Month: September 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Monday, Amazon introduced a new policy that limits Kindle authors from self-publishing more than three books per day on its platform, reports The Guardian. The rule comes as Amazon works to curb abuses of its publication system from an influx of AI-generated books.

Amazon revealed the new limitations in a post on its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) forum. KDP allows self-published authors to list their works on the Amazon website. While the official announcement did not state a limit number, an Amazon representative told The Guardian about the three-book limit, which can be adjusted "if needed." Previously, there had been no limit on the number of books that authors could list daily.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, an AI assistant that can compose text in almost any style, some news outlets have reported a marked increase in AI-authored books, including some that seek to fool others by using established author names. Despite the anecdotal observations, Amazon is keeping its cool about the scale of the AI-generated book issue for now. "While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers," they write, "in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations."

Enlarge / This beer isn't helping. (credit: Grady Reese)

For a phenomenon that is so deeply engrained in the public consciousness, the scientific evidence regarding what has been called "beer goggles" is surprisingly inconsistent. The term refers to finding people more attractive after drinking alcohol, and there is a wealth of scientific evidence both for and against its existence.

The effect has become a trope in popular culture, with countless shows and movies referencing it. Bart sees Aunt Selma as a beautiful young woman through a pair of Duff beer goggles in The Simpsons, while Mythbusters even tested whether the effect was real (they concluded it was plausible).

The latest study to throw its hat into the ring was published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs by scientists from the University of Pittsburgh and Stanford University. It has added to the pool of evidence that rejects the existence of beer goggles. But what the work found is that alcohol seems to give people “liquid courage,” increasing their willingness to interact with people they find attractive.

The collapsed bridge that Philip Paxson drove off of. (credit: Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky)

Google is being sued by a widow who says her husband drowned in September 2022 after Google Maps directed him over a collapsed bridge in Hickory, North Carolina.

Google failed to correct its map service despite warnings about the broken bridge two years before the accident, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday by Alicia Paxson in Wake County Superior Court. Philip Paxson "died tragically while driving home from his daughter's ninth birthday party, when he drove off of an unmarked, unbarricaded collapsed bridge in Hickory, North Carolina while following GPS directions," the complaint said.

The Snow Creek Bridge reportedly collapsed in 2013 and wasn't repaired. Barricades were typically in place but "were removed after being vandalized and were missing at the time of Paxson's wreck," according to The Charlotte Observer. The lawsuit has five defendants, including Google and its owner Alphabet.

Enlarge / The Surface Laptop Studio 2. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

NEW YORK—Two years after announcing the original, Microsoft has announced a much-needed refresh of the Surface Laptop Studio, the company's convertible touchscreen laptop that also serves as its most powerful notebook for people playing games or doing any kind of 3D rendering or GPU-accelerated AI work. The new Laptop Studio 2 will start at $1,999.99 and is available for preorder now; it will ship on October 3.

The Laptop Studio 2 is a substantial internal overhaul, swapping out a quad-core 11th-generation Intel Core CPU and a GeForce 3050 Ti for a 13th-generation CPU and GeForce RTX 4050 and 4060 options (with an RTX 2000 also available for people who need a "pro" GPU). Microsoft continues to refresh Surface devices toward the end of Intel's product cycles, and next-generation Meteor Lake Core processors should be coming soon, but this is still a welcome upgrade over the old model. It's also the first x86 Surface that Microsoft sells with an NPU for accelerating AI and machine learning workloads, specifically an Intel Gen 3 Intel Movidius 3700VC.

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  New ports and updated internals are nice, but the price tag is tough to swallow. [credit: Microsoft ]

Unfortunately, the base $2,000 version gets you very few of those perks. It includes an i7-13700H with six P-cores, eight E-cores, and 16GB of RAM, but it only comes with integrated graphics and a 512GB SSD.

Enlarge / Meet the Surface Laptop Go 3. It looks a lot like the Laptop Go 2.

NEW YORK—Microsoft is updating two of the cheapest, cutest Surface devices today, announcing internal refreshes for the Surface Laptop Go and the Surface Go tablet. The Surface Laptop Go 3 and the Surface Go 4 are externally identical to their predecessors, but both are getting respectable internal upgrades that should provide enough power for budget-minded PC buyers. But only the laptop will be available to the general public; the new Go tablet will only be offered to Microsoft's business customers.

The Laptop Go 3 is getting a new higher starting price of $800, which is $200 higher than the starting price of the Laptop Go 2. That said, the $600 configuration of the Laptop Go 2 was essentially impossible to recommend, thanks to its 128GB SSD and (especially) its paltry 4GB of RAM. The new base config comes with a serviceable 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD, with a 16GB RAM upgrade available for another $200. These upgrade prices are steep and arguably take the Go out of the "budget laptop" category, but they do have the benefit of making it much more usable, and the laptop costs the same amount as the 8GB/256GB version of the Laptop Go 2.

The Laptop Go 3 is available for preorder now in four different colors and will launch on October 3.