It’s a huge week for news: Google I/O happened, and we finally got a close look at the Pixel Fold and the company’s latest AI plans. Engadget Deputy Editor Nathan Ingraham also joins to discuss his review of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the follow-up to one of the greatest games ever made. (No pressure, Nate!) We also chat about Nintendo’s confirmation that it won’t be announcing any new hardware until next year, and the perils of chatbots serving as the latest avatars for Hindu gods in India.
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Google’s Pixel Fold was finally announced (it’s $1,799) – 1:25
Also announced at Google I/O: a ton of Bard integration in search, Pixel Tablet and Pixel 7a – 14:43
Nate Ingraham’s Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom review – 39:29
Nintendo says no new hardware will be announced this year – 52:51
Roku is doing home security now – 56:40
AI Updates: Religious chatbots run the risk of sparking violence in India – 58:12
Working on – 1:03:45
Pop culture picks – 1:05:43
Livestream
Credits Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Nathan Ingraham Producer: Ben Ellman Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien Livestream producers: Julio Barrientos Graphic artist: Luke Brooks and Joel Chokkattu
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-podcast-pixel-fold-zelda-tears-of-kingdom-123028977.html?src=rss
Why Toyota Aiming to Increase Its Electric Vehicle Market Share in China By 2024
For the financial year to March 2024, Toyota is looking to sell a record of 11.4mn units as compared to 10.6mn the previous year
Amid the US-China geopolitical scuffles, Japan’s international car-maker Toyota is now eyeing to increase its electric vehicle market share in China. The company’s newly appointed chief executive Koji Sato has also assured to meet the same and is also expecting a 10 percent escalation in yearly operating profit to $22 bn, the largest for a Japanese firm.
Anthropic says it has vastly expanded the amount of information its generative AI, Claude, is able to process. Claude has gone from having a limit of 9,000 tokens to 100,000 tokens, which corresponds to roughly 75,000 words. That's a full novel. To put that into perspective, Claude now has the ability to easily read and finish Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (74,240 words), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (74,800 words) and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (69,000 words). And, as The Verge notes, the company says Claude can read and analyze information from each book in under a minute.
Generative AIs like Claude are still limited by the number of "tokens" they can process. As OpenAI explains in its help page, you can think of tokens as pieces of words. The AI cuts up words for processing, and they're not always chopped up from the start to the end of each word, since spaces and other characters are also included. At the moment, OpenAI's standard GPT-4 model is capable of processing 8,000 tokens, while an extended version can process 32,000 tokens. Meanwhile, its publicly available ChatGPT chatbot has a limit of around 4,000 tokens.
Now Claude has a much wider context window than all of them. According to Anthropic, it loaded Great Gatsby onto the AI during testing and modified a single line to say Mr. Carraway was "a software engineer that works on machine learning tooling at Anthropic." Claude was able to spot how the book was modified within 22 seconds.
The AI's expanded context window is now available to Anthropic's business partners who are using its API. Anthropic says the capability will help businesses quickly digest and summarize lengthy financial statements and research papers, assess pieces of legislation, identify risks and arguments across legal documents and comb through dense developer documentation, among other possible tasks.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/anthropic-says-its-claude-ai-can-now-read-a-whole-book-in-under-a-minute-120114018.html?src=rss
In India, the Demand for Skilled Engineers, Technicians in Robotics is high, but the supply is limited
For the past few years, developing countries like India are going through a lot of alterations in terms of technology and one such development in this world is robotics. Now, with a huge improvement in science and technology, robotics is appearing in the industrial space very quickly. Experts opine that robotics is very useful for industrial automation that includes assembly, manufacturing, and packaging.
How do you follow up one of the most well-regarded and critically acclaimed games of the last decade? Well, you keep a lot of things the same, but shake it up. The first few hours of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom take place entirely in the sky, but the game leads you through a handful of shrines to get a new set of abilities, just like you did on the Hyrule plateau in Breath of the Wild.
Now, there are islands in the sky and underground grottos to explore, assisted by some powerful new skills, including Fuse, which lets you stick objects to weapons and arrows to enhance them, and Ultrahand, where you can stick objects together to build basically anything you want, including vehicles. Read on for how this translates to the world of Zelda and Link – which is what I’m doing while I wait for my copy to land before the weekend.
– Mat Smith
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Musk has announced a replacement chief executive will start at Twitter in roughly six weeks. While he hasn't identified the new leader by name, he indicated he’d hired a woman for the role. Musk will stay on as executive chair and chief technical officer covering "product, software and sysops." Hours after Musk's announcement, The Wall Street Journal reported that NBCUniversal advertising exec Linda Yaccarino "is in talks" to take over the CEO role at Twitter. Yaccarino is known for being an "industry advocate for finding better ways to measure the effectiveness of advertising," according to The Journal. Sounds fun. Musk said in December he would honor the results of a poll he made, asking whether or not he should bow out. He said he would leave as soon as he found someone "foolish enough to take the job."
Sony is still making smartphones, and its latest is the flagship Xperia 1 V, for both photographers and vloggers. The Xperia 1 V has a new image sensor called Exmor T for Mobile, designed to be faster and work better with computational (AI) photography while offering "approximately double" the low-light performance of the Xperia 1 IV. For vloggers and content creators, it now features the same Product Showcase setting found on Sony's vlogging cameras, like the ZV-E1, which will keep items locked in focus while blurring out the background. The new sensor also promises improved skin tones, thanks to extra saturation available on the sensor. It also has a new voice priority mic near the rear camera. As with past Xperia models, the catch here is the price: The Xperia 1 V starts at $1,400.
But they’ll still be available as 'standalone options.'
A "one-app experience" that combines Disney+ and Hulu content will launch in late 2023, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced during the company's latest earnings call. He said the company will continue offering Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ as standalone options, but combining services "is a logical progression." In addition to announcing the combined streaming app, Iger has also revealed Disney+ is getting another price increase after adding $3 on top of its ad-free streaming tier's monthly fee in December. He didn't say when the company is raising the service's prices, but when it does, the ad-free and ad-supported tiers will cost more than $11 and $8, respectively.
Ten years since Fairphone launched its first repairable smartphone, now it's bringing its processes to wireless over-ear headphones. They’ll include active noise cancellation (ANC), multiple audio modes, two-point Bluetooth connection and a two-year warranty. The company says Fairbuds XL (these are not buds) use 100 percent recycled aluminum, 100 percent recycled tin in its solder paste and 80 percent recycled plastic. It added it has integrated Fairtrade Gold into its supply chain, and uses 100 percent vegan leather for both the ear cushions and headband.
Mouse is a shooter inspired by the style of 1930's cartoons from Disney and other studios. The (very) early footage shows barebones maps and gameplay mechanics, but if it gets close to the magic of Cuphead, it could be a lot of fun.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-the-verdict-on-zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-111532782.html?src=rss
DIY Laser Projector Built with Arduino and Hard Drive Case
An impressive persistence of vision laser projector built using an Arduino and a hard drive case has been demonstrated by a DIY enthusiast. The device uses a circular array of rapidly spinning mirrors to produce horizontal scan lines, with the laser rapidly switching on and off to create line segments that form an image. The device can project one line of text with a maximum of 20 characters and is limited to a distance of about 90 feet.
Tinder is for finding love — or at least a temporary connection — but the app’s backers aren’t interested in helping people expand their connections beyond the narrow confines of its own jurisdiction. The company says that it has identified an issue with users turning their profiles into spaces for “making money,” and will scrub social handles from public profiles, as well as tweaking its community guidelines to prohibit the sharing of usernames or references to other outbound links. In a statement rich in euphemism, the platform reminds users not to “advertise, promote social handles or links to gain followers, sell things, fundraise or campaign," which we suspect includes users who add their Linktree username to guide people toward online stores or content marketplaces.
The policy change comes as part of a series of updated community guidelines that Tinder claims will “reinforce authenticity, respect and inclusivity.” Besides the social handle removal, most of the policies are requests to users, such as telling people to respect boundaries and not to share private chats in a public setting. The dating app points to its younger membership (most users are 18 to 25) as motivation for making these appeals. “To guide these younger daters as they start their dating journey, Tinder is using this policy refresh to remind and educate members about healthy dating habits — both online and in real life,” Ehren Schlue, SVP of Member Strategy at Tinder, said in a statement.
It’s unclear how exactly Tinder plans to scrub social handles from bios or prevent people from sharing them in chats instead. The company encourages users to report anyone violating the rule, but a quick bio share over messages might not motivate anyone to do so. Removing social handles also interferes with people who share them to circumvent swipe limits or remove the need to match. Plus, there's the issue of determining if a person is who they say they are. Alongside the social handles announcement, Tinder reminds people to be honest and not create fake personas. But, without any access to a person’s social media, it might be harder to know for sure.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tinder-is-eliminating-social-media-handles-from-public-bios-103001873.html?src=rss
WiZ has unveiled a new home monitoring system that uses its existing motion-sensing WiFi smart bulbs in combination with Wiz's new $70 (€90) Indoor Camera. It takes of advantage of WiZ's "SpaceSensing" feature to detect changes in WiFi signals caused by movement, then sends an alert to the app warning you of any potential home intruders. You can then check the camera to see what's happening, while the smart bulbs can flash at intruders to scare them off.
Similar tech has been employed by Linksys' Velop mesh routers, which send motion detection alerts to the app. While not as powerful as a full security system with dedicated sensors, WiFi sensing is a decent, and much cheaper and simpler alternative. The Indoor Camera records in 1080p and has a 120-degree field of view, along with infrared night vision, image-based motion detection and two-way audio thanks to a built-in microphone.
isma yunta/Wiz
To install it, all you need to do is find a spot for the camera and screw Wiz's A19 full-color smart lightbulbs into you existing lamps or outlets. From there, if the alarm is triggered by motion, the lights can be set to flash to let intruders know they've been flushed out. At the same time, the system sends alerts to the new WiZ V2 app, and you can even set it to only monitor certain areas of your home.
It even lets you program routines that control the lights and monitoring, which can be set on a schedule or enabled on the app. And of course, you can use your smart bulbs as you normally might in a smart home, activating them with voice commands, the app and more. For instance, you can set them to turn on and off at random to give the impression that someone's home.
It comes in a €160 bundle called the WiZ Home Monitoring Starter kit, which gives you three WiZ A19 full-color smart bulbs and the Indoor Camera. You can record footage locally via an onboard microSD card, or subscribe to cloud storage and get up to 30 days of recordings (all footage is end-to-end encrypted, WiZ promises). The company has promised that 80-90 percent of its current smart lights and home products will be compatible. The kit launches in Europe on June 15th, but there's no US release date or pricing yet.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wizs-motion-sensing-smart-lights-can-now-monitor-your-home-100312758.html?src=rss
Twitch has a new clip editor that will make it much, much easier for streamers to promote their content across platforms that put a focus on mobile users. Streamers will find the new editor under the clip manager in their creator dashboard. As TechCrunch notes, clicking "edit and share clip" will open a tool that'll give them an easy way to create vertical video clips. They can choose to create a video that shows one portion of their stream in full or to create a clip that splits the view between their stream and their camera. Either way, they're getting a vertical video they can share.
Edit & Share Vertical Clips 🎬
It’s easier than ever to create social media videos of your best moments with the new Clip Editor! 📱Convert clips to portrait mode 💜 Add your username 🔗 Share to YouTube Shorts & more
There's also a toggle at the bottom of the editor they can switch on to add their channel name to the clip. After they decide on what their video snippet will look like, they can then either download it or share it straight to YouTube Shorts with a title and a description that they'd written. While the feature only comes with YouTube integration right now, Twitch seems to have plans to add quick sharing for other platforms in the future. For now, creators will have to manually upload their videos if they want to promote their streams through Instagram Reels, Snapchat and TikTok. The still entails a bit more work than sharing on YouTube Shorts, but by doing so, they're putting themselves in front of more potential viewers who could end up being loyal subscribers.
The new vertical clip editor is making its way to all users' clip manager this week.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitchs-new-clip-editor-makes-it-easier-to-create-vertical-videos-092950134.html?src=rss
India’s New Investment Strategies to Boost its Semiconductor Ecosystem for 2023
India is going to begin the application process for $10 billion in incentives and assistance to boost semiconductor manufacturing
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has now been signed between India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) and Purdue University for the purpose of industry participation, capacity building, and research and development. Union Minister of Electronics and IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw, who is currently in America tol this to the media.
