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So it’s an interesting time to be writing about weird gadgets produced by small Chinese companies because I have no idea if the price tags they’re advertising this week are going to be the actual prices for long now that the Trump administr…
So it’s an interesting time to be writing about weird gadgets produced by small Chinese companies because I have no idea if the price tags they’re advertising this week are going to be the actual prices for long now that the Trump administration has imposed a global tariffs on imports to the United States. Some […]
The post Lilbits: Tariffs and tech prices, a 13.3 inch color ePaper monitor, and a dual-screen rugged phone appeared first on Liliputing.
Some wealthy Europeans have death rates 35 percent lower than the richest Americans.
It's well-established that, on the whole, Americans die younger than people in most other high-income countries. For instance, an analysis from 2022 found that the average life expectancy of someone born in Switzerland or Spain in 2019 was 84 years. Meanwhile, the average US life expectancy was 78.8, lower than nearly all other high-income countries, including Canada's, which was 82.3 years. And this was before the pandemic, which only made things worse for the US.
Perhaps some Americans may think that this lower overall life-expectancy doesn't really apply to them if they're middle- or upper-class. After all, wealth inequality and health disparities are huge problems in the US. Those with more money simply have better access to health care and better health outcomes. Well-off Americans live longer, with lifespans on par with their peers in high-income countries, some may think.
It is true that money buys you a longer life in the US. In fact, the link between wealth and mortality may be stronger in the US than in any other high-income country. But, if you think American wealth will put life expectancy in league with Switzerland, you're dead wrong, according to a study in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
DeepMind says AGI could arrive in 2030, and it has some ideas to keep us safe.
As AI hype permeates the Internet, tech and business leaders are already looking toward the next step. AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to a machine with human-like intelligence and capabilities. If today's AI systems are on a path to AGI, we will need new approaches to ensure such a machine doesn't work against human interests.
Unfortunately, we don't have anything as elegant as Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. Researchers at DeepMind have been working on this problem and have released a new technical paper (PDF) that explains how to develop AGI safely, which you can download at your convenience.
It contains a huge amount of detail, clocking in at 108 pages before references. While some in the AI field believe AGI is a pipe dream, the authors of the DeepMind paper project that it could happen by 2030. With that in mind, they aimed to understand the risks of a human-like synthetic intelligence, which they acknowledge could lead to "severe harm."
Yes, encryption/decryption occurs on end-user devices, but there’s a catch.
When Google announced Tuesday that end-to-end encrypted messages were coming to Gmail for business users, some people balked, noting it wasn’t true E2EE as the term is known in privacy and security circles. Others wondered precisely how it works under the hood. Here’s a description of what the new service does and doesn’t do, as well as some of the basic security that underpins it.
When Google uses the term E2EE in this context, it means that an email is encrypted inside Chrome, Firefox, or just about any other browser the sender chooses. As the message makes its way to its destination, it remains encrypted and can’t be decrypted until it arrives at its final destination, when it’s decrypted in the recipient's browser.
The chief selling point of this new service is that it allows government agencies and the businesses that work with them to comply with a raft of security and privacy regulations and at the same time eliminates the massive headaches that have traditionally plagued anyone deploying such regulation-compliant email systems. Up to now, the most common means has been S/MIME, a standard so complex and painful that only the bravest and most well-resourced organizations tend to implement it.
300 aspects of each call were cataloged, letting researchers estimate meaning.
Bonobos, great apes related to us and chimpanzees that live in the Republic of Congo, communicate with vocal calls including peeps, hoots, yelps, grunts, and whistles. Now, a team of Swiss scientists led by Melissa Berthet, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Zurich, discovered bonobos can combine these basic sounds into larger semantic structures. In these communications, meaning is something more than just a sum of individual calls—a trait known as non-trivial compositionality, which we once thought was uniquely human.
To do this, Berthet and her colleagues built a database of 700 bonobo calls and deciphered them using methods drawn from distributional semantics, the methodology we’ve relied on in reconstructing long-lost languages like Etruscan or Rongorongo. For the first time, we have a glimpse into what bonobos mean when they call to each other in the wild.
The key idea behind distributional semantics is that when words appear in similar contexts, they tend to have similar meanings. To decipher an unknown language, you need to collect a large corpus of words and turn those words into vectors—mathematical representations that let you place them in a multidimensional semantic space. The second thing you need is context data, which tells you the circumstances in which these words were used (that gets vectorized, too). When you map your word vectors onto context vectors in this multidimensional space, what usually happens is that words with similar meaning end up close to each other. Berthet and her colleagues wanted to apply the same trick to bonobos’ calls. That seemed straightforward at first glance, but proved painfully hard to execute.
Nvidia says the Switch 2’s GPU is 10 times faster than the original Switch.
In the wake of the Switch 2 reveal, neither Nintendo nor Nvidia has gone into any detail at all about the exact chip inside the upcoming handheld—technically, we are still not sure what Arm CPU architecture or what GPU architecture it uses, how much RAM we can expect it to have, how fast that memory will be, or exactly how many graphics cores we're looking at.
But interviews with Nintendo executives and a blog post from Nvidia did at least confirm several of the new chip's capabilities. The "custom Nvidia processor" has a GPU "with dedicated [Ray-Tracing] Cores and Tensor Cores for stunning visuals and AI-driven enhancements," writes Nvidia Software Engineering VP Muni Anda.
This means that, as rumored, the Switch 2 will support Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscaling technology, which helps to upscale a lower-resolution image into a higher-resolution image with less of a performance impact than native rendering and less loss of quality than traditional upscaling methods. For the Switch games that can render at 4K or at 120 FPS 1080p, DLSS will likely be responsible for making it possible.
Voice breaks in Latin American monkey calls resemble human yodeling, but over a much wider frequency range.
Humans have practiced some form of yodeling since at least the 13th century, when Marco Polo encountered Tibetan monks on his travels who used the vocal technique for long-distance communication. It's since morphed into a distinctive singing style. But can animals also yodel? According to a new paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences, several species of monkey dwelling in the rainforests of Latin America employ "voice breaks" in their calls that acoustically resemble human yodeling—i.e., "ultra-yodels" that boast a much wider frequency range.
Many years ago, I wrote about the bioacoustics of human yodeling for New Scientist. In many respects, yodeling is quite simple. It merely involves singing a long note subjected to repeated rapid sharp shifts in pitch. It's the unique anatomy of the human vocal tract that makes it possible, notably the larynx (voice box) located just behind the Adam's apple. The larynx is comprised of cartilage and the hyoid bone that together support the vocal cords, which are attached to muscles on either side of the larynx.
When air flows through the trachea, the vocal cords vibrate at frequencies ranging from 110 to 200 Hz. We have the capability of contracting the muscles to change the shape, position, and tension of our vocal cords, thereby altering the pitch of the sound produced. Stiffer vocal cords result in faster vibrations, which produce higher pitches.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open source email client, calendar, and contact application that’s been available for more than two decades. It first launched at a time when Gmail wasn’t a thing and most web-based email service providers …
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open source email client, calendar, and contact application that’s been available for more than two decades. It first launched at a time when Gmail wasn’t a thing and most web-based email service providers offered only a few megabytes of storage space. But the demand for desktop-only email applications has […]
The post Thunderbird plans to launch open source alternatives to Gmail, Google Calendar and Office 365 appeared first on Liliputing.
Trump accused of consulting chatbots after critics mock tariffs on islands of penguins.
Critics are questioning if Donald Trump's administration possibly used chatbots to calculate reciprocal tariffs announced yesterday that Trump claimed were "individualized" tariffs placed on countries that have " the largest trade deficits" with the US.
Those tariffs are due to take effect on April 9 for 60 countries, with peak rates around 50 percent. That's in addition to a baseline 10 percent tariff that all countries will be subject to starting on April 5. But while Trump expressed intent to push back on anyone supposedly taking advantage of the US, some of the countries on the reciprocal tariffs list puzzled experts and officials, who pointed out to The Guardian that Trump was, for some reason, targeting uninhabited islands, some of them exporting nothing and populated with penguins.
Some overseas officials challenged Trump's math, such as George Plant, the administrator of Norfolk Island, who told the Guardian that "there are no known exports from Norfolk Island to the United States and no tariffs or known non-tariff trade barriers on goods coming to Norfolk Island."
SpaceX hasn’t said whether the next Starship flight will use a new or flight-proven booster.
SpaceX is having trouble with Starship's upper stage after back-to-back failures, but engineers are making remarkable progress with the rocket's enormous booster.
The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship's first stage—called Super Heavy—came at 9:40 am local time (10:40 am EDT; 14:40 UTC) Thursday at the company's Starbase launch site in South Texas. With an unmistakable blast of orange exhaust, SpaceX fired up a Super Heavy booster that has already flown to the edge of space. The burn lasted approximately eight seconds.
This was the first time SpaceX has test-fired a "flight-proven" Super Heavy booster, and it could pave the way for this particular rocket—designated Booster 14—to fly again soon. A reflight of Booster 14, which previously launched and returned to Earth in January, could happen as soon as the next Starship launch. With Thursday's static fire test, Booster 14 appears to be closer to flight readiness than any of the boosters in SpaceX's factory, which is a short distance from the launch site.