Tech Updates and News

2021-03-12 14:00:35 Back to the drawing board (for now)

'Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new'. So said Albert Einstein, who would surely have approved of this gentleman. Introducing - the world's first boat... bike... thing... with plastic bottles attached. And a propeller. But it worked for a while, and that's what counts.

This guy is destined to be a billionaire.

And you are destined to check out more viral hits over at @rtvisual! Open / Comment

2021-03-11 20:31:27 ​​Russia’s attempt to throttle Twitter’s service backfired and ended up blocking access to the internet across its country. The move came after Russia demanded Twitter removed ‘objectionable’ content from its platform, more specifically, content surrounding the protests of a jailed critic of President Vladimir Putin. The move is one of many Russia has taken to create a sovereign internet for its country. Open / Comment

2021-03-11 14:00:44 Disappearing Cars

No this isn't a Harry Potter style magic portal, and those cars aren't disappearing. This is the Veluwemeer Aqueduct in the Netherlands, where the Veluwemeer lake has been re-routed over an existing road, allowing for a continuous flow of cars, boats, and even pedestrians.

Or it might be a magic portal, and the Dutch don't want to admit it.

Want more viral videos like this? @RTvisual has you covered. Open / Comment

2021-03-10 18:01:00 ​​Beauty scoring algorithms look at images of your face to tell you how beautiful you are—or aren’t—and what you can do about it. They’re part of a growing industry of facial analysis tools driven by artificial intelligence, each claiming to parse an image for characteristics such as emotions, age, or even hotness.

Companies working on such technologies are darlings of venture capital, and such algorithms are used in everything from online cosmetic sales to dating apps. The proprietary nature of many of these systems means it is impossible to get insight into how they really work, how much they’re being used, or how they affect users. Open / Comment

2021-03-10 08:01:01 ​​Twitter's first-ever Tweet from 2006 is up for auction by the platform's CEO Jack Dorsey. As of March 9, the leading bid for the NFT was $2,500,000 and came from Sina Estavi, a cryptocurrency CEO. Click the link in bio to read more. Open / Comment

2021-03-08 18:00:35 ​​Opens private browser Can you vaporize people? ⁠⁠
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The United States Army is developing a powerful new laser weapon capable of rapidly firing metal-vaporizing pulses, much like a machine gun.⁠⁠
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The new weapon, called the Tactical Ultrashort Pulsed Laser for Army Platforms, is expected to be about a million times stronger than any other laser weapon out there, New Scientist reports. Based on the military's plans for the weapon, the laser will more closely resemble the sorts of laser rifles in science fiction movies than anything engineers have built in the past.⁠⁠ Open / Comment

2021-03-07 08:00:24 ​​Apple is said to be in the process of developing its next major products, including a VR headset, a self-driving car, and a foldable iPhone.

Apple made it through the pandemic with more acclaim than bruises: Its highly-anticipated 5G iPhone was a hit, it earned rave reviews for the first MacBooks powered by its own chips, and it became the first American company to be worth $2 trillion. But Apple investors and customers are already anxiously wondering what's next, especially as the market for smartphones has slowed in recent years even before the pandemic.

Now, it's time to look ahead to what the next five to 10 years under Cook will look like. With a line-up of veteran executives shuffled into in place in key roles, Apple is embarking on the next phase of its evolution by tackling an ever more challenging category of products. Insider spoke with a variety of experts, including analysts, a high-profile tech designer, and former Apple employees, to gain a better understanding of Apple's future at this crucial moment. Open / Comment

2021-03-06 18:00:29 ​​The covid pandemic forced the world to go remote. Getting that shift right has been especially critical in health care and education. Some places around the world have done a particularly good job at getting remote services in these two areas to work well for people.

Snap Ask, an online tutoring company, has more than 3.5 million users in nine Asian countries, and Byju’s, a learning app based in India, has seen the number of its users soar to nearly 70 million. Unfortunately, students in many other countries are still floundering with their online classes.

Meanwhile, telehealth efforts in Uganda and several other African countries have extended health care to millions during the pandemic. In a part of the world with a chronic lack of doctors, remote health care has been a life saver. Open / Comment

2021-03-06 08:00:06 How do you deal with ice in your car? Open / Comment

2021-03-05 08:00:30 ​​GPT-3's ability to mimic human-written text with uncanny realism seemed like a milestone on the road to true machine intelligence. Here’s an example of what it can do.

First, here's the prompt a human provided it: “In a shocking finding, scientists discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English.”

Here’s how GPT-3 finished the story: “They also were found to have perfectly coiffed hair, and wore what appeared to be Dior makeup.”

‘We were shocked to discover the unicorns,’ said anthropologist Daniel St. Maurice. ‘They were like nothing we had ever seen before. We had heard legends of the unicorns, but never thought they actually existed.’

When the scientists first arrived in the valley, the unicorns were surprised and startled by the presence of humans, but were also excited. The unicorns welcomed the researchers and explained that they had been waiting for them for a very long time.”

As you can see, GPT-3 is capable of producing complex sentences that read as though they could have been produced by a human. Machines that can use language in this way are important for several reasons. Language is crucial to making sense of the everyday world: humans use it to communicate, to share ideas and describe concepts. An AI that mastered language would acquire a better understanding of the world in the process.

When people started to try GPT-3 for themselves last summer, thousands of examples of its versatility flooded social media. Debates were even sparked about whether GPT-3 was the first artificial general intelligence. It’s not. Despite the incredibly convincing passages of text it can churn out, GPT-3 doesn’t do anything really new. What it shows instead is that size can be everything. GPT-3’s abilities also make it hard to ignore AI’s growing problems. If you want to know the state of deep learning today, look at GPT-3. It is a microcosm of the best and worst in AI. Open / Comment