You might have noticed that it’s pretty cold throughout much of the United States—frostbite-inducing, school-closing, scald-yourself-with-boiling-water-while-attempting-that-stupid-instant-snow-trick cold. You might wonder what that means, scientifically.
Source: Gizmodo – A Guide to the Chemistry of Cold Weather
It brings food from farmers markets to customers without filling up the trash.
Source: TreeHugger – This zero-waste grocery delivery service is plastic-free
This is some footage from the VR goggles worn by YouTuber Omegoolibird in order to fly a 265MPH R/C plane. Obviously you need to wear first person POV goggles to fly a plane that goes so fast because it only takes about 10 seconds for the plane to be out of sight and crash landing in a neighboring state. 265MPH — man, that’s fast. I can’t even keep my eye on the giant R/C car I was just playing with, and it only goes like 5MPH. “You mean the one with your nephews in it?” Shit! BRB.
Keep going for the video.
Source: Geekologie – VR Goggle View Of Flying A 265MPH R/C Plane
You haven’t seen Bohemian Rhapsody!? That’s fine. The Lifehacker staff gathered our collective 2018 movie-watching experience, and named the Oscar-nominated movies that you can safely skip—including ones we ourselves did not even watch. You can actually safely skip any movie, ever, that’s how entertainment works. But…
Source: LifeHacker – You Can Skip These Oscar-Nominated Movies
Students at a California high school are getting less screen time since the school implemented a ban on cellphone use during the school day. From a report: After one teacher at San Lorenzo High School brought pouches, created by the tech start-up Yondr, into her classroom to lock away students’ phones, the entire school began using them from the beginning of the school day at 8 a.m. until the end of the day at 3:10 p.m. According to a 2018 study from the Pew Research Center, more than half of teens said they felt loneliness, anxiety, or upset in the absence of a cellphone. The study also found that girls were more likely to feel these sentiments than boys.
“If something feels weird about modern life to young kids who are dealing with a lot of angst and anxiety in general, maybe it has something to do with relating to the world primarily through a screen eight hours a day,” Yondr’s founder Graham Dugoni told CNBC. Students said they initially felt awkward and annoyed having their phones taken away during the school day, but added that they started to see more teens interacting with each other. One student added that not having a phone in class helped with concentration.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Schools Are Locking Students’ Phones Away to Help With Concentration
Following new allegations that Bryan Singer molested and raped a number of underage teen boys, Millennium Films CEO Avi Lerner came to the director’s defense with a bafflingly-bad public statement citing Bohemian Rhapsody’s box office success as one of the reasons why Singer is still attached to the studio’s upcoming Red Sonja movie
Source: io9 – Red Sonja’s Producer Claims No One in Hollywood Complained After His Bryan Singer Defense
It’s…it’s beautiful. I’ve always kept my batteries loose and scattered across like three different drawers, but this organizer is surely better. It even has a built in battery tester to make it easier to know which batteries need to be recharged or recycled. At $16, it’s also never been cheaper.
Source: LifeHacker – Spark Joy With This Discounted Battery Organizer
While the initial “G-SYNC Compatible” (FreeSync) support is the big headlining feature of today’s NVIDIA 418.30 Linux beta driver drop, there are also other changes to get excited about too…
Source: Phoronix – NVIDIA 418.30 Linux Driver Adds Video Codec SDK 9.0, Optical Flow Support
Today, Intel launched the 28-core W-3175X workstation processor. As we previously reported, this monster CPU is based on the same die that Intel’s $10k+ Xeon Platinum 8180 CPUs use, but trades multi-socket support and other enterprise-focused features for an unlocked multiplier, higher clockspeeds, and a higher TDP. Unlike its predecessors, the W-3175X won’t fit into a regular LGA 2066 socket, as it requires a special LGA-3467 motherboard. Intel says the platform offers up to 68 PCIe lanes and 6 channels of DDR4 with ECC support, but curiously, the platform is capped at an uneven 512GB of maximum memory. Asetek developed the 690LX-PN AIO liquid cooler to handle the monster CPU, and Intel claims it’s “1.52x” faster than the i9-9980XE when building Epic’s Infiltrator demo.
Reviews around the web suggest that the W-3175X excels in situations that can make use of the extra threads, but otherwise matches the Core i9-9980XE in workloads that don’t scale across that many cores. Unfortunately, the W-3175X appears to only be available from system integrator at this time, as I don’t see it listed at any major U.S. retailer yet. There’s no word on when, or if, we’ll see the the CPU and compatible motherboards for sale by themselves. Intel’s recommended tray price for the CPU alone is $2999, and for reference, a Maingear system based on the platform starts at a cool $14,899.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Intel Launches the 28 Core W-3175X
As you might already know, some Nvidia RTX cards are dying, and we’re trying to figure out why. HardForum user Admiral_Ackbar6 was kind enough to send us an EVGA RTX 2080 TI that started failing after 10 hours of use, and we sent it to an engineering firm for further testing. While the analysis is still a work in progress, they’ve apparently been able to reproduce the corruption.
Hey Kyle, they are moving along slowly due to some other priorities in the equipment queue. I can confirm that we can consistently reproduce the corruption – so it is definitely not a system/user isolated issue. I am optimistically hoping that we can confirm it is not a thermal-sensitive issue by end of week. I will check in with you then.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Update on RTX Space Invaders in the House!
Denisova cave in southern Siberia was home to Neanderthals and Denisovans for thousands of years, but questions remain about the timing of their stay. A pair of new studies traces the history of archaic human occupation at the site, showing who lived there and when—including a possible era during which the two…
Source: Gizmodo – Neanderthals and Denisovans Shared a Siberian Cave for Thousands of Years, New Research Suggests
If you’ve been looking for an easier way to play weird covers of “7 Rings” through your Sonos speakers, today’s your lucky day — YouTube Music subscribers can now stream tunes directly through the Sonos app. You’ll find your saved music in your libr…
Source: Engadget – Sonos now works with YouTube Music
The iRobot Terra. Check out that huge antenna. [credit:
iRobot ]
iRobot is the biggest name in home robotics thanks to its Roomba line, a robotic army of indoor cleaning bots that will suck up the dust and dirt on your floors. But what about that other giant flat surface you own that constantly needs maintaining? For that, the Roomba lawnmower is finally here: the iRobot Terra.
A Roomba lawnmower has been rumored for years. The company has robomower patents going all the way back to 2008, and as recently as 2015 the company was petitioning the FCC to allow it to make its outdoor beacon navigation system legal. The original Roomba was introduced in 2002, when iRobot mostly had the home-robotics market to itself. Waiting 17 years to tackle the great outdoors means iRobot is now jumping into a crowded field of competitors, and it will have to do battle with Robomow, Husqvarna’s Automower line, Honda’s Miimo, and a line of mowers from Worx, among others.
A lot of the Roomba basics make the trip to the outdoors. The Terra is still a battery-powered robot that wheels around your property. It has all the usual self-docking capabilities that allow it to park itself on the outdoor charger when it’s low on power, and it can pick up right where it left off. It uses the same “Home” app as the Roomba, so you can relax indoors and still monitor the robot as it toils in the hot sun.
Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – The Roomba lawnmower is finally happening
We’re live with etiquette expert Daniel Post Senning until 2 PM Eastern! As host of the podcast Awesome Etiquette, author of Manners in a Digital World: Living Well Online, and the great-great-grandson of Emily Post herself, Daniel is more than qualified to help you navigate the nuances of manners in the age of…
Source: LifeHacker – Live: Ask Daniel Post Senning Your Modern Etiquette Questions [Update: Finished]
George Monbiot describes how we are shipping our garbage, including old tires, around the world.
Source: TreeHugger – Jargon watch: “Waste Colonialism”
Americans are now getting so many robo-calls on a regular basis that many are simply choosing not to answer the phone altogether. From a report: That’s one big takeaway from a report [PDF] released Tuesday by Hiya, a Seattle-based spam-monitoring service that analyzed activity from 450,000 users of its app to determine the scope of unwanted robo-calling — and how phone users react when they receive an automated call. Consistent with other analyses, Hiya’s report found that the number of robo-calls is on the rise. Roughly 26.3 billion robo-calls were placed to U.S. phone numbers last year, Hiya said, up from 18 billion in 2017. One report last year projected that as many as half of all cellphone calls in 2019 could be spam.
While many businesses have legitimate purposes for using robo-calls — think package delivery services, home maintenance technicians and banks — unwanted robo-calls represent a growing challenge for regulators and telecom companies. In its analysis of a month’s worth of calling data, Hiya found that each of its app users reported an average of 10 unwanted robo-calls. Many more incoming calls, about 60 on average, were from unrecognized numbers or numbers not linked to a person in the recipient’s address book.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Americans Got 26.3 Billion Robocalls Last Year, Up 46 Percent From 2017
Because the 1% are, for the most part, ridiculous human beings, these are a couple shots of the $2,500 Jenga style game set from Louis Vuitton. I say Jenga style game because it isn’t an officially licensed Jenga product, presumably because Hasbro just laughed and hung up the phone when Louis called. Instead of wood, the game consists of 54 colored plexiglass game pieces adorned with Louis Vuitton patterns. The game is being released as part of Louis Vuitton’s 2019 Fall-Winter collection and is expected to sell out quickly because I really don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
Keep going for one more shot.
Source: Geekologie – Louis Vuitton Releasing A ,500 Plexiglass Jenga Game
Last night, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate got Mario’s Piranha Plant, the platform fighter’s first downloadable fighter, and it’s a doozy. Piranha Plant’s moveset is a radical departure from what we’ve seen in prior Smash games, but thankfully, unlike those games’ downloadable fighters, this one isn’t overpowered.
Source: Kotaku – Smash Ultimate’s Piranha Plant Is Sluggish But Fun
Although federal workers who’ve gone all month without a paycheck during the government shutdown are expected to be paid this week, diaper banks are still working tirelessly to distribute diapers to their families.
Source: LifeHacker – Help Federal Workers by Donating to Diaper Banks
Enlarge / Two groups of Stalkers controlled by AI AlphaStar approach the army of Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz in the decisive battle of the pair’s fourth game. (credit: DeepMind)
DeepMind, the AI startup Google acquired in 2014, is probably best known for creating the first AI to beat a world champion at Go. So what do you do after mastering one of the world’s most challenging board games? You tackle a complex video game. Specifically, DeepMind decided to write an AI to play the realtime strategy game StarCraft II.
StarCraft requires players to gather resources, build dozens of military units, and use them to try to destroy their opponents. StarCraft is particularly challenging for an AI because players must carry out long-term plans over several minutes of gameplay, tweaking them on the fly in the face of enemy counterattacks. DeepMind says that prior to its own effort, no one had come close to designing a StarCraft AI as good as the best human players.
Last Thursday, DeepMind announced a significant breakthrough. The company pitted its AI, dubbed AlphaStar, against two top StarCraft players—Dario “TLO” Wünsch and Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz. AlphaStar won a five-game series against Wünsch 5-0, then beat Komincz 5-0, too.
Read 39 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – An AI crushed two human pros at StarCraft—but it wasn’t a fair fight
