is trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web.

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MIT’s Augmented Reality Headset Enables You To See Hidden Objects

An augmented reality headset combines computer vision and wireless perception to automatically locate a specific item that is hidden from view, perhaps inside a box or under a pile, and then guide the user to retrieve it.

The device could help workers locate objects for fulfilling e-commerce orders or identify parts for assembling products.

MIT researchers have built an augmented reality headset that gives the wearer X-ray vision.

The headset combines computer vision and wireless perception to automatically locate a specific item that is hidden from view, perhaps inside a box or under a pile, and then guide the user to retrieve it.

The system utilizes radio frequency (RF) signals, which can pass through common materials like cardboard boxes, plastic containers, or wooden dividers, to find hidden items that have been labeled with RFID tags, which reflect signals sent by an RF antenna.

The headset directs the wearer as they walk through a room toward the location of the item, which shows up as a transparent sphere in the augmented reality (AR) interface. Once the item is in the user’s hand, the headset, called X-AR, verifies that they have picked up the correct object.

When the researchers tested X-AR in a warehouse-like environment, the headset could localize hidden items to within 9.8 centimeters, on average. And it verified that users picked up the correct item with 96 percent accuracy.

X-AR could aid e-commerce warehouse workers in quickly finding items on cluttered shelves or buried in boxes, or by identifying the exact item for an order when many similar objects are in the same bin. It could also be used in a manufacturing facility to help technicians locate the correct parts to assemble a product.