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The Vivo V30 Pro could be an ideal option for those seeking a camera-centric smartphone with sleek aesthetics, all without a steep price tag. It carries three 50MP cameras on the back (main + ultra-wide + portrait), which promise reliable performance in different lighting conditions. The triple cameras get complimented by an in-built ring light, which Vivo calls Smart Aura, and can be highly versatile in super dim environments. There’s a 50MP front camera as well that gets some native features and filters to up your…

—Will Douglas Heaven Thirteen years ago, as an assignment for a journalism class, I wrote a stupid short story about a man who eats luxury cat food. This morning, I sat and watched as a generative AI platform called Lore Machine brought my weird words to life. Lore Machine analyzed the text, extracted descriptions of the characters and locations mentioned, and then handed those bits of information off to an image-generation model. An illustrated storyboard popped up on the screen. As I clicked through vivid comic-book…

Last Thursday, the Biden administration announced it would investigate the security risks posed by Chinese-made smart cars, which could “collect sensitive data about our citizens and our infrastructure and send this data back to the People’s Republic of China,” the statement from White House claims. While many other technologies from China have been scrutinized because of security concerns, EVs have largely avoided that sort of attention until now. After all, they represent a technology that will greatly help the world…

The Realme 12+ is the first-ever ‘Plus’ smartphone in the company’s numeric-series lineup. The handset fills the void between the vanilla Realme 12 and Realme 12 Pro (review) smartphones. The Realme 12+ has been priced in India starting at Rs 20,999. Key specs of the 12+ include an AMOLED display, MediaTek Dimensity 7050 SoC, 50MP triple rear cameras, and a 5,000mAh battery. Read this Realme 12+ review to discover its real-world performance, camera prowess, battery life, and more.VerdictThe Realme 12+ should appeal to you…

In a short span of time, Nothing has come a long way, and it now actually stands for something. The company makes good mid-range and upper mid-range smartphones that can be total value for money. With the Nothing Phone 2a, things are new and different. While you get a similar experience with a unique design, everything has been toned down a little. The upside is that the price is now in the budget-premium segment.I have been testing (mostly the Glyph interface; just kidding, I tried everything) the Nothing Phone 2a over a…

The narrator sits on the floor and eats breakfast with the cats. LORE MACHINE / WILL DOUGLAS HEAVEN After more than a year in development, Lore Machine is now available to the public for the first time. For $10 a month, you can upload 100,000 words of text (up to 30,000 words at a time) and generate 80 images for short stories, scripts, podcast transcripts and more. There are price points for power users too, including an enterprise plan costing $160 a month that covers 2.24 million words and 1792 images. The…

—This is an excerpt from a new book, The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots, by MIT CSAIL director Daniela Rus  Robots are an incredible way to enhance and extend the reach of human capabilities. In 2009, I worked with the biologist Roger Payne to use camera-mounted drones to study whales and their life spans.  The same drone was used to study uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, so they could be observed without the risk of bringing germs to people who had not developed immunity.  We also built a drone…

Nothing Phone (2a) is a fresh attempt from the company to target buyers in the mainstream segment, and it does so with minimum compromises. The overall design resembles the Nothing Phone 2 (review), and the new phone also comes with Nothing’s signature Glyph Interface and black-and-white-themed UI. Additionally, the handset marks the debut of the MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro SoC, which is touted to be more powerful than its Snapdragon counterparts. We attempt to find that out and more in this Nothing Phone (2a) review.…

The Nothing Phone 2a takes all the most-loved aspects of previous-generation Nothing phones, but offers them at a lower price.Pros Cool unique design Solid performance Good battery life High-end display for the price InexpensiveCons No wireless charging Camera isn’t greatNothing could well be the hottest new smartphone brand in some time. After the success of the Nothing Phone (1) and its follow-up, the Nothing Phone 2, the company is expanding its portfolio a little, with the launch of a…

Recently we’ve seen some AI failures on a far bigger scale. In the latest (hilarious) gaffe, Google’s Gemini refused to generate images of white people, especially white men. Instead, users were able to generate images of Black popes and female Nazi soldiers. Google had been trying to get the outputs of its model to be less biased, but this backfired, and the tech company soon found itself in the middle of the US culture wars, with conservative critics and Elon Musk accusing it of having a “woke” bias and not…