The SwitchBot Curtain 3 on a telescoping rod. | Image: SwitchBot SwitchBot has announced the Curtain 3, a smart curtain controller it says will be quieter than the Curtain 2, and twice as strong. The company also claims a new, improved (and separately available) solar panel will offer “true unlimited battery power,” something the previous
Read MoreNot every project has to be an AI-powered particle accelerator using lasers. Sometimes simple projects can be very satisfying, and a simple project can be a great gateway to introduce a friend or a child to our hacker ways. That’s why we noticed [Crazy Science’s] bubble machine upcycled from a CD and a water bottle.
Read MoreThe Apple AirPods Pro (2nd generation) are arguably the most sought-after true wireless earbuds on the market, particularly for Apple users. In addition to reproducing music with impressive sound quality, the AirPods Pro 2 stand tall as bastions of superior active noise canceling. That’s not to mention a wide array of proprietary features such as
Read MoreAmanda Hoover / Wired: How Science, Nature, and other peer-reviewed journals are grappling with outlines, drafts, or papers that authors wrote using generative AI, without disclosure — Ethics watchdogs are looking out for potentially undisclosed use of generative AI in scientific writing. But there’s no foolproof way to catch it all yet.
Read MoreThe Apple AirPods Pro (2nd generation) are arguably the most sought-after true wireless earbuds on the market, particularly for Apple users. In addition to reproducing music with impressive sound quality, the AirPods Pro 2 stand tall as bastions of superior active noise canceling. That’s not to mention a wide array of proprietary features such as
Read MoreJames Titcomb / Telegraph: Sources: the UK is in talks to acquire GPUs worth up to £100M for a national “AI Research Resource”; some officials are pushing for allocating more funds — Effort fuels prime minister’s ambitions to make Britain a global leader in the field
Read MoreHere in the West, power going out is an unusual event. But in more remote regions like the Himalayas, reliable electricity isn’t a given. A group of local craftspeople, researchers, and operators in Nepal have worked together to devise a modular waterwheel system. Based on a 20-30 cm-wide bucket module consisting of only four galvanized
Read MoreCredit: Robert Triggs / Android Authority Opinion post by Hadlee Simons The latest US smartphone market share report from Counterpoint Research makes for grim reading in the battle of Android versus iOS. Apple’s iPhone accounted for a massive 55% of the market in Q2 2023, up an impressive 10% compared to a year ago. This
Read MoreHere in the West, power going out is an unusual event. But in more remote regions like the Himalayas, reliable electricity isn’t a given. A group of local craftspeople, researchers, and operators in Nepal have worked together to devise a modular waterwheel system. Based on a 20-30 cm-wide bucket module consisting of only four galvanized
Read MoreAmanda Hoover / Wired: How Science, Nature, and other peer-reviewed journals are grappling with outlines, drafts, or papers that authors wrote using generative AI, without disclosure — Ethics watchdogs are looking out for potentially undisclosed use of generative AI in scientific writing. But there’s no foolproof way to catch it all yet.
Read MoreMathematicians can often figure out what happens as quantities grow infinitely large. What about when they are just a little big?
Read MoreThe Verge X, which was formerly known as Twitter until its recent rebranding, is having a problem displaying old posts that came with images attached or any hyperlinks converted through Twitter’s built-in URL shortener. It’s unclear when the problem started, but it was highlighted on Saturday afternoon in a post by Tom Coates, and a
Read MoreGood Omens second season highlights how good queer and disabled representation could be in the fantasy genre. | Image: Amazon Warning: Spoilers ahead for season 2 of Amazon Prime’s Good Omens With the release of the second season of Good Omens on July 28th, writer Neil Gaiman has officially (and rather devastatingly) put any accusations
Read MoreWhen regular people think of 3D printing, they likely imagine semi-newfangled objects like twisty vases and useless trinkets. But there is so much more to 3D printing, as [andrei.erdei]’s printed, woven coasters demonstrate. The design is based on the stake and strand basket weaving technique, which uses rigid strips called stakes in one direction and
Read MoreLouise Matsakis / Semafor: Q&A with TikTok Head of Music Ole Obermann on launching TikTok Music in Indonesia and Brazil before the US and helping artists from discovery to distribution — Since it first exploded in popularity five years ago, TikTok has evolved into the de facto launching pad for new musicians around the world
Read MoreResearchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shared a pre-print paper on generalized robot training within a small “practical data budget.” The team developed a system that breaks movement tasks into 12 “skills” (e.g., pick, place, slide, wipe) that can be combined to create new and complex trajectories within at least somewhat novel scenarios, called MT-ACT:
Read MorePixel Binary Transparency is the latest security benefit for Pixel owners.
Read MoreThe KEF R3 Meta speakers look unbelievable and sound very natural; the only downside is the cost.
Read MoreImage: William Joel / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome back to issue No. 2 of Installer, your guide to all the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. Thanks so much to everyone who’s been emailing, commenting, sending feedback, and telling me what you want to see in this series going forward. I love chatting
Read MoreI’ve never seen a laptop that looks quite like this. I’ve also never seen a laptop with its particular set of problems. Continue reading…
Read MoreMatt Novak / Forbes: X appears to have deleted all images posted directly on the website between 2011 and 2014; links that used Twitter’s native shortening service are also broken — Twitter, the social media platform officially known as X, appears to have deleted all images from the website that were posted between 2011 and
Read MoreGuitar effects have come a long way from the jangly, unaltered sounds of the 1950s when rock and roll started picking up steam. Starting in large part with [Jimi Hendrix] in the 60s, the number of available effects available to guitarists snowballed in the following decades step-by-step with the burgeoning electronics industry. Now, there are
Read MoreBrody Ford / Bloomberg: As Big Tech companies compel employees back to the office, some companies, like Atlassian, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Twilio, remain steadfast backers of remote work — – Some tech companies still see benefit of work-from-home policy — Move runs counter to effort to revive US office comeback
Read MoreAlex Reisner / The Atlantic: Analysis: Books3, a dataset used to train Meta’s Llama, BloombergGPT, and EleutherAI’s GPT-J, contains 170K+ books from Stephen King and other authors — Stephen King, Zadie Smith, and Michael Pollan are among thousands of writers whose copyrighted works are being used to train large language models.
Read MoreIllustration by Alex Castro / The Verge United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. She was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after it refused a copyright to Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image made with
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