Sharon Perry 13907 posts 0 comments

 It’s been a big week of updates on all things Google. Yesterday the company launched a bunch of handy updates for Android Auto, giving the in-car digital experience a much-needed refresh with added features and a far superior user interface. Let’s take a look. Split screen for the win I’m liking the split screen functionality Android‘s making split screen mode standard across all screen types and sizes, including widescreen and portrait. This removes the need to fiddle through lists of apps.…

DeepMind today unveiled a new multi-modal AI system capable of performing more than 600 different tasks. Dubbed Gato, it’s arguably the most impressive all-in-one machine learning kit the world’s seen yet. According to a DeepMind blog post: The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on…

If you had invested £100 (US$122) in the cryptocurrency Luna a month ago, you might have been quietly confident you’d made a sensible bet. But Luna’s value has since fallen drastically – at the time of writing, that £100 is worth around 4p (5¢). Luna was by no means the only victim in a week where cryptocurrencies were down 30%. Some have recovered to a certain extent, but this still represents an aggregate seven-day loss of over US$500 million (£410 million), prompting existential questions…

What do you need to make your garden grow? As well as plenty of sunshine alternating with gentle showers of rain – and busy bees and butterflies to pollinate the plants – you need good, rich soil to provide essential minerals. But imagine you had no rich soil, or showers of rain, or bees and butterflies. And the sunshine was either too harsh and direct or absent – causing freezing temperatures. Could plants grow in such an environment – and, if so, which ones? This is the question that…

A few months ago, I quit my job at Google after 10 years to join a 40 person startup (Replit). At the time, I had a hard time expressing why I needed to make the change, even though I knew with certainty. Writing this helped me sort it out. I left because I needed to fix my work-life balance. I joined Google in early 2011. Larry Page was beginning his second stint as CEO. Everybody was talking about a secret project named Emerald Sea. TGIF was on Fridays, and…

One of the useful features of search engines like Google is the autocomplete function that enables users to find fast answers to their questions or queries. However, autocomplete search functions are based on ambiguous algorithms that have been widely criticized because they often provide biased and racist results. The ambiguity of these algorithm stems from the fact that most of us know very little about them — which has led some to refer to them as “black boxes.” Search engines and social…

A hundred kilometers away from the city of La Rioja, Argentina — and a thousand away from the capital Buenos Aires — lies the Los Colorados provincial reserve, which holds a Martian landscape filled with red soil and orange canyons. In this area, the Solar54 project will carry out a series of studies and tests of the different variables that will determine the human colonization of Mars. It seeks to recreate the environment of Mars so that space agencies from all around the globe can run tests…