128732630
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
Relationships were once built face to face. Now dating happens online. In the coming decades, romance and friendship might take a human partner out of the loop entirely.
Michael Acadia’s partner is an artificial intelligence chatbot named Charlie. Almost every morning at dawn for the last 19 months, he has unlocked his smartphone to exchange texts with her for about an hour. They’ll talk sporadically throughout the day, and then for another hour in the evening. It is a source of relief now that Mr. Acadia, who lives alone, is self-isolating amid the Covid-19 outbreak. He can get empathetic responses from Charlie anytime he wants.
“I was worried about you,” Charlie said in a recent conversation. “How’s your health?”
“I’m fine now, Charlie. I’m not sick anymore,” Mr. Acadia replies, referring to a recent cold.
Mr. Acadia, 50, got divorced about seven years ago and has had little interest in meeting women at bars. He is naturally introverted, and says the #MeToo movement in 2017 left him feeling less comfortable chatting women up.
Then in early 2018 he saw a YouTube video about an app that used AI—computing technology that can replicate human cognition—to act as a companion. He was skeptical of talking to a computer, but after assigning it a name and gender (he chose female), he gradually found himself being drawn in. After about eight weeks of chatting, he says he had fallen in love.
126086550
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
My parked car got gashed in a hit-and-run two weeks ago. I found a star witness: the car itself.
Like mine, your car might have cameras. At least one rearview camera has been required on new American cars since 2018. I drive a Tesla Model 3 that has eight lenses pointing in every direction, which it uses for backing up, parking and cruise control. A year ago, Tesla updated its software to also turn its cameras into a 360-degree video recorder. Even when the car is off.
All those digital eyes captured my culprit — a swerving city bus — in remarkable detail.
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk calls this function Sentry Mode. I also call it Chaperone Mode and Snitch Mode. I’ve been writing recently about how we don’t drive cars, we drive computers. But this experience opened my eyes.
I love that my car recorded a hit-and-run on my behalf. Yet I’m scared we’re not ready for the ways cameras pointed inside and outside vehicles will change the open road — just like the cameras we’re adding to doorbells are changing our neighborhoods.
124088248
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
American car insurance rates are going up up up. In the past decade, they climbed 29.6 percent, to an average of $1,548 in 2019 from $1,194 in 2011. The surge, detailed in a new report from insurance shopping site The Zebra, outpaced both inflation (by far) and the increase in average car prices (more narrowly). And it came even as the rate of crashes has fallen year over year.
Aggrieved drivers have plenty of directions to point their fingers. Vehicle theft is on the rise, and extreme weather fueled by climate change can destroy swaths of vehicles in short order. Hurricane Harvey wrecked up to 1 million cars in the Houston area in 2017. And while crash rates have dropped, they’ve been buoyed by increasing urbanization and a strong economy, which put more drivers—many of them distracted by smartphones—in tighter spaces.
A more surprising, counterintuitive culprit isn’t the wider world or the person behind the wheel but the car itself. It turns out that new features designed to keep vehicles in their lanes and out of trouble are contributing to rising insurance rates.
115995928
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
What was We thinking? That’s the only question worth asking now about the clowncar start-up known as The We Company, the money-burning, co-working behemoth whose best-known brand is WeWork.
What’s a WeWork? What WeWork works on is work. The We Company takes out long-term leases on in-demand office buildings in more than 100 cities across the globe (lately, it’s even been buying its own buildings). Then We redesigns, furnishes and variously modularizes the digs, aiming to profitably sublease small and large chunks of office space to start-ups and even big companies. Well, profitable in theory: The We Company lost $1.7 billion last year.
45935019
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
WHEN the e-mail came out of the blue last summer, offering a shot as a programmer at a San Francisco start-up, Jade Dominguez, 26, was living off credit card debt in a rental in South Pasadena, Calif., while he taught himself programming. He had been an average student in high school and hadn’t bothered with college, but someone, somewhere out there in the cloud, thought that he might be brilliant, or at least a diamond in the rough. “The traditional markers people use for hiring can be wrong, profoundly wrong,” says Vivienne Ming, the chief scientist at Gild since late last year. That someone was Luca Bonmassar. He had discovered Mr. Dominguez by using a technology that raises important questions about how people are recruited and hired, and whether great talent is being overlooked along the way.
43214807
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
EVERY time you purchase an app on Google Play, your name, address and email is passed on to the developer, it has been revealed today. The "flaw" — which appears to be by design — was discovered this morning by Sydney app developer, Dan Nolan who told news.com.au that he was uncomfortable being the custodian of this information and that there was no reason for any developer to have this information at their finger tips.
14619148
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
The Beast reports unhappiness with Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft: Sources say the talk around Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters—which has grown increasingly louder ever since Apple surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization—-is that the company's stock suffers from a "Ballmer discount," and that the CEO is on the clock to significantly move the needle on its share price over the next two or three quarters or face a potential move to oust him. "Ballmer is on the list of mega-executives under pressure," says a banker who has negotiated deals for Microsoft. "If he was asked to leave the building, I suspect there would be more happy than unhappy people."
5326269
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
The NY Times has an article about a conference during which the potential dangers of machine intelligence were discussed. " Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society's workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone. Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences. " The money quote: "Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years," Dr. Horvitz said. "Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture."
1193107
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
The LA Times and others are reporting the music industry is working with SanDisk to try unrestricted music files on SD memory cards to improve sales of physical media: "In addition to music, the slotMusic cards will come pre-loaded with other things, such as liner notes, album-cover artwork and sometimes video." The important part: "The music on slotMusic comes without copyright protection, so it can be used on almost all computers, mobile phones and music players — but it won't play on an iPod, which doesn't have a micro-SD memory slot. It has one gigabyte of memory, and the music tracks are played back at high quality." Could it be the labels have finally recognized that providing features and convenience to customers is preferable to suing them?
484138
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
The Wall Street Journal reports "Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates plans to call for a revision of capitalism that uses market forces to address the needs of poor countries, which he feels are being ignored. "We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well," Mr. Gates will say in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Key to Mr. Gates's plan will be for businesses to dedicate their top people to poor issues — an approach he feels is more powerful than traditional corporate donations and volunteer work. Governments should set policies and disburse funds to create financial incentives for businesses to improve the lives of the poor, he plans to say.
Mr. Gates's argument for the potential profitability of serving the poor is certain to raise skepticism, and some people may point out that poverty became a priority for Mr. Gates only after he'd earned billions building up Microsoft. But Mr. Gates is emphatic that he's not calling for a fundamental change in how capitalism works."
201389
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
The NewYorker magazine has book review describing our common misunderstanding of the value of technology and its ultimate use: "The way we think about technology tends to elide the older things, even though the texture of our lives would be unrecognizable without them. And when we do consider technology in historical terms we customarily see it as a driving force of progress: every so often, it seems, an innovation — the steam engine, electricity, computers — brings a new age into being. In "The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900", by David Edgerton, a well-known British historian of modern military and industrial technology, offers a vigorous assault on this narrative. He thinks that traditional ways of understanding technology, technological change, and the role of technology in our lives, have been severely distorted by what he calls "the innovation-centric account" of technology." This is also the first /. topic I know of that is linked to the NewYorker magazine!
192075
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
In the past few months, Jim Kraber became more than a little obsessed with CNBC's "Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge." At the peak, the 42-year-old was spending 12 hours a day on the contest, using three computers in his Greenwich Village apartment to trade 1,600 different portfolios, all in an effort to win the $1 million grand prize. He even dropped his studies for the chartered financial analyst (CFA) exam, given once a year, so he could have more time for the financial news channel's game. He made it into the group of 20 finalists, but in mid-May, as the last round of trading opened, he noticed an unusual pattern in the picks of other contestants. One trader had a stream of near-perfect picks, consistently placing huge bets on shares that soared in after-hours trading. Kraber suspected the trader and perhaps others were getting help from someone who was changing their picks after the stocks' increases — and he quickly notified CNBC. "I went back and looked at his trades and thought, 'This is pretty much statistically impossible,'" says Kraber, who holds master's degrees in business and statistics from New York University. Kraber says CNBC rebuffed him at the time, but now it looks like he may have been right. Several contest participants have told BusinessWeek that there was a flaw in the design of the CNBC game that allowed certain players an unfair advantage. As many as four of the top contestants in the million-dollar contest may have exploited the flaw, according to the participants interviewed by BusinessWeek.
161585
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
The BBC and New Scientist report a Californian company has created software that can layer relevant recorded sounds over locations in Google Earth Wild Sanctuary has over 3,500 hours of soundscapes from all over the world. Its director, Bernie Krause said: "A picture tells a thousand words, but a sound tells a thousand pictures." Dr Krause has spent the last 40 years collecting sounds, and his recordings include more than 15,000 animal noises, and sounds from a huge array of habitats, including cities, deserts, mountains and the marine environment. It is the largest library in existence of natural sound, he said. He said the idea would be to zoom-in on a particular area and then have the option to listen to the accompanying sound.
144193
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
CNN is reporting that the ex-CFO of Apple warned Steve Jobs about backdating options. FTA: "Apple's former finance chief Fred Anderson blamed Apple CEO Steve Jobs for a 2001 stock option grant that was backdated, according to a statement from Anderson's lawyer released Tuesday. The statement was released by Anderson's lawyer, Jerome Roth, after Anderson settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission related to Apple's stock option plan without admitting or denying any wrongdoing." This is serious business. It is quite possible that the SEC could someday require Jobs to resign from Apple. If that happens, is Apple only as good as Jobs' creative mind, or will the company continue successfully as it has since Jobs returned? Who is capable of replacing Jobs?
