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And so, the folding phone was born. The advent of folding displays has opened the door to all sorts of new form factors, but so far the market seems to have settled on the two designs offered by Samsung: roughly regular-sized phones that unfold into little tablets, a la Galaxy Fold, and compact clamshell phones that unfold into a regular-sized screen, like the Galaxy Flip. After living with both of Samsung’s most recent folding phones for a few months (provided by AT&T for testing) I’ve come to an important conclusion: I absolutely love the Galaxy Fold’s design, but I just can’t recommend the Flip to most people....

So when it came time, some years ago, for me to envision and build out the right office space for me and my colleagues, I dared to dream differently and put my theories into practice. I put my seat right in the middle of the office. In my experience, CEOs are typically concerned that they won’t find privacy — for focus, and for proprietary matters — which makes layout like mine sound impossible to attempt, much less to perfect....

Thirty years after the birth of the world wide web, you’d still be hard-pressed to go anywhere today and find a majority of people who understand what web hosting is, how it works, or why it’s absolutely essential for getting anything online. There are currently more than 1.8 billion (yes, with a B) websites out there. And every single one of them depends on a web host to store created web pages, then make them available to anyone who happens to come by your website....

Lemoine’s bosses at Google disagree, and have suspended him from work after he published his conversations with the machine online. Other AI experts also think Lemoine may be getting carried away, saying systems like LaMDA are simply pattern-matching machines that regurgitate variations on the data used to train them. Regardless of the technical details, LaMDA raises a question that will only become more relevant as AI research advances: if a machine becomes sentient, how will we know?...

UI and UX. Yin and yang. Two sides of the same coin. A website based on a compelling user interface can’t survive without an equally streamlined user experience — and vice versa. For anyone with an eye toward site or app building, both pursuits need to be at the forefront of that campaign. Of course, that’s easier said than done. From scraping together user research to defining a strategy for the project to putting together wireframes and sitemaps, crafting a new site with both beautiful design and supreme functionality can be a tall order....

A report from cybersecurity company VPN Mentor suggests that this 409GB database was stored in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket, making all data publicly accessible. The report noted that the database belonged to BHIM’s website, which is mainly used for onboarding users. For the uninitiated, BHIM is an app based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform by the National Payments Corporation of India. Paytm, Google Pay, PhonePe, and WhatsApp payments are some other notable services that use UPI to facilitate financial transactions....

This is alarming because it illustrates that the country’s government is clamping down on citizens’ efforts to voice their opinions on numerous issues plaguing India right now, and restricting their ability to coordinate protests. The news follows the onset of protests in several cities and towns against the National Register of Citizens Bill (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). At the same time, Section 144 of India’s Criminal Procedure Code is being imposed in cities like Bangalore, and in parts of New Delhi....

“Strong commodity (and cryptocurrency) prices, plus sharply falling US dollar hedging costs should keep the dollar on the soft side this week,” warned ING’s global head of strategy Chris Turner in his latest foreign exchange analysis. Turner’s right: the price of the DXY index – which measures the performance of the US dollar against a basket of international currencies – has struggled to find momentum moving into the new week of trade....

Think of this feature as “Throwback Thursday” coming to life. It shows a random picture from your feed posted on this day in the past. If you didn’t upload a photo or video on this day, it’ll show you a story from the date instead. The fun part is you can’t choose a particular picture and upload it as “On this day,” but you can hit the dice button to shuffle through posts on that day....

You may have heard that Apple and Epic Games are in a stand-off over the issue of App Store policies. It’s a sordid affair, and I won’t bore you with all the details, which you can read here. Essentially Apple has banned Fortnite from the App Store, at least until the legal issue is resolved. As much as I enjoy watching two enormous companies duke it out over who gets to keep a giant pile of money, the effect this has had on actual gamers has been a decidedly negative one: at the moment, you cannot download Fortnite on an iPhone that doesn’t already have it....

In order to attract interest of larger and institutional investors, Bitcoin had to be painted as a serious investment vehicle. One with its own unique characteristics. Incomparable with conventional financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, and commodities. Thus: serving the purpose of decreasing risk in a diversified portfolio of investments, because it’s behaving differently in certain market conditions. That theory is all and well, but how did it actually play out in the past ten years?...

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 previous reviews. According to the researchers, its output is comparable to, and often indistinguishable from, reviews created purely by humans. The big question here is: who is this for?...

Even though the planned legislation does not specify what is meant by “removal”, the possible inclusion of natural carbon sinks has been termed “cheating” by Greenpeace and “games” by the WWF. Are these accusations justified? To understand this, we need to remember that to meet the Paris Agreement target to keep global warming “well below 2°C”, the world has less than 12 years of current CO₂ emissions until it exhausts its remaining budget....

The team set out to discover if the “ideal quantum measurement” exists in nature. One of the fundamental principals of quantum mechanics involves a wacky concept called “superposition.” This idea basically says that things in the quantum world can be in more than one place at the same time. In this experiment, the researchers trapped an atom and attempted to measure an electron in superposition. The big idea here was that the electron’s atomic orbit can take more than one trajectory (high or low) and, through superposition, it can exist in both trajectories at the same time....

WhatsApp notes that its primary focus was reducing eye-strain in low light environments. That’s why, unlike some other apps, the dark areas aren’t quite pitch black. During testing, the company found the contrast of pure black and white can lead to eye fatigue, so it’s using a dark grey background instead. It also used colors and other design elements “to make sure the most important information stands out.” Moreover, it’s matched the shade of the dark grey backgrounds to fit the respective OS....

But tapping this human potential is proving challenging. Starting afresh is hard anyway. Factor in the inherent bureaucracies and frustrations of life as a refugee, and it’s almost impossible to create a new business. Trying to address this problem is Square, the financial services giant founded by Jack Dorsey, who also serves as Twitter’s CEO. The company today announced a partnership with The Entrepreneurial Refugee Network (TERN), which will see it provide training, software, and hardware to business-minded refugees living in the UK....

I’ve always loved all things that go. I wanted to grow up to be a fighter pilot. My first car was a Mustang. I spent my military career riding in speed boats and helicopters. Much like my fictional shipmate, Lt. Maverick from the movie Top Gun, I feel the need for speed. Unfortunately, around the time I turned 30, I was diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder and made the decision to surrender my driver’s license....

In its yearly compliance report, cryptocurrency exchange Kraken says that global data requests from law enforcement agencies in 2019 are up 49 percent over 2018. The crypto exchange says it received a total of 710 information requests in 2019 which impacted 1,222 accounts. Back in 2018, law enforcement agencies made 475 information requests from Kraken. If last year’s news coverage is anything to go by, it’s not surprising that the US leads the charge having made the most requests....

You know all about Android and Windows and iOS. So if Linux is an operating system and you’ve never heard of it, should you really care? It’s at the center of so much, yet so off the radar. But you can add this important item to your IT resume with the training in The Complete 2020 Learn Linux Bundle. Right now, it’s only $69, a savings of over 90 percent off the regular price from TNW Deals....

One popular approach would be to treat a non-numerical feature as categorical. This could work well if the number of categories is small (for example, if data indicates a profession or a country). However, if we try to apply this method to emails, we will likely get as many categories as there are samples. No two emails are exactly the same, hence this approach would be of no use. Another approach would be to define a distance between data samples, a function that tells us how close any two samples are....