Technology

lundi 22 mai 2023

A trip to Dyson’s dirt-filled, germ-obsessed world

Dyson’s Singapore HQ.

Dyson invited me to spend two days inside its hyper-clean universe to see what’s next and why it’s trying to scrub every hidden bit of filth from our homes.

The Dyson Kool-Aid is powerful. For a week after touring Dyson’s Singapore headquarters, soaking up talks and presentations on filth and viruses, I can’t help but feel like my home isn’t clean enough. I’d always known that dust mites were an inevitable problem in all beds, but I’d never really had the urge to learn about how they defecate in the unreachable bowels of my mattress, filling our homes with allergy-causing poop. Thanks to Dyson, I now spend way too much time thinking about microscopic crap that cloaks my body as I sleep.

“Dust is a problem,” announces Zerline Lim, an associate principal engineer from Dyson’s Malaysian labs, during an hour-long presentation on dust and air science. For Dyson’s team, though, it’s less of a problem and more of a standing invitation — dust, to them, is a gateway into people’s lives.

You don’t need to tell me twice — I’m the sort of person who wakes up with watery eyes and pops a Zyrtec every day — and today, Dyson is unveiling a new range of cleaning products to address that sort of thing. It’s an unsurprisingly pricey set of gadgets that does more of the same robust cleaning and air filtering that the company has become known for. But this new set of toys is being introduced to a pandemic-driven world where our concerns around dust, air pollution, and germs have stoked interest in better and more powerful cleaning solutions.

It’s a sweltering Tuesday morning as I walk into the vast, cool interior of Dyson’s global headquarters in Singapore — an Edwardian-style brick behemoth that was once the St James Power Station, Singapore’s first power plant. After a stint as a warehouse, in 2006, the location became a sprawl of cheesy harborside nightclubs with flashy cars and obnoxious drunks. Now, it’s pristine and quiet, a serene corporate haven of concrete, glass, and open-plan office spaces nestled within the building’s original industrial steel skeleton. On the ground floor’s communal area is a small copse of trees, which I’m told contained some rather unhappy snakes when they first arrived.

Inside, I take a mini-tour of Dyson products on display in the cavernous reception area, which includes a functioning prototype of its canceled electric car — a hulking, boxy SUV that would have been manufactured in Singapore. There’s even a Recyclone, a vacuum cleaner made entirely of recycled plastic that apparently remains a real catch among vacuum cleaner enthusiasts due to how few were ever produced. The common thread between these failures, at least how they’re spun, is that Dyson was too ahead of its time. The Recyclone came out in 1995 when “there was a perception that because they were made out of recycled plastic, they weren’t as good,” says floorcare VP Charlie Park. The car project, which involved costly original designs, wasn’t commercially viable. It was the same story for Dyson’s short-lived Contrarotator washing machine. In 2023, things are different for the technologically bold and environmentally sustainable. Fast failures and clean green consumerism are positive selling points amid a climate crisis.

Three identical stick vacs mounted to a wall. They are mostly a drab gray, but the new Submarine heads are brightly colored turquoise and red. — The Dyson v15s Detect with the new Submarine mopping attachment.

We’re here to learn about the “future of clean” and the company’s new slate of products. Although many Dyson products already have HEPA filters, the company has, understandably in the wake of the pandemic, leaned even harder into virus filtration and granular cleaning features for the place many of us were confined during the first year of covid and continue to spend most of our time.

After we take seats on a set of college quad-like steps in the former Turbine Hall, CEO Roland Krueger takes the stage to lay out James Dyson’s vision: to find solutions to problems that others cannot or will not solve. On the simplest level, the company is attempting to align cleanliness with relentless progress and a sense of personal and public good. To this end, Krueger explains, Dyson’s long-term plan for the “future of clean” asks customers — in an unmistakably polite, British way — to learn to “[disrupt] ourselves internally,” which largely means using the Dyson app to optimize their cleaning.

Even as the pandemic has amplified my most germaphobic qualities, it’s hard to imagine being so concerned about my home’s cleanliness that I’m willing to download yet another app and consider a new arsenal of pricey gadgets (least of all, the Bane mask-adjacent Dyson Zone). For the past few years, my housekeeping habits have revolved around a big weekly clean — I air my linens, scrub the bathroom and kitchen, dust shelves, vacuum with an old Dyson V10 Fluffy, and mop the floor. It’s been working just fine, though to be fair, a one-bedroom apartment (with a cat) is a far more intuitive and manageable cleaning situation than a house with children.

Dyson claims that people have become more house-proud in the covid era, though we’re far from being truly clean: “only 41 percent” of people have a regular cleaning schedule and 60 percent “admit to only cleaning when they see visible dust or dirt,” according to the company. It makes sense, then, that Dyson’s flagship invention, the clear bagless vacuum, lets you see exactly how much dirt is being removed from your floors — a constant reminder that you ought to be using it more or a gentle suggestion to upgrade to its new line of laser-enabled stick vacuums.

But there’s always room for improvement. Like the Six Million Dollar Man, Dyson has the technology to improve its cleaning tools beyond what they once were: better, stronger, and more suctiony. And so, we meet Dyson’s new lineup of cleaning products. There’s the Dyson 360 Vis Nav, a D-shaped smart robot vacuum that can hug corners, and the Dyson Purifier Big + Quiet Formaldehyde, a HEPA-standard, CO2-sensing air filter for large spaces that mimics the feel of outdoor breezes by employing a scaled-up version of the same Coandă effect used in the Dyson Airwrap. (It’s a bit upsetting to see “Formaldehyde” in a fan name since it’s usually associated with dead people, but formaldehyde is, apparently, something we should all be aware of in our homes, and this model filters it out.)

A close-up of the mopping attachment. It is rectangular, with a padded roller in front and a water tank in back. — Dyson’s Submarine mopping head.

The semi-anechoic chamber where Dyson tests the noise level of its air purifiers. Dyson employees and journalists gather around a new Dyson Big + Quiet purifier in the corner.

There’s also some new tech for stick vacuums. Dyson shows us the Submarine, an admittedly impressive wet roller head attachment — only available on the company’s new vacuum models — that effortlessly sucks up a blotch of ketchup on a swatch of rug liner. And finally, there’s a new crop of Gen5detect stick vacuums, which supposedly mark the first time Dyson can make a virus filtration claim on its products thanks to a “whole-machine HEPA” filtration system that captures germs and dirt and prevents them from escaping back into the home. Pricing and availability is TBD on most of these new products, but the new Gen5detect models will start at $949. The company’s demo of the new vacuums becomes a source of deep personal horror for me: we’re shown how it sucks up a grainy pile of dust (an analog for dust mite feces) through six layers of fabric. It’s all a logical continuation of Dyson’s pursuit of engineering perfection in the commodity-driven world of home care.

It’s especially interesting to see Dyson unveil the Vis Nav in Singapore, where robot vacuums with mop functions have been common for several years. This mop-less robot is the first robovac that Dyson will be selling in the US in years, which I’m repeatedly told has prohibitively different cleaning requirements than other countries. Besides the larger home sizes, American complications are mostly stairs and rugs, which are features of many British homes, too (though that didn’t stop Dyson from releasing the tall layer cake-like 360 Heurist in the UK). Vis Nav improves on the formula with its corner-hugging ability and powerful suction. But it still feels more like a bonus luxury than a must-buy staple. According to principal robotics engineer Antony Waldock, the robot is a great complement to regular vacuuming rather than a full-fledged replacement. At Dyson prices, that’s a lot to ask from the average homeowner.

The world of Dyson, at least what we’ve been allowed to see with an exquisitely prepared cohort of engineers, is exactly what you would expect from the Rolls-Royce of vacuum cleaning companies. Its language is extremely fixated on the degree of cleanliness people need, a valid concern in a post-pandemic world. But for a company so obsessed with eradicating germs and dust, it might have had better precautions for a close contact global press event where I could count the number of masked people on two hands. During a dust and air science presentation, we’re told that despite having “come out of the pandemic,” there are still large concerns about viruses indoors and in the home. Yet the Big + Quiets remain relegated to their designated corner, rather than being employed to ventilate the masses of international visitors sitting together indoors.

When it comes to cleanliness anxiety, CTO John Churchill believes that customers can make up their own minds about how dirt or germ-free they want to be. He says Dyson’s focus on fact-based research balances out a “world with lots of information” so that customers feel empowered to make up their own minds about how much energy (and money) they need to devote to cleaning. “If you look at really the core of our company, that engineering culture is around people looking for information, researching, making their own minds up. I think we would say our position from an education perspective is to inform people,” he says.

Racks of hair in Dyson’s lab used to test the efficacy of its dryer.

The next day, we visit Singapore Advanced Manufacturing, Dyson’s fully automated, minimally staffed motor manufacturing facility where production runs 24/7 with the help of mobile Omron robots. As we inch between rows of glass-cased machine lines, the engineers’ basic explanations are drowned out by the relentless drone of balancing stations, magnetizers, and conveyor belts. Next, we tour a second Dyson facility, including a semi-anechoic chamber to perform sound tests, a glimpse at how Dyson tests human hair for the Supersonic and Airwrap (which I’m emphatically told is ethically sourced from the UK), and a disappointing look at a laser in a fluid dynamics lab that isn’t allowed to be turned on. When another journalist asks if it’s true that people will lose balance and fall over in a darkened anechoic chamber, we’re told yes, but nobody takes my request to try this seriously.

One of Dyson’s most understated yet critical selling points is its lean engineering approach, which, according to the company, is an intrinsically sustainable process to “do more with less.” To create a sense of moral desirability for something as mundane as a vacuum cleaner is, whether you like it or not, tremendously clever; it’s a highly effective way to extrapolate personal household cleanliness into a much broader global concern about environmental purity. At the same time, Dyson labs use specially prepared dust flown in from Germany to keep its tests consistent, gathers 64 products from around the world — like Japanese cat food and UK cereal — for use in “pick-up” tests for their vacuums, and brings together around 30 different resins for a single vacuum body. Commercial and industrial sustainability is a far cry from the kind of individual responsibility we’re trained to think of; as a result, when I think of the “right” vacuum to buy, more often than not, I’ve historically always thought of the right choice as a Dyson not just for their perceived effectiveness but also for the company’s “better, cleaner living through engineering” image.

“[Sustainability] is a very thoughtful space, which is why we don’t communicate it a lot, because it’s very complicated,” Churchill says. “We’ve got loads of examples of little things we’re doing. The ultimate thing for us now is to bring that all together for Dyson to have a more comprehensive position on sustainability that people can understand.” Fortunately for Dyson, no one seems to care if the company can’t communicate it well enough because the Dyson name already commands the right sort of attention from an enthusiastic design-minded demographic. That Dyson also seems to be eco-friendly — or at least as close to eco-friendly as you can be in the appliance business — is more of an ambient, reassuring vibe.

What I do understand is that cleaning products today, environmentally conscious or not, aren’t built like they were in my parents’ generation, and seeing the amount of work and resources that go into Dyson products is at once inspiring and exhausting. Park, the floorcare VP, believes that the expectations and perceptions of “acceptable lifespans” aren’t just generational but also location-based. “If you go to Germany, for example, the general behavior there is to invest more and a lot less regularly, compared to America, which is the exact opposite extreme where people will generally pay for something cheaper but are happy to replace it more regularly,” he says. Somewhere along the way, advertising succeeded in conflating newness with cleanliness — that the idea of an old but well-maintained and functional machine pales in comparison to a shinier but less robust one.

So, what is the future of clean for Dyson? It seems more of the same, except with a 30-year plan to connect all its products together under a centralized MyDyson app to gather data and offer tips. I can’t help but feel a little disappointed, even if I found myself enthralled by the Submarine demo or marveling at how far the Big + Quiet Formaldehyde (what a mouthful) seemed to project its jet of air. This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful Jetsons wife. This is not something I can imagine myself needing, at least not for my cleaning purposes.

When it’s all over, I come home to my relatively clean apartment. Not being able to see every speck of Schrödinger’s dirt makes me question my own relationship with cleanliness, anxiety about recycling efficacy, and Dyson’s outwardly spotless reputation as the go-to company for quality home care. Do I need a new vacuum? Absolutely not, but it doesn’t stop me from thinking about the security of a HEPA-standard replacement. When asked about potential conflict between robot vacuums and Dyson’s stick vacuums, Park poses a simple question that inadvertently sums up what Dyson is really trying to sell: “when you roll it right back, the key question is ‘do you want to vacuum-clean your home or would you rather it just happen magically?’” My answer to that, with the image of the fabric-wrapped layers of dust mite feces still burned into my retinas, is simple: I’ll choose magic, if only it didn’t come at such costs.

Photography by Alexis Ong for The Verge

Artifact now lets you mark articles as clickbait

A promotional image for the Artifact app. — Image: Artifact

Feel like an article is clickbait-y? Artifact, the AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders, now has a tool that lets you feel like you can do something about it. In the latest version of the app, which is now available, you can flag articles you think are clickbait. The feedback will be used as “a signal in ranking so we can better prioritize helpful articles over misleading ones for the community,” Artifact writes in a blog post.

To start, Artifact will be monitoring the most reported articles and then deciding what it might want to do in response. That includes options like reducing an article’s distribution in feeds or even modifying the headline in some way to be less misleading, Artifact’s Kevin Systrom tells The Verge over email. The company is “actively experimenting with different approaches” to change articles if needed, it hasn’t “decided what the best course of action is yet,” he says. “We’ll come to a conclusion through running experiments and gathering user feedback.”

I’m curious to see what those changes might end up looking like in practice. If Artifact changes a headline, that puts the onus on the company to make sure the headline is accurate. But if a changed headline isn’t clearly marked in some way, readers may unfairly blame any inaccuracies on those changes to a writer.

You can find the option to flag something as clickbait in the three dots menu in an article or by pressing and holding on an article in your feed.

Artifact announced two other features on Monday. You’ll be able to save an article as an image, which could be a useful way to pass along something interesting to a friend who never clicks through the links you share with them. Artifact says the feature will start rolling out on Android “later this week,” and it’s already available on iOS for me.

You can also now add emoji reactions to articles: , ❤️, , , , or . Those reactions show up under headlines in your feed, so you can get an idea at a glance of how people are feeling about the article.

Screenshots from Artifact showing emoji reactions.

Since launching in January, Artifact has been pushing out updates at a rapid rate, including dropping the waitlist, adding AI-generated article summaries, introducing comments that live only in Artifact, and creating writer profiles. It’s clear the company is trying to turn its app into a blend of a news app and a social network — which is kind of what Twitter was before it got bad. But I don’t know if these and features like the clickbait flag and emoji reactions will be enough to make Artifact my next destination for social media and news.

Fake AI-generated image of explosion near Pentagon spreads on social media

Picture shared on verified accounts fuels concerns over AI’s potential to generate misinformation

An AI-generated image that appeared to show an explosion next to a building in the Pentagon complex circulated on social media platforms on Monday, in the latest incident to highlight concerns over misinformation generated by AI.

The image of a tall, dark gray plume of smoke quickly spread on Twitter, including through shares by verified accounts. It remains unclear where it originated.

Is The Creator the first (or last) in a new wave of sci-fi movies about AI?

The trailer for Gareth Edwards’ new film shows humanity being outsmarted by AI – and is released just as our overlords-to-be are rearing their terrifying heads

It’s been a while since we had a truly great movie about devious, dystopian AIs priming themselves to take over the world, in which the key choices made by mere humans will decide whether we end up as just an organic footnote in histories written by our machine conquerors. Alex Garland’s Ex-Machina (2014) springs to mind, while 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron was a fun comic book romp, if lacking the spiky gravitas and sly intellectual thrust of Garland’s debut. Grant Sputore’s I Am Mother explored similar territory in 2019 with a rather more claustrophobic, yet devastatingly incisive touch. Now there’s Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, the first trailer for which debuted this week, arriving just as very real concerns about the ability of artificial intelligence to really muck things up for us humans are rearing their terrifying digital heads.

At first glance, it looks as if Edwards has thrown in all our favourite sci-fi tropes. The basic scenario – tooled up military man fails in mission to wipe out robot child because she is just too cute – reminds us of kind-hearted Din Djarin’s inability to bounty hunt Grogu in early episodes of The Mandalorian.

Meta Fined $1.3 Billion for Violating E.U. Data Privacy Rules

Meta Fined $1.3 Billion for Violating E.U. Data Privacy Rules The Facebook owner said it would appeal an order to stop sending data about European Union users to the United States.

Pac-Man is the latest video game classic to be lovingly recreated in Lego

A lego pac-man arcade cabinet in a busy room. — *Lego’s new Pac-Man set.* | Image: Lego

Lego has announced a new premium set based on 1980s arcade classic Pac-Man. The 2,650-piece set is designed to recreate a Pac-Man arcade cabinet, complete with an illuminating coin-slot, four-way joystick, and a mechanical chase.

There’s a crank on the side of the cabinet which you can turn to move the characters around the game’s maze, and the set comes with a diorama of a figurine playing a smaller version of the arcade cabinet. On top of the cabinet sit rotating versions of Pac-Man and the ghosts Blinky and Clyde.

A person turns the crank on the side of the lego arcade cabinet. — *Turning a small crank makes the characters move around the ‘screen.’*

A person presses a button on the arcade cabinet, causing its coin-slot to light up. — *There’s even an illuminating coin-slot.*

The Lego Icons Pac-Man set will cost $269.99 (€269.99 / £229.99) when it goes on general sale on June 4th (it’ll be available to Lego VIP members a couple days earlier on June 1st). That’s the same price as Lego’s other recent video game tribute to the Nintendo Entertainment System after last year’s price rise. In case the pricing and brick-count weren’t enough of an indicator, Lego has specified that this Pac-Man set is meant for people aged 18 and over.

The Pac-Man set’s reveal comes 43 years to the day after Bandai Namco (then known as Namco) first tested the game with members of the public in 1980. The arcade game is considered to be one of the most popular of all time, with Lego’s press release noting that it was installed in 293,822 arcade units in the seven years after its original release.

In a fun twist, today’s announcement contains the tidbit that Pac-Man’s yellow color drew inspiration from the “iconic yellow of the Lego brick,” according to the game’s original creator Toru Iwatani.

This Pac-Man machine is the latest in a string of video game collaborations from Lego, which in addition to the NES console have also included a series of interactive Super Mario sets.

Turn a crank and the characters move. — *Here’s that crank in action.*

dimanche 21 mai 2023

Uber Suspends DEI Chief After Employees Complain of Insensitivity

Uber Suspends DEI Chief After Employees Complain of Insensitivity The executive hosted sessions about race and being a white woman that were titled “Don’t Call Me Karen,” prompting an employee uproar.

Through Ukraine, Tech Start-Ups Make Their Move Into the U.S. Defense Industry

Through Ukraine, Tech Start-Ups Make Their Move Into the U.S. Defense Industry Small, fast-moving U.S. tech firms are using the war in Ukraine to demonstrate a new generation of military systems but face the challenge of selling them to a risk-averse Defense Department.

China Bans Some Chip Sales of Micron, the US Company

China Bans Some Chip Sales of Micron, the US Company Many analysts see the move as retaliation for Washington’s efforts to cut off China’s access to high-end chips.

Philosopher Peter Singer: ‘There’s no reason to say humans have more worth or moral status than animals’

The controversial author on the importance of updating his landmark book on animal liberation, being ‘flexibly vegan’ and the ethical dangers of artificial intelligence for the non-human world

Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, published in 1975, exposed the realities of life for animals in factory farms and testing laboratories and provided a powerful moral basis for rethinking our relationship to them. Now, nearly 50 years on, Singer, 76, has a revised version titled Animal Liberation Now. It comes on the heels of an updated edition of his popular Ethics in the Real World, a collection of short essays dissecting important current events, first published in 2016. Singer, a utilitarian, is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. In addition to his work on animal ethics, he is also regarded as the philosophical originator of a philanthropic social movement known as effective altruism, which argues for weighing up causes to achieve the most good. He is considered one of the world’s most influential – and controversial – philosophers.

Why write Animal Liberation Now?
The last full update was 1990. Though the philosophical arguments have stood up well, the chapters that describe factory farming and what we do to animals in labs needed to be almost completely rewritten. I also hadn’t really discussed factory farming’s contribution to the climate crisis and I wanted to reflect on our progress towards animal rights. Effectively, this is a new book for the next generation, hence the new title.

WhatsApp now lets you hide your messages from prying eyes. But is Chat Lock a cheaters’ charter?

You can now hand your phone to your partner without any danger of them reading your chats. But what’s the big secret?

Name: Chat Lock.

Age: The Chat Lock feature on WhatsApp is new. Cheating, by contrast, has been going on since Venus was carrying on with Mars behind Vulcan’s back, and probably long before that.

Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision is over. Can Apple save it?

The CEO of the social media giant has spent billions on his virtual reality dream – and still no one understands the idea. Now the world’s richest firm could change the game

In Meta’s quarterly earnings call in April, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was on the defensive. The metaverse, the vision of a globe-spanning virtual reality that he had literally bet his multibillion-dollar empire on creating, had been usurped as the new hot thing by the growing hype around artificial intelligence (AI).

Critics had even noticed Meta itself changing its tune, highlighting the difference between a November statement from Zuckerberg, in which he described the project as a “high-priority growth area” and a March note that instead focused on how “advancing AI” was the company’s “single largest investment”.

samedi 20 mai 2023

The E-Sports World’s Future Is Uncertain as Growth Stalls

The E-Sports World’s Future Is Uncertain as Growth Stalls At least two organizations in America’s most prominent league for professional video game players are selling their teams, underscoring the industry’s uncertain future.

I took my own advice and bought a last-gen iPhone — I regret nothing

iPhone 13 Mini in the front pocket of an orange belt bag. — *The best camera is the one you have with you as you chase your kid across the playground.* | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

I spent an exciting, exhausting week last September with the new Apple iPhone 14 in hand before it went on sale. I did everything I could over the course of that week — navigating, web browsing, recording video, gaming, selfies, ferry rides, selfies on the ferry, you name it — to try to answer the $800 question: should you buy it?

The answer then, which I stand by now, is “probably not.” It’s a great phone, but it’s not meaningfully better than the iPhone 13. Sure, it makes sense to pick the 14 if your carrier is giving you a great deal or you spend a lot of time out of cell range where the new Emergency SOS might be a literal lifesaver. Or go for the iPhone 14 Pro if you’re after the very latest features. But for the rest of us, the iPhone 13 is just as good with the added benefit of costing a little less.

I’m a woman of my word, so when it became clear that it was time to upgrade my iPhone 11 before its trade-in value fell off a cliff, I headed straight for the iPhone 13 — the Mini, to be precise, which is down to $600. Since the end of last year, I’ve spent a lot of time testing the latest generation of high-end phones: the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, Google Pixel 7 Pro, and a recent revisit of the iPhone 14 Pro. They’re all amazing phones in their own ways. But when it came time to make my own decision about which phone to buy, I didn’t pick any of those latest and greatest devices. Nope, I traded in my 11 (along with a small piece of my soul) to Verizon for the humble little iPhone 13 Mini, and I haven’t looked back.

I opted for the Mini because I love a small phone, and it seems very likely that the 13 Mini is going to be the last good small phone. But even if you prefer a bigger phone, I still think the 13 is where it’s at. You don’t get the upgraded camera hardware and processing offered by the 14, but it’s still a good camera overall — decent portrait mode photos, very good video, and an ultrawide for a little drama. And you do get photographic styles and cinematic video mode — both of which I use regularly (rich contrast stans, unite!).

Outside of the camera, the 13 Mini remains a really good phone by modern standards, even a year and a half after launch. Battery life isn’t its strong suit, but it’s enough to get me through a day of moderate use with a comfortable margin. It fits beautifully into the outer pocket of my mom-at-the-playground-chic belt bag. It’s plenty fast and responsive with its A15 Bionic processor. It has MagSafe and, therefore, wireless charging. It also has a physical SIM tray, whereas the iPhone 14 is all eSIM. Most people don’t need to worry about this; I change phones once a week, and eSIM makes my life a living hell.

The 13 Mini isn’t perfect. There are things I wish it had but that, for the most part, I wouldn’t get on the iPhone 14 anyway — they’re features reserved for the pricier 14 Pro. And while the 14 is just moderately more expensive than the 13 Mini ($800 versus $600), the $1,000 14 Pro is a lot more expensive by comparison. A smooth-scrolling 120Hz screen, telephoto lens, always-on display: all Pro-only. They’re very nice things to have, but are they $400 nicer? Maybe. But not for me, not right now.

That’s the question it always comes down to: not which is the best phone but which is the best phone for me? That’s the question I spend most of my days trying to help people answer. It’s fun to declare winners and losers, but when it comes to something as personal as your phone, picking the right one to live with is always a little more complex than that.

Artificial intelligence holds huge promise – and peril. Let’s choose the right path | Michael Osborne

AI can fight the climate crisis and fuel a renewable-energy revolution. It could also kill countless jobs or incite nuclear war

The last few months have been by far the most exciting of my 17 years working on artificial intelligence. Among many other advances, OpenAI’s ChatGPT – a type of AI known as a large language model – smashed records in January to become the fastest-growing consumer application of all time, achieving 100 million users in two months.

No one knows for certain what’s going to happen next with AI. There’s too much going on, on too many fronts, behind too many closed doors. However, we do know that AI is now in the hands of the world, and, as a consequence, the world seems likely to be transformed.

Michael Osborne is a professor of machine learning at the University of Oxford, and a co-founder of Mind Foundry

Elections in UK and US at risk from AI-driven disinformation, say experts

False news stories, images, video and audio could be tailored to audiences and created at scale by next spring

Next year’s elections in Britain and the US could be marked by a wave of AI-powered disinformation, experts have warned, as generated images, text and deepfake videos go viral at the behest of swarms of AI-powered propaganda bots.

Sam Altman, CEO of the ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, told a congressional hearing in Washington this week that the models behind the latest generation of AI technology could manipulate users.

Xgimi MoGo 2 Pro Android TV projector review: automatic entertainment

An all-in-one portable projector that also doubles as a Bluetooth speaker.

If you’re the nomadic type or someone who’s rarely within casting distance of a television, then you’re likely consuming media on a handheld rectangle with lousy speakers and a tiny screen that’s tough to share. I’m here to tell you there’s a better way.

Not only does the new MoGo 2 Pro smart projector from Xgimi run Android TV version 11.0 to stream all your favorite videos over fast Wi-Fi but it also doubles as a Bluetooth speaker when you shut off the reasonably bright LED lamp (and fan). It’s got everything you need inside a compact little beamer — everything but a battery that you must provide separately for true portability.

I’ve lived with a MoGo 2 Pro for the last month, using the little guy in a campervan around Europe, in a tiny off-grid home on a mud-soaked field, and in a surf shack buffeted by North Sea winds. In all cases, it’s proven itself to be an adaptable all-in-one source of shareable entertainment that rarely disappoints.

One of the best things about the MoGo 2 Pro is how easy it is to set up, both initially and each time you want to use it.

The MoGo 2 Pro supports Android Quick Start, which made it dead simple to copy my Google account and Wi-Fi settings from my Android phone. Android TV then made it easy to log in to each of my streaming services by offering up QR codes that can quickly be authenticated by my Android phone without having to type in a bunch of passwords.

I’m glad initial setup was quick because I had to factory reset the MoGo 2 Pro once after upgrading to firmware version 2.8.147. It takes about 10 minutes to go from factory settings to having my credentials entered into six media services. Netflix must be installed via a workaround since the media giant only officially supports a handful of projectors. While it’s relatively easy to perform the simple hack, most people won’t feel comfortable installing the app from outside the Google Play Store. There’s also the option to just cast Netflix from your phone since the projector has Chromecast built-in.

Xgimi’s little projector has otherwise been perfectly stable, if plodding, as the UX often lags presses on the Bluetooth remote control. But it’s not often I find a $500-ish projector with a speedy interface.

Under normal use, the MoGo 2 Pro will start in less than five seconds from standby. But reattach the power source, and it boots from zero to Android TV in about 50 seconds, then takes another 10 seconds or so to perform all the automated screen adjustments (which can be disabled if you want).

The MoGo 2 Pro has a built-in time-of-flight sensor that can find a flat, obstacle-free surface to project the image onto. It then automatically focuses the image and corrects the keystone to create a properly aligned rectangle. It’s not perfect, but it does usually find the surface I’m aiming at, only with a smaller image than I want. Fortunately, Xgimi gives you the option to quickly jump into manual adjustment mode to fine-tune the display if you want — no hunting through menus.

While Xgimi’s second-generation screen adaptation tech isn’t as good as the marketing promotions suggest, it’s an improvement over the previous version. It was so useful on the MoGo 2 Pro that I ticked the setting to automatically adjust the keystone every time the device was moved — and I moved it a lot. In this way, I could avoid the cumbersome manual adjustments and just give the beamer a nudge until it produced the desired results.

The projected image is about what you’d expect at this price range: a modest 400 ANSI lumens spread across a 1920 x 1080 image that looks better at 30 inches (when all that light is concentrated) than it does at 200 inches. And while HDR10 is supported, it serves more as a bullet point on a spec sheet than anything you’ll notice during viewing.

If you’re not too fussy, then you can watch some casual YouTube videos in a room saturated by ambient light, but the MoGo 2 Pro is best viewed in the darkest room possible. It’s only then that you can see the bright, rich, and crisp image that Xgimi’s latest portable projector is capable of producing.

Here’s how it looks in medium to low lighting:

*Photo taken four hours before sunset next to west-facing windows.*

*Photo taken around sunset next to west-facing windows.*

For use as a Bluetooth speaker, it’s best to first hold the power button down on the remote control and select “Display Off” to shut off the lamp and fan. Then, it sits silently waiting for a Bluetooth connection to transform the projection box into a passable speaker for music with reasonably balanced sound from a pair of 8W side-firing speaker drivers.

For its size, the projected image and sound produced are reasonably good. I was impressed.

The MoGo 2 Pro always boots into Eco Mode (less bright, less loud), which can be annoying if you’re always near a power socket. When connected to a 10,000mAh (40Wh) battery, the MoGo 2 Pro was able to boot the projector and play the first 40 minutes of Babylon when set to “bright” and “movie” presets. When connected to a power meter, I could see that power draw averages around 40W in Eco mode, which climbs to about 48W on average with Eco mode turned off. Xgimi lists the required power for the MoGo 2 Pro at 65W.

I do find it odd that a projector designed for all-in-one portability lacks any onboard controls beyond a simple power button. More than once, I misplaced the Bluetooth remote, requiring me to grab my Apple or Android device to launch the Google Home app’s remote control. It worked fine, but I was usually sitting so close to the MoGo 2 Pro that built-in playback and volume controls would have been more convenient.

*A look around back at the ports, vents, and passive radiator bass.*

Photographer Chase Jarvis is credited with saying “the best camera is the one that’s with you,” a sentiment that can be applied to displays, speakers, and media streamers. The MoGo 2 Pro might not be the brightest video projector, best-sounding Bluetooth speaker, or most powerful media streamer, but it’s so small and compact that you can easily toss it in your luggage or backpack to take with you wherever you go.

Yes, the MoGo 2 Pro ditched the internal battery from the original MoGo Pro in favor of a better speaker. But it can still be powered from a battery pack you might already own. For most people, I think Xgimi made the right decision.

At $599 / €599, the Xgimi MoGo 2 Pro undercuts Samsung’s disappointing Freestyle portable projector by almost $300. The original MoGo Pro was already one of the best portable projectors, and the MoGo 2 Pro is an improvement upon that in almost every way.

Photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

TechScape: Can Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky really take over from Twitter?

The spinoff app is trying to do what Mastodon couldn’t and take a piece of Elon Musk’s pie. Plus: the race to save 1bn NSFW images on Imgur

Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Let’s check in on social media.

In February, Bluesky released its iOS app. The social network began as a spinoff within Twitter to build a fully “decentralised” protocol, something that could replicate the Twitter experience without placing the company itself at the centre of impossible decisions around content moderation.

Musk added on Friday that he looked forward to working with Yaccarino on transforming Twitter into X, the “everything app” along the lines of China’s multi-faceted WeChat.

Musk did not name Yaccarino in the initial post, but on Friday, NBCUniversal, the entertainment conglomerate behind the NBC TV network and the Universal film studio, announced that Yaccarino had left the business without revealing her onward destination. Musk’s confirmation came soon afterwards.

She interviewed Musk on stage at an advertising conference in Miami last month, in which she told the Tesla CEO that some advertisers “have a challenge with your points of view”, to which Musk replied that some of his tweets should be taken with a “grain of salt”. Yaccarino also said in the interview: “If freedom of speech, as he says, is the bedrock of this country, I’m not sure there’s anyone in this room who could disagree with that.”

In April, Yaccarino tweeted a clip from an interview between Musk and the comedian Bill Maher on the HBO show Real Time With Bill Maher, in which she tagged Musk with an “on fire” emoji. In the clip, Musk is asked by Maher about the “woke mind virus”, prompting Musk to state that the world needed to be “cautious” about anything that is “anti-meritocratic” and “results in the suppression of free speech”.

vendredi 19 mai 2023

Mr. Altman Goes to Washington, and Casey Goes on This American Life

Mr. Altman Goes to Washington, and Casey Goes on This American Life Then, Kevin and Casey try their hands at content moderation.

US charges ex-Apple engineer with stealing trade secrets, then fleeing to China

Justice department announces charges involving company’s self-driving car technology

The US has charged a former Apple engineer accused of stealing the company’s technology on autonomous systems, including self-driving cars, and then fleeing to China.

The Department of Justice on Tuesday announced charges in that case and several others involving the alleged theft of trade secrets and efforts to steal technology to benefit China, Russia and Iran.

jeudi 18 mai 2023

Researchers explore feasibility of using drones to survey sites for low levels of radiation

Researchers explore feasibility of using drones to survey sites for low levels of radiation Unoccupied aerial vehicles, better known as drones, have rapidly advanced from a quirky, high-flying novelty to a versatile workhorse.

My students are using AI to cheat. Here’s why it’s a teachable moment

Ignoring ChatGPT and its cousins won’t get us anywhere. In fact, these systems reveal issues we too often miss

In my spring lecture course of 120 students, my teaching assistants caught four examples of students using artificial-intelligence-driven language programs like ChatGPT to complete short essays. In each case, the students confessed to using such systems and agreed to rewrite the assignments themselves.

With all the panic about how students might use these systems to get around the burden of actually learning, we often forget that as of 2023, the systems don’t work well at all. It was easy to spot these fraudulent essays. They contained spectacular errors. They used text that did not respond to the prompt we had issued to students. Or they just sounded unlike what a human would write.

Montana TikTok users file lawsuit challenging ban

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies before Congress in March. | Photo by Becca Farsace /The Verge

A group of TikTok creators have sued to block a recently signed law that bans the app’s operation in Montana. The suit, filed last night and announced today, alleges that Montana’s SB 419 is an unconstitutional and overly broad infringement of their right to speech.

“Montana has no authority to enact laws advancing what it believes should be the United States’ foreign policy or its national security interests, nor may Montana ban an entire forum for communication based on its perceptions that some speech shared through that forum, though protected by the First Amendment, is dangerous,” says the suit, filed by law firm Davis Wright Tremaine. “Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes.”

Davis Wright Tremaine was behind a similar suit filed by TikTok users in 2020 after then-President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning the ByteDance-owned app. Trump, like Montana lawmakers, claimed that TikTok’s Chinese ownership made it a national security threat. The firm successfully secured a temporary halt to the order — which was later revoked by incoming President Joe Biden.

This week’s lawsuit attacks the Montana law on several fronts. It argues that Montana is depriving state residents of a forum for sharing and receiving speech, violating their First Amendment rights. It also argues that SB 419 violates the Commerce Clause by effectively restricting interstate commerce. And it says the law is preempted by federal sanctions powers.

The suit defends TikTok as a way to learn about current affairs, promote local businesses, and “showcase the natural beauty” of Montana, offering a counterpoint to SB 419’s claims that the app encourages dangerous stunts and promotes inappropriate content. Its plaintiffs include the owner of a small Montana-based swimwear business that has gained a following on TikTok, as well as a US Marine Corps veteran, a college student, a rancher, and a comedian, all of whom share videos and make money through the app.

Restricting app access on a state-by-state basis raises numerous logistical problems for TikTok, mobile app stores, and users. SB 419 says that TikTok “may not operate” within the state of Montana and that storefronts like the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store may not offer it for download at risk of fines. (Users would not be penalized for accessing TikTok.) As noted by the lawsuit, Governor Greg Gianforte unsuccessfully attempted to rewrite the bill to address concerns before signing it. The law would be declared void if TikTok is spun off from Chinese ownership or if federal lawmakers passed their own TikTok ban like the RESTRICT Act. Otherwise, it’s set to take effect in January of 2024 — unless this legal challenge, or one like it, successfully blocks the rule.

Meta is working on a new chip for AI

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta is building its first custom chip specifically for running AI models, the company announced on Thursday. As Meta increases its AI efforts — CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said the company sees “an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful” — the chip and other infrastructure plans revealed Thursday could be critical tools for Meta to compete with other tech giants also investing significant resources into AI.

Meta’s new MTIA chip, which stands for Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, is its “in-house, custom accelerator chip family targeting inference workloads,” Meta VP and head of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan wrote in a blog post. The chip apparently provides “greater compute power and efficiency” than CPUs and is “customized for our internal workloads.” With a combination of MTIA chips and GPUs, Janardhan said that Meta believes “we’ll deliver better performance, decreased latency, and greater efficiency for each workload.”

The MTIA could be a big boon for Meta, especially given increasingly high demand for AI compute power. But the MTIA chip is seemingly a long ways away: it’s not set to come out until 2025, TechCrunch reports.

In addition to the MTIA, Meta is also introducing a new ASIC specifically to help with video transcoding, which it calls the “MSVP,” or Meta Scalable Video Processor. It’s designed to support both “the high-quality transcoding needed for VOD as well as the low latency and faster processing times that live streaming requires,” Meta said in a separate blog post, and “in the future,” it will help bring things like AI-made content and AR- and VR-specific content to Meta’s apps.

Meta is also working on a “next-generation data center design” that will be “AI-optimized” and “faster and more cost-effective to build,” Janardhan said, and the company also touted the power of its Research SuperCluster (RSC) AI Supercomputer, “which we believe is one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world.” This isn’t exactly new rhetoric about the RSC from Meta; the company has been sharing high praise about the supercomputer since last year. But as the company tries to stand out against an increasing number of AI initiatives from many of the biggest technology giants — including other custom chips —it makes sense that Meta would want to brag about its faith in its own AI hardware.

YouTube is bringing unskippable 30-second ads to TV

The longer unskippable ads should only be applied to the top-performing YouTube content. | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Watching YouTube on your TV is about to get more frustrating if you’re not paying to avoid ads. As announced at the YouTube Brandcast event on Wednesday, YouTube will soon add 30-second unskippable ads to top-performing content watched on connected TVs.

YouTube says viewers will see a single 30-second ad instead of two consecutive 15-second ads, though that doesn’t mean that those shorter ads will be disappearing entirely. 30-second ads will be available to advertisers via YouTube Select, a curated advertising platform that targets the top five percent of YouTube content. YouTube claims 70 percent of YouTube Select impressions come from TVs, making it the ideal platform for longer ads.

“More and more, viewers are tuning into YouTube on the biggest screen in their home,” said YouTube CEO Neal Mohan during the Brandcast event (seen via Variety). “Viewers — especially younger viewers — no longer make a distinction between the kind of content they’re watching.”

YouTube also announced that it will start testing ads that appear when the viewer pauses a video on a connected TV. It’s similar to the pause ad feature rolled out by Hulu a few years back, and has been dubbed “pause experiences” by YouTube. Judging by the example image published by AdWeek, YouTube’s pause ads will appear as a banner around the video and can be removed by selecting the “dismiss” button.

A screenshot of a YouTube video with an example of a YouTube pause ad overlayed around it. — *The paused video will shrink down to accomodate the banner-style pause ads, but at least they can be dismissed.*

YouTube hasn’t mentioned when either of these changes — 30-second unskippable ads and pause ads — will be rolling out, but we’ve reached out for detail and will update if we hear back.

Yesterday’s announcements follow a recent crackdown on ad blockers by the video hosting platform. Last week, YouTube revealed that it’s experimenting with pop-up messages that state “Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube,” encouraging viewers to instead subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.

How one woman raised $100,000 for cancer treatment she never needed

In this week’s newsletter: Why did Amanda Riley con the blogosphere into paying for her fake illness? Find out in Scamanda. Plus: five of the best podcasts to mend a broken heart

Don’t get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

People Who Knew Me
BBC Sounds, episodes weekly from Tuesday
Rosamund Pike, pictured above, stars as Emily, a woman who faked her own death on 9/11 and is now living happily in California. That’s until she’s diagnosed with breast cancer and decides to confront her past. Pike is natural and relatable, which puts this adaptation of Kim Hooper’s novel streets ahead of the average radio drama. Convincing characters, 15-minute episodes and a gripping storyline fuel a need to hear more. Hannah Verdier

Another Side of the AI Boom: Detecting What AI Makes

Another Side of the AI Boom: Detecting What AI Makes More than a dozen companies have popped up to offer services aimed at identifying whether photos, text and videos are made by humans or machines.

Sony’s Access controller has a PS5 accessibility UI and virtual controller feature

Sony’s new Access controller sits to the left of a standard PS5 DualSense controller — *Sony’s Access controller.* | Image: Sony

Sony’s Project Leonardo PS5 accessibility controller now has an official name: Access controller. The customizable controller is designed for players with disabilities and includes swappable buttons and stick caps to adapt to many needs. Sony has also built an Access controller UI into the PS5 console that offers control over button mapping and profiles, and a special virtual controller option.

“On the PS5 console, players can select their preferred orientation for the Access controller, map different inputs to the various buttons, toggle buttons on or off, or even map two different inputs onto the same button,” explains Hideaki Nishino, senior VP of platform experience at Sony Interactive Entertainment.

*The Access controller has its own accessibility UI on the PS5.*

This customization includes profiles for different games and the ability to use up to two Access controllers and a single DualSense controller together as a virtual controller. This virtual controller helps mix and match devices or even allow for collaborative play with other people. Sony has also created a toggle mode which works like a keyboard’s caps lock key to toggle a button on or off without players needing to hold it down.

While Sony has announced the Access controller name and some additional details today (as part of Global Accessibility Awareness Day) we’re still waiting to hear pricing and release date information. “We’ll have more to share about the Access controller for PS5, including more product and release details, in the months ahead,” says Nishino.

‘The Velvet Hammer’: who is Twitter’s new CEO and can she fix its problems?

Linda Yaccarino is praised for understanding of advertisers – but Elon Musk must cede enough control

“I see I have some new followers,” said Linda Yaccarino, adding side-eyes and waving hand emojis to a tongue-in-cheek post responding to the social media explosion that followed her unveiling as Twitter’s new chief executive on Friday.

Still weeks away from taking up the role, Yaccarino, a respected media veteran known in advertising circles as the “Velvet Hammer” for her silky but tough negotiating style, has already had a taste of the shambolic corporate environment that has swept the platform since billionaire Elon Musk bought it for $44bn last October.

mercredi 17 mai 2023

Beepberry is a Blackberry keyboard tinker toy from the founder of Pebble

Beepberry device in between a banana and apple — *The ‘Beepberry’ with other fruits accompanying it.* | Image: SQFMI

Are you a hacker who happens to miss their Blackberry? Looks like there’s a new product that’s just your speed: the “Beepberry.” It literally grafts the keyboard of a Blackberry Classic onto a pocketable custom board designed to fit a Raspberry Pi Zero W, all paired with a 400 x 240 “Memory LCD” screen that looks like it was ripped from an old graphing calculator — but is a bit more sophisticated.

Beepberry is designed by Eric Migicovsky, founder of the gone-but-not-forgotten Pebble smartwatch and more relevantly co-founder of Beeper: the hacky all-in-one messenging app that stuffs every service from WhatsApp to iMessage (using a jailbroken iPhone) into one place.

I’m excited to introduce a little side project I’ve been working on: Beepberry - a portable e-paper computer for hackers, designed for chatting on Beeper. It’s available today to pre-order for $79. It’s a partnership between me (@onbeeper) and @sqfmi: https://t.co/hIZRQMTrvr
— Eric Migicovsky (@ericmigi) May 17, 2023

The device is ostensibly designed to run Beeper without any other online distractions, but Migicovsky knows what you’re thinking: he also describes Beepberry as a portable “e-paper” computer for hackers.

You could build yourself a fun handheld device that’s purposefully limiting but also kind of limitless in terms of what you can do with a Raspberry Pi. The website provides a few examples to get your mind oriented, including a simple weather checker, playing Ascii Star Wars, browsing the cyberdeck subreddit, and running a gomuks Matrix client.

In case you’re wondering about that “e-paper” screen, it’s not technically e-ink — but it is an LCD made by Sharp with a one-bit memory circuit embedded in each pixel for e-ink-like image retention.

For $79 you get the Beepberry, mounting screws, and a 2,000mAh battery — although you’ll have to find a way to hold the battery in place. (In some demos, the creators are literally using a rubber-band.) In addition to the 2.7-inch screen and Blackberry Classic Q20 backlit keyboard, you get an USB-C port, a RGB LED, a side button, a power switch, and General Purpose Input / Output (GPIO) breakouts.

*A Beepberry installed inside a 3D-printed shell next to a Pebble-like ‘Watchy’ smartwatch.*

For $99, you can get a Beepberry kit that includes a Pi Zero W preinstalled. Otherwise, you’ll have to bring your own or another single-board computer chip like the Radxa Zero or MQ-Pro — which should be drag-and-drop since the Beepberry has a solder-less header.

Notably, the Beepberry itself lacks any hardware for cellular data connectivity, so it’s not quite a self-contained beeper in the traditional sense. You’ll need to use Raspberry Pi’s built-in Wi-Fi, perhaps hotspot it to a smartphone when you’re out and about, unless you’re willing to devise a cellular add-on that plugs into its headers.

If you’re interested in a Beepberry, you might want to act fast: there’s only 50 initially available to ship. You’ll need to put in your order, and then fill out the Early Access Program form on the bottom of the page to let them know you want it now. The site does not mention how many of the initial 50, if any, remain available for purchase.

Software and firmware for the Beepberry is available to download online. There are even 3D-printable enclosures to get started with, and a Discord community for anyone taking on a Beepberry project.

It’s important to note that the software / firmware is still actively being developed and nothing is final, so don’t expect many out-of-box features if you get your hands on one. If you simply want something with a complete out-of-box experience and a black and white screen, a Playdate may be more your speed. And if you’re just looking to support the Pebble founder’s next endeavor, you could wait for his team’s upcoming Small Android Phone.

mardi 16 mai 2023

Elon Musk keeps insisting the Texas shooter with a swastika tattoo is not a white supremacist

Elon Musk grins in a photo illustration, lifting his arms over his head triumphantly — Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

In an interview with CNBC Tuesday evening, Elon Musk defended spreading conspiracy theories about the deadly mass shooting in Texas earlier this month.

On May 9th, open-source intelligence research group Bellingcat posted a story with details about the shooter that indicated he held white supremacist and neo-Nazi views. Bellingcat’s story included social media posts from the Russian social network Odnoklassniki that traced back to the shooter, including photos featuring a large swastika tattoo and body armor with a RWDS (Right-Wing Death Squad, a far-right slogan) patch. The Texas Department of Public Safety has also said that the shooter showed indications of holding neo-Nazi ideology, with an official saying that “He had patches. He had tattoos.”

But on Twitter on May 9th, Musk replied to a crude meme questioning details about the shooter, claiming that Bellingcat “literally specializes in psychological operations” and saying that “this is either the weirdest story ever or a very bad psyop!”

CNBC’s David Faber asked him about that tweet in an interview Tuesday evening. “I think it was incorrectly ascribed to be a white supremacist action,” Musk said. “And the evidence for that was some obscure Russian website that no one’s ever heard of that had no followers. And the company that found this was Bellingcat. And do you know what Bellingcat is? Psyops.” In its story, Bellingcat notes that it did not in fact discover the profile; its existence was first reported by The New York Times.

Musk added, “I’m saying I thought that ascribing it to white supremacy was bullshit. And that the information for that came from an obscure Russian website and was somehow magically found by Bellingcat, which is a company that does psyops.” Bellingcat’s report describes finding the profile by matching accounts against the shooter’s date of birth. The account had posted photos of identification documents, including a speeding ticket and a boarding pass that included the shooter’s name.

You can hear Musk’s comments for yourself starting at 2:39 in this video.

Elon Musk on Tuesday said that if his inflammatory tweets scare away advertisers from Twitter, he will accept that. “I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it." https://t.co/0Pi3Yl8Jo2 pic.twitter.com/rpZ3Ff8Dw0
— CNBC (@CNBC) May 16, 2023

Musk’s comments about the shooting were part of an escalating series of messages that echo right-wing talking points. In the interview he similarly defended comments claiming billionaire philanthropist George Soros, a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories, “hates humanity.” Last year he also shared a widely dismissed conspiracy theory about the motives for an attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi. Later in the interview with CNBC, he reiterated his denial that the shooter held white supremacist views:

Faber: There’s no proof, by the way, that he was not [a white supremacist]

Musk: I would say that there’s no proof that he is.

Faber; And that’s a debate you want to get into on Twitter?

Musk: Yes. Because we should not be ascribing things to white supremacy if it is false.

This conversation happened after Musk told Faber that he’ll say what he wants even if it loses him money. I have to imagine these comments will make him lose some money.

Court rules Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes must go to prison while she appeals sentence

Holmes, who was charged with defrauding investors in her blood-testing start-up, hoped to stay out of jail while she appealed her conviction

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes must begin serving her prison sentence while she appeals her conviction on charges of defrauding investors in the failed blood-testing startup, an appeals court in San Francisco ruled on Tuesday.

Holmes, who rose to fame after claiming Theranos’ small machines could run an array of diagnostic tests with just a few drops of blood, was convicted at trial in San Jose, California, last year and sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison.

Elon Musk: I will say what I want even if it loses me money

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

During an interview on CNBC, Elon Musk defended his right to say inflammatory things on Twitter, even if those statements lose him money. He appeared to disassociate briefly after being asked why even bother tweeting. And he eventually quoted The Princess Bride to explain his cavalier attitude toward what he shares on Twitter.

It was a very weird interview.

The interview came after a particular troubling run of tweets for Musk, in which he promoted conspiracy theories about a mass shooting in Texas, was accused of antisemitism after claiming that George Soros “hates humanity,” and retweeted discredited theories about crime and race.

Elon Musk on Tuesday said that if his inflammatory tweets scare away advertisers from Twitter, he will accept that. “I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it." https://t.co/0Pi3Yl8Jo2 pic.twitter.com/rpZ3Ff8Dw0
— CNBC (@CNBC) May 16, 2023

After a series of mostly softball questions about Tesla and time management, CNBC’s David Farmer asked why he tweets conspiracy theories and makes statements that have been criticized as racist and anti-semitic, especially when they could lose him customers and hurt the companies he runs.

After an extremely long and uncomfortable pause, Musk referenced the scene from the 1987 movie The Princess Bride, in which Mandy Patinkin’s Inigo Montoya character confronts the man who killed his father.

“He says, ‘Offer me money. Offer me power,’” Musk said. “‘I don’t care.’”

“You just don’t care,” Faber replied, to which Musk just stared at him. “You want to share what you have to say.”

Eventually, Musk said, “I’ll say what I what to say, and if the consequences are losing money, so be it.”

As CEO of a public company, there are limits to what Musk can say, on Twitter or elsewhere. If he tweets misleading things about Tesla, shareholders will sue him — as they did after he tweeted about taking the company private at $420 a share. (The shareholders lost the suit and Musk was found to not be liable for their losses.)

His tweets have caused him all sorts of headaches over the years. His take-private tweet in 2018 got him fined $40 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission and lost him the chairmanship of Tesla. He is currently under a consent decree with the SEC that requires a lawyer to approve his tweets about Tesla before he can post them. A federal appeals court recently ruled against Musk’s attempts to vacate the consent decree.

We’ve been through all this before. Musk is asked why he tweets incendiary things, and he points to his follower count to justify his increasingly unhinged behavior — as if a large chunk of those followers aren’t just rubber-necking. His followers and shareholders implore him to stop tweeting, but he doubles and triples down, again and again. It is, one might say, inconceivable.

Elon Musk says ‘get off your work-from-home bullshit’

An image of Elon Musk on a blue illustrated background. — Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

In an interview aired on CNBC, Elon Musk called remote work “morally wrong” and “bullshit,” arguing it was unfair to those workers who can’t work from home.

Musk, who banned remote work at Twitter after acquiring the company, has not been shy about sharing his disdain about work from home policies. But in the interview, Musk was more animated than usual, arguing that remote work was counter-productive.

“I’m a big believer that people need to be more productive when they’re in person,” he told CNBC’s David Faber.

Musk imposed a strict return-to-the-office policy for Tesla in June 2022, warning them they would lose their jobs if they refused to do so. Employees would need to spend a minimum of 40 hours at the office a week; anything less would be “phoning it in.”

Tesla was more open to remote work before the pandemic, workers told CNBC. But after covid, Musk took a hard line against remote work, as well as other preventative measures like mask-wearing. The company also lacked room and resources to bring many of its employees back to its San Francisco offices.

After acquiring Twitter, Musk set the same strict policy, just as he was laying off over three-fourths of the workforce. During the interview Tuesday, he became extremely animated when CNBC’s David Faber casually referenced the policy.

“Get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bullshit,” Musk said, “because they’re asking everyone else to not work from home while they do.”

He went on to argue that because people who deliver food and build houses can’t work from home, neither should office workers, calling the decision “messed up” and a “moral issue.”

“If you want to work at Tesla, you want to work at SpaceX, you want to work at Twitter — you got to come into the office every day,” he said.

Valve just got sued by Immersion over Steam Deck and Index rumble

Consider it a rite of passage: Valve has finally become successful enough at building gaming hardware that it’s getting sued by Immersion Corporation.

Immersion — the haptic feedback company that’s purchased, developed, or otherwise accumulated so many patents on rumble tech that almost every major tech company has licensed or settled out of court — is now accusing Valve of infringing its patents with the Steam Deck handheld, the Valve Index VR platform, its SteamVR software, and Half-Life: Alyx among other titles. There’s no mention of Valve’s long-gone Steam Controller, which also used lots of haptic feedback.

Immersion is asking for damages, royalties, and an injunction against Valve “from deploying, operating, maintaining, testing, and using the Accused Handheld Instrumentalities and Accused VR Instrumentalities”.

The company filed its complaint Monday in federal court, specifically the Western District of Washington, citing patents 7,336,260, 8,749,507, 9,430,042, 9,116,546, 10,627,907, 10,665,067, and 11,175,738.

Sony and Microsoft both license Immersion’s patent portfolio, following lawsuits and settlements. Apple, Google, Motorola and Fitbit settled as well. Meta is currently in the middle of its own Immersion lawsuit, filed a year ago. Nintendo seemingly escaped a suit, perhaps due to its own development of Rumble Pak tech for the Nintendo 64, but it also licenses Immersion tech now.

While you might be tempted to point out that Valve’s hardware uses a different form of rumble than the ones that Sony and co. got sued for back in the day — linear resonant actuators (LRA), rather than an eccentrically swinging weight on a shaft — that didn’t stop Nintendo from signing an agreement with Immersion to bring its technology to the Switch, which uses LRAs as well. So does Sony’s DualSense, for that matter.

And if you look at the individual patents I link above, they’re much more nuanced than hardware. I would be surprised if Valve doesn’t settle.

Valve didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The Steam Deck once again topped the Steam Weekly Top Sellers (by revenue) this past week; while we don’t know sales numbers, it’s safe to say the handheld has sold well over a million units. Valve is looking at an eventual successor, too, and reportedly has a successor headset codename “Deckard.”

Ring founder to become CEO of commercial smart home company Latch

Just a day after we found out Ring co-founder Jamie Siminoff was leaving Amazon and Ring altogether, it seems he will become CEO of enterprise smart home company Latch after it buys Honest Day’s Work (HDW), a little-known business Siminoff appears to have founded about four months ago.

The interim CEO, Jason Keyes, had this to say:

“I am confident Jamie’s passion for leading mission-driven technology companies, his operational expertise, and his track record for creating industry-dominating products will be invaluable as Latch enters its next phase. I am excited about the opportunity to further improve our customer experience via the integration of HDW services into LatchOS.”

LatchOS is the name of the company’s “full-building operating system,” which gives apartment building owners and landlords control over the smart home products they include with tenants’ leases — devices like Sonos speakers, Honeywell and Ecobee thermostats, and the company’s own smart locks.

Latch promotes this as a way for landlords to eschew keys for access via phone or watch only, leaving physical keys out of the equation altogether. In fact, one of its products, the Latch C2, has no physical key option. As we noted when the company announced its funding in 2016, however, this also creates more privacy issues, like records of when a resident left their apartment and when they returned.

Latch’s products have created friction between landlords and tenants in the past — in 2019, five New York City tenants successfully sued their landlord for the right to keyed access to their building’s lobby after its owner installed a Latch smart lock.

Of the transition, Siminoff said:

“I’m excited to join the Latch team, which has built an incredible offering that users across the country enjoy and benefit from every day. Smart, secure access control is not only fundamental to real estate operators like myself, but also to residents and service providers. I look forward to combining Honest Day’s Work with Latch to build a residential ecosystem that empowers building owners, operators, service providers, and residents alike.”

HDW appears to be about four months old, with a website that only just went live and offers no clues about its purpose. According to Latch’s press release, HDW’s mission is “to enable residential service providers, such as housekeepers, dog walkers, electricians, and drivers…more control over their businesses and enable them to deliver high-quality service to their customers.” How HDW achieves the mission isn’t stated, but it seems likely to be similar to Amazon Key or Walmart Plus deliveries, where personnel can enter your home and place orders, such as groceries, inside your door, garage, or even your refrigerator.

Perhaps HDW will let you give providers, like those listed in the release, temporary access to your home or garage. It makes sense that Latch would be interested in incorporating such a feature into its platform, making it easier for building owners to manage and scale controls.

Whether HDW’s brand will remain around or the company will simply gobble up its assets and repurpose them under the Latch brand is unclear, but it sounds like maybe the latter, as the release says 30 of HDW’s employees will be shuffled into its ranks after the transition. I asked, in an email exchange, whether the HDW brand would remain in use, and Meredith Chiricosta, a PR representative for Latch, only said, “The primary focus has been on refining the concept for Honest Day’s Work and building out the technology.”

I also asked if layoffs were expected, and Chiricosta responded that “right now, the teams are focused on ensuring a smooth transition. The goal is to build a strong foundation for what we expect to be a unique offering that will make life easier for property owners, tenants, and service providers. We’re excited for what the future holds.”

‘Why would we employ people?’ Experts on five ways AI will change work

From farming and education to healthcare and the military, artificial intelligence is poised to make sweeping changes to the workplace. But can it have a positive impact – or are we in for a darker future?

In 1965, the political scientist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon declared: “Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.” Today, in what is increasingly referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace is igniting similar concerns.

The European parliament’s forthcoming Artificial Intelligence Act is likely to deem the use of AI across education, law enforcement and worker management to be “high risk”. Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “godfather of AI”, recently resigned from his position at Google, citing concerns about the technology’s impact on the job market. And, in early May, striking members of the Writers Guild of America promised executives: “AI will replace you before it replaces us.”

lundi 15 mai 2023

The NFL will make one playoff game a streaming exclusive on Peacock next year

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The NFL just announced a new deal with Peacock that gives the NBCUniversal-owned streaming service national broadcast rights to one wild card playoff game next season. Described as the “first-ever exclusive live streamed NFL Playoff game,” it will feature two teams facing off in primetime on January 13th, 2024. The arrangement was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which cites sources saying the deal for this one game is worth around $110 million.

Of course, we don’t know which two teams will be playing, but for fans without Peacock, options for watching may depend on where you live. Along with a regular season game (Bills vs. Chargers on December 23rd, or as you may know it, the Burn It All game) that will also be a Peacock exclusive, the game will be broadcast in those teams’ local markets on an NBC affiliate and on NFL Plus, the league’s subscription streaming platform made for phones and tablets but not TVs.

The Peacock exclusive Wild Card game and regular season game will be broadcast on NBC stations in the two competing team cities, and available on mobile devices with NFL+. The NFL is the only sports league that presents all regular-season and postseason games on free, over-the-air television in local markets.

According to the WSJ, when the league struck new broadcasting deals in 2021, it reserved the rights to one playoff game per season, and this NBCUniversal deal is only for the 2023 postseason. NFL Media exec Hans Schroeder told the outlet it’s “likely” that in future years, the game will continue to be streaming only, which could attract bids to put it on platforms including Peacock again, Viacom-owned Paramount Plus, Disney’s ESPN Plus streaming, or Fox’s Tubi.

Disclosure: Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, is also an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.

A small cable company is going all-in on YouTube TV for video

YouTube TV | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Cable TV is on the way out, and YouTube TV is in for Wide Open West, or WOW!, a smaller US broadband operator with just over a half million internet customers and, as of March 31st, 117,000 households paying for cable TV.

The company said Monday that it would start migrating residential TV customers this summer:

The process of migrating WOW!’s residential video customers to YouTube TV will begin this summer as WOW! discontinues the marketing and selling of its TV services, including WOW! tv+, and sells YouTube TV across its footprint. WOW! will maintain and support its current video services as its existing base of video customers can switch from WOW!’s current video products to YouTube TV.

WOW! has been transitioning away from traditional cable since introducing WOW! tv+ several years ago, which is its IPTV service that uses an Android-based streaming box for on-demand video, cloud DVR, and a Google Assistant voice remote. The company also offers bundled pricing for streaming TV alternatives like FuboTV, DirecTV streaming, and, yes, YouTube TV, but this new deal would distill its video options to just marketing the YouTube TV subscription with no included hardware.

The presumed end goal here would be moving its customers off traditional cable entirely, which would free up bandwidth for the ISP overall. WOW! isn’t the only provider with a YouTube TV deal. Verizon bundled YouTube TV with its Fios service in 2019, and Frontier began selling a YouTube TV bundle with integrated billing in March, among others.

Streaming services have been steadily ascendant for years, and in 2022, actually edged out cable for most viewership by a few tenths of a percent, so the move to YouTube TV makes sense, particularly given the company’s successful bid for NFL Sunday Ticket just a few months ago.

Google said YouTube TV surpassed 5 million subscribers last year, and a recent analyst report pegged its total at about 6.3 million now, with months to go before the Sunday Ticket deal kicks in. Still, whether they get their TV from a streaming service or traditional cable, the number of pay-TV subscribers in the US has continued to drop and is around 75.5 million households, according to the report by MoffettNathanson.