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If everything goes according to plan, we could be wearing doo-dads or getting chip implants that allow us to control machines with our minds in a decade or less. That’s a pretty cool idea and there are innumerable uses for such a device, but who knows how useful they’ll actually be in the beginning. It’s easy to get swept up in dreams of controlling entire drone swarms with our thoughts like a master conductor or conducting telepathic conversations with people around the world via the cloud....

The company’s security researcher, Gal Weizman, found vulnerabilities in WhatsApp’s Content Security Policy (CSP) that could be exploited to send manipulated messages and links using Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). He was able to take advantage of these flaws to send malicious code or read files from a computer’s local file system. That could’ve been quite harmful if someone stored sensitive documents on their machine. [Read: WhatsApp no longer works on millions of (very) old phones] The researcher was able to find and manipulate code from where messages are formed in the desktop app....

I never took a proper vacation for most of my life. Even when I was traveling, usually to see family or friends, I was on. Even on the weekends, or in the evenings, I was on. Even when I went out for drinks, I was on. One of the perils of being a one-man business is that you are your business, and there’s no one to pick up the slack if you switch off, so you’re always on, because you never know when an opportunity shows up....

When learning a different language, the easiest way to get started is with fill in the blank exercises. “It’s raining cats and …” By making mistakes and correcting them, your brain (which linguists agree is hardwired for language learning) starts discovering patterns in grammar, vocabulary, and word sequence — which can not only be applied to filling in blanks, but also to convey meaning to other humans (or computers, dogs, etc....

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Noble Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman discusses the psychological phenomenon of loss aversion, which he, along with Amos Tversky, first identified back in 1979. At its core, loss aversion refers to the tendency of the human brain to react more strongly to losses than it does to gains. Or, as Wikipedia puts it, people “prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains: it is better to not lose $5 than to find $5....

People on average use their cars daily to get to work, for social calls, and to run errands. It’s rare that any of these tasks will take you farther than 60 kilometers from your home. With new electric vehicle models like the Polestar 2 that have a range of 400 to 500 kilometers per charge, why is running out of fuel still a concern for prospective EV buyers? We need to dispense with the idea of range anxiety....

With new drone models flying on to store shelves almost as fast as they soar in real life, it can be tough to settle on the right one to fit your flying needs. There’s almost a ratio you have to hit to balance the flight abilities and navigation features with the skills of the pilot so the aircraft isn’t too much or too little for a given flyer. Then, you’ve got to assess the camera situation of a prospective buy as well as the ultimate difference maker — the price....

As professors of business, we studied how well men and women in midlevel business jobs performed on computing tasks. We also asked them to rate how they thought they did. Study participants were randomly assigned basic, intermediate or advanced problems on laptops, tablets or mobile devices, while seated, standing or walking slowly. We found no difference in the performance between men and women in the total number of questions answered correctly or the time taken to answer the questions....

A persistent rumor surrounding the next console generation has been that we’re going to get “streaming only” consoles alongside the traditional corporeal ones — consoles built sort of like Google’s Stadia, with streaming only in mind. These would be cheaper to purchase, with the trade-off being that you wouldn’t be able to use any physical game hardware. But Xbox head Phil Spencer — who’s refuted the rumor several times already — appears to have definitively put this notion to bed in a recent GameSpot interview, in which he explicitly says the only Xbox console we’ll be getting for the foreseeable future is Project Scarlett....

The device looks drop-dead gorgeous, and I’ll challenge anyone who disagrees to a duel on top of a volcanic mountain. Before you point your pitchforks at me, feast your eyes on this magnificent beast in the video below. Xiaomi said that the display is curved at 88-degrees to all sides: top, bottom, left, and right. The company claims that they achieved this flex in the screen through a “3D bonding process” — which tells us nothing....

Nope, it’s not just you: Twitter is down for many users across the globe. The service appears to be experiencing downtime in Central Europe, Japan, and the US West Coast, with thousands of users reporting being unable to access the service on Down Detector. Here’s a screenshot of DownDetector’s outage heatmap that’ll give you a better idea of the areas worst affected by the issue. Twitter has yet to acknowledge the downtime on its official status page, so hopefully the service will be back up shortly....

When I first heard about it, I was pumped. Flashing my QR code to enter a restaurant or grab a coffee would be far simpler if it sat in my Apple Wallet. Friends, the time I’d save! But, of course, the world had something to say about that. While putting my digital certificate of vaccination in an easy-to-access place is cool… is it safe? And because I can do it, does that mean I should?...

And for businesses that fail to keep their website at optimal performance, there’s a big risk: it kills the customer experience. Studies show that just two seconds of additional loading time can increase bounce rates by 103%, meanwhile 100 milliseconds of load time can cause a 7% drop in conversion. Site speed is also a factor in Google rankings on desktop and mobile. Poor performance can reduce your site’s visibility on search engines, killing your traffic....

Under the brand name “BMW IconicSounds Electric,” Zimmer will work with Renzo Vitale, an acoustic engineer and sound designer, to shape the sound for its upcoming electric cars. The iconic composer said he admired BMW growing up and expressed his enthusiasm about the project: The duo has already worked on sounds for the BMW Vision M NEXT at Zimmer’s London and Los Angeles studios. We can’t wait to see hear what the future sounds like....

In total, 10.85 million of the 11.4 million videos removed from the platform between April and June were flagged by automated systems, according to YouTube’s latest Community Guidelines Enforcement Report. AI played an even bigger role in the removal of user comments. Of the 2.1 million comments taken down, 99.2% were detected by automated systems. In a blogpost, YouTube said it was forced to rely more heavily on AI due to the impact of COVID-19....

YugaByte is both an SQL and NoSQL database, meaning it offers all the benefits of legacy SQL while also offering capabilities to work with large sets of distributed data. The 2.0 version brings support for PostgreSQL syntax, Oracle-to-YugaByte migration, Jepsen testing for correctness, and integrations with GraphQL, Rook and a variety of database administration tools. “Distributed SQL is the modern answer for any organization looking to adopt cloud-native technologies throughout their entire IT stack, including data infrastructure,” said YugaByte’s co-founder and CEO Kannan Muthukkaruppan....

Still, the social restrictions don’t mean you can’t experiment with devilish new looks from the comfort of your home. Thanks to the magic of AI, you can now transform yourself — or anyone else whose picture you’ve purloined — into a revolting zombie. The app’s creator Jose Brown Kramer built the system by first transfer-learning a StyleGAN2 zombie generator. He then tweaked it to develop a hybrid model comprised of earlier layers from a human generator and later ones from the zombie generator....

During the lengthy session, Zuckerberg sought to defend the digital currency, which has faced mounting criticism from lawmakers and regulators, and suffered several blows after some of its high profile partners withdrew their support from the project. Although Facebook originally said it was looking to launch Libra in 2020, Zuckerberg conceded during the somewhat tense hearing that it was still a long way away from a specific launch date. The entrepreneur was also probed on several issues, including whether Facebook could be trusted to handle customers’ financial data, why it sought to create a new digital currency instead of simply using the dollar, and how it was collaborating with regulators and lawmakers to ensure Libra operated within a legal framework....

The device, reported in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, works a lot like a battery. It absorbs carbon dioxide from air passing over its electrodes. It could be made as small and large as needed, making it easy to use at different carbon dioxide emission sources. And unlike today’s carbon-capture techniques, it works for a wide range of concentrations. So it could be used to scrub carbon dioxide from factory and power plant flue gases or even directly pull it from the atmosphere, where it’s present at much lower levels....

Fortunately, there are plenty of resources available for beginners to build up their knowledge and skills—or even figure out whether this path is for them. To find out more, we asked a panel of Young Entrepreneur Council the following: What is the most important thing novices or programmers should know if they’re interested in learning more about AI development? Here’s what they said: Understand The Math Behind Machine Learning AI development professionals must grasp probabilities, which serve as the foundation for machine learning....