Because evolution is just an r short of revolution (I don’t know I’m just spitballing here), this is a video featuring a brief evolutionary history of Theo Jansen’s wind-powered Strandbeests, culminating in footage of his most recent species. Do, uh, do these things mate? And do you think they’ll ever evolve past needing wind for power? Because if they dip their toes in the surf long enough next thing you know they’ll be harnessing water power! Then they’re just earth, fire, and heart away from summoning Captain Planet.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll come back to a book or TV show after pausing it for a few days or weeks, only to have to spend hours on a wiki reminding yourself of where you left off, while also trying to dodge spoilers. Spotify is doing its best to fix at least one of those problems, by testing AI recaps for some of its audiobooks.

It’s the first new AI-powered feature in a while that I would actually use. In fact, I’ve played a few video games with similar features (not powered by AI, admittedly), and it’s always such a value-add that it makes me pine for it in pretty much every other piece of media I engage with.

Here’s how Spotify’s new feature works: First, you unfortunately do need to be using the Spotify app for iOS, so Android, web, or desktop listeners are out of luck, at least during this beta test. Then, you’ll need to have listened to a supported English language audiobook for at least 15-20 minutes. After that, you’ll see a Recap button at the top of the page that will quickly generate a one- to two-minute-long summary of what’s happened in the book so far, which Spotify promises will be spoiler-free for future plot events.

Credit: Spotify

Previously on [your book]

Spotify’s likening it to a “previously on” segment on a TV show, although it also says that, “Recaps do not replicate narration or replace the original audiobook in any way,” so don’t expect to hear actual clips from the book, nor an AI voice trying to mimic the narrator. However, just as TV’s “previously on” segments will change with new episodes, your AI Recap will be “regularly updated to match your progress.”

As for any potential issues with the feature, the company says it is “not using audiobook content for LLM training purposes or voice generation” and that authors can opt out of having Recaps on their books. Still, there are a few caveats, including the fact that the Recap feature isn’t free.

On the plus side, it is included alongside the free audiobook hours you get with Spotify Premium, as well as any add-on hours you might buy. But otherwise, audiobooks on Spotify need to be bought on a per-book basis, so for users without Spotify Premium and with no audiobooks in their libraries (that’s me), there’s no way to try AI Recaps before you buy, which means it’s maybe not a convincing reason to swap audiobook platforms just yet.

Not all books will get Recaps

Spotify’s also not being upfront about which books have Recaps, so it could be a bit before you see the button pop up for you. So while I like the idea in theory, I’m probably not going to get to test it anytime soon. (I’ve reached out to Spotify to ask for a current list of books with Recaps enabled, and will update this article when I hear back.)

Could Recaps include hallucinations?

Another potential issue with these Recaps: hallucinations. Spotify didn’t address accuracy at all in its announcement, which I’d like to think implies the company is feeling pretty confident it won’t be an issue. But there is still a potential for an AI to misreport specific details of your story, or accidentally slip a spoiler in regardless of what Spotify claims. One would hope your memory would be jogged enough by a general outline to catch inconsistencies, but still, it might be worth keeping a few notes while you read, just in case.

How to get AI summaries for any book (without using Spotify)

If you aren’t a Spotify audiobook listener or just haven’t gotten to try the beta, I’ll give you a cheat: You can already ask other AI chatbots for book summaries for free. So long as you remember where you left off, just head over to your AI of choice and ask for a summary up to that point. Here’s one for the opening chapters of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt (via ChatGPT)

I won’t deny that there’s real convenience in having a summary feature baked directly into your app, especially one that doesn’t require you to cross reference where you left off lest you, I don’t know, spoil the Red Wedding for yourself or something. But if you’re like me (not a Spotify audiobook customer), at least you’re not out of options.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has landed the booster of its New Glenn mega-rocket on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean on just its second attempt — making it the second company to perform such a feat, following Elon Musk’s SpaceX. It’s an accomplishment that will help the new rocket system become an option to send larger payloads to space, the Moon, and beyond. Thursday’s launch wasn’t just about the landing attempt, though. Roughly 34 minutes after takeoff, the upper stage of New Glenn successfully deployed the rocket’s first commercial payload: twin spacecraft for NASA that will travel to Mars to study the red planet’s atmosphere. The pair of achievements are remarkable for the second-ever launch of such a massive rocket system. And it could put Blue Origin in position to compete with SpaceX, which dominates the world’s launch market with its Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship rockets. You can watch a recording of the launch here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The day after Google filed a lawsuit to end text scams primarily targeting Americans, the criminal network behind the phishing scams was “disrupted,” a Google spokesperson told Ars.

According to messages that the “ringleader” of the so-called “Lighthouse enterprise” posted on his Telegram channel, the phishing gang’s cloud server was “blocked due to malicious complaints.”

“We will restore it as soon as possible!” the leader posted on the channel—which Google’s lawsuit noted helps over 2,500 members coordinate phishing attacks that have resulted in losses of “over a billion dollars.”

Read full article

Comments

This is a video of maker of marginally useful things Uri Tuchman constructing an auto-deploying tape measure. That’s neat. What would be even neater is if it were a voice-activated SMART tape measure. “Tape measure, give me 4-feet 5-inches!” Yeah…that would really be something.

If you have multiple Android devices, you might like to keep the experience about the same across them. If you download an app that’s useful on your phone, there’s a good chance you’ll also want that app on your tablet, or even your Chromebook. Likewise, if you no longer find an app useful on one device, you likely won’t want to keep it on your other devices, either.

It can be annoying, however, to uninstall the app from each of your devices individually. Maybe you’re using the app on your smartphone and you decide to delete it, but forget to delete it on your other devices. It might live on your tablet or Chromebook for a while before you realize you want it gone. That’s annoying, but, in extreme cases, it can also be risky: Maybe you’re trying to delete an app that was later discovered to be malicious, but if it still lives on your other devices, it might end up causing you harm. While there has been a way to remotely uninstall apps on other devices, it’s been buried in the “Manage apps and device” section, and isn’t all that easy to execute.

The latest update to the Play Store aims to fix that problem. As spotted by Android Authority, with version 48.8, the Play Store now lets you simply uninstall apps from your other devices using your smartphone. Once you’re running this version of the Play Store (as well as future versions), you can visit an app’s Play Store page and look for a new “Available on more devices” section. Here, you’ll see all of your connected Android devices, with options to either “Uninstall” or “Install” the app on those devices. There’s no longer the need to dig through your settings.

This feature should make it easy to keep your Android ecosystem a bit more ordered and organized, but it’s not the only improvement the Play Store is rolling out. Starting next year, Google will start penalizing apps that use too much battery power. The Play Store will either remove those apps from discoverability pages, or add an alert to the apps’ Play Store pages, warning users these apps take up more battery than necessary.

If you ask random gamers what price they think Valve will charge for its newly announced Steam Machine hardware, you’ll get a wide range of guesses. But if you ask the analysts who follow the game industry for a living the same question… well, you’ll actually get the same wide range of (somewhat better-informed) guesses.

At the high end of those guesses are analysts like F-Squared‘s Michael Futter, who expects a starting price of $799 to $899 for the entry-level 512GB Steam Machine and a whopping $1,000 to $1,100 for the 2TB version. With internal specs that Futter says “will rival a PS5 and maybe even hit PS5 Pro performance,” we can expect a “hefty price tag” from Valve’s new console-like effort. At the same time, since Valve is “positioning this as a dedicated, powerful gaming PC… I suspect that the price will be below a similarly capable traditional desktop,” Futter said.

DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole similarly expects the Steam Machine to start at a price “around $800” and go up to “around $1,000” for the 2TB model. Cole said he expects Valve will seek “very low margins” or even break-even pricing on the hardware itself, which he said would probably lead to pricing “below a gaming PC but slightly above a high-end console.”

Read full article

Comments

Amazon is making its satellite communication network a bit more official with a rebrand. The company has announced that Project Kuiper will now be called “Amazon Leo,” a nod to the fact that its network is composed of satellites in low Earth orbit. 

Project Kuiper’s journey to becoming a proper Amazon brand has been a long one. The company introduced the project in 2019 with the goal of offering internet in regions without a reliable connection, through a proposed constellation of over 3,000 satellites that could blanket 95 percent of the global population in high-speed internet. That constellation has yet to fully take shape, however. In the years following the Project Kuiper reveal, Amazon launched prototype satellites, detailed plans for a space laser mesh network and showed off the antennas customers will use to connect to its network, but it didn’t actually launch the first 27 satellites in its constellation until April 2025. 

In comparison, its competitor Starlink has had a much faster expansion. SpaceX launched the Starlink satellite internet service in beta in 2020, and has rapidly expanded it since then. Now SpaceX has a deal with T-Mobile for satellite-enabled texting, and has struck up partnerships with airlines to test or offer internet connection on flights. Rebranding Project Kuiper to Leo suggests Amazon is finally ready to think about its satellite network as a product in its own right, but the company still has some catching up to do.

Amazon hasn’t shared a date for when its satellite internet service will be widely available for personal and commercial use, but you can sign-up on the Amazon Leo website to receive updates as the company works towards launch.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/amazon-rebrands-its-starlink-competitor-to-amazon-leo-214453569.html?src=rss

The Wall Street Journal reported that Verizon plans to cut about 15,000 jobs over the next week. Sources told the publication that Verizon is attempting to reduce costs as it faces more competition for wireless service and home internet customers. At the reported scope, this would be the largest reduction in history for the telecom company. 

Verizon leadership indicated that a sea change was coming in its third-quarter financial report last month, although many of the figures for the period were positive. The company’s net income reached $5.1 billion and most other metrics showed year-on-year growth. However, Verizon did a marked drop in postpaid wireless customers, losing 7,000 customers in that segment compared with a gain of 18,000 in Q3 2024. “We are going to take bold and fiscally responsible action to redefine Verizon’s trajectory at this critical inflection point for our company,” CEO Dan Schulman said. “These will not be incremental changes.” 

According to WSJ, most of the coming cuts will take the form of layoffs, but Verizon may also look to reduce employee count by turning about 200 stores into franchise locations.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/verizon-may-cut-15000-jobs-next-week-214143406.html?src=rss

In a strange reversal of the usual seller/customer dynamic, Google is now giving buyers the power to send out their own robocalls. It’s not the first time the company has experimented with giving the average Joe the ability to send AI robocalls, but it is much more robust than previous outings.

Rolling out today, the feature will show up while you’re browsing for certain products on Search, so long as you add a “near me” to the end of your query. If the product is supported, you’ll see a “Let Google Call” button, which is where the fun begins.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

Tap “Get started,” and the AI will ask you a few clarifying questions and have you fill in your email (or phone number) and address information. After that, it’ll call local businesses on your behalf and ask for product availability and pricing before sending you an email or text with information broken down by store.

At a press event, I got to experience a live demo of what these robocalls sound like from the seller’s perspective. If you’re worried about getting blacklisted for pestering your local stores with too many calls, don’t be. The robocall does not link itself to you at all, and instead says it’s an AI calling on behalf of Google and that it won’t use the information on the call for training purposes (phew). It’ll then ask a few questions before hanging up and moving on. In the demo, the Google employee acting the part of store clerk was also able to interrupt the call and refer to previous statements for context without issue, although she also spoke clearly and slowly—this might not pan out as well in the real world.

For what it’s worth, I did think the call sounded a little disconcertingly close to a human voice for me, so I could see some employees getting confused if they miss the first line clarifying it’s coming from an AI. A Google spokesperson at the press event also addressed what might happen if your robocall gets picked up by an automatic answering system, saying “they’ll figure it out” before suggesting that, in a worst case scenario, the answering system would probably forward the call to a human.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

Unfortunately, Google didn’t give any indication of how long it might take for you to get your text or email with results from your calls. Examples that Google demonstrated showed that the robot can do more than simply report inventory and price; it can also make notes about special deals or bundles an employee might mention.

This feature is currently limited to “categories like toys, health and beauty, and electronics” for now, so don’t expect to be able to use it for everything yet. It also seems to have a somewhat slow rollout—either I didn’t know what to search, or I don’t have the feature yet, because I couldn’t get it to pop up for me while I was writing this article.

If you’re anything like me, your biggest concern about this feature is that you might annoy the workers at whatever stores you’re calling. Google says it will try to limit multiple calls asking for the same info (such as from multiple customers who want to know the same thing) and that it will avoid calling late at night or early in the morning. Businesses are also able to opt out of getting AI calls by saying something like “please stop calling my business” during the call, or by updating their business profile under More > Business Profile settings > Advanced settings > Google automated calls and text messages.

Google’s AI robocalls also are only available in the U.S. and only in English, so business owners abroad can breathe a sigh of relief. Because of state laws, AI robocalls also can’t be placed in Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana, and Nebraska.

I’ll admit that I have opted not to call a business because of social anxiety before, although I’m not sure having a robot bother someone for me would make me feel any better.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Chinese suppliers such as Huawei will be excluded from the country’s future telecommunication networks on security grounds as he pushes for more digital sovereignty. From a report: “We have decided within the government that everywhere it’s possible we’ll replace components, for example in the 5G network, with components we have produced ourselves,” Merz told a business conference in Berlin on Thursday. “And we won’t allow any components from China in the 6G network.”

Europe is increasingly concerned about its reliance on foreign technology, ranging from Asian semiconductors to US artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure, as trade and geopolitical tensions threaten critical supply chains. Germany last year ordered telecom operators to remove Huawei equipment from their core networks, citing risks to national security. Berlin is now considering using public funds to pay Deutsche Telekom AG and others to strip out Chinese gear, Bloomberg News reported last month.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Standard brain implants use electrodes that penetrate the gray matter to stimulate and record the activity of neurons. These typically need to be put in place via a surgical procedure. To go around that need, a team of researchers led by Deblina Sarkar, an electrical engineer and MIT assistant professor, developed microscopic electronic devices hybridized with living cells. Those cells can be injected into the circulatory system with a standard syringe and will travel the bloodstream before implanting themselves in target brain areas.

“In the first two years of working on this technology at MIT, we’ve got 35 grant proposals rejected in a row,” Sarkar says. “Comments we got from the reviewers were that our idea was very impactful, but it was impossible.” She acknowledges that the proposal sounded like something you can find in science fiction novels. But after more than six years of research, she and her colleagues have pulled it off.

Nanobot problems

In 2022, when Sarkar and her colleagues gathered initial data and got some promising results with their cell-electronics hybrids, the team proposed the project for the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award. For the first time, after 35 rejections, it made it through peer review. “We got the highest impact score ever,” Sarkar says.

Read full article

Comments

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

Paint can be a cheap way to transform and improve your house, covering up the wear and tear of daily life or bringing a pop of color into your home. The paint you pick up at your local hardware store is pretty powerful stuff, but if you’ve ever struggled to make a DIY paint job look professional, or tried to solve a specific problem with paint, you should know about paint additives.

Paint additives are just what they sound like: Stuff you add to your paint to increase its usefulness or to make it easier to work with. They’re essentially chemicals that interact with the paint or the surface it coats to achieve a specific effect. Many additives are already included in the paint you buy, but you can purchase some specific additives on your own. I’ve used a few to great success—I’ve become a big believer in paint additives to make my DIY paint projects more effective and easier to clean up.

Additives I’ve used

These additives really work wonders, in my experience:

• Floetrol. This is a paint conditioner for water-based paints. Paint conditioners essentially lubricate your paint, making it flow more smoothly off the brush and slowing down the drying time slightly, resulting in a smoother finish with fewer brush strokes. It really works! I used to be the King of Brush Strokes, and adding this to my paint has made a difference. There’s also Penetrol for oil-based paints, but I haven’t used an oil-based paint in a long time.

• Paint hardeners. There’s a reason every garage and basement in the world is filled with old, rusting paint cans filled with swampy, useless muck that used to be paint: It’s a pain to dispose of. A paint hardener is the secret: If you’ve got some old paint to get rid of, add some paint hardener to the can and it turns into a solid that you can safely (and legally) throw into the trash.

• Anti-mildew. If you’re painting a damp area—a bathroom, basement, or even a laundry room—I’ve found that including some anti-mildew additives, in conjunction with an anti-mildew primer, will stop mold and mildew in its tracks. Instead of having to clean and re-paint my bathroom ceiling every year, for example, I haven’t had a problem since using this additive.

• Anti-slip. I wrote about my famously slippery stairs in my old house before I discovered anti-slip additives for paint. Adding some to floor and patio paint creates a slightly textured, nonslip finish that has made my stairs safer—I haven’t seen my life flash before my eyes in months!

Other useful additives

There are other additives you can purchase for your paint projects. I haven’t personally used these, but they’re worth knowing about:

• Scent additives. A scent additive makes your paint smell nice and acts as a room freshener as well. They’re easy to use, and typically last a few months before the smell fades. People use them to mask the harsh smell of fresh paint or just for the temporary scent they bring to a room.

• Textures and flakes. If you want your walls to have a texture to them that mimics stone, sand, or stucco, you can buy an additive that will give that finish to any paint. You can also buy additives that will add glitter or other elements to your paint, if that’s something you’re into.

• Insecticides. You can add insecticides to your paint to kill off/repel bugs like ants, silverfish, or mosquitoes. They don’t last very long, so it’s not a permanent solution. But if you’re concerned about an invasion of bugs, this can be one more weapon in your efforts to keep your house or yard bug-free.

bobthesungeek76036 writes: Beijing’s proposed regulation aims to tame rapid launches by forcing cars to boot up in a restricted performance mode after every ignition.

Under a proposed update to the National Standard, every passenger car would need a default mode in which it takes no less than five seconds to reach 100 km/h (62 mph) at startup, unless the driver manually selects a quicker setting.

The draft title “Technical Specifications for Power-Driven Vehicles Operating on Roads” appears to be part of a broader safety and road behavior initiative in China. It is intended to replace the current GB 7258-2017 standard that didn’t impose such restrictions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple will not be granted a preliminary option for appealing a landmark antitrust ruling in the UK. In October, the country’s Competition Appeal Tribunal determined that Apple benefited from “near absolute market power” over app distribution and in-app payments and was “abusing its dominant position by charging excessive and unfair prices” as developer commission. At the time, Apple was reportedly planning to appeal, but today, the Tribunal refused to give the company permission to challenge its decision. 

That means Apple’s next recourse, if it wants to not pony up more than £1 billion in damages, is to take its case directly to the UK Court of Appeal. The company has requested 21 days to file any application with that judicial body. 

It has been a busy year for Apple as it faces more regulatory pressure over its rules for the App Store and fees charged to mobile developers. Earlier today, Apple announced a new partner program that would halve the commissions it charges for mini-app transactions.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-suffers-setback-in-uk-app-store-fee-lawsuit-204627286.html?src=rss