Новости за 02.04.2024

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images

The United States and United Kingdom agreed to work together to monitor advanced AI models for safety risks. The two countries will collaborate on research and do at least one joint safety test.

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images

When New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced the city would be testing out AI gun detectors on at subway stations last week, he touted the technology as “clearly impressive.” But critics, including the Legal Aid Society, were immediately skeptical of the pilot — and as it turns out, they were right to be.

Image: Square Enix

I’m in awe of how smart the developers of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth are. After seeing a post comparing Cloud during the Nibelheim flashback and his arrival at the city much later in the game, my mind is reeling from the subtle brilliance in how Square used the tiniest of animation details to convey one of the biggest, most shocking plot twists in Final Fantasy narrative history.

An Amazon Dash Cart in Whole Foods. | Photo by Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu via Getty Images

Amazon has decided to give up on its Just Walk Out program that lets customers leave its brick-and-mortar grocery stores without a formal checkout process. Instead, it’s switching fully to “Dash Carts,” where customers scan products as they toss them in their cart.

Illustration: The Verge

Google just sent out its final reminder that Dropcam and Dropcam Pro cameras and Nest Secure home security systems will stop working next Monday, April 8th. Google first made the announcement a year ago, a month before it rolled out its redesigned Home app.

Phones need to go to notification jail. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Feel that? Your phone buzzing in the pocket of your yoga pants? Better check it. Maybe it’s a request to approve a substitution in your grocery order. Maybe it’s a fraudulent charge on your credit card. Maybe it’s your mom or your spouse or your sister. Maybe it’s a notification from your kid’s daycare. It might be any of those things! But it’s probably not. It’s probably something like:

Screenshot: Chris Welch / The Verge

I’ve become almost numb to the deluge of notifications that hit my phone every day. But when an app sends a simple, very human “Hi!” message, apparently that’s enough to stop me in my tracks. And Starbucks just sent exactly that push notification to god knows how many devices a few minutes ago. For what purpose? Who knows?

Apple’s second-gen AirPods still deliver a lot of value for Apple fans given how well they integrate with other iOS devices. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

We don’t often recommend five-year-old earbuds, but Apple’s second-generation AirPods are one of those rare gadgets that have stood the test of time. They’re still a good option if you just need a simple pair of earbuds that integrate well with other Apple devices, and right now, they’re just $89 ($40 off) at Amazon and Walmart. Читать дальше...

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Tesla delivered 386,810 vehicles this quarter, falling short of its fourth quarter 2023 deliveries by nearly 100,000 and marking a year-over-year sales drop from Q1 2023’s 422,875 vehicles. As Bloomberg notes, the company hasn’t delivered fewer vehicles than the same prior-year period since 2020 and hasn’t delivered under 400,000 vehicles in a quarter since Q3 2022.

Google Podcasts was a simple but good podcasts app — and now it’s gone. | Image: Google

Google Podcasts is dead. It has been dying for months, since Google announced last fall that it was killing its dedicated podcast app in order to focus all its podcasting efforts on YouTube Music. This is a bad idea and a big downgrade, and I’d be more mad if only I were more surprised.

You’re not limited to hovering in FaceTime. | Video: Apple

Starting today, Vision Pro personas will be able to do more than hover like a ghost in FaceTime calls. Now, you can use them in SharePlay-enabled apps to collaborate, play games, or watch media with other people.

Jon Stewart interviews Lina Khan. | Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

In the months since the cancellation of The Problem With Jon Stewart on Apple TV Plus, the former host of the show, Jon Stewart, has revealed details here and there about the acrimonious relationship with Apple. While interviewing FTC Chair Lina Khan yesterday on The Daily Show about tech companies and antitrust behavior, he revealed more, telling Khan, “I wanted to have you on a podcast,” but Apple “literally said,... Читать дальше...

As per this still from an Anchorage Daily News video, Aurora is already hard at work spooking the local animals. | Image: Anchorage Daily News

The Alaskan government has a new four-legged friend keeping migratory birds and other animals away from the runways at Fairbanks International Airport: a dog-like Boston Dynamics robot dubbed “Aurora.” The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities posted its “new hire” on Instagram last month, saying that the robot will be trialed... Читать дальше...

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

There are fewer things more ubiquitous in technology than QWERTY keyboards. If you type anywhere, you almost certainly type the QWERTY way. But why? It turns out that by almost any objective measure, the keyboards we use are decidedly unoptimized. Commonly used keys are too hard to reach; your fingers have to move side to side too much; it requires way too much movement overall. There are a million theories about why QWERTY was invented — the most common... Читать дальше...

Photo: Brother

It’s been over a year since I last told you to just buy a Brother laser printer, and that article has fallen down the list of Google search results because I haven’t spent my time loading it up with fake updates every so often to gain the attention of the Google search robot.

The Artifact app will be gone soon — but the Yahoo News app might start to be more like it. | Image: Artifact

Instagram’s co-founders built a powerful and useful tool for recommending news to readers — but could never quite get it to scale. Yahoo has hundreds of millions of readers — but could use a dose of tech-forward cool to separate it from all the internet’s other news aggregators. And so, the two sides are joining forces: Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the companies announced on Tuesday. Читать дальше...

A mockup of what Microsoft’s Xbox chatbot looks like. | Cath Virginia / The Verge

Microsoft is currently testing a new AI-powered Xbox chatbot that can be used to automate support tasks. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the software giant has been testing an “embodied AI character” that animates when responding to Xbox support queries. I understand this Xbox AI chatbot is part of a larger effort inside Microsoft to apply AI to its Xbox platform and services.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Of all the allegations that the Department of Justice has laid at Apple’s door, the most contentious is perhaps its salvo over security and privacy. Apple has warned that if the DOJ gets its way, Apple products — especially the iPhone — will be less secure for users. Meanwhile, the DOJ claims that Apple’s much-touted privacy features are pretextual.

The record was broken during a 15-hour stream on April 1st. | Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Game developer Jason Thor Hall, better known by the moniker Pirate Software, has set a new Twitch Hype Train world record, with his channel reaching level 106 on April 1st. Once the Hype Train was initiated, it took Hall roughly three hours to beat his previous level 55 world record from December, with viewers contributing 54,380 gifted subs (alongside regular subscriptions) and 8,225,386 Bits ... Читать дальше...

Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge

“The ability to know somebody’s age and try to protect privacy at the same time can be challenging,” says Meta’s Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis. Meta has been advocating for app store operators like Apple and Google to be in charge of verifying users’ ages and soliciting parental consent for app downloads. Now, it’s using its own virtual reality Quest store as a model for how it thinks that should work.

Are you there, Bixby? | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Bixby’s not dead yet, apparently. A Samsung executive tells CNBC that the company is “working so hard” to equip its voice assistant with AI features, suggesting that the company sees the likes of Gemini as competition — not a replacement.

Illustration: The Verge

You can’t really blame Meta’s executives for wanting to limit the amount of political yelling on Instagram and Threads. That stuff can get pretty toxic. As a result, both of Meta’s social networks now limit what Meta terms “political content” from people you are not following.