Modern-day chat apps have allowed us to stay connected with our friends and family. But there are some pesky people and groups whom you don’t want to interact with all the time. That’s why these apps have a mute function that hides alerts from a particular chat for a certain period. WhatsApp Open the app on your phone. Tap on the chat you want to mute. If you’re using the Android app, tap on the three-dot menu on the top-right corner, and then select the Mute option....

Google just added a couple of useful features to its cross-platform Chrome browser, so you can easily beam text, links, and even open tabs between your desktop and your Android mobile devices. It’s a piece of cake, but there are a few simple things to do before you can start copying stuff across. Setup You’ll need to be signed into the same Google account, and have version 79 of the browser installed on all your devices....

A lack of diversity is one of the biggest problems the tech industry faces, despite a significant growth in the number of women working in the tech industry, female representation has stalled over the last decade. Currently, just 18% of leadership roles are filled by women, and the stats are even bleaker for women of color. Research has proven time and time again that diverse teams are good for business — as they bring new perspectives, attract new talent, and improve company culture....

There’s no debating that wearing masks is a part of our lives now — at least for a few months. If you’re wearing a mask, you won’t be able to unlock your iPhone through Face ID. At the moment, we don’t know if Apple plans to enhance its Face ID feature to work with a mask. There’s a workaround that lets you register an alternative masked appearance, but it’s kinda hit-or-miss, and so we can’t confidently recommend that....

Just like a message from your crush, the best push notifications come complete with a proposition that makes your heart race. Maybe it’s a discount, access to new features, or exclusive information you won’t find anywhere else. Whatever it is, it’s juicy. Appearing in the same place as the missed calls from your mum, push notifications feel oddly personal. Monzo’s telling you to stop spending so much on takeaway. Tinder is informing you you’ve matched with your ex again....

If the world hadn’t gone completely off the rails in the last few months, E3 would be taking place roughly this week. As the world has adapted to the necessity of social distancing, many of the companies who would have been showing at the trade event are instead moving their events online. Here’s a run down of the shows that are replacing E3. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the company behind E3, revealed shortly after the cancellation of the physical event that it wouldn’t be replacing the show with an online-only one....

Investors often receive hundreds of emails every week and most successful founders make in-roads with a VC after a warm introduction. I’d argue cold emails don’t always lead to good outcomes, but if you’re not lucky enough to know someone who can introduce you to a prospective investor, the onus is on you to make sure you do your research properly. If you don’t, well, you risk your email being instantly deleted....

The Chinese tech giant said the OS will be open-sourced with its own ARK compiler. It will also support existing Android apps. Huawei will first launch the OS on smart TVs, and it’ll arrive on wearables and laptops by 2020. The company mentioned it will only use it if Android is not allowed on its smartphones. — Huawei Mobile (@HuaweiMobile) August 9, 2019 The Harmony OS will have Trusted Execution Environment across devices, to keep data secure regardless of platforms....

EVs appeal to different customers in different ways. Many buyers want to help protect the environment; others want to save money on gasoline or try out the latest, coolest technology. In areas like California and Texas that have suffered large weather-related power failures in recent years, consumers are starting to consider EVs in a new way: as a potential electricity source when the lights go out. Ford has made backup power a selling point of its electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck, which is due to arrive in showrooms sometime in the spring of 2022....

Earlier this month, India officially launched its coronavirus contact tracing app named Aarogya Setu. Within weeks it has reached the milestone of 80 million downloads. Now, the government wants smartphone makers to pre-install the app in their devices. According to a report by Livemint, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) asked phone manufacturers to install the app by default in a meeting held yesterday. As per a release from the ministry, the meeting was attended by major smartphone makers such as Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, Foxconn, and Wistron, along with several of the country’s manufacturing bodies....

Yesterday, local police imposed curfew in some areas under section 144, and disrupted internet and mobile services to maintain law and order. According to a report by the Indian Express, even cable services have been put on hold in some areas. The state’s prominent senior leaders were also placed under house arrest last night. This morning the government moved to remove Article 370, which gives J&K a special status. India’s Home Minister, Amit Shah, address the parliament today, and moved the motion to scrap the special status and divide the state into union territories....

If not, you should. If yes, you know it’s a weekly podcast that runs about an hour per episode. It’s made by a team of about 20 people. I’ve always been impressed by the frequency and quality of their output. After creating a podcast for TNW, I’m in complete awe. Turns out: podcast making might be the least time-efficient way to tell a story. At the same time, it was completely worth it....

Failure is more than a rite of passage when working in technology — it’s a guarantee. The failure designers and developers are comfortable with, however, usually falls into the cozy iteration cycle where it’s “OK” to fail. Do users hate your proposed process flow? (No big deal, it was just a wireframe!) But the stakes are a little different when products ship, code is live, and things don’t go as expected....

Ive, according to a press release, plans to start his own company though he will continue to work with Apple on a range of projects. No further details are available at this time about Ive’s new company, but it’s clear Apple will be one of his largest clients. “After nearly 30 years and countless projects, I am most proud of the lasting work we have done to create a design team, process and culture at Apple that is without peer,” Ive said....

Large language models like GPT-3 have advanced to the point that it has become difficult to measure the limits of their capabilities. When you have a very large neural network that can generate articles, write software code, and engage in conversations about sentience and life, you should expect it to be able to reason about tasks and plan as a human does, right? Wrong. A study by researchers at Arizona State University, Tempe, shows that when it comes to planning and thinking methodically, LLMs perform very poorly, and suffer from many of the same failures observed in current deep learning systems....

So-called “Joy-Con drift” has been plaguing Switch players since shortly after the console was released. In case you haven’t experienced it, it’s a distressing hardware problem that causes the Joy-Con’s analog sticks to start “drifting,” meaning the console would read movement from them even when the player wasn’t moving them. It’s distressingly common, even if no one seems to know what’s causing it. Up to now, the response from Nintendo to consumers has been a sort of vague handwave — up to now, users had to pay a fee and prove their devices were still under warranty in order to even qualify for in-house repair....

While many have made a case about why low-code is well-suited for the data scientist, I think there may be an equally strong case to be made for the benefits of the business. Data science is a collaborative art — one that requires a combination of data and business acumen. Yet, in reality, the two departments couldn’t sit farther apart. While data scientists worry about feature selection and model accuracy, their business counterparts think about customer retention and product quality....

The change was quietly revealed in a Cortana support article on Microsoft’s site. Microsoft said it’s “integrating Cortana into your Microsoft 365 productivity apps” and therefore discontinuing the app itself. Starting January 31, you’ll no longer be able to download the Cortana app. According to Microsoft, the app will be pulled from the Google Play and App Stores in UK, Australia, Germany, Mexico, China, Spain, Canada, and India at that time....

The company has been previewing a new version of its browser powered by the popular Chromium rendering engine for some time now, and it’ll roll out via an over-the-air update to Windows 10 users on January 15, 2020. The lack of support for a wide range of extensions has been a major sticking point for Edge over the past couple of years, and it’s one of the reasons why desktop users have stuck with other browsers....

However, researchers from MIT are making this process safer by using machine learning. The team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has come up with a technology called SensiCut, a material sensing platform for laser cutters that warns you of potentially harmful materials. The tool consists of low-cost hardware components such as a Raspberry Pi Zero microprocessor board hosted in a 3D printed board. The module is then attached to the laser cutter and the neural network of the tool identifies various materials based on the speckled image of a material’s surface microstructure....