Over the past few years, we’ve seen a number of AI projects demonstrate how effectively artificial intelligences can play certain games, from classics like chess to the Chinese game Go and even DOTA 2 and Starcraft 2. Now, the non-profit OpenAI has released what it calls Neural MMO. The look is heavily reminiscent of Minecraft, but the long-term impact of the idea could be considerable. We’ve actually touched on some of these topics in a discussion of in-game AI and how DirectX 12 by freeing up system resources to be spent on AI instead of handling GPU rendering requests.
The case of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX just got a lot more complicated. After CEO Gerald Cotten’s death late last year, the company said it was holding customer funds because Cotten was the only person with the passwords. After examining data provided by the exchange, auditor Ernst & Young reports that the exchange’s wallets were . Like most cryptocurrency exchanges, QuadrigaCX kept most of its funds in so-called “cold wallets.” These repositories of cryptocurrency aren’t connected to the internet, making them more secure from hacking attempts. The company would just move small amounts of crypto into the “hot wallets” as needed.
HBO CEO Richard Plepler has announced his retirement from the company, less than a year after AT&T bought it and the rest of Time Warner Inc. Plepler’s departure is thought to be the result of ongoing conflicts with the leadership AT&T brought in as a result of the merger and is being reported as confirmation of rumors that began in June 2018. After the Time Warner acquisition, AT&T called a town hall-style meeting at HBO and that the channel’s historic focus on producing a relatively small number of shows at an exceptional level of quality was over.
Twenty years ago, the question of whether Mars ever had large reserves of liquid water was still open to debate. Today, the discussion has shifted to an evaluation of the nature and size of those reserves, where they existed, and what this implies for any effort to find life (or the remains of it) on the Red Planet. Scientists with the European Space Agency have of Mars Express’ observation of some 24 deep, enclosed craters in the northern hemisphere of Mars. “Early Mars was a watery world, but as the planet’s climate changed this water retreated below the surface to form pools and ‘groundwater,’” says lead author Francesco Sales of Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
The ascendent smartphone maker OnePlus branded itself out of the gate with its “Never Settle” slogan, but that might not have been a great idea in hindsight. Like Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, the internet delights in pointing out when the company strays from its stated goal. Most recently, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau suggested in the upcoming OnePlus 7. Never Settle, indeed? This is a mistake because even with wireless charging shortcomings, it’s something consumers want. Wireless charging isn’t 100 percent confirmed to be missing on the OnePlus 7, but Lau certainly made it sound that way in a interview.
As CPU performance improvements have slowed down, we’ve seen the move towards accelerator cards to provide dramatically better results. Nvidia has been a major beneficiary of this shift, but it’s part of the same trend driving research into neural network accelerators, FPGAs, and products like Google’s TPU. These accelerators have delivered tremendous performance boosts in recent years, raising hopes that they present a path forward, even as Moore’s law scaling runs out. A new paper suggests this may be less true than many would like. Specialized architectures like GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs may work very differently from a general-purpose CPU, but they’re still built using the same process nodes as an x86, ARM, or POWER processor.
Last year, services like Bird and Lime launched new shared scooter programs around the country, often by deploying the scooters on city streets without permission from local government. There have been a variety of articles discussing the basics of these operations, but relatively little discussion of how much revenue per scooter the services might be generating or whether the companies in question are earning enough revenue to establish sustainable models for transportation. Quartz reporter Ali Griswold on revenue-per-scooter using open data sets provided by Louisville, KY. The question of how much revenue companies earn per scooter is an interesting one, given that much of the “disruption” that Silicon Valley has brought to transportation has, to date, been based on floods of venture capital money.
Pluto used to be the ninth planet, but it lost that distinction several years back. It became the first of many dwarf planets in the outer reaches of the solar system, but there’s a hint something larger may lurk out there. Scientists have been on the hunt for a true ninth planet since 2014, and a pair of new studies . The Kuiper Belt exists in the space out past the orbit of Neptune, so Pluto and the other objects in this region of space are often called Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO). While studying the orbits of KBOs discovered in recent years, astronomers Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin of Caltech realized there was an unusual clustering or orbits.
They may not have debuted in time for the Galaxy S10 unveil, but Samsung has announced it’ll be turbo-charging storage performance on future devices, courtesy of its new 512GB UFS 3.0 embedded flash drives. UFS (Universal Flash Storage) UFS boosts maximum bandwidth per lane up to 1450MB/s, with up to two lanes. Previously, the maximum bandwidth per lane was 600MB/s. Total available bandwidth has therefore increased to 2900MB/s, up from 1200MB/s. The company intends to bring 128GB and 512GB products to market first, with 256GB/1TB devices debuting in the second half of 2019. The 512GB edition has already been slated for the Galaxy Fold, and it’s not crazy to think that the 256GB/1TB flavors could tip up in the Galaxy Note 10.
