Social media might be addictive, but it turns out quitting is complicated. A study out Wednesday from the UK’s Durham University asked 51 moderate to heavy social media users to stay off the apps for one week. Participants had a decrease in negative emotions and feelings including boredom, but they reported a drop in…
Source: Gizmodo – Keep Scrolling: Social Media Detox May Not Improve Mental Health
Nintendo announced on November 7 that it has been quietly laboring on the first-ever live-action The Legend of Zelda movie, and fans’ minds detonated with the implications. The movie, which game director Shigeru Miyamoto said has been in the works “for many years now,” is being made alongside former Marvel Studios CEO…
Source: Kotaku – Our Picks For Link, Ganon, And More In The Live-Action Zelda Movie
While there is no magic number of credit cards to hold in your name, I’ve repeatedly recommended trying to balance at least two or three of them to give your personal finances a boost. The advice to juggle multiple credit cards won’t work for everyone, though—after all, using a credit card comes with inherent risk—and…
Source: LifeHacker – Here’s When It’s Smart to Have Just One Credit Card
Blizzard President Mike Ybarra says that gamers lack patience and have unrealistic expections when it comes to new content. However, while Ybarra says he is unsure how things will change for the company following Microsoft’s acquisition, he is confident that it is the start of a “new era’ for Blizzard.
In a new interview, Ybarra commented
Source: Hot Hardware – Blizzard Boss Says Gamers Have No Patience And Want New Content Every Hour
Enlarge / I’m just so good at this game, it would be disheartening for you to see my progress in your feed. Yep, that’s it. (credit: Getty Images)
Steam has long sought to strike the right balance between convenience, community, and private refuge. Until recently, sharing your gaming history was either public, exclusive to your friends, or turned off entirely. A screenshot from a noted Steam watcher suggests that a “Mark as Private” option could be coming for individual games that you’re not keen on anyone, including friends, knowing you’ve put some time into.
Posting on X (formerly Twitter), Pavel Djundik, creator of the Steam insight tool SteamDB, shows options on the three-dot menu to the right of a game, with the last being “Mark as Private.” A tooltip on the option reads, “Mark this game as private and hide it from my friends.” Djundik’s example is Counter-Strike 2, which, perhaps in some circles, is a game worth hiding.
Tweet (Xeet?) from the SteamDB founder, pointing to a not-yet-public feature in Steam for hiding certain games from public or friends’ profiles. (credit: X / Pavel Djundik)
Some folks may be concerned to show the massive hour counts they’ve put into certain games. Others might be concerned about certain obsessive or ignoble achievements in games standing out in their timeline. More likely, of course, are the kinds of adult and fetish games with which Steam has a highly confusing relationship. The replies to Djundik’s tweet suggest that people get this, though they also have some suggestions about other refinements, like finer-grained friend management tools.
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Source: Ars Technica – Steam might let you hide those embarrassing games in your profile soon
Enlarge / One of the first galaxies that Euclid observed is nicknamed the “Hidden Galaxy.” This galaxy, also known as IC 342 or Caldwell 5, is difficult to observe because it lies behind the busy disk of our Milky Way. (credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi)
The European Space Agency released the first five science images from the Euclid space telescope Tuesday, showing how the wide-angle observatory will survey familiar cosmic wonders like galaxies and stars to study the unseen dark energy and dark matter that dominate the Universe.
Stationed nearly a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, Euclid will scan one-third of the sky over the next six years, collecting an estimated 1 million images of billions of galaxies. Scientists have developed sophisticated algorithms to analyze the data coming down from Euclid to measure the distances and shapes of each of these galaxies.
From that, scientists can infer how the influence of dark matter pulls on the galaxies, forming clusters and causing them to spin faster. Dark energy is the mysterious force that is driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe.
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Source: Ars Technica – Scientists show off the wide vision of Europe’s Euclid space telescope
Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company owned by General Motors, has issued a recall for 950 of its robotaxis following a collision with a pedestrian in San Francisco last month, as originally reported by NBC. This move comes after California revoked the company’s driverless permits, requiring a human on-board at all times.
The collision that started all of this occurred on October 2 when a pedestrian was thrown into the path of a Cruise robotaxi after being hit by a human driver. The robotaxi tried to brake aggressively and pull over to the side of the road, but ended up dragging the pedestrian 20 feet before finally stopping.
This triggered a federal probe and several independent investigations into the company, which dredged up some unsavory data. For instance, reports indicate that Cruise’s algorithm had real trouble identifying children. The data also suggests that Cruise knew about this incredibly dangerous blind spot but still kept its vehicles on the streets.
Internal safety documents acquired by The Intercept state that “Cruise AVs may not exercise additional care around children,” and that the robotaxis may “need the ability to distinguish children from adults so we can display additional caution around.” The company responded by touting its safety features, writing in a statement that it has “the lowest risk tolerance for contact with children.”
All of that’s moot now, as Cruise’s robotaxis are being recalled. GM and Cruise have not issued statements as to when and if the cars would return to the streets. GM did announce, however, that it has already lost $1.9 billion on the venture through September of this year, as reported by CNBC.
Rival companies like Google-owned Waymo are still operating driverless vehicles in California and beyond. As a matter of fact, the company just doubled the service area for its robotaxis in San Francisco and Phoenix.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gm-recalls-nearly-1000-cruise-robotaxis-after-pedestrian-collision-183049933.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – GM recalls nearly 1,000 Cruise robotaxis after pedestrian collision
Rick and Morty’s currently in its seventh season, but it was much earlier in the Adult Swim show’s run that people started realizing how involved its fan base really was—remember 2017’s Szechuan sauce kerfluffle?
Source: Gizmodo – Rick and Morty’s Dan Harmon on the Adult Swim Show’s Outspoken Fan Base
SheetMagic integrates ChatGPT with Google Sheets, and you can get a lifetime subscription on sale for $48.99 right now (reg. $299). It uses your existing OpenAI account, whether you have the free or paid version.
Source: LifeHacker – You Can Get SheetsMagic for Right Now and Integrate ChatGPT With Google Sheets
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Highly invasive malware targeting software developers is once again circulating in Trojanized code libraries, with the latest ones downloaded thousands of times in the last eight months, researchers said Wednesday.
Since January, eight separate developer tools have contained hidden payloads with various nefarious capabilities, security firm Checkmarx reported. The most recent one was released last month under the name “pyobfgood.” Like the seven packages that preceded it, pyobfgood posed as a legitimate obfuscation tool that developers could use to deter reverse engineering and tampering with their code. Once executed, it installed a payload, giving the attacker almost complete control of the developer’s machine. Capabilities include:
In all, pyobfgood and the previous seven tools were installed 2,348 times. They targeted developers using the Python programming language. As obfuscators, the tools targeted Python developers with reason to keep their code secret because it had hidden capabilities, trade secrets, or otherwise sensitive functions. The malicious payloads varied from tool to tool, but they all were remarkable for their level of intrusiveness.
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Source: Ars Technica – Highly invasive backdoor snuck into open source packages targets developers
A group of Google employees has published an open letter on Medium calling out an alleged double standard in the company related to freedom of expression surrounding the Israel-Palestine war. The essay condemns “hate, abuse and retaliation” within the company against Muslim, Arab and Palestinian workers. The employees who penned the letter, which doesn’t include specific names out of fear of retaliation, demand that CEO Sundar Pichai, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and other senior leaders publicly condemn “the ongoing genocide in the strongest possible terms.” In addition, they urge the company to cancel Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion deal to supply AI and other advanced tech to the Israeli military.
“We are Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab Google employees joined by anti-Zionist Jewish colleagues,” the letter opens. “We cannot remain silent in the face of the hate, abuse, and retaliation that we are being subjected to in the workplace in this moment.”
The letter cites specific examples of emotionally charged and inappropriate workplace behavior. These include unnamed Googlers accusing Palestinians of supporting terrorism, committing “slander against the Prophet Muhammad,” and publicly calling Palestinians “animals” on official Google work platforms. The group describes leadership as “standing idly by” in the latter two cases, and it says Google managers have called employees “sick” and “a lost cause” for expressing empathy toward Gaza residents.
The employees say Google managers have publicly asked Arab and Muslim people in the company if they support Hamas as a response to their concern for Palestinian families. “There are even coordinated efforts to stalk the public lives of workers sympathetic to Palestine and to report them both to Google and law enforcement for ‘supporting terrorism,’” the letter reads.
Other examples cited include “heartfelt appeals” to donate to a charity for Gaza citizens being “met with multiple comments dehumanizing Gazans as being ‘animals,’ disregarding their plight and calling upon Googlers to boycott relief work for civilians due to the fact that Palestinian schools and hospitals were being used for ‘terrorism.’” The letter also accuses Google managers of using their rank to “question, report, and attempt to get fired Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Googlers who express sympathy with the plight of the besieged Palestinian people.” It describes one manager endorsing “surveillance of Google employees on social media,” and then openly harassing them on Google work platforms.
“You have to be very, very, very careful, because any sort of criticism toward the Israeli state can be easily taken as antisemitism,” Sarmad Gilani, a Google software engineer who took part in the letter, said in an interview with The New York Times. “It feels like I have to condemn Hamas 10 times before saying one tiny, tiny thing criticizing Israel.”
Engadget contacted Google for a comment but didn’t immediately receive a response. We will update this article if we hear back.
The tensions inflamed in the last month by the Israel-Palestine war have resurfaced resentments about Google’s involvement in Project Nimbus. In 2021, Google and Amazon workers penned a similar open letter calling on their companies to pull out of the deal, which they said would enable surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians. Today’s letter echoes that sentiment. “We demand that Google stop providing material support to this genocide by canceling its Project Nimbus contract and immediately cease doing business with the Israeli apartheid government and military,” it reads.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-workers-publish-letter-criticizing-companys-israel-palestine-double-standard-181516404.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Google workers publish letter criticizing company’s Israel-Palestine ‘double standard’
Enlarge / Students decide between Lunchables and a walking taco during lunch at Pembroke Elementary School on Thursday September 7, 2023, in Pembroke, NC. (credit: Getty | Matt McClain)
For the first time, health experts who develop the federal government’s dietary guidelines for Americans are reviewing the effects of ultra-processed foods on the country’s health—a review that could potentially lead to first-of-their-kind warnings or suggested limits in the upcoming 2025 guidance, The Washington Post reports.
Such warning or limits would mark the first time that Americans would be advised to consider not just the basic nutritional components of foods, but also how their foods are processed.
Ultra-processed foods have garnered considerable negative attention in recent years. Dozens of observational studies have linked the food category to weight gain, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases, the Post notes. A small but landmark randomized controlled study in 2019, led by the National Institutes of Health’s nutrition expert, Kevin Hall, found that when inpatient trial participants received diets with ultra-processed foods, they ate roughly 500 extra calories a day compared to a control group of inpatient participants who were served a diet that was matched in macronutrients but did not include ultra-processed foods.
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Source: Ars Technica – Americans may soon get warnings about ultra-processed foods: Report
Enlarge / How’s about we just forget about those plans for a competing Android app store? (credit: Getty Images | krisanapong detraphiphat)
For years now, Google has stressed the “open” nature of the Android’s sideloading-enabled mobile platform over Apple’s completely locked-down iOS App Store. But Epic has used the opening days of its jury trial against Google to argue that this technical openness hasn’t prevented Google from creating an effective monopoly over Android app distribution through its Google Play Store.
In its opening statement (as reported by multiple sources inside the San Francisco federal courtroom), Epic attorney Gary Bornstein pointed out that the Google Play Store is responsible for 90 percent of all Android app downloads, resulting in $12 billion in profit for Google. And Epic argues that Google has maintained that dominance through a “bribe and block” strategy that “pays actual and potential competitors not to compete—literally gives them money and other things of value.”
Epic’s opening arguments specifically called out League of Legends maker Riot Games as one of the companies that Google paid to eliminate the possible launch of a competing Android app store. While Epic says Google was smart enough not to note this payment in written contractual language, a less formal system helped ensure Riot was one of many companies that would “sit this one out and let [Google] win.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Epic lays out Google’s alleged “bribe and block” monopoly strategy in trial opening
Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), which currently provides generative AI summaries at the top of the search results page for select users, is about to be much more available. Just six months after its debut at I/O 2023, the company announced Wednesday that SGE is expanding to Search Labs users in 120 countries and territories, gaining support for four additional languages and receiving a handful of helpful new features.
Unlike its frenetic rollout of the Bard chatbot in March, Google has taken a slightly more measured tone in distributing its AI search assistant. The company began with English language searches in the US in May, expanded to English-language users in India and Japan in August and on to teen users in September. As of Wednesday, users from Brazil to Bhutan can give the feature a try. In addition to English, SGE now supports Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Indonesian (in addition to the existing English, Hindi and Japanese) so you’ll be able to search and converse with the assistant in natural language, whichever form it might take. These features arrive on Chrome desktop Wednesday with the Search Labs for Android app versions slowly rolling out over the coming week.
Among SGE’s new features is an improved follow-up function where users can ask additional questions of the assistant directly on the search results page. Like a mini-Bard window tucked into the generated summary, the new feature enables users to drill down on a subject without leaving the results page or even needing to type their queries out. Google will reportedly restrict ads to specific, denoted, areas of the page so as to avoid confusion between them and the generated content. Users can expect follow-ups to start showing up in the coming weeks. They’re only for English language users in the US to start but will likely expand as Google continues to iterate the technology.
SGE will start helping with clarifying ambiguous translation terms as well. For example, if you’re trying to translate “Is there a tie?” into Spanish, both the output, the gender and speaker’s intention are going to change if you’re talking about a tie, as in a draw between two competitors (e.g. “un empate”) and for the tie you wear around your neck (“una corbata”). This new feature will automatically recognize such words and highlight them for you to click on, which pops up a window asking you to pick between the two versions. This is going to be super helpful with languages that, say, think of cars as boys but bicycles as girls, and you need to specify the version you’re intending. Luckily, Spanish is one of those languages and this capability is coming first to US users for English-to-Spanish translations.
Finally, Google plans to expand its interactive definitions normally found in the generated summaries for educational topics like science, history or economics to coding and health related searches as well. This update should arrive within the next month, again, first for English language users in the US before spreading to more territories in the coming months.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-ai-powered-search-feature-goes-global-with-a-120-country-expansion-180028037.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Google’s AI-powered search feature goes global with a 120-country expansion
Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), which currently provides generative AI summaries at the top of the search results page for select users, is about to be much more available. Just six months after its debut at I/O 2023, the company announced Wednesday that SGE is expanding to Search Labs users in 120 countries and territories, gaining support for four additional languages and receiving a handful of helpful new features.
Unlike its frenetic rollout of the Bard chatbot in March, Google has taken a slightly more measured tone in distributing its AI search assistant. The company began with English language searches in the US in May, expanded to English-language users in India and Japan in August and on to teen users in September. As of Wednesday, users from Brazil to Bhutan can give the feature a try. In addition to English, SGE now supports Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Indonesian (in addition to the existing English, Hindi and Japanese) so you’ll be able to search and converse with the assistant in natural language, whichever form it might take. These features arrive on Chrome desktop Wednesday with the Search Labs for Android app versions slowly rolling out over the coming week.
Among SGE’s new features is an improved follow-up function where users can ask additional questions of the assistant directly on the search results page. Like a mini-Bard window tucked into the generated summary, the new feature enables users to drill down on a subject without leaving the results page or even needing to type their queries out. Google will reportedly restrict ads to specific, denoted, areas of the page so as to avoid confusion between them and the generated content. Users can expect follow-ups to start showing up in the coming weeks. They’re only for English language users in the US to start but will likely expand as Google continues to iterate the technology.
SGE will start helping with clarifying ambiguous translation terms as well. For example, if you’re trying to translate “Is there a tie?” into Spanish, both the output, the gender and speaker’s intention are going to change if you’re talking about a tie, as in a draw between two competitors (e.g. “un empate”) and for the tie you wear around your neck (“una corbata”). This new feature will automatically recognize such words and highlight them for you to click on, which pops up a window asking you to pick between the two versions. This is going to be super helpful with languages that, say, think of cars as boys but bicycles as girls, and you need to specify the version you’re intending. Luckily, Spanish is one of those languages and this capability is coming first to US users for English-to-Spanish translations.
Finally, Google plans to expand its interactive definitions normally found in the generated summaries for educational topics like science, history or economics to coding and health related searches as well. This update should arrive within the next month, again, first for English language users in the US before spreading to more territories in the coming months.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-ai-empowered-search-feature-goes-global-with-expansion-to-120-countries-180028084.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Google’s AI-empowered search feature goes global with expansion to 120 countries
In this tutorial, learn how to configure network bonding in Linux for redundancy and performance using Netplan and nmcli commands.
The post A Step-by-Step Guide to Configuring Network Bonding in Linux for High Availability appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – A Step-by-Step Guide to Configuring Network Bonding in Linux for High Availability
Did you know you can send documents to your printer straight from your iPhone? I didn’t, until I was frustrated by needing to print a single page and sought some answers. It turns out that it’s really easy, as all iPhones come with something called AirPrint. You can do it without AirPrint, too, but we’ll get to that.
Source: LifeHacker – How to Print Documents From Your iPhone
Enlarge / A non-Amazon TV displaying a fire. (credit: Getty)
People who buy a Fire TV from Amazon are probably looking for a cheap and simple way to get an affordable 4K smart TV. When Amazon announced its first self-branded TVs in September 2021, it touted them as being a “great value.” But owners of the devices will soon be paying for some of those savings in the form of more prominently displayed advertisements.
Charlotte Maines, Amazon’s director of Fire TV advertising, monetization, and engagement, detailed the new types of ads that Amazon is selling on Fire TVs. In a StreamTV Insider report from November 1, Amazon said the new ads will allow advertisers to reach an average of 155 million unique monthly viewers.
Some of the changes targeting advertisers, like connecting display placement ads with specific in-stream video ads, seem harmless enough. Others could jeopardize the TV-watching experience for owners.
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Source: Ars Technica – After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
Google is testing a new feature on YouTube and, stop us if you’ve heard this one before, it’s based on generative AI. Advanced machine learning algorithms and large language models are popping up in numerous products from Google, Microsoft, and almost every other tech company under the sun. This time, Google is leveraging a sometimes-accurate
Source: Hot Hardware – YouTube Is Testing Generative AI To Answer Questions And Weed Through Comments
Though Halo Infinite might be drawing folks back with its expanding map diversity and new customization options, the in-game cosmetics shop is still rubbing fans the wrong way. A recent skin intended to be a tribute to the very first Halo game, 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved, is drawing a bit of attention not for its…
Source: Kotaku – You Should Buy The OG Halo Instead Of The Pricey Infinite Skin
