Scientists have confirmed that organic molecules exist in samples taken from the asteroid Ryugu, adding credence to the idea that the ingredients for life came to Earth via meteorite and asteroid impacts.
Source: Gizmodo – Samples From Asteroid Suggest Space Rocks Brought Ingredients for Life to Earth
Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / Snap, Inc.)
On Monday, Snapchat announced an experimental AI-powered conversational chatbot called “My AI,” powered by ChatGPT-style technology from OpenAI. My AI will be available for $3.99 a month for Snapchat+ subscribers and is rolling out “this week,” according to a news post from Snap, Inc.
Users will be able to personalize the AI bot by giving it a custom name. Conversations with the AI model will take place in a similar interface to a regular chat with a human. “The big idea is that in addition to talking to our friends and family every day, we’re going to talk to AI every day,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told The Verge.
But like its GPT-powered cousins, ChatGPT and Bing Chat, Snap says that My AI is prone to “hallucinations,” which are unexpected falsehoods generated by an AI model. On this point, Snap includes a rather lengthy disclaimer in its My AI announcement post:
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Source: Ars Technica – “Sorry in advance!” Snapchat warns of hallucinations with new AI conversation bot
Snapchat is introducing a chatbot powered by the latest version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. According to Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, it’s a bet that AI chatbots will increasingly become a part of everyday life for more people. From a report: Named “My AI,” Snapchat’s bot will be pinned to the app’s chat tab above conversations with friends. While initially only available for $3.99 a month Snapchat Plus subscribers, the goal is to eventually make the bot available to all of Snapchat’s 750 million monthly users, Spiegel tells The Verge. “The big idea is that in addition to talking to our friends and family every day, we’re going to talk to AI every day,” he says. “And this is something we’re well positioned to do as a messaging service.” At launch, My AI is essentially just a fast mobile-friendly version of ChatGPT inside Snapchat. The main difference is that Snap’s version is more restricted in what it can answer. Snap’s employees have trained it to adhere to the company’s trust and safety guidelines and not give responses that include swearing, violence, sexually explicit content, or opinions about dicey topics like politics.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Snapchat is Releasing Its Own AI Chatbot Powered by ChatGPT
While it isn’t time yet for the March Feature Drop, it’s still an exciting day to be on Android. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google unveiled nine new Android and Wear OS features users can expect in coming weeks, with some features available starting today. From Magic Eraser dropping on more devices, to new…
Source: LifeHacker – All the New Android Features Google Announced Today
LibreOffice 7.5 released earlier this month as just the latest six-month update to this cross-platform, open-source office suite while today the Apache Software Foundation released OpenOffice 4.1.14. While the prior release, Apache OpenOffice 4.1.13, happened all the way back in July, there isn’t much to show for today’s update…
Source: Phoronix – Apache OpenOffice 4.1.14 Brings A Handful Of Bug Fixes
Last year, Ubisoft’s ambitious sci-fi multiplayer adventure, Beyond Good and Evil 2, surpassed Duke Nukem Forever’s dubious record for having the longest development time of any video game. Last week, staff at Ubisoft Montpellier were informed their managing director was no longer with the company, Kotaku has learned.…
Source: Kotaku – Beyond Good And Evil 2 Studio Head No Longer At Ubisoft
Once upon a time it was the case that chipset drivers were just as vital as graphics drivers. In fact, you’d usually install them first, immediately after setting up Windows itself. That practice has fallen by the wayside as more and more parts of the “chipset” have been standardized, but you’d better make sure to grab the new AMD chipset
Source: Hot Hardware – AMD’s Latest Chipset Driver Optimizes Game Performance On Ryzen 7000X3D V-Cache CPUs
Enlarge / Entrance to Fox News headquarters at NewsCorp Building in New York. (Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)
News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and several other news outlets, said that hackers were inside its network for nearly two years and made off with private documents and emails.
News Corp. first disclosed the breach in February 2022, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission and an article in The Wall Street Journal. The company said at the time that it discovered “persistent cyberattack activity” a month earlier in a third-party cloud service it used. Security firm Mandiant, which aided News Corp. in investigating the intrusion, told the WSJ it believed the attack was conducted by a threat actor aligned with the Chinese government.
Last week, News Corp. sent a breach notification letter to at least one affected employee that provided additional details.
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Source: Ars Technica – Conservative News Corp. empire says hackers were inside its network for 2 years
One year ago today, the largest aircraft ever built was destroyed during the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Now, the Antonov An-225 Mriya is once again taking to the skies — albeit in Microsoft Flight Simulator. What’s more, if you buy the add-on, you could help restore the only real-life Mriya that was ever completed.
The Ukraine-built Mriya was an ultra-heavy lift jet transport aircraft with six engines. It was the heaviest aircraft ever built and it had the largest wingspan of any plane at 290 feet. The Mriya, which had its first flight in 1988, was used to transport things like Soviet space shuttles, tanks, diesel locomotives and dozens of cars at a time.
A second Mriya was in the works, but it was never finished. There are plans to reconstruct the plane by using parts of the destroyed Mriya and pieces from the unfinished airframe. The project is expected to cost over $500 million.
The Microsoft Flight Simulator version of the Antonov An-225 Mriya is available in six liveries, including an Xbox Aviators Club one. It’s in the in-game marketplace on PC today and will be available for the Xbox Series X/S and cloud versions later this month. The Mriya costs $20, with all proceeds going to the Antonov Corporation’s Mryia reconstruction efforts. Meanwhile, iniBuilds, the team behind the virtual Mriya, has released a manual and other details about the plane on its forums.
One of the best players in competitive Mortal Kombat 11 might’ve fallen shy of claiming the title of champion in a recent tournament, but that didn’t stop them from striking fear and awe into every opponent as they bested some of the most lethal players. The thrilling victory would go on to another player, but for…
Source: Kotaku – Mystery Mortal Kombat 11 Turbo Teabagging Troll Wows At Pro Tourney
Reddit announced today that it added the ability to search for comments within a single post. The new feature is now available on desktop, iOS and Android.
As Reddit mod u/anon-axolotl explained in the pinned announcement post in r/reddit, “So what does this mean? You don’t have to ‘cmd-f’ on the post page anymore and you can search comment threads without expanding them. No more long scrolling sessions — quickly get to the parts of the conversation you’re looking for and jump in where you want.” Previously, searching in a browser with Ctrl-F (Windows) or Cmd-F (macOS) required you first to expand any collapsed comments before it would yield the full results. Reddit’s enhanced built-in search will bring up all results without extra taps or clicks.
The new feature builds on the ability to search comments sitewide, which Reddit only added last year. Before that, Reddit’s search would only yield results from the original posts and topics within a community.
Reddit has been busy beefing up its search capabilities in recent months. It introduced the ability to search for text within images in October, which is handy for memes or other text-filled pictures. The company also improved the algorithm for its subreddit search, delivering “a larger number of and more relevant subreddits for most searches” along with better autocomplete results. Finally, it incorporated better navigation for video search results in Reddit mobile apps, letting you swipe up and down to browse between the results of a video search easily.
Source: Engadget – You can now search the comments within an individual Reddit post
Step into the future by way of the past on Apple TV+’s new series Hello Tomorrow!, which stars Billy Crudup as a chipper salesman for Brightside, a company hawking condos on the moon. The show’s take on a sci-fi retro-future version of the 1950s is one of its most striking elements, so io9 was excited to speak with…
Source: Gizmodo – Hello Tomorrow!’s Production Designer on Creating the Show’s Retro-Future Vision
Technically, National Pancake Week ended on Feb. 26, but tell that to the International House of Pancakes, who will celebrate it on Tuesday, Feb. 28 by giving away free pancakes. Whether they’re doing it on a different day to be edgy, who knows and who cares.
Source: LifeHacker – Get a Free Short Stack at IHOP for National Pancake Day
The Mozilla Foundation has released a study into Google Play Store’s Data Safety labels that found nearly 80 percent of the apps reviewed were false or misleading. Apps such as TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook are listed among those that are misleading its users.
The study, “See No Evil: How Loopholes in the Google Play Store’s Data Safety
Source: Hot Hardware – Mozilla Study Slams Google Play Store False And Misleading Data Privacy Labels
LinkedIn has been hit by a rise in sophisticated recruitment scams, as fraudsters seek to take advantage of the trend towards remote working and widespread lay-offs across the tech sector. From a report: Jobseekers on the world’s largest professional network are being defrauded out of money after taking part in fake recruitment processes set up by scammers who pose as employers, before obtaining personal and financial information. “There’s certainly an increase in the sophistication of the attacks and the cleverness,” Oscar Rodriguez, vice-president of product management at LinkedIn told the Financial Times “We see websites being set up, we see phone numbers with a seemingly professional operator picking up the phone and answering on the company’s behalf. We see a move to more sophisticated deception,” he added.
The warning comes as the Microsoft-owned social media company said it has sought to block tens of millions of fake accounts in recent months, while US regulators warn of an increase in jobs-related cons. Last month, cyber security company Zscaler revealed a scam that targeted jobseekers and a dozen US companies, where fraudsters approached people through LinkedIn’s direct messaging feature InMail. Scammers identified businesses that were already hiring, including enterprise software company Zuora, software developer Intellectsoft and Zscaler itself. They then created “lookalike” websites with similar job ads and, via LinkedIn’s InMail feature, invited jobseekers to enter personal information into the websites, before conducting remote interviews via Skype.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – LinkedIn Scammers Step Up Sophistication of Online Attacks
The Nokia G22. You can open it. [credit:
iFixit ]
HMD and its licensed Nokia brand is taking a swing at a repairable smartphone with the Nokia G22. Like Google and Samsung, HMD has struck up a partnership with iFixit to offer official parts and repair guides online. Besides the partnership, HMD goes one step further and claims: “Starting with Nokia G22, we’ll be designing and building smartphones that are easier to repair.” It’s great to see a company tout attempts at a more repairable design, but there isn’t much in the G22 that makes it more repairable than a normal cheap phone.
The phone is a low-end $179 (179 euro) device with a 6.52-inch, 90 Hz, 1200×720 LCD. The SoC is a ‘Unisoc T606’—a 12 nm chip with two Cortex A75 Arm cores, two A55 cores, and an ARM Mali-G57 MP1. It has 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 5050 mAh battery with 20 W charging. The phone has a side fingerprint reader, a headphone jack, MicroSD slot, and, if you get the “TA-1528” model, NFC. The phone comes with Android 12 and has two years of major OS updates and three years of monthly security updates, which are both pretty good for a cheap phone. It’ll be for sale on March 8 in the UK for 149.99 pounds ($179), with sales also happening in Europe and Australia eventually.
As for iFixit’s half of this partnership, there are four parts for sale in the parts store: A screen for $53, a battery for $26, a charge port for $20, and a new plastic back panel for $26. There are also the usual high-quality guides from iFixit that detail every screw and clip you’ll have to deal with to replace those parts, along with a recommended list of tools.
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Source: Ars Technica – The “designed for reparability” Nokia G22 is just a normal cheap phone
Nokia, also known as HMD Global, has announced its first modern smartphone designed with “repairability at its core.” Designed in collaboration with iFixIt, the new Nokia G22 can be repaired and rejuvenated with new parts, and an easily fixable device is highly attractive.
Many readers will miss the many of the old mobile features we used
Source: Hot Hardware – Nokia Turns Heads With DIY Repairable Phones For MWC 2023
Adin Ross, one of Twitch’s top broadcasters with over seven million followers, has been banned from the livestreaming platform for the eighth time. This time, it appears to be permanent following a string of incidents he’s engaged in on rival streaming platform Kick, including pulling up porn for his largely young…
Source: Kotaku – Twitch Star Adin Ross Banned After Streaming Porn, Now Lashing Out
I’ve been getting into sports lately. Not like physically, mind you, but parasocially. Y’know, watching Hajime No Ippo ahead of the anime AF Creed III and seeing what the hubbub is about LeBron James making history while being an “old.” While new Netflix game show Physical: 100 inspires lapsed athletes like myself to…
Source: Kotaku – New Netflix Must-Watch Reality Show Is Now Steeped In Assault Allegations
Bitter is good. Burnt ends, blackened catfish, crème brûlée, and the giant charred bubble on your pizza pie are just a few examples of how good it can be. The palate can taste five flavors—sweet, salty, bitter, savory, and umami—and the best dishes will work with several, if not all five, to create a harmonious…
Source: LifeHacker – Go Ahead, Burn Dinner (a Little)
