Month: August 2023

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / Snap Inc.)

It's not Halloween yet, but some users of Snapchat feel like it is. On Tuesday evening, Snapchat's My AI chatbot posted a mysterious one-second video of what looks like a wall and a ceiling, despite never having added a video to its messages before. When users asked the chatbot about it, the machine stayed eerily silent.

"My AI" is a chatbot built into the Snapchat app that people can talk to as if it were a real person. It's powered by OpenAI's large language model (LLM) technology, similar to ChatGPT. It shares clever quips and recommends Snapchat features in a way that makes it feel like a corporate imitation of a trendy young person chillin' with its online homies.

Late yesterday, many people discovered that My AI had left a short video of a two-toned scene as a "story" (what Snapchat calls a shared photo or video), shocking users because it was unknown that the bot had this capability. And the bot's faux personality makes it easy to assume there is some intentional action behind the video, even though it's probably just a weird technical glitch.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Today, Intel officially announced the termination of a $5.4 billion deal with Tower Semiconductor that was supposed to propel Intel closer to its "goal of becoming the second-largest global external foundry by the end of the decade."

Yesterday, the deadline for completing the deal passed after the tech companies failed to secure timely regulatory approval in China, Intel said in its press release.

Intel and Tower reached the deal back in February 2022. According to Bloomberg, this week's scrapping of the deal was expected, as Chinese officials dragged their feet for months, ultimately never signing off on it.

Enlarge (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Despite growing electric vehicle adoption in the US, satisfaction with the electric vehicle charging experience continues to suffer. That's according to a new study on the EV public charging experience conducted by JD Power, which together with PlugShare has been asking EV owners about their satisfaction levels since 2021. This year, the study found that people are unhappy with charge times, and one in five reported visiting a charger but being unable to charge.

The not-great state of public EV charging is a topic of much conversation—a story about fast charger reliability garnered almost 1,200 comments last year. Just about everyone who has tried to fast-charge a non-Tesla EV will have a horror story or two, and it's a problem the automakers are well aware of.

That's why the past few months have seen a flurry of announcements from car companies announcing a switch from the Combined Charging Standard 1 plug—until now, the de facto industry standard for non-Tesla EVs—to Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug. In doing so, those OEMs gain access to the Tesla Supercharger network for their customers starting in 2024.

Enlarge (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Despite growing electric vehicle adoption in the US, satisfaction with the electric vehicle charging experience continues to suffer. That's according to a new study on the EV public charging experience conducted by JD Power, which together with PlugShare has been asking EV owners about their satisfaction levels since 2021. This year, the study found that people are unhappy with charge times, and one in five reported visiting a charger but being unable to charge.

The not-great state of public EV charging is a topic of much conversation—a story about fast charger reliability garnered almost 1,200 comments last year. Just about everyone who has tried to fast-charge a non-Tesla EV will have a horror story or two, and it's a problem the automakers are well aware of.

That's why the past few months have seen a flurry of announcements from car companies announcing a switch from the Combined Charging Standard 1 plug—until now, the de facto industry standard for non-Tesla EVs—to Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug. In doing so, those OEMs gain access to the Tesla Supercharger network for their customers starting in 2024.

Enlarge / 2.7-billion-year-old basalt lava flows in the Pilbara Craton, now tilted about 45 degrees from horizontal. (credit: Jennifer Kasbohm )

Have tectonic plates changed speed over the last three billion years? The answer has far-reaching implications, as plate tectonics affected everything from the supply of vital nutrients for early life to the rise of oxygen. We know Earth’s interior was hotter early in its history, but did plates move faster because the hotter mantle was squishier, or did the hotter mantle contain less water, which helps mantle minerals flow, slowing plates down?

A new study, led by Dr. Jennifer Kasbohm of Yale, measured ancient magnetic fields and dated rocks from Western Australia to show that the “Pilbara Craton”—an early continent—moved at quite a clip around 2.7 billion years ago. While today’s fastest plate motion is around 12 cm (4.7 in) per year, the Pilbara Craton moved as much as 64 centimeters (25 inches) per year.

A rare remnant of early Earth

In the Archean eon, a time far closer to the formation of our Solar System than to today, basalt oozed over what would later be Western Australia in much the same way it does in Iceland and Hawaii today. Plate tectonics was still relatively new, and continents were in the early stages of emerging from what had largely been a water world. The air was devoid of oxygen, and the most advanced life came in the form of microbial communities that are preserved today in hummocky fossils known as “stromatolites.”

Enlarge / Artist's conception of the newly found species. (credit: Matheus Fernandes)

It was relatively small in comparison to the giants that would follow it later in Earth’s history. With a hip height of approximately 0.3 meters (about a foot) and a length of perhaps a meter (roughly three feet), this ancient reptile existed long before the evolution of the pterosaurs most of us recognize.

Its most striking features are its skull and hands, two body parts that rarely survive fossilization among similar animals this old. The skull consists of a raptorial-like beak without teeth, while its forelimbs end in long fingers with scimitar-like claws. These two surprising features are among many revelations in a paper published Wednesday in Nature.

Venetoraptor gassenae is the name of this new species of lagerpetid, a type of pterosaur precursor that lived about 230 million years ago in Brazil. Named for the district of Vale Vêneto in the same municipality in which the fossil was found—and for the plundering it might have done with its beak and claws ("raptor" is Latin for "plunderer")—it is also named to honor Valserina Maria Bulegon Gassen. Although not a paleontologist herself, the authors note that she is “one of the main people responsible for the CAPPA/UFSM” (the Centro de Apoio à Pesquisa Paleontológica da Quarta Colônia, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria), a paleontological research support center).

Artist interpretation of the creatures talking about your mom on Xbox Live last night. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

This week, Microsoft is rolling out a newly standardized strike-based system laying out tiered enforcement plans for violations of the existing Xbox Community Standards. The intent, Microsoft says, is to give players "clarity into how their behavior impacts their experience." But the system's time-based "eight strikes and you're out" system and the relative severity of certain sample infractions are already drawing perplexed comments from some corners.

As outlined in a Tuesday post on Xbox Wire, the new strike enforcement program will impose more stringent penalties for successive infractions, a system Microsoft says is modeled after "demerit strikes used in driver’s license systems in many countries." Successive strikes will lead to suspensions from Xbox Live for one day to a maximum of 365 days, according to the following scale:

• 1 strike: 1-day suspension
• 2 strikes: 1-day suspension
• 3 strikes: 3-day suspension
• 4 strikes: 7-day suspension
• 5 strikes: 14-day suspension
• 6 strikes: 21-day suspension
• 7 strikes: 60-day suspension
• 8 strikes: 365-day suspension

A sample "User Journey" outlining how the new strike-based enforcement system can shake out. (credit: Microsoft)

Not all potential infractions are treated equally under this rubric, though; Microsoft notes that the number of strikes per enforcement action can "range in severity based on inappropriate activity" and are "based on the severity of [the user's] actions." While Microsoft hasn't published a complete list of how many strikes are associated with each different type of infraction, a sample "User Journey" graphic in the blog post includes a list of the following "examples of strikes added for each type of action."