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Jeroen van der Most (aka Most) used the GPT-3 language model to generate a series of politically-neutral slogans. He then fused them with a nightmarish morph of Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s faces uttering peak-centrist platitudes. Producing the slogans was a pretty laborious process. Most began it by feeding GPT-3 the following three prompts: But the model struggled to understand the categories. For instance, when asked for a liberal tagline, it might respond with “Lower taxes, bigger military....

But apparently, Microsoft isn’t giving up on Skype just yet. In a blog post today, the company detailed myriad new features coming to the app, including a cleaner new design. In particular, the company focused on its call grid, allowing everyone to be visible with larger video feeds rather than small previews. Your own video feed will also now be visible on the main view of the call. In all, the layout it seems to work more like other video conferencing apps, like Teams or Zoom....

A person familiar with the discussion told ET that talks with Microsoft “began last year when Paytm was in the middle of raising funds. While Microsoft could not participate in the funding then, it is likely to pump in cash now.” [Read: Facebook invests $5.7B in Indian mobile carrier Reliance Jio to bring small businesses online] A Paytm spokesperson told TNW, ”We do not comment on market speculations.” Until now, Microsoft has made only cloud-related deals with major startups in India....

When Microsoft announced the Duo and Neo–its larger Windows 10X-running sibling–in October, the company said the devices would be released during the holiday period of 2020. As much hype as Microsoft built around the devices, that’s a long time to wait for any product. But according to Zac Bowden of Windows Central “multiple contacts” suggest the Duo may actually be available as soon as this summer. The report claims “the hardware and software are pretty much done,” and that Microsoft is basically focusing on putting the finishing touches on its Duo-specific features and Android tweaks....

But as consumers are looking to buy locally, and manufacturers are feeling the pain of supply chain woes, one ebike startup is reaping the rewards of their mission to bring bicycle manufacturing back to the Netherlands. They’re called Mokumono, and twin brothers Bob and Tom Schiller make up half of the tiny team at bike company. How does a company of four compete with the big players in the market?...

The company this week announced the $120 Fisheye 14mm Lens, a bulbous metal-and-glass component that attaches to one of the company’s custom phone cases. This lens provides an even wider perspective than most of those on our smartphones – as much as 170 degrees (the typical smartphone ultrawide will capture a 120-degree field of view). Moreover, Moment’s lens promises “edge to edge” clarity that ensures a sharp image throughout the entire frame....

The move will bring E-Trade’s 5.2 million clients onto Morgan Stanley’s books, along with its $360 billion in assets. According to Financial Times, the bank considers those users as a “pipeline of emerging wealth.” [READ: Morgan Stanley wants to sell Bitcoin – without actually selling it] It will also see Morgan Stanley grow to compete with finance’s biggest names. CEO James Gorman told Wall Street Journal, which broke the news: “We’ll take on Schwab....

Fortunately (for the ad agencies, at least), reinforcement learning, the branch of artificial intelligence that has become renowned for mastering board and video games, provides a solution. Reinforcement learning models seek to maximize rewards. In the case of online ads, the RL model will try to find the ad that users are more likely to click on. The digital ad industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars every year and provides an interesting case study of the powers of reinforcement learning....

Thankfully, Puma has risen to the occasion and, after “extensive talks with professional gamers,” developed active gaming footwear to address this issue. For just $160, you can buy sock-like shoes that “deliver seamless comfort, support and grip” so you can frag like never before, both in your home and at the arena. Yeah, this article is mostly just me copying and pasting stuff from Puma’s store page, because the company’s description for this shoe is just that damn good....

OSIRIS-REx (for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer)) was launched in September 2016, arriving at its target asteroid 101955 Bennu in December 2018. The purpose of the mission was to characterize the asteroid, then bring some of it back for study on Earth. The spacecraft spent two years circling Bennu, making detailed maps of its surface, learning as much as possible about the asteroid before the next phase of the mission: looking for somewhere safe to land....

The Tim Cook-backed company first made a splash with its original water-saving showerhead back in 2014; now it’s on version 3.0. The new showerhead was designed in partnership with faucet brand Moen, and promises twice the spray coverage and savings of 45 percent water compared to standard showers. It does so using a large diameter showerhead with atomizing nozzles to purportedly deliver the sensation of more water while actually using less....

The “Odeuropa” team will develop machine learning and computer vision techniques to scour documents and images for references to smells such as tobacco and the stench of industrialization. A selection of the scents will then be “reconstructed” using heritage science techniques. “Smells shape our experience of the world, yet we have very little sensory information about the past,” said project lead Inger Leemans, a professor of cultural history at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam....

The team developed the system by first mining 1 million tweets. They then refined the dataset by searching the posts for three abusive keywords: whore, slut, and rape. Next, they categorized the remaining 5,000 tweets as either misogynistic or not, based on their context and intent. These labeled tweets were then fed to a machine learning classifier, which used the samples to create its own classification model. The system uses a deep learning algorithm to adjust its knowledge of terminology as language evolves....

A recently registered trademark has hinted toward the “Pixel Watch” name — and I really like that. This week, we’ve had a chance to look at more than just renders or trademarks. An Android Central report gave us a glimpse of what the Pixel Watch might look like with real-life photos. The images came through a person who found the watch left behind at a bar in the US. The first set of pictures showed us a round — and chic-looking — watch design....

If you look at the specifications of the new offering, Apple’s still shipping a 720p camera on the front for video calls. But the firm says that the Image Signal Processor (ISP) on its M1 chip. will improve the call quality. It will expectedly reduce noise, offer a better dynamic range, and, adjust white balance automatically. Plus, there’s a feature called ML-enhanced face detection that will make you “look more natural” on your call....

But what about water? Water on Mars is currently found on the surface as a layer of ice – several kilometers thick – at the north pole. It also appears as seasonal frost at the coldest times of the year, and in the atmosphere as vapor and ice. Nevertheless, the Martian atmosphere is extremely dry compared to Earth’s, with about 100 times less water. While precipitation on Earth results in water layers several centimeters thick, water that would precipitate on Mars would only form a thin film of less than a millimeter....

So what exactly is this ring? Um… I don’t actually know. It appears to be made of rubber, given how enthusiastically the people in the video bend it. It also has slots along the side where you can fit Joy-Con. The video also shows users putting on some kind of leg band with another Joy-Con slotted into it. All we have to go on is the trailer, given I don’t think we’ve even seen a patent for this thing before now....

Even if your company is not ready to go public at the moment, if there may be an IPO in your future, things go more smoothly for companies that begin the work well in advance. As a financial manager who consults for public and soon-to-be-public companies, I’ve worked with organizations traveling along a well-planned path, and those with an IPO date looming and management panicking. Here’s what I’ve learned in the process....

It’s hard to find a good note-taking app that works across all your devices, but if you’re in the Apple ecosystem, Notability is one of them. The good news is that the app is now free, but is it really? The app is switching to a subscription model which requires you to pay a yearly fee of $14.99 (currently $11.99) for its premium features. First, the good news: the app (which used to be $8....

Once you have a killer idea, what’s next? That’s the curious question mark for me. Throughout time, we’ve invented so many ways to describe inspiration. We’ve personified it with the Greek Muses or the Norse Kvasir. We credit divine inspiration or a whisper in a dream. Sometimes we say that an idea is inspired by the natural world as George de Mestral did. He said the idea for Velcro sprung into his mind seeing how the tiny hooks of cockle-burs clung to his dog’s fur as they hiked the Swiss Alps....