The regular, 6 qt. Instant Pot is still on sale for $70, and honestly, it’s probably the one you should buy at that price. But if you need a larger model for a bigger family, or care about aesthetics and a few extra features, the Instant Pot Ultra just went on sale too, in two different sizes.
Source: LifeHacker – The Pretty and Powerful Instant Pot Ultra Has Never Been Cheaper, In Two Different Sizes
If the Ferrari 488 GTB is getting a bit too long in the tooth for your tastes, rest assured that the Italian sports car maker has heard your cries for help. This morning, Ferrari pulled the wraps off the magnificent F8 Tributo.
If you have to squint to find the differences between the two cars, we won’t admonish you. The F8 Tributo is still
Source: Hot Hardware – Ferrari’s F8 Tributo Is A Delicious And Hellacious 710 Horsepower Mid-Engine Track Monster
Using the faces generated by an artificial intelligence program for the website Thispersondoesnotexist (previously posted here), Judge Fake People is a site that adds a hot or not feature to the fake faces so you can judge them all on attractiveness to your heart’s content. You can also filter the faces by highest/lowest ratings, or most average. And isn’t judging fake people one of the shared human experiences? Take my coworker Greg for example — he acts like he’s my friend but I know he’s gone behind my back and tried to get me fired at least twice. “For valid reasons?” That depends — is stealing a coworker’s project and trying to pass it off as my own a valid reason?” “Yes.” Then MAYBE.
Thanks to becca b, who made me briefly stop and consider maybe I’m the fake person before I laughed off the notion because I’m the realest person who’s ever existed.
Source: Geekologie – Judge Fake People: A Hot Or Not Website For AI Generated Faces
Note: Keep your volume in check, high winds.
This is a video from Fort Erie, Ontario, of a bunch of ice that was pushed over the Lake Erie-Niagara River ice boom (a series of massive 30-foot floating steel pontoons designed to prevent ice from entering the Niagara River from Lake Erie) and crashing ashore over a brick wall at Mathers Arch near the Peace Bridge. As fun as it is to watch that ice come ashore, it’s really the guy’s reaction that makes it even better. Some highlights: “I got it!”, “Whoooooo!”, “Mary Ann — move my car! Move my car!”, “Holy shit I got it!”, “Oh my God I can’t believe I actually got it.” “Whooooohoooo!”, “That’s it, gotta be here at the exact time, you have like thirty seconds to get it. How cool is that?” If I didn’t know better I’d swear he just won the lotto. Also, is Mary Ann okay? Because a check-in at the end of the video would have been nice. I worry, I know how these three-hour tours can go.
Keep going for the whole video, most of the action is in the first half though.
Source: Geekologie – High Winds Push Ice Over Ice Boom Into Niagara River, Crashing Ashore
By now, it’s clear MWC 2019 turned into a breakout celebration for all sorts of bendy-screen devices. So after the appearance of Samsung’s Galaxy Fold and Huawei’s Mate X, I went on the hunt for more gadgets with flex displays. That’s when I remembered that Nubia—makers of weird devices like this dual-screen phone…
Source: Gizmodo – This Bendy Smartphone-Watch Hybrid Actually Isn’t as Silly as It Looks
Battle royale game Apex Legends has only been out for a few weeks and Fortnite is already copying one of its best ideas, with today’s Season 8 update adding a ping system alongside other new stuff like pirate ships and a giant volcano.
Source: Kotaku – Fornite Season 8 Update Adds Apex Legends-Style Ping Feature
Members of Microsoft’s Windows Insider program have not seen a new build to the Slow ring channel in months due to GSOD (green screen of death) bug that has proven to be extra pesky. Now, however, it is finally pushing out a new 19H1 preview build (18342.8) to Windows Insiders in the Slow ring with a workaround of sorts.
The issue that
Source: Hot Hardware – Windows 10 19H1 Preview Build Pushed To Slow Ring Testers With GSOD Upgrade Block
Fake products aren’t a new headache for Amazon, but now the tech retailer is shifting its strategy on how to deal with them. In a blog Thursday, Amazon announced it will allow individual brands to directly remove counterfeit products themselves.
Source: Gizmodo – Amazon’s New Plan for Fighting Counterfeit Crap Is Letting Brands Deal With It
Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and his X-Men try to save Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) in second trailer for 20th Century Fox’s Dark Phoenix.
Not even Magneto’s levitating machine guns can stop Sophie Turner’s Dark Phoenix in the latest trailer for the latest installment in the rebooted X-Men franchise. The Game of Thrones star plays Jean Grey, a powerful psychic and telekinetic mutant who finds herself succumbing to a dark entity called the Dark Phoenix, pitting her against her former colleagues.
(Some spoilers for The X-men franchise below.)
Jean’s transformation is one of the classic storylines in The X-Men comics canon, and we’ve seen it on the big screen before, in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). That’s when Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey took out two key X-Men, allied herself with Magneto, and destroyed an entire military battalion before someone finally managed to stop her. Those are pretty big shoes to fill, and we’ll see if Turner is up to the challenge.
Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – GoT’s Sophie Turner takes on the X-Men in new trailer for Dark Phoenix
In the world of Netflix’s new French-language dystopian thriller, finding one’s true love in the near future is something that most people aspire to do, particularly because all of the guessing’s been taken out of the equation thanks to a new technological development: the Osmosis app.
Source: io9 – In the First Osmosis Trailer, Guaranteed True Love Can Be Yours…for a Price
Ricoh has unveiled the Theta Z1, a 360-degree camera that offers near-professional features for a price. It’s got a pair of backside-illuminated 1-inch sensors and variable apertures that let you shoot 23-megapixel images at f/2.1, f/3.5 and f/5.6. O…
Source: Engadget – Ricoh’s Theta Z1 shoots 360-degree RAW images for 9
The results of a new study suggest that listening to music can significantly impair your ability to perform creative tasks. Whilst music was found to disrupt creative processes, ambient “library noise” was found to have no significant effect. From a report: The first experiment saw volunteers complete tasks while being played music with vocals that wouldn’t mean anything to them — for example, English-speaking listeners being played music with Spanish lyrics. In the second experiment, the participants were played instrumental music with no vocals, and in the third the volunteers were played music with familiar lyrics that they could understand. During the third experiment, the participants were also subjected to “library noise” conditions, which involved ambient noise such as unintelligible distant speech, photocopier noise, typing, and the rustling of papers.
The team discovered that creative performance dropped significantly when listening to music over the course of all three exercises, as compared to periods during which participants were allowed to complete the exercises without distraction. Even when participants declared that the music improved their overall mood, in the third exercise, it still impaired creativity.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Listening To Music May Be Damaging Your Creativity
Yesterday, Boeing introduced a autonomous UAV designed to perform the role of a “loyal wingman to manned platforms.” The press release says that the aircraft is about 38 feet long has a range of over 2,000 nauticle miles, while Defense News says it can carry unspecified weapons into combat. It can supposedly be controlled from the ground or the manned aircraft its following, and Boeing also mentioned that it will “Use artificial intelligence to fly independently or in support of manned aircraft while maintaining safe distance between other aircraft.” Unfortunately, they stopped short of revealing just how extensive the aircraft’s autonomous systems are, what sort of silicon they use for the aircraft’s artificial intelligence, or what kind of performance we can expect from the plane. But unlike most other military drones I’ve seen, this particular airframe seems to be optimized for supersonic (or at least high transonic) travel.
“This aircraft is a historic endeavor for Boeing. Not only is it developed outside the United States, it is also designed so that our global customers can integrate local content to meet their country-specific requirements,” said Marc Allen, president, Boeing International. “The Boeing Airpower Teaming System provides a transformational capability in terms of defense, and our customers – led by Australia – effectively become partners on the program with the ability to grow their own sovereign capabilities to support it, including a high-tech workforce.” First flight is planned for 2020.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Boeing Reveals an Intelligent Drone Designed to Escort Manned Fighters
Despite Amazon’s best efforts so far, the retailer’s online storefront is still filled with counterfeit or bogus products that are frequently accompanied by fake 5-star reviews. Earlier this month, the FTC brought the hammer down on one such merchant with a $12.8 million dollar fine, and today, Amazon announced a new initiative designed to fight counterfeit products. The company claims “Amazon Zero” allows brands to remove counterfeit listings themselves, rather than having to go through Amazon first. The counterfeits companies take down will then be fed into a machine-learning powered automated protection mechanism, which they say will “continuously scan our stores and proactively remove suspected counterfeits.” Amazon is also introducing a product serialization service that can supposedly stop counterfeits that slip through, before they reach customers.
Brands provide us with their logos, trademarks, and other key data about their brand, and we scan over 5 billion product listing updates every day, looking for suspected counterfeits. We’ve been testing these automated protections with a number of brands, and on average, our automated protections proactively stop 100 times more suspected counterfeit products as compared to what we reactively remove based on reports from brands… Project Zero is currently an invite-only experience, and we’re working to add more brands quickly.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Amazon Announces Plan to Fight Counterfeits
Micron’s line of client SATA SSDs for the OEM market is making the jump to 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory with the new Micron 1300 SSD. This replaces the Micron 1100 SSD, which used Micron’s first-generation 32-layer 3D TLC.
The Micron 1100 was very similar to the Crucial MX300 consumer/retail SATA drive, but since then the two product lines have diverged. The Crucial MX series switched over to using Silicon Motion controllers with the MX500, featuring 64L 3D TLC. The Micron 1100 stuck around and occasionally made an impact on the retail market as a cheaper alternative available through grey-market resellers.
The Micron 1300 leapfrogs the Crucial MX series by adopting 96L TLC, but otherwise little has changed from the 1100 series—it’s still using Marvell controllers and provides the same feature set including optional TCG Opal encryption support and partial power loss protection.
| Micron 1300 SSD Specifications | |||||
| Capacity | 256 GB | 512 GB | 1 TB (1024 GB) |
2 TB | |
| Controller | Marvell 88SS1074 | ||||
| NAND Flash | Micron 96L 3D TLC | ||||
| Form-Factor, Interface | 2.5″ or M.2 2280 SATA | 2.5″ SATA | |||
| Sequential Read | 530 MB/s | ||||
| Sequential Write | 520 MB/s | ||||
| Random Read | 58k IOPS | 90k IOPS | |||
| Random Write | 87k IOPS | ||||
| Warranty | 5 years | ||||
| Write Endurance | 180 TB 0.39 DWPD |
300 TB 0.32 DWPD |
400 TB 0.22 DWPD |
400 TB 0.11 DWPD |
|
Since there’s hardly any room for performance improvement behind a 6Gbps SATA link, Micron is primarily touting improved pricing and power efficiency for the 1300 SSD, though neither is quantified all that well by their press release. We found Micron’s 32L 3D NAND to be consistently one of the slowest 3D flash memories ever shipped, so it’s likely that the Micron 1300 with 96L NAND does provide a boost to performance at low queue depths even if the peak performance is largely unchanged.
The Micron 1300 does not expand the range of available capacities: up to 2TB for 2.5″ drives, and up to 1TB for M.2 SATA drives. Micron’s datacenter SATA drives have hit 8TB using the same Marvell controllers, but the mainstream client SSD market doesn’t have much demand for 4TB or 8TB drives yet.
The write endurance ratings at the higher capacities are rather disappointing, with both 1TB and 2TB models rated for the same 400TB total endurance. Micron is reportedly already selling 96L TLC in the recently introduced 960GB Crucial BX500, so they shouldn’t need to use the 1300 to unload low-grade 96L NAND. Instead, it seems the low endurance ratings are simply due to a lack of market pressure, highlighting one of the ways that the OEM market differs from the consumer retail SSD market.
Source: AnandTech – Micron Announces 1300 Client SATA SSD With 96L TLC
By injecting nanoparticles into the eyes of mice, scientists gave them the ability to see near-infrared light—a wavelength not normally visible to rodents (or people). It’s an extraordinary achievement, one made even more extraordinary with the realization that a similar technique could be used in humans.
Source: Gizmodo – Incredible Experiment Gives Infrared Vision to Mice—and Humans Could Be Next
As a gamer parent, I long for the day when I can play side-by-side with my beloved progeny. Overtly or not, I think most of us hope that our kids will turn out to be mini Pokémon trainers or enthusiastic Destiny squadmates. But what’s the best way to introduce children to games?
Source: Kotaku – When Should You Start Introducing Your Kids To Video Games?
Roll up those yoga mats and hop down from the pull-up bar—our month of creative core exercises is over.
Source: LifeHacker – How’s Your Core Feeling After This Month’s Fitness Challenge?
A triumphant win for Toledo residents means that the Great Lake’s wellbeing is now an official top priority.
Source: TreeHugger – Lake Erie now has its own Bill of Rights
If you’re looking for camera overload with your next smartphone, HMD Global is hoping to grab your attention with the release of the Nokia 9 PureView flagship smartphone. We talked about the phone in detail earlier this week when it was officially unveiled, but official pricing and availability is now being presented for all to see.
For
Source: Hot Hardware – Nokia 9 PureView Penta-Camera Android Flagship Arrives Stateside March 3rd With Limited Time Discount