Apple is really excited to share its next steps into augmented reality tech at this year’s WWDC, so much so that it’s released a teaser of its ‘AR experience’ to iPhones and iPads. We hope the company’s rumored headset is a bit more exciting than this.
Source: Gizmodo – Apple’s Corny ‘AR Experience’ All But Confirms We’ll See Its Rumored Headset At WWDC
Google has promoted Chrome 114 to stable across Linux, Windows, and macOS…
Source: Phoronix – Chrome 114 Released With CHIPS, Popover API
Enlarge / Inside the Steve Jobs Theater building at Apple’s headquarters. (credit: Samuel Axon)
Apple’s 2023 Worldwide Developer Conference is just a few days away—it kicks off with a keynote on Monday, June 5. That keynote will be livestreamed (we’ll liveblog it, too), and it’s expected to be a doozy.
The WWDC keynote isn’t always the most exciting for non-developers, as it usually focuses on iOS updates rather than exciting new hardware. There have been exceptions, though, and next week’s event will surely be one of them. Apple is expected to finally unveil its rumored mixed reality headset, which has taken a long and winding path to market.
That will be the main focus, but there will be interesting new developments on the iPhone, Mac, and Watch. Here’s what to expect from the WWDC keynote next week.
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Source: Ars Technica – What to expect at WWDC 2023: Reality Pro, iOS 17, and new MacBooks
Last week, Daedalic Entertainment, the developers of the stealth adventure J.R.R. Tolkien video game The Lord of The Rings: Gollum, posted an apology for the game failing to “meet the expectations” of players and devs alike. Although Gollum being one of the worst-rated games of 2023 on Metacritic is a tough L to hold,…
Source: Kotaku – Game Developers Open Up About The ‘Worst’ Games They Worked On
Do you love hitting the green with your golf clubs but hate when rainy days or an overloaded schedule get in the way of your games? You might be interested in the TruGolf Mini Golf Simulator, which aims to recreate the golfing experience right in your home, and with far more realism that a video game.
Source: LifeHacker – This At-Home Golf Simulator Is 20% Off Right Now
Celebrity voices are disappearing from Amazon’s Alexa including the widely popular voices of Shaquille O’Neal, Melissa McCarthy, and Samuel L. Jackson. Amazon jumpstarted the feature with Jackson in 2019, offering the option for consumers to download the actor’s voice for just .99 cents, but recently increased the…
Source: Gizmodo – These Celebrity Voices Are Disappearing From Amazon’s Alexa
Even lawyers aren’t big fans of legal jargon. A new study has found that lawyers have an easier time remembering legal documents written in simple English over those filled with so-called legalese. They also seem to prefer the simpler version for themselves and their clients.
Source: Gizmodo – Lawyers Hate Legal Jargon, Too
Far-right activists have taken a shotgun approach to their supposed “anti-woke” crusade, and now some of that buckshot shrapnel has hit favored brand among religious conservatives, Chick-Fil-A. The chicken sandwich chain has come under fire for daring to have a page and executive dedicated to diverse hiring programs,…
Source: Gizmodo – Right-Wingers Consider Fully Canceling Their Once-Holy Chick-Fil-A
Universal Pictures’ upcoming live-action remake of Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon animated franchise has found its leading actors.
Source: Gizmodo – How to Train Your Dragon Live-Action Adds Mason Thames and Nico Parker
A database containing the details of almost half-a-million RaidForums users has leaked online, a year after the U.S. Department of Justice seized the notorious cybercrime forum. From a report: The leaked database was posted on Exposed, described by security researchers as an up-and-coming forum “wanting to fill the void” left by the recent BreachForums shutdown. An Exposed admin, known as “Impotent,” posted the alleged RaidForums user data, which includes the details of 478,000 users, including their usernames, email addresses, hashed passwords and registration dates. “All of the users that were on raidforums may have been infected,” the admin’s post says. RaidForums had around 550,000 users at the time of its shutdown last year. The admin added that some users’ details have been removed from the leak, though it’s unclear how many or the reasoning behind this.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – RaidForums User Data Leaked Online a Year After DOJ Takedown
The PlayStation 5 released in November of 2020. That’s two and a half years ago at this point, and yet the number of games exclusive to the system can nearly be counted on your hands. Indeed, this phenomenon has become a meme among certain segments of the internet, and there’s no shortage of comical send-ups of the nascent console’s minuscule
Source: Hot Hardware – PS5 Exclusive Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Is Making Its Way To PC Via Steam
The Webb Space Telescope’s latest subject is a wet one: a gigantic plume of water vapor spewing from Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Source: Gizmodo – Webb Telescope Spots a Plume of Unusual Size Spewing From Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
We here at Lifehacker advise against nickel-and-diming your friends and family. A better mindset is to think, “Hey, you get me this drink, I’ll get the next one, right?” But unfortunately, a casual approach to money only works when everyone holds up their end of the bargain. It falls apart when one friend is a…
Source: LifeHacker – What to Say to Your Freeloading Friend
An overview of Arm’s new chips. [credit:
Arm ]
Over the weekend, Arm showed off its vision for the next generation of flagship CPUs. As usual, these designs include CPUs in various sizes for different workloads. The ‘big’ chip this year is the Arm Cortex X4, the ‘medium’ chip is the Cortex A720, and the ‘small’ chip is the Cortex A520. The new chips should arrive in Android phones and Windows laptops in 2024.
Arm claims the big Cortex X3 chip will have 15 percent higher performance than this year’s X3 chip, and “40 percent better power efficiency.” The company also promises a 20 percent efficiency boost for the A700 series and a 22 percent efficiency boost for the A500.
The new chips are all built on the new ‘Armv9.2’ architecture, which adds a “new QARMA3 algorithm” for Arm’s Pointer Authentication memory security feature. Pointer authentication assigns a cryptographic signature to memory pointers and is meant to shut down memory corruption vulnerabilities like buffer overflows by making it harder for unauthenticated programs to create valid memory pointers. This feature has been around for a while, but Arm’s new algorithm reduces the CPU overhead of all this extra memory work to just 1 percent of the chip’s power, which hopefully will get more manufacturers to enable it.
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Source: Ars Technica – Arm announces the Cortex X4 for 2024, plus a 14-core M2-fighter
What complaints you had about the Pixel Watch’s battery life might disappear with its sequel. Sources speaking to 9to5Google claim the Pixel Watch 2 will switch from Samsung’s 2018-era Exynos 9110 to one of Qualcomm’s much newer Snapdragon W5 models. Although the battery in the new smartwatch isn’t supposed to be significantly bigger, the longevity is supposed to be much-improved — reportedly, it can last over a day with the always-on display enabled where that simply wasn’t possible before.
The Pixel Watch 2 is also said to use the same health sensors as the Fitbit Sense 2. That could introduce ways to measure stress (that is, electrodermal activity) and skin temperature. Many other details remain a mystery, but it won’t be surprising if the new model is one of the first devices to run Wear OS 4. The new platform should boost performance, add backup support and increase accessibility.
A previous rumor hinted the Pixel Watch will debut 2 alongside the Pixel 8 this fall. If the wristwear does use Snapdragon hardware, it’ll represent an unusual twist. Google has so far leaned heavily on Samsung-based chips for recent mobile devices, including the Tensor G2 found in phones as recent as the Pixel 7a. This suggests Google is willing to break with recent tradition in the name of a better product.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-pixel-watch-2-will-reportedly-have-significantly-improved-battery-life-201057558.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Google’s Pixel Watch 2 will reportedly have significantly improved battery life
It feels like Overwatch 2 is gayer than it’s ever been. First Lifeweaver was revealed as the series’ first pansexual hero, then dialogue seemed to hint that Baptiste was also queer. Now, a Pride event has confirmed that Baptiste is indeed, queer, and veteran hero Pharah is also a member of the alphabet army.
Source: Kotaku – Overwatch 2’s Pride Event Shows Blizzard’s Trying To Do Better By Its Queer Community
CERN: The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 marked a significant milestone in particle physics. Since then, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations have been diligently investigating the properties of this unique particle and searching to establish the different ways in which it is produced and decays into other particles. At the Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP) conference last week, ATLAS and CMS report how they teamed up to find the first evidence of the rare process in which the Higgs boson decays into a Z boson, the electrically neutral carrier of the weak force, and a photon, the carrier of the electromagnetic force. This Higgs boson decay could provide indirect evidence of the existence of particles beyond those predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.
The decay of the Higgs boson into a Z boson and a photon is similar to that of a decay into two photons. In these processes, the Higgs boson does not decay directly into these pairs of particles. Instead, the decays proceed via an intermediate “loop” of “virtual” particles that pop in and out of existence and cannot be directly detected. These virtual particles could include new, as yet undiscovered particles that interact with the Higgs boson. The Standard Model predicts that, if the Higgs boson has a mass of around 125 billion electronvolts, approximately 0.15% of Higgs bosons will decay into a Z boson and a photon. But some theories that extend the Standard Model predict a different decay rate. Measuring the decay rate therefore provides valuable insights into both physics beyond the Standard Model and the nature of the Higgs boson.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – LHC Experiments See First Evidence of a Rare Higgs Boson Decay
Keeping your files stored locally is convenient, but it comes with obvious risk and the frustration of low-storage warnings. Degoo was founded in 2012 and has since grown as a reliable option for cloud backup services, and you have until May 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT to get Degoo’s Premium lifetime 10TB Backup Plan for only…
Source: LifeHacker – This 10TB Lifetime Cloud Backup Is Over 90% Off Right Now
When we reviewed the Pixel Watch back in October, we genuinely liked Google’s first Android smartwatch, and found it to be a solid choice for those not already deep into Samsung’s eco-system. One thing we weren’t so keen on was the Pixel Watch’s disappointing battery life, but if leaked details turn out to be correct,…
Source: Gizmodo – New Pixel Watch 2 Processor Boosts Battery in a Big Way, Leaked Specs Suggest
As AI-generated images and video become more prominent on Twitter, the company is testing out a new feature that could make it easier for people to identify potentially “misleading media.” The company is experimenting with Community Notes for media, which will apply the site’s crowd-sourced fact checks to specific photos and video clips.
The feature allows for Community Notes contributors who have high enough ratings to apply notes to images shared within tweets. Like notes on tweets, the labels could add additional “context” to images, like indicating if a photo was created using generative AI or is otherwise manipulated.
From AI-generated images to manipulated videos, it’s common to come across misleading media. Today we’re piloting a feature that puts a superpower into contributors’ hands: Notes on Media
Notes attached to an image will automatically appear on recent & future matching images. pic.twitter.com/89mxYU2Kir
— Community Notes (@CommunityNotes) May 30, 2023
The feature could also address the viral spread of such photos. According to Twitter, the goal is for notes to automatically appear on “recent and future” copies of the same image even if they are shared by separate users in new tweets. However, Twitter notes that it will take some time to perfect its image matching. “It’s currently intended to err on the side of precision when matching images, which means it likely won’t match every image that looks like a match to you,” the company shared. “We will work to tune this to expand coverage while avoiding erroneous matches.”
It’s also worth pointing out that Community Notes’ track record is far from perfect. While the feature can sometimes result in nuanced fact checks or debunks of false claims, Community Note contributors themselves have pointed out that the feature “is not impervious to errors or perpetuating common misconceptions.”
For now, Twitter is testing out notes for media for tweets with a single image only, but the company says it plans to expand the feature to tweets with multiple images and videos in the future. Twitter isn’t the only platform grappling with how the rise of generative and AI and the spread of misinformation. Google also recently introduced features that will help users track an image’s history in search, which could help searchers intuit whether or not a photo was faked.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitter-is-testing-community-notes-for-images-194609173.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Twitter is testing Community Notes for images
