Enlarge / Workers walk outside Hon Hai Group’s Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China, in 2010. (credit: Getty) Violent worker protests have erupted at the world’s largest iPhone factory in central China as authorities at the Foxconn plant struggle to contain a COVID-19 outbreak while maintaining production ahead of the peak holiday season. Workers at the…
Enlarge / MineDojo’s AI can perform complex tasks in Minecraft. (credit: Nvidia) A paper describing MineDojo, Nvidia’s generalist AI agent that can perform actions from written prompts in Minecraft, won an Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Paper Award at the 2022 NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference, Nvidia revealed on Monday. To train the MineDojo framework…
Enlarge / This ThinkCentre M90n-1 Nano from 2019, passively cooled with a big heatsink, was $145 when the author last looked on eBay. It’s not a Raspberry Pi, and it looks like Batman’s reception desk system, but it can do the work. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) “Raspberry Pi boards are hard to get, probably also next…
Enlarge / An example of Disney’s FRAN age-changing AI that shows the original image on the left and re-aged rows of older (top, at age 65) and younger (lower, at age 18) examples of the same person. (credit: Disney) Disney researchers have created a new neural network that can alter the visual age of actors…
Enlarge / Benj Edwards’ computer running The Cave BBS in 1994. (credit: Benj Edwards) Thirty years ago last week—on November 25, 1992—my BBS came online for the first time. I was only 11 years old, working from my dad’s Tandy 1800HD laptop and a 2400 baud modem. The Cave BBS soon grew into a bustling…
Enlarge / Two examples of Stable Diffusion-generated artwork provided by Apple. (credit: Apple) On Wednesday, Apple released optimizations that allow the Stable Diffusion AI image generator to run on Apple Silicon using Core ML, Apple’s proprietary framework for machine-learning models. The optimizations will allow app developers to use Apple Neural Engine hardware to run Stable…
Enlarge (credit: Peach_istock via Getty Images) It is common to hear news reports about large data breaches, but what happens once your personal data is stolen? Our research shows that, like most legal commodities, stolen data products flow through a supply chain consisting of producers, wholesalers, and consumers. But this supply chain involves the interconnection…
Enlarge / Nvidia’s 12VHPWR power cable adapter, as shipped with an RTX 4080. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Nvidia’s new RTX 4090 and 4080 GPUs both use a new connector called 12VHPWR to deliver power as a way to satisfy ever-more power-hungry graphics cards without needing to set aside the physical space required for three or four…
Enlarge / An early augmented reality demo by Apple, using a smartphone instead of a headset. (credit: Apple) Apple’s mixed-reality headset is still on track for an unveiling sometime next year, and its future operating system has a new name, according to a report published Thursday. Bloomberg claims the name of the operating system has…
Enlarge / Waze for Android Automotive. (credit: Waze) Google’s other big navigation app, Waze, is coming to Android Automotive. Today the company announced the move on the Waze blog, saying, “The new dedicated Waze app for cars brings the best of Waze real-time navigation, routing and alerts feature[s] right in the car’s display. When you drive,…