Boeing and SpaceX have traded the lead a few times in the race to send a crewed spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS). Initially, Boeing was the favorite due to its long history navigating the intricacies of government contracts, but SpaceX pulled ahead on the strength of the Falcon 9 and a fuel leak that delayed Boeing. Now, SpaceX is looking at a delay after the loss of a Dragon 2 capsule during engine tests. Meanwhile, Boeing is back on track after . Boeing’s CST-100 “Starliner” is a reusable spacecraft that builds on the design heritage of the Apollo command module.
Hardly a day goes by when there isn’t a story about fake news. It reminds me of a quote from the favorite radio newsman from my youth, “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” OpenAI’s breakthrough language model, the 1.5 billion parameter version of GPT-2, got close enough that the group decided it was too dangerous to release publicly, at least for now. However, OpenAI has now released two smaller versions of the model, along with tools for fine-tuning them on your own text. So, without too much effort, and using dramatically less GPU time than it would take to train from scratch, you can create a tuned version of GPT-2 that will be able to generate text in the style you give it, or even start to answer questions similar to ones you train it with.
In addition to a strong sale on a high-end 65-inch TCL TV, today there are strong deals on mobile accessories including a wireless charging power bank and an enormous 400GB microSDXC. In addition to supporting both 4K and HDR content, this TV also has a localized dimming feature that helps to improve image quality by giving you deeper blacks with reduced light bleeding. You can get it from Amazon currently marked down from $1,299.99 to $699.99. With an enormous 400GB of storage space, this microSDXC card can hold a tremendous amount of data.
Ever since Uber launched with an almost casual disregard for city governments, it has been an uphill struggle for cities to deal with a tech-inspired onslaught of ride-sharing, bike-sharing, and most recently, scooter-sharing companies. While there is no doubt those companies provide convenience, and in many cases fill the need for an important but missing service, they have also exacerbated traffic congestion, caused safety issues, and in some cases cluttered up sidewalks with abandoned bikes or scooters. To effectively govern in that environment, cities have started to realize they need better data and a set of tools for making decisions and implementing policies.
The last few years of smartphone design have been centered around minimizing bezels to get as much screen as possible in a roughly hand-sized form factor. That’s led to some… interesting approaches to squeezing in the front-facing camera. Apple, Google, LG, and others use a notch, but Samsung is using a hole-punch. And there there’s OnePlus, which has a motorized pop-up camera. Now, Oppo says it’s to release a phone with the camera hidden underneath the display. It will probably come with some tradeoffs, but the aesthetic appeal won’t be one of them. Oppo sells phones mostly in its home market of China, which gives it the chance to experiment with designs and iterate rapidly.
It’s not often that you discover a co-worker at a sister publication has made national news. Over the weekend, I was downright startled to see PCMag and FedEx popping up in headlines declaring the package company was refusing to deliver Huawei products as a result of the embargo levied against that company by the Trump Administration. To recap: PCMag (a sister publication of ExtremeTech, also owned by Ziff Davis) an already-purchased Huawei P30 from the United Kingdom to the US for additional analysis. The Huawei P30 is an already-released device from Huawei. The package arrived in the United States, went to Indianapolis, IN (a major FedEx distribution hub) and was then returned to the UK.
Microsoft has made some changes to its OneDrive service that could entice potential users who have avoided the cloud to date based on security concerns. They’ve also adjusted OneDrive pricing and tweaked storage offers for Office 365 users. The security changes, however, are the most interesting from our perspective. According to Microsoft, OneDrive now comes with the capability to store data within the OneDrive Personal Vault, a special area of storage that you define. Accessing data within the PV requires an additional authentication step of one type or another. Here’s Microsoft’s : Personal Vault is a protected area in OneDrive that you can only access with a strong authentication method or a second step of identity verification, such as your fingerprint, face, PIN, or a code sent to you via email or SMS.
While AI continues to rapidly advance, we still have a long road ahead when developing the necessary sensors to translate the physical world to data a computer can understand. While sight and sound had a bit of a head start, our other senses have few practical applications in the digital world—but that’s not the case with robots. MIT recently created a new robot using that allow it to see the objects it touches and create a 3D map of the texture to better understand it. The video below demonstrates how the GelSight technology, typically used for aerospace applications, can “see” what it touches.
Smart speakers and other home technologies continue to raise serious and . Many of us own smart devices because the convenience outweighs the , and . While these data collection practices typically come with complex ethical issues that most of us still struggle to resolve in our daily lives, it’s important to remember that the practices, themselves, are morally agnostic. However, researchers at the University of Washington have discovered that continuous data collection from your smart speaker could save your life. It’s not a stretch to imagine a scenario in which a person in an emergency situation asks Alexa to get help and it utilizes its numerous connections to get help.
