Charger recall spells more bad news for Humane’s maligned AI Pin

Humane’s AI Pin was already struggling to take off, but the company’s troubles deepened on Thursday as it recalled the product’s portable charging case. Humane released the AI Pin in April 2024. It’s a lapel pin that features an integrated camera and speaker, AI voice assistant, and laser projector. The device launched at a $700 starting price before dropping to $500 in June. The AI Pin also requires a subscription…

November 1, 2024
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Adobe unveils AI video generator trained on licensed content

On Monday, Adobe announced Firefly Video Model, a new AI-powered text-to-video generation tool that can create novel videos from written prompts. It joins similar offerings from OpenAI, Runway, Google, and Meta in an increasingly crowded field. Unlike the competition, Adobe claims that Firefly Video Model is trained exclusively on licensed content, potentially sidestepping ethical and copyright issues that have plagued other generative AI tools. Because of its licensed training data…

October 14, 2024
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Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at age 78

On Friday, Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today. Friends and associates remember Christensen as humble and unassuming, a quiet innovator who never sought the spotlight for his groundbreaking…

October 14, 2024
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The Internet Archive and its 916 billion saved web pages are back online

The Internet Archive has brought its Wayback Machine back online “in a provisional, read-only manner” as it continues to recover from attacks that took the site down last week, founder Brewster Kahle said in a post last night. The archive.org home page points users to the now-functional Wayback Machine but notes that other Internet Archive services are temporarily offline. Kahle said it was “safe to resume” the Wayback Machine’s operations,…

October 14, 2024
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Smart gardening firm’s shutdown a reminder of Internet of Things’ fickle nature

AeroGarden, which sells Wi-Fi-connected indoor gardening systems, is going out of business on January 1. While Scotts Miracle-Gro has continued selling AeroGarden products after announcing the impending shutdown, the future of the devices’ companion app is uncertain. AeroGarden systems use hydroponics and LED lights to grow indoor gardens without requiring sunlight or soil. The smart gardening system arrived in 2006, and Scotts Miracle-Gro took over complete ownership in 2020. Some…

October 14, 2024
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Asahi Linux’s bespoke GPU driver is running Windows games on Apple Silicon Macs

A few years ago, the idea of running PC games on a Mac, in Linux, or on Arm processors would have been laughable. But the developers behind Asahi Linux—the independent project that is getting Linux working on Apple Silicon Macs—have managed to do all three of these things at once. The feat brings together a perfect storm of open source projects, according to Asahi Linux GPU lead Alyssa Rosenzweig: the…

October 11, 2024
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Trek CarBack bike radar lets you know when cars are approaching

“Car back!” If you’ve ever been on a group bike ride, you’ve no doubt heard these two words shouted by a nearby rider. It’s also the name of Trek’s new bike radar. For safety-conscious cyclists, bike radars have been a game-changer. Usually mounted on the seat post, the radar units alert cyclists to cars approaching from behind. While they will work on any bike on any road, bike radar is…

October 11, 2024
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Are Tesla’s robot prototypes AI marvels or remote-controlled toys?

Two years ago, Tesla’s Optimus prototype was an underwhelming mess of exposed wires that could only operate in a carefully controlled stage presentation. Last night, Tesla’s “We, Robot” event featured much more advanced Optimus prototypes that could walk around without tethers and interact directly with partygoers. It was an impressive demonstration of the advancement of a technology Tesla’s Elon Musk said he thinks “will be the biggest product ever of…

October 11, 2024
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AMD unveils powerful new AI chip to challenge Nvidia

On Thursday, AMD announced its new MI325X AI accelerator chip, which is set to roll out to data center customers in the fourth quarter of this year. At an event hosted in San Francisco, the company claimed the new chip offers “industry-leading” performance compared to Nvidia’s current H200 GPUs, which are widely used in data centers to power AI applications such as ChatGPT. With its new chip, AMD hopes to…

October 11, 2024
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Intel’s Core Ultra 200S CPUs are its biggest desktop refresh in three years

Intel’s 14th-generation desktop processors were a mild update on top of a mild update: a barely faster revision of the 13th-gen Core CPUs, which were themselves a modest tweak to 2021’s 12th-gen Core processors. The new Core Ultra CPUs (and their underlying architectural changes) were exclusive to laptops. Today, that changes: The Core Ultra 200S processors (codenamed Arrow Lake) will bring to desktops many of the changes Intel has made…

October 10, 2024
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