In a popular video, Youtuber GCP Grey makes the claim that autonomous vehicles (AVs) will solve traffic jams. Whilst the basic logic underlying his claim is accurate, it couldn’t be further removed from the truth because it utterly ignores externalities. As does this laughably inaccurate article from 2016 that claims we’ll only need 15-25% of our current number of cars after AV technology becomes widely adopted. GCP Grey’s claim is essentially that AVs can react faster than humans and communicat
This article was originally published on .cult by Luis Minvielle. .cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers. We write about all things career-related, make original documentaries and share heaps of other untold developer stories from around the world. In the programming world, few aspects seem as inescapable as the infamous coding bootcamps. One way or another, you’ll hear about them: From scanning through your best friend’s resume to checking your LinkedIn feed, you’ll eventuall
Twitter debuted a new feature called Circle last night that might help you shitpost better. This function, available to select users on Android, iOS, and the web, will let you tweet stuff to a restricted audience of 150 people. This is very similar to Instagram’s Close Friends feature that allows you to share a Story to a select number of people. Prior to this feature’s announcement, you had to lock your account to share your tweets with just your followers. But now, you can ‘tune’ your audience
Sony’s WH-1000XM4 is one of the best noise-canceling headphones money can buy. So were its predecessors going back to the company’s OG premium noise-canceling headphone, the MDR-1000X. In other words, Sony has a pretty great streak going on, so I was excited to see leaks of the new WH-1000XM5 begin to pop up. Leaked images of the new headphones posted by The Walkman Blog show a design that departs significantly from Sony’s usual aesthetic for the series. Behold: Credit: The Walkman Blog Someone
The world of AI research is in shambles. From the academics prioritizing easy-to-monetize schemes over breaking novel ground, to the Silicon Valley elite using the threat of job loss to encourage corporate-friendly hypotheses, the system is a broken mess. And Google deserves a lion’s share of the blame. How it started There were approximately 85,000 research papers published globally on the subject of AI/ML in the year 2000. Fast-forward to 2021 and there were nearly twice as many published in t
This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. (In partnership with Paperspace) In recent years, the transformer model has become one of the main highlights of advances in deep learning and deep neural networks. It is mainly used for advanced applications in natural language processing. Google is using it to enhance its search engine results. OpenAI has used transformers to create its famous GPT-2 and GPT-3 models. Since
The West Japan Rail Company (JR West) has unveiled a new futuristic worker that’s tasked with infrastructure jobs considered too risky for humans. And people? It’s a giant robot humanoid that looks like a cross between WALL-E and a Transformer. Sign us the hell up. First spotted by News Atlas, the robot has a a large human-like torso and terrifying, mechanical claw-hands. It’s mounted on a hydraulic crane, which rides around the rail system on a specially made vehicle. Screenshot via Twitter. Cr
Some Sonos owners have been having a torrid time recently. Following the 14.6 software update that dropped at the end of April, people using the speakers as part of a surround sound multimedia setup have claimed stuttering, out-of-sync, and unreliable audio. This has been reported by multiple users and appears to impact people watching television, movies, or playing games — with those simply listening to music unimpacted. According to a range of reports, this issue with audio dropping occurs whe
If you’ve downloaded an ebook in the past decade, it’s likely it was an EPUB file. Well, unless you bought it from Amazon of course. For years now, the company has used its proprietary AZW format for ebooks — but now it’s opening up its doors. Kinda. A recent update of its Send To Kindle documentation (spotted first by Good E-Reader) revealed that Amazon’s ereaders will support EPUB files by “late 2022.” Since its launch in 2007, EPUB has been poised to become the ebook format file of choice, wi
Video conferencing is making us dumber and less creative — and that’s according to science. A laboratory study by Columbia Business School’s Melanie S. Brucks and Stanford’s Jonathan Levav found that “video conferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas.” How’s that for a great excuse to keep your video turned off on your next Zoom call? The study found that “video conferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus.