There are regular household chores that you don’t particularly enjoy, but they have to get done. So…you do ‘em. But when you sit back and actually think about how much time you spend handling these menial tasks over the course of your many years, the blown time becomes pretty astronomical. Like…did you know you could spend upwards of 47 days mowing your lawn during your life? Granted, depending on the type of mower, that number could actually be as low as seven days....

Oh, and it’s not a laptop. That’s a weird one, because Pi-Top is known for its elaborate Raspberry Pi-based portable computers. In its early years, the company 3D printed its machines, but as time has dragged on, its computers have become increasingly sophisticated – and, dare I say, a bit more professional. The Pi-Top [4] comes in a square package and looks not too dissimilar from one of Intel’s NUC computers....

This year, the Chinese phone maker has introduced a new series – the K series – which dabbles in the same price range as the Pocophone F1, but sports a much better design and a triple camera on the rear on its Pro offering. I’ve been using the K20 Pro for the last few weeks and I’ve been rarely this happy using a Xiaomi phone. It looks delightful, performs extremely well, has a battery life of more than a day....

Yes, retro consoles are still coming out. I thought the tepid release of the Commodore 64 Mini and the apparent abandonment of the trend by Nintendo would have put an end to the flow of retro consoles. But apparently we’re going to drag every single gaming device from the 80s and 90s into the 21st century, kicking and screaming. ORDER HERE: https://t.co/ugS71AKJRT — Konami (@Konami) July 15, 2019 If you don’t remember the TurboGrafx-16, don’t worry — the console wasn’t exactly a hit in America....

Driving assist also helps with reversing out of parking. There’s also a Blind Spot Information System (BLIS) with steer assist. When a vehicle enters your blind spot or approaches rapidly, you’re alerted via a light in the left or right door mirror. Infotainment keeps you connected The Volvo C40 comes with a great infotainment system, jointly developed with Google and based on the Android operating system. Google Assist even turns on the seat warmers and Google Maps tells you where to find the next EV charging station....

Start-up Refraction AI has launched a pilot program with ten of its REV-1 delivery robots in Austin, Texas. The service launched with Southside Flying Pizza for deliveries in the South Congress, Downtown and Travis Heights areas of the city, with scope to expand as more businesses come on board. The three-wheeled electric devices, which travel up to 15 mph and are controlled remotely, will operate in bike lanes or the street where bike lanes aren’t available....

Janelle Shane, a research scientist and budding cupid, recently used GPT-3 to generate pick-up lines for failed Casanovas. Some of the results are incomprehensible and a few are plain creepy. But who could resist gems like this? The project isn’t the first time Shane’s applied AI to the art of seduction. She’d previously created pick-up lines by training a neural net on a veritable cesspit of human-penned lines. Fortunately, the system was too primitive to reproduce the wordplay of their worst sentiments....

Since the advent of mobile phones, the way we text has changed. We’ve seen the introduction of autocorrect, which corrects errors as we type, and word prediction (often called predictive text), which predicts the next word we want to type and allows us to select it above the keyboard. Functions such as autocorrect and predictive text are designed to make typing faster and more efficient. But research shows this isn’t necessarily true of predictive text....

While a 2020 spend indoors probably wasn’t your idea of a good time, there were some who took the COVID-inspired lemons and made lemonade. One of those beneficiaries were tablet makers, who saw sales on those portable workhorses soar almost 14 percent last year as everybody settled into working from home. And of course, that was a huge boon to the top tablet manufacturer Apple, who shipped over 52 million iPad tablets in 2020....

While you can easily find hours of footage with Peterson, none of what you hear in this piece comes from his mouth. Instead, it’s been produced by a neural network – called NotJordanPeterson – which has been trained to mimic the voice of the psychologist. And the resemblance is… absolutely uncanny. Check out these examples we generated with my colleagues: The model, which you can try with the link below, lets you type anything and then converts it into the voice of Peterson....

It works on the simple principle of text prediction, but for programming languages. The autocompleter suggests the next token based on the token you’ve just typed out. You can install it as an add-on to any editor you’re working on. The tool supports 22 languages in total including Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, C, PHP, Go, C#, Ruby, Objective-C, Rust, and Swift. So you’re pretty much covered if you’re coding in one of the popular languages....

Leave it to scientists to take the most pragmatic route to solve a problem. Geneticists were having a bear of a time using Microsoft Excel to catalog and shift through details of various human genes because the names of those genes were being mistaken by the app as dates and automatically reformatted. Rather than suffer in silence or wait for Microsoft to adjust Excel to their needs, the entire genetics community decided instead to rename 27 human genes like March1 to less confusing, more Excel-friendly names....

Bourdakos’ Code Pattern, called “Create a real-time object detection app using Watson Machine Learning,” relies on a tool called Cloud Annotations. It’s basically a blueprint for training an AI model to recognize whatever objects you train it on, with a tool that makes labeling your data dead simple. According to Bourdakos’ LinkedIn post on the project: Using Cloud Annotations and the Code Pattern is relatively simple. Bourdakos and IBM published a tutorial, which you can view here, that takes developers through the entire process: If this all seems too easy to be true, it’s because it is....

You’ve probably read this before: the Netherlands is an English-speaker’s paradise. Tied with the Nordic countries for proficiency, more than 90% of Dutch people speak English fluently. Indeed, language does not seem to be a barrier for developers looking to settle in the Netherlands, since companies seem to evaluate experience over speaking Dutch. Our research shows that in 2022 salaries grew in the Netherlands. Companies in the country may even pay above average expectations....

Auggi, a startup developing a health app, and Seed Health, a company that develops and sells probiotics, have joined forces for the “give a shit for science” campaign in hopes they can obtain 100,000 poop pics from regular people around the world. With this database the two companies – and anyone else with access – should be able to train a solid computer-vision network to predict various medical conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome and other chronic gut illnesses....

AIportraits.com does just that. Created by a team of researchers at the MIT IBM Watson AI Lab, the site uses an AI model trained on 45,000 portraits from styles ranging from the Early Renaissance to the Contemporary period. The results are surprisingly authentic. The images might not look exactly like their sources – I couldn’t render a portrait that clearly looked like me – but the end result could have fooled someone into thinking they were real paintings of a lookalike at a glance....

Credit: Let’s Go Digital The ‘leak’ comes to us from Let’s Go Digital, and the documents appear to be real. But don’t get too excited: this is almost certainly not going to be the final look of the actual PlayStation 5 console. Chances are, this is one of the concepts for the PlayStation 5 developer’s kit. Dev kits are usually bulkier and have more ports than the finished product because, at this stage, there’s little reason for engineers to concern themselves with aesthetics....

The voice sounds oddly familiar, like I’ve heard it a thousand times before — and I have. Indeed, it sounds just like Sir David Attenborough. But it’s not him. It’s not a person at all. It’s simply a piece of AI software called Vocodes. The tool, which I can best describe as a deepfake generator, can mimic the voices of a slew of politicians and celebrities including Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bryan Cranston, Danny Devito, and a dozen more....

Artist Heqi Wang has come up with a unique solution to this problem. He has designed a dual-utility electric motorbike that can easily hop on railway tracks and function as a stylish ride on regular roads as well. Meet the Railway Motorcycle: The bike’s design is fantastically futuristic. It comes with hubless wheels and, unlike regular motorcycles, its long wheel-base is shifted towards the front, rather than the rear. In railway mode, the side sliding panels move to latch on the rails....

Now, as Trump’s been eagerly announcing the mysterious progress he’s making in negotiations with China, posts about the president are apparently showing up everywhere on the Chinese-owned social network. — Emily Turrettini (@textually) October 15, 2019 One Reddit user posting about the phenomenon said: A couple of weeks ago, leaked documents obtained by The Guardian showed that TikTok censored certain ‘politically sensitive’ topics. Some, such as posts about the Hong Kong protests, appeared to be outright deleted....