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.
Meta’s next VR headset is expected to be one of the company’s biggest launches — perhaps its most important hardware launch to date. We’ve known about the headset, dubbed Project Cambria, since the company changed its name to Meta last year. But since then, several leaks have provided a better picture of what to expect from the headset, and one thing has become clear: this isn’t just another VR headset aimed at gamers. What’s different about Project Cambria? The most important description we’ve
A team of researchers recently developed an algorithm that generates original reviews for wines and beers. Considering that computers can’t taste booze, this makes for a curious use-case for machine learning. The AI sommelier was trained on a database containing hundreds of thousands of beer and wine reviews. In essence, it aggregates those reviews and picks out keywords. When the researchers ask it to generate its own review for a specific wine or beer, it generates something similar to previou
In 1996, Joseph W. Ashy, former U.S. commander-in-chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, famously said: “We’re going to fight in space. We’re going to fight from space and we’re going to fight into space.” In less than three decades since then, we’ve seen the establishment of the U.S. Space Force, anti-satellite weapons testing by major spacefaring nations and the rapid development of weapons that can interfere with, disrupt or destroy space assets. No wonder there are many conce