$30 million in prizes were up for grabs, the largest ever for an esports event, and more than 40 million attempted to qualify for a spot. Now IGN reports:
The grand champion of the Fortnite World Cup finals has been crowned. Kyle “Bugha” Giersdorf, a 16-year-old American boy, took home the trophy and a $3 million prize… “Words can’t even explain [how I feel] right now,” Giersdorf said from the Champion’s circle. “I’m just so happy. Everything I’ve done, the grind, it’s all paid off. It’s just insane.”

And the Guardian reports that a 15-year-old won $1.25 million (£1m) when his two-man team placed second in the duos competition.
He told the BBC that his mother initially thought he was wasting his time. “Now I’ve proved to her that I can do stuff, I’m really happy,” he said. With regard to spending the prize money, his mother said her son was not materialistic, and that she anticipated he would spend the prize money on a “lifetime of Uber Eats”.

IGN also reported on another Fortnite drama:
A pair of Fortnite World Cup competitors, formerly banned by Epic for cheating, were the target of much ire Saturday, as the crowd loudly booed one’s appearance onscreen and subsequently cheered for their loss…
Epic Games previously banned XXiF and Ronaldo from Fortnite for 14 days, after an internal review found that the players had colluded with other players in order to acquire easy elimination points during week 3 of the Fortnite World Cup qualifiers, according to Dexerto. The pair were subsequently dropped from their team, Rise Nation. That initially sounded like the end of the whole matter, but then XXiF and Ronaldo qualified during the week 8 qualifier, finishing in third place and securing a spot during the finals.

XXiF and Ronaldo ended up placing 28th during the duos finals, securing them $50,000 each in prize money.

Fornite had to ban more than 1,200 Fortnite accounts for cheating in just the first week of the World Cup Open online.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Teenagers Win Millions At Fortnite World Cup

One of America’s top foodservice distributor’s recently surveyed 1,518 customers of food-delivery services — and then also surveyed 500 delivery drivers. Restaurant Business magazine shares one surprising result:

About 21% of delivery customers worry the driver may have nibbled their order en route — and with good reason, according to a new study of delivery gripes. Some 28% of drivers say they were unable to resist taking a bite…

Overall, the research uncovered a wariness on the part of consumers about the drivers who cart their meals. More than 4 out of 5 (85%) said they would like restaurants to adopt tamper-proof packaging. The consumer respondents were given a hypothetical situation: “If you ordered a burger and fries, and the deliverer grabbed a few fries along the way, how upset would you be?” On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being an attitude of “no big deal” and 10 representing “absolutely unacceptable,” the average score was 8.4.

They also readily cited service snafus. 34% of respondents said they’d experienced a driver refusing to leave his or her car to hand over the meal. 29% said a driver refused to walk all the way to their door for the delivery. Nearly 1 in 5 (17%) reported that a driver had dropped the food at the door and left, without any interaction.

Meanwhile, though 95% of customers said they tip regularly, insufficient tipping was a “consistent” complaint for 60% of the drivers — and in fact, the survey showed the drivers had much higher rates of consistent irritation. 52% complained their restaurants didn’t have their orders ready on time, though many also complained about customers leaving unclear instructions in the app (39%), taking to long to answer the door (33%), not answering their phone (37%), or messaging the deliverer with questions or complaints (34%).

And a full 54% of drivers said they were “often tempted” by the smell of food they delivered.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – 28% of Delivery Drivers Have Tasted Your Food, Survey Finds

An anonymous reader quotes The Verge’s AI and Robotics reporter:

By scanning huge datasets of text, machine learning software can produce convincing samples of everything from short stories to song lyrics. Now, those same techniques are being applied to the world of coding with a new program called Deep TabNine, a “coding autocompleter.” Programmers can install it as an add-on in their editor of choice, and when they start writing, it’ll suggest how to continue each line, offering small chunks at a time. Think of it as Gmail’s Smart Compose feature but for code.

Jacob Jackson, the computer science undergrad at the University of Waterloo who created Deep TabNine, says this sort of software isn’t new, but machine learning has hugely improved what it can offer… Earlier this month, he released an updated version that uses a deep learning text-generation algorithm called GPT-2, which was designed by the research lab OpenAI, to improve its abilities. The update has seriously impressed coders, who have called it “amazing,” “insane,” and “absolutely mind-blowing” on Twitter…

Deep TabNine is trained on 2 million files from coding repository GitHub. It finds patterns in this data and uses them to suggest what’s likely to appear next in any given line of code, whether that’s a variable name or a function… Most importantly, thanks to the analytical abilities of deep learning, the suggestions Deep TabNine makes are of a high overall quality. And because the software doesn’t look at users’ own code to make suggestions, it can start helping with projects right from the word go, rather than waiting to get some cues from the code the user writes.
It’s not free software. Currently a personal license costs $49 (with a business-use license costing $99), the Verge reports — but the tool supports the following 22 languages…

Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, C, PHP, Go, C#, Ruby, Objective-C, Rust, Swift, TypeScript, Haskell, OCaml, Scala, Kotlin, Perl, SQL, HTML, CSS, and Bash.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – New AI-Assisted Coding Tool Called ‘Amazing’

To buy his favorite oatmeal, Gregory Kelly drives to a city 40 miles away rather than sharing his data with an online retailer, or purchasing it from the company’s web site, “which he says is riddled with tracking software from Google,” according to the Washington Post:

“I’m just not sure why Google needs to know what breakfast cereal I eat,” the 51-year-old said. Kelly is one of a hearty few who are taking the ultimate step to keep their files and online life safe from prying eyes: turning off Google entirely. That means eschewing some of the most popular services on the Web, including Gmail, Google search, Google Maps, the Chrome browser, Android mobile operating software and even YouTube. Such never-Googlers are pushing friends and family to give up the search and advertising titan, while others are taking to social media to get the word out. Online guides have sprouted up to help consumers untangle themselves from Google.

These intrepid Web users say they’d rather deal with daily inconveniences than give up more of their data. That means setting up permanent vacation responders on Gmail and telling friends to resend files or video links that don’t require Google software. More than that, it takes a lot of discipline.

While there’s no data on how many people are avoiding Google, the article points out that DuckDuckGo is now averaging 42.4 million searches every day — up from 23.5 million a year ago.

But at least one Berkeley tech consultant acknowledged that “the improvement is mostly in the category of self-righteousness.” Seeking an office software with better privacy protections, he’s now paying $100 a year for a subscription to Microsoft Office 365.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘Never-Googlers’ Take Extreme Measures To Avoid Data Tracking