With the ever present climate doom, I try to make as many people as I can consider an electric car, so they can make an impact and be ahead of the adoption curve. Soon they won’t have a choice, as going electric will be the only option. None of this seems to motivate them right now, though. Let me put you in my shoes. The conversation I have with my never ending stream of help-seekers usually goes something like this:...
The previous company I co-founded with Amit Bareket, SaferVPN, had recently brought together the whole team and invested a significant amount to create our new website. This was intentionally on the heels of App Store approval, but more specifically Apple’s approval of our company’s more unique security features. In the end, the fact that our product was superior wouldn’t matter much. A transformation in sales did come to pass, just as I hoped for, but not in the way I imagined… The steep opportunity cost of $1 million in lost sales and ignored leads were the result of our efforts, and it was also a slow and painful lesson on preparation and organization that we quickly and repeatedly implemented since then....
The streaming giant has launched a new opt-in feature that automatically downloads new content the app infers you’ll like. “Downloads For You” uses data from your viewing history to find new shows and films that match your tastes. It then downloads the content to your mobile device when it’s connected to a Wi-Fi network. “Whether you’re a comedy fan stuck on a long car ride or a rom-com lover without internet, we do the work so there is always something new waiting to entertain and delight you,” said Patrick Flemming, Netflix’s Director of Product Innovation, in a statement....
The researchers fed the system health data from almost 4,000 COVID-19 patients in Denmark to train it to find patterns in their medical histories. The tool determined whether an uninfected person who later catches the virus will die from the disease with up to 90% certainty. [Read: How much does it cost to buy, own, and run an EV? It’s not as much as you think] It also predicted whether someone who’s admitted to hospital with COVID-19 will need a respirator with 80% accuracy....
In the space of just a couple of years, average temperatures abruptly dropped, resulting in temperatures as much as 14 degrees Fahrenheit (-10°C) cooler in some regions of the Northern Hemisphere. If a drop like that happened today, it would mean the average temperature of Miami Beach would quickly change to that of current Montreal, Canada. Layers of ice in Greenland show that this cool period in the Northern Hemisphere lasted about 1,400 years....
This likely hasn’t changed as a result of the pandemic; in fact, career disillusionment may even be worse in the current climate as uncertainty continues to grow, and progression is frozen in line with difficult economic conditions. But the general dissatisfaction with careers felt by young people arguably begins when they leave school or graduate from university. Despite having the talent and potential to start a company, the majority will follow a more traditional path of a stable occupation and dependable income — even if it means missing out on fulfilling their ambition....
Nvidia has been working on the service for years now, and it’s finally out of the beta phase. Like other cloud gaming services out there, it claims to offer you the chance to play your PC games on other devices. When you launch a game within GeForce Now, it’ll be running on Nvidia’s cloud servers, and streamed to the device in question, allowing you to pick up and play them from supported devices without loading or any of that nonsense....
The company ended a week that introduced a new enterprise GPU and an Arm-based “superchip” with a trademark flashy demo. Some 75 years after the world’s first instant photo captured the 3D world in a 2D picture, Nvidia showcased the inverse: turning 2D images into a 3D scene within milliseconds. Dubbed Instant NeRF, the technique involves training a neural rendering model on a few dozen still photos, alongside data on the camera angle for each shot....
Up front: Atomic clocks have been in popular use since the 1950s. They’re used in myriad applications ranging from managing fairness on the stock market to allowing spaceships to navigate at extreme speeds. The Oxford team’s experiment involved a relatively new wrinkle to the formula called an optical atomic clock. Where traditional atomic clocks typically rely on energizing atoms at precise frequencies (read: zapping them with microwaves), the optical variety uses a lattice of laser beams to trap and isolate individual atoms....
Ruby on Rails is a framework known for its fast adaptability, scalability and rock solid consistency. And as one of the most respected methods for building a flashy, yet fully functional website, it’s a discipline every developer should have at their disposal. The Complete Ruby on Rails Master Class Bundle is how even the first time web builder can get a handle on this powerful creation tool. Best of all, thanks to this TNW Deals offer, you can learn all about it by paying your own price....
Is phosphorus around exoplanets a sign of life-friendly worlds? By examining the chemical composition of stars known to host exoplanets, it may be possible to determine which solar systems are likely to house alien lifeforms. Life on Earth depends on the presence of six key ingredients — carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur (known as CHNOPS). Of these, phosphorus is the rarest on Earth, making it the limiting ingredient for the chemical reactions of life....
A portmanteau of “game” and “decentralized finance,” the model offers a chance at earning cash by gaming. Players who complete in-game tasks are rewarded with crypto and NFTs, which can then be traded for real money. It’s a tempting pitch on paper. But play-to-earn shows signs of plateauing before it enters the mainstream. In April, active users shrunk by 24.9% to 9.22 million, while transaction volumes fell by 73.4%, according to Footprint Analytics, A big barrier to mass adoption is simple economics: a sustainable market needs more money coming in than going out....
A college student in Washington, D.C., used facial recognition to extract faces from videos on social media. The Washington Post used facial recognition to count the number of individual faces at the Capitol Building attack, and a researcher from Citizen Lab used it to identify people involved in the riots. And when the FBI posted photos of rioters, looking for help with identification, the Miami Police Department assigned two detectives to scan faces into the department’s Clearview facial recognition app....
Founded in 1996, Great Wall Group started off as a creative porcelain business. However, its 2018 annual report, featured details about six blockchain projects. Investigators are keen to find out whether the company‘s blockchain drive is indeed genuine. “According to the Securities Law of the People’s Republic of China, the committee of CSRC has decided to open an investigation against the firm,” the filing reads. Chinese authorities are right to be concerned In August last year, Hard Fork reported on how Long Island Tea Corp changed its name to Long Blockchain Corp....
Project Arrow is the collective effort of industry partners and University students working together to design, engineer, and build a connected and autonomous zero-emissions vehicle concept car. A digital twin is an immersive and active virtual reality environment that is used to test and validate connected and autonomous technologies before they are integrated into the physical car. A twin of the car has ben created at the catchily named Invest WindsorEssex, home to a Virtual Reality(VR) CAVE....
Following the murder of George Floyd by the US police, protests have erupted across America. While this is a legally protected right, Trump’s attempt to label Antifa as “domestic terrorists” and the police’s brutal responses suggests this isn’t a given. Which is why you need to protect yourself when protesting. And, specifically, why you must turn off location services on your phone if you go out. If you’re protesting against racial injustice and police brutality, you don’t want timestamped records of everywhere you’ve been....
The development comes almost more than a month after the internet giant made it easy for Google users to sign in to their accounts on their laptops or PCs using their Android smartphones as hardware security keys. This passwordless authentication method was initially available only for ChromeOS, macOS, and Windows 10 devices. With the latest announcement, Google has expanded the technology to include devices running iOS as well. But there is also a key difference between signing in iOS and other devices....
In December, C# looked almost certain to win the crown, but tables turned by the end of the year, and Python grabbed the pole position. For the uninitiated, TIOBE, a software quality measurement company based in the Netherlands, produces a monthly index of popular languages across the world. It’s based on the number of search results for a programming language across popular search engines. The programming language of the year title is decided by the jump in ratings year-on-year....
Take dynamic typing as an example. It seems amazing at first: Python literally figures out by itself what sort of value a variable might take, and you don’t need to waste another line of code by telling it. This makes everything go faster! At first. Then you mess it up on one single line — yes, one! — and your whole project crashes before it’s finished running. To be fair, many other languages use dynamic typing....
The phone has no official name and is just called a Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders. The marketing team clearly wasn’t bothered about it. Qualcomm said that it built the phone with the help of Asus. It will be initially available in China, Germany, the UK, and the US starting next month. The phone’s specifications suggest that it can compete with any Android flagship released this year — at least on paper....
