We’ve all been there: Ya sink a bunch of hours into a dense RPG only to find out your character build isn’t working out as well as you’d like. When that happens, it’s time to respec. No two games handle this the same way, and it sounds like Diablo IV will be choosing a middle path between the rigidity of Diablo II and…
Source: Kotaku – Diablo IV: Respeccing Is ‘Essentially Free’ Up To A Point
Kevin Mitnick, a former black hat hooligan-turned-good-guy who spent several years in prison in the 1990s for various computer-related tomfoolery, is showing off a beastly setup outfitted with 30 high-end GeForce graphics cards. We know what you’re wondering—can it run Crysis? It certainly has enough firepower to push pixels around like a
Source: Hot Hardware – Famed Hacker Unveils Wild Crack-In-The-Box Password Cracker Fueled By Dozens Of RTX 4090s
In this guide, we offer some of the best free and open-source alternatives to Apple Automator for Linux systems.
The post Best Free and Open-Source Alternatives to Apple Automator appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – Best Free and Open-Source Alternatives to Apple Automator
Google’s cloud business has turned profitable for the first time in the three years it’s been reporting operating metrics. CNBC reports: The segment generated $191 million in operating income on $7.45 billion in revenue in the first quarter, according to Alphabet’s earnings statement. In the year-ago quarter, the unit reported a $706 million loss on $5.82 billion in revenue. The cloud business includes the Google Cloud Platform, which rents out cloud infrastructure and services that companies can use to build and run their own applications, as well as Google Workspace productivity software subscriptions. Cloud customers include Deutsche Bank, Major League Baseball, PayPal and UPS.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Google’s Cloud Business Turns Profitable For the First Time
While the world is still basking in the glory of the Barbie trailers that are out in the world, the stars and filmmakers took the stage at CinemaCon 2023 and made things even wilder. Co-writer and director Greta Gerwig was joined by stars Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, and America Ferrara to show new footage from this…
Source: Gizmodo – New Barbie Footage Reveals the Real World and a ‘Weird’ Barbie
ChatGPT introduced a new privacy feature on Tuesday to protect users’ information. The new feature will allow users to turn off their chat history and disable its ability to use their data to train and improve the AI models.
Source: Gizmodo – How to Hide Your Chats from ChatGPT’s Algorithm
Apple devices can already offer health insights, but they might soon tell you just how to improve. Bloombergsources claim Apple is developing an AI-based health coach, nicknamed Quartz, that draws on Apple Watch data to create personalized programs for exercise, diet and sleep. The offering will reportedly require a subscription and launch sometime in 2024, provided nothing changes.
In the near term, the Health app may become more useful. Apple is finally bringing Health to the iPad with this year’s iPadOS 17 release, the insiders say. A further update will supposedly help you track your mood by answering questions about your day. You may also use Health to manage vision issues like nearsightedness. A recent rumor also hinted that Apple may release a journaling app to help document your days, much like Day One.
Apple has already declined to comment. If the claims are accurate, you’ll most likely hear about all but the coach at WWDC on June 5th. The company is expected to unveil its long-expected mixed reality headset at the developer event, and rumors suggest the wearable may offer health-related features like a VR edition of Fitness+ and a meditation tool. This initial product would be aimed at developers and power users, but a more affordable follow-up is believed to be in the works.
A coaching app wouldn’t be shocking. Apple is still leaning heavily on services to improve its bottom line, and Quartz may be appealing to those who would otherwise pay for a human coach to rethink their habits. Apple has already made health a major selling point for its devices, particularly the Apple Watch. Of course, the coach could further entrench Apple users — you may be less likely to switch to Android if you have to give up your watch and digital trainer at the same time.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-is-reportedly-developing-an-ai-health-coach-for-apple-watch-212515646.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Apple is reportedly developing an AI health coach for Apple Watch
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Commission will require 19 large online platforms and search engines to comply with new online content regulations starting on August 25, European officials said. The EC specified which companies must comply with the rules for the first time, announcing today that it “adopted the first designation decisions under the Digital Services Act.” Five of the 19 platforms are run by Google, specifically YouTube, Google Search, the Google Play app and digital media store, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram are on the list, as are Amazon’s online store, Apple’s App Store, Microsoft’s Bing search engine, TikTok, Twitter, and Wikipedia. These platforms were designated because they each reported having over 45 million active users in the EU as of February 17. The other listed platforms are Alibaba AliExpress, Booking.com, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and German online retailer Zalando.
Companies have four months to comply with the full set of new obligations and could face fines of up to 6 percent of a provider’s annual revenue. One new rule is a ban on advertisements that target users based on sensitive data such as ethnic origin, political opinions, or sexual orientation. There are new content moderation requirements, transparency rules, and protections for minors. For example, “targeted advertising based on profiling towards children is no longer permitted,” the EC said. Companies will have to provide their first annual risk assessment on August 25, and their risk mitigation plans will be subject to independent audits and oversight by the European Commission. “Platforms will have to identify, analyze and mitigate a wide array of systemic risks ranging from how illegal content and disinformation can be amplified on their services, to the impact on the freedom of expression and media freedom,” the EC said. “Similarly, specific risks around gender-based violence online and the protection of minors online and their mental health must be assessed and mitigated.” The new requirements for the 19 platforms include:
– Users will get clear information on why they are recommended certain information and will have the right to opt-out from recommendation systems based on profiling;
– Users will be able to report illegal content easily and platforms have to process such reports diligently;
– Platforms need to label all ads and inform users on who is promoting them;
– Platforms need to provide an easily understandable, plain-language summary of their terms and conditions, in the languages of the Member States where they operate.
Platforms will be required to “analyze their specific risks, and put in place mitigation measures — for instance, to address the spread of disinformation and inauthentic use of their service,” the EC said. They will also “have to redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety to minors.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – EU Names 19 Large Tech Platforms That Must Follow Europe’s New Internet Rules
Following the recent review bombing of Horizon Forbidden West’s latest story DLC Burning Shores, review aggregator Metacritic has confirmed in a statement to Eurogamer that the site is “evolving [its] processes” to introduce tools that will create stricter moderation for abusive and disrespectful reviews.
Source: Kotaku – Metacritic Will Improve Moderation After Horizon Review Bombing
In the second half of Frank Herbert’s Dune, there’s a moment that changes everything: when Paul Atreides, the left-for-dead son of a Duke, finally proves himself to the Fremen, the native people of the planet Arrakis who have been protecting him and his mother.
Source: Gizmodo – First Dune: Part Two Footage Features Timothée Chalamet Riding a Sandworm
Enlarge (credit: OpenAI / Stable Diffusion)
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced new controls for ChatGPT users that allow them to turn off chat history, simultaneously opting out of providing that conversation history as data for training AI models. Also, users can now export chat history for local storage.
The new controls, which rolled out to all ChatGPT users today, can be found in ChatGPT settings. Conversations that begin with the chat history disabled won’t be used to train and improve the ChatGPT model, nor will they appear in the history sidebar. OpenAI will retain the conversations internally for 30 days and review them “only when needed to monitor for abuse” before permanently deleting them.
However, users who wish to opt out of providing data to OpenAI for training will lose the conversation history feature. It’s unclear why users cannot use conversation history while simultaneously opting out of model training.
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Source: Ars Technica – ChatGPT now allows disabling chat history, declining training, and exporting data
Magpie Aviation announced a novel new approach to electric airplanes on Monday. Today’s battery technology (including CATL’s new, more efficient one) severely limits the practicality of zero-emission aircraft, leaving clean-energy innovators with two incomplete options: flying a plane full of batteries or one full of people — but not both. So the California-based startup wants to tie them together, extending the rear plane’s range by hundreds of miles.
Towing planes isn’t a new concept, with military use going back to World War II when aerial tows would pull smaller aircraft carrying troops and supplies. But applying it to the world of green transportation is new. Magpie Aviation’s concept uses one or more electric aircraft to act as a tractor plane towing a passenger (or cargo) aircraft using a long cable. The towed plane would have enough battery power for takeoff, landing and flying to alternate airports but not enough to fly the full distance on its own, as reported byAeroTime.
The lead plane would take on the bulk of the traction, and when its battery is depleted, it could hand off towing duties to another electric towing aircraft to extend the rear plane’s range. Magpie CEO Damon Vander Lind summarized toAviation Week, “You get towed until you’ve depleted down to your reserve in the lead aircraft, and then you swap in another tow aircraft.” Although it’s still a regional solution impractical for cross-country or international flights, Vander Lind says it could allow for a trip from San Francisco to Seattle — far beyond the sub-regional distances battery-powered passenger flights can travel on their own.
Magpie says it’s conducted successful small-scale tests using a synthetic fiber rope around 330 ft. long; the company envisions a later commercial version to use nearly mile-long cables. The startup plans to scale up its testing gradually and believes it could be implemented commercially by 2030. It expects advances in battery tech to allow it to tow single-aisle airliners eventually. Magpie suggests that the concept, mainly targeting electric planes, could also work with hybrid, hydrogen and standard aircraft in low-power modes. Additionally, the company says it’s working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) with an eye toward certification.
“It sounds kind of crazy, but we kept coming back to it because we couldn’t find any reason why we couldn’t do it,” said Vander Lind. “While our modeling shows that there is an advantage to doing a custom tow aircraft like this, we get a big advantage because the more expensive and critical passenger- and cargo-carrying ‘main aircraft’ has similar requirements to today’s aircraft and so adapts well to existing in-operation and already-in-development platforms. Remember that if we want to hit a zero-carbon 2050 goal, an airliner has a 30-year life, so we’re already at the point where airlines have to think hard about the operating life of the assets that they are buying today.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/electric-airplane-towing-concept-could-mean-longer-zero-emission-flights-205023296.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Electric airplane towing concept could mean longer zero-emission flights
Microsoft’s Edge browser appears to be sending URLs you visit to its Bing API website. Reddit users first spotted the privacy issues with Edge last week, noticing that the latest version of Microsoft Edge sends a request to bingapis.com with the full URL of nearly every page you navigate to. Microsoft tells The Verge it’s investigating the reports. From a report: “Searching for references to this URL give very few results, no documentation on this feature at all,” said hackermchackface, the Reddit user who first discovered the issue. While Reddit users weren’t able to uncover why Microsoft Edge is sending the URLs you visit to its Bing API site, we asked Rafael Rivera, a software engineer and one of the developers behind EarTrumpet, to investigate, and he discovered it’s part of a poorly implemented new feature in Edge. “Microsoft Edge now has a creator follow feature that is enabled by default,” says Rivera in a conversation with The Verge. “It appears the intent was to notify Bing when you’re on certain pages, such as YouTube, The Verge, and Reddit. But it doesn’t appear to be working correctly, instead sending nearly every domain you visit to Bing.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Edge is Leaking the Sites You Visit To Bing
Upscaler is GUI GTK4 software that uses sophisticated AI models to enhance your images by guessing what the details could be. It’s free and open source software.
Source: LXer – Machine Learning in Linux: Upscaler – upscale and enhance images
If you’re one of the many thousands of customers from bankrupt crypto company Voyager Digital, you’re going to have to wait even longer to see your locked funds as hopes for a Binance.US buyout have been squashed flat.
Source: Gizmodo – Binance.US Says It’s No Longer Interested in Buying Voyager
From Republican smear campaigns against Biden to a collaboration between The Weeknd and Drake going viral, it feels like AI is coming for every part of our lives. Now, it appears that some products on Amazon are being reviewed with AI chatbots.
Source: Gizmodo – AI-Generated Amazon Reviews Are Beginning to Spread
It should now be easier to deduce whether Twitter has restricted the visibility of a tweet over a possible violation of the company’s hateful conduct policy. Twitter has started applying a label to tweets that it believes breaks those rules, as it recently pledged to do.
When Twitter detects a tweet that may violate the policy, it will limit the reach of the post and apply a label that reads “Visibility limited: this tweet may violate Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct.” The company plans to expand the labels to include more types of policy violations in the coming months.
🚫Censorship
🚫Shadowbanning
✅Freedom of speech, not reach.Our new labels are now live. https://t.co/a0nTyPSZWY
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) April 24, 2023
Twitter says it may limit the visibility of rulebreaking tweets by excluding them from search results, as well as from the For You and Following timelines. Such tweets may be downranked in replies and it may not be possibly to reply to them, retweet them, bookmark them or pin them to profiles.
Twitter noted that it may incorrectly label a tweet as one that violates its rules, so the authors of such tweets can effectively appeal the decision by providing feedback. However, the company said it may not acknowledge the feedback or restore the tweet’s typical reach.
The company is taking a looser approach to moderation under current owner Elon Musk as it has adopted a “Freedom of Speech, not Freedom of Reach” philosophy. For instance, it quietly updated the hateful conduct policy this month to lift a ban on misgendering and deadnaming transgender people.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitter-starts-putting-labels-on-tweets-with-restricted-reach-201509292.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Twitter starts putting labels on tweets with restricted reach
Nima Momeni, the suspect accused of stabbing Cash App founder Bob Lee to death on April 4, will plead not guilty to murder, according to multiple reports. Momeni’s lawyer, Paula Canny, told journalists outside the San Francisco state court on Tuesday that, in the defense’s view, a premeditated murder charge isn’t…
Source: Gizmodo – Cash App Founder’s Accused Killer Will Plead Not Guilty, Lawyer Says
In case you missed it, conservatives deeply care about whales and the oceans now.
Source: Gizmodo – Don’t Fall for the New GOP Environmentalism
More than half the public would like to see a ban on gambling advertising, according to a new poll taken as ministers prepare to unveil an overhaul of the industry. In the survey, carried out for the charity Gambling with Lives, 52% of respondents said they supported a ban on all gambling advertising, promotion and sponsorship, and nearly two-thirds wanted new limits on online stakes. From a report: Ministers are expected to reject a blanket ban on gambling advertising in a white paper that could be published this week. The Premier League recently announced that its clubs would end shirt sponsorship by gambling firms by the end of the 2025/26 season.
Will Prochaska of Gambling with Lives, which supports families bereaved by gambling-related suicide, said: “This poll displays the strength of public sentiment on gambling advertising. The Premier League’s decision to remove ads from shirts but leave them all over stadiums and across broadcasts, is a cynical attempt to avoid regulation. This data shows the public won’t be tricked into thinking it’s enough. If gambling reforms fail to significantly restrict gambling advertising, they’ll be woefully out of step with a public that expects action.” The Survation poll of 1,009 adults found that 68% of respondents thought under-18s should not be exposed to gambling advertising, 64% supported affordability checks for those wanting to bet more than $124 a month, and 60% saw gambling as a danger to family life.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Ban All Gambling Adverts, Say More Than Half of Britons
