And it looks like more change is afoot. On January 3, the sale of Evernote to the Italian company Bending Spoons was finally confirmed. On one hand, this could be concerning for remaining users. Evernote will no longer be an independent company, meaning there could be huge changes to its current direction. But on the other hand… good? I was an Evernote user for close to a decade before I switched last year....
Here’s what you need to know from what is likely to be Samsung’s biggest launch event of the year. Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra Let’s get straight to the most interesting phone: the S22 Ultra has the biggest and baddest specs of Samsung’s lineup, and this time around the S-Pen is built right into the body. You’re no longer forced to buy the pen separately and use an awkward case to carry the S-Pen, as with the S21 Ultra....
This year’s focus is on climate change. Developers participating in the $200K competition have three key areas to develop novel solutions (with a little help from IBM) for: Clean water and sanitation World hunger Green production and consumption Per IBM’s developer blog: If you’re hoping to join the 400K developers who’ve already contributed, all you need is a willingness to learn and a link to IBM’s Call For Code developers page....
There are many different types of reinforcement learning algorithms, but two main categories are “model-based” and “model-free” RL. They are both inspired by our understanding of learning in humans and animals. Nearly every book on reinforcement learning contains a chapter that explains the differences between model-free and model-based reinforcement learning. But seldom are the biological and evolutionary precedents discussed in books about reinforcement learning algorithms for computers. I found a very interesting explanation of model-free and model-based RL in The Birth of Intelligence, a book that explores the evolution of intelligence....
The new chip packs a lot of interesting stuff, so let’s get straight into it. Specifications The M1 processor has eight cores — four high-performance and four efficiency — with a claimed 3.5x performance boost. It also features a 12MB L2 cache which makes data processing faster. The chip has whopping 16 billion transistors, made possible by the 5nm fabrication process. Anandtech notes that this might result in roughly a 120mm² sized processor....
One key to understanding why constant contact with our family feels so unusual comes from looking at how social groups work in other primate species. Normally, a primate’s interaction with others is very well balanced. Neither our ancestors before Homo sapiens nor our close relatives like chimpanzees and bonobos would usually live in fixed, unchanging social settings. Instead, their natural social groups are flexible, which gives them space and time to change their interactions over short time periods....
When President Donald Trump wanted to reach out to older Arizona voters in August with the message “The RADICAL Left has taken over Joe Biden and the Democratic Party,” with photos of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar, Facebook charged his campaign an estimated $14 for each 1,000 times the advertisement appeared in people’s feeds. A few days later, Biden targeted that same demographic with a message of his own, that he had a plan to expand Medicare and cut drug prices....
The merge will allow shared messaging across both platforms, as well as video calls and the use of a range of tools drawn from both platforms. It’s currently being rolled out across countries on an opt-in basis, but hasn’t yet reached Australia. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans in March last year to integrate Messenger, Instagram Direct and WhatsApp into a unified messaging experience. At the crux of this was the goal to administer end-to-end encryption across the whole messaging “ecosystem”....
The social network spent two years in developing these tools, and is now making it available to OpenStreetMap community members. The program’s current marquee tool, called RapidID, lets you identify, add, and edit roads in a pinch. Here’s how RapidID works. It takes satellite images from commercially available public images from Maxar, a US-based space tech company. Then, its AI model predicts the presence of roads in a given image and shows them on the map with a magenta overlay, along with existing roads with a white overlay....
Now the company is trying to make a match of an odd pair: encryption and ads. According to a report from The Information, the tech giant is building a team of AI researchers to explore possibilities to analyze data without breaking encryption. This will allow Facebook to insert targeted ads on WhatsApp, and let me highlight here that end-to-end encryption is one of the app’s most marketed features. And that’s the basis of Facebook’s fight against traceability worldwide....
The France and Barcelona forward explained his decision in an Instagram post on Thursday. A post shared by Antoine Griezmann (@antogriezmann) “Following strong suspicions that Huawei has contributed to the development of a ‘Uighur alert’ thanks to facial recognition software, I am announcing the immediate termination of my partnership with the company,” the World Cup winner told his 31.5 million followers. “I take this opportunity to invite Huawei to not just deny these accusations, but to take concrete actions as quickly as possible to condemn this mass repression, and to use its influence to contribute to the respect of human and women’s rights in society....
As you might expect given the partnership, the Radiance are premium headphones, coming in at a cool $1,300 (£1199/€1300). For the price, you’re getting an elegant black and copper closed-back design with leather earpads and a fancy diamond grille pattern. The headphones use Focal’s 40mm M-shaped dome common throughout many of Focal’s high-end headphones. That said, it’s also worth noting these are far from the most expensive headphones in Focal’s lineup....
Earlier this month, the French government amended a 2017 regulation, ending the requirement that all new DC fast-chargers must offer a CHAdeMO connector. Instead, all new chargers will have to offer the significantly more widely used CCS connector for fast DC charging or Type 2 connector for standard AC charging. [Read: This dude drove an EV from the Netherlands to New Zealand — here are his 3 top road trip tips] While CHAdeMO is no longer a legal requirement, it hasn’t been outright banned....
As the race for talent heats up in a post pandemic world, companies need to up their game. It’s simply not enough to provide a new employee with a company laptop and a desk on their first day. Here are just some of the amazing onboarding perks that the world’s top tech companies are offering. Buckle up for boot camp Etsy puts all new employees through their paces at their one of a kind bootcamps....
Since my last post, the US patent office issued over 31,765 patents and published over 32,673 patent applications. Each patent asset adds a little something new to the human knowledge base. As I cannot list all these patent assets here, the PatentYogi team and I have selected the five most interesting patent assets. Enjoy! According to the patent publication, Alexa devices listen and record your speech even before you say “Alexa....
There’s a reason why WordPress is the most popular content management system on the planet and the engine behind 30 percent of all websites running today. It reached that lofty position by being a haven for open source developers, allowing virtually anyone to create cool new plug-ins and added features to make WordPress-built sites that extra little bit more awesome than the rest. The only downside to that is that there are now over 55,000 plugins available, including many with redundant features and some that just don’t work well at all....
It’s been quite some time since Google launched Stadia, its cloud gaming service, to the world at large. After being exclusive to those who purchased a controller bundle for months, it finally went free to play in April this year. That was probably a smart move, as it meant that many who were in lockdown would have the chance to try something new at no additional cost. So suppose you want to try out Stadia now....
For some mysterious reason, the device showed up on the company’s Canadian page for the Google Nest Wifi. Mistakes happen, but at least when Samsung made a similar mistake with the Note 20, it was on the page for its predecessor. Conspiracy theories aside, the leak all but confirms what we know about the Pixel 4a’s appearance — that it looks like a lot like a Pixel 4 with just one rear camera and with a hole-punch camera on the front....
The folks at Google must have heard the cries, because they’re working on new ways to help manage the addiction. Reddit user Leopeva64-2 spotted an option in tahe Canary build version of Chrome that allows users who’ve closed a tab group to easily restore the pages both individually and en masse. The experimental feature adds tab groups to Chrome’s History menu. From there, users can quickly restore an entire group, or cherry-pick them one by one....
Google says the conversational neural network with 2.6 billion parameters can chat with people better than any AI generator out there. The team trained the model with 40 billion words — 341 GB of text data including social media conversations — using the seq2seq model. Seq2seq is a variation of Google’s Transformer — a neural network that compares words in a paragraph to each other to understand the relationship between them....
