Author: zppiot
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Can AI help me plan my honeymoon? —Melissa Heikkilä I’m getting married later this summer and am feverishly planning a honeymoon together with my fiancé. It has been at times overwhelming trying to research and decide between what seem like millions of options while juggling busy work schedules and wedding planning. So I decided to take inspiration from a piece we just published about how to use AI to plan your vacation and tried using the same tools…
In the future, an AI agent could not only suggest things to do and places to stay on my honeymoon; it would also go a step further than ChatGPT and book flights for me. It would remember my preferences and budget for hotels and only propose accommodation that matched my criteria. It might also remember what I liked to do on past trips, and suggest very specific things to do tailored to those tastes. It might even request bookings for restaurants on my behalf. Unfortunately for my honeymoon, today’s AI systems lack the kind of reasoning, planning, and memory needed.…
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Monday launched Turkey’s first domestically-built communications satellite, a powerful relay station designed to carry secure military traffic within Turkish borders while providing expanded commercial services across India, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.”We have just launched our domestic communication satellite Türksat 6A into space,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğa said on social media. “We have witnessed another source of pride for our country and our nation. More than 81 percent of the subsystems, satellite ground stations and software in the 6A project, which is of great importance for the future of our country in space, have…
Pig butchering scams are on the rise. How you can protect yourself Pig butchering scams are on the rise. How you can protect yourself 05:03 A new cyberattack is targeting iPhone users, with criminals attempting to obtain individuals’ Apple IDs in a “phishing” campaign, security software company Symantec said in an alert Monday. Cyber criminals are sending text messages to iPhone users in the U.S. that appear to be from Apple, but are in fact an attempt at stealing victims’ personal credentials. “Phishing actors continue to target Apple IDs due to their widespread use, which offers access to a vast pool of potential…
2 Scrappy weapons startups are changing the face of war in UkraineThey’re leaving the more established players in the dust. (FT $)+ Inside the messy ethics of making war with machines. (MIT Technology Review) 3 How to scam a scammerAI bots are the first line of defense against crooks on the phone. (The Guardian)+ Crypto hacking thefts are on the rise. (Reuters)+ Watch out for card skimmers, too. (Insider $) 4 Saudi Arabia is using esports to launder its reputationIt’s been accused of attempting to sportswash its human rights record. (CNN) 5 Here’s what would happen if Russia detonated a…
Hearing the voice of Sir Laurence Olivier catch you up on work memos may not offer the same thrill as watching the acclaimed English actor on stage or screen, but it could make your morning commute more interesting. That’s the vision of artificial intelligence startup ElevenLabs, which this week announced that fans of Hollywood icons such as Judy Garland and James Dean can now listen to the voices of the deceased film stars narrate books, articles and other digital text.The company said it had reached agreements with the estates of Olivier, Garland, Dean and Burt Reynolds to add their voices to…
Frustrated singles breaking up with dating apps – CBS News Watch CBS News Last year, Americans downloaded dating apps more than 36 million times, which is down 16% from 2020. Dating coach Damona Hoffman says an increasing number of her clients are feeling what she calls “dating app burnout,” which is stress and fatigue caused by endless swiping. Be the first to know Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. Not Now Turn On #Frustrated #singles #breaking #dating #apps
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What are AI agents?When ChatGPT was first released, everyone in AI was talking about the new generation of AI assistants. But over the past year, that excitement has turned to a new target: AI agents. Agents featured prominently in Google’s annual I/O conference in May, when the company unveiled its new AI agent called Astra, which allows users to interact with it using audio and video. OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model has also been called an AI agent. And…
This reliance can shape our behavior. Normally, people tend to assume others are telling the truth. That was borne out in this study—even though the volunteers knew half of the statements were lies, they only marked out 19% of them as such. But that changed when people chose to make use of the AI tool: the accusation rate rose to 58%. In some ways, this is a good thing—these tools can help us spot more of the lies we come across in our lives, like the misinformation we might come across on social media. But it’s not all good. It could also…
The news: Less than 1% of clothing is recycled. Most of the rest ends up dumped in a landfill or burned. A team of researchers hopes to change that with a new process that breaks down mixed-fiber clothing into reusable, recyclable parts without any sorting or separation in advance.How they did it: Many garments are made of a mix of natural and synthetic fibers. Once these fibers are combined, they are difficult to separate. To tackle this problem, the team used a solvent that breaks the chemical bonds in polyester fabric while leaving cotton and nylon intact. To speed up…
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. For nearly two years, I’ve been thinking about a set of photos of fish I saw at a conference. The presentation was from our ClimateTech event in 2022, when we invited scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs in fields from fusion energy to agriculture to talk about their work. Gia Schneider, a cofounder of Natel Energy, was speaking about her company’s mission to design hydropower turbines that are safer for fish. She showed images of fish that had been…
Nevertheless, the process could be difficult to scale, says Bryan Vogt, a chemical engineer at Penn State University, who was not involved in the study. That’s because the solvent used to break down polyester is expensive and difficult to recover after use. Further, according to Andini, even though BHET is easily turned back into clothing, it’s less clear what to do with the leftover fibers. Nylon could be especially tricky, as the fabric is degraded significantly by the team’s chemical recycling technique. “We are chemical engineers, so we think of this process as a whole,” says Andini. “Hopefully, once we…
We all want to be able to speak our minds online—to be heard by our friends and talk (back) to our opponents. At the same time, we don’t want to be exposed to unpleasant speech. Technology companies address this conundrum by setting standards for free speech, a practice protected under federal law, hiring in-house moderators to examine individual pieces of content and removing them if posts violate predefined rules. The approach clearly has problems: harassment, misinformation about topics like public health, and false descriptions of legitimate elections run rampant. But even if content moderation were implemented perfectly, it would still…
Researchers at the Robotics and Embodied AI Lab at Stanford University set out to change that. They first built a system for collecting audio data, consisting of a gripper with a microphone designed to filter out background noise, and a GoPro camera. Human demonstrators used the gripper for a variety of household tasks, then used this data to train robotic arms how to execute the task on their own. The team’s new training algorithms help robots gather clues from audio signals to perform more effectively. “Thus far, robots have been training on videos that are muted,” says Zeyi Liu, a…
Car dealerships still struggling with impact of cyberattack – CBS News Watch CBS News More than half of U.S. car dealerships are still struggling with a cyberattack that crippled a key software system, hampering their ability to sell cars. J.D. Power estimates the attack may have caused June retail sales to drop more than 5% compared to last year. Be the first to know Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. Not Now Turn On #Car #dealerships #struggling #impact #cyberattack
What’s new: When someone loses part of a leg, a prosthetic can make it easier to get around. But most prosthetics are static, cumbersome, and hard to move. A new neural interface connects a bionic limb to nerve endings in the thigh, allowing the limb to be controlled by the brain.How they did it: First, patients undergo surgery to connect shin muscle, which contracts to make the ankle flex upward, to calf muscle, which counteracts this movement. The prosthetic can also be fitted at this point. In step two, surface electrodes measure nerve activity from the brain to the calf…