Month: September 2023

Enlarge / A new report claims that last year's iPhone 14 could be the foundation of a new iPhone SE in 2025. (credit: Apple)

I've got a soft spot for Apple's budget phone, the iPhone SE. It has never been technologically impressive, but it has always been a way to get most of what's good about the iPhone ecosystem—an active App Store, Apple services like iMessage, and prompt software updates delivered for a respectable number of years—for several hundred dollars less than whatever the current flagship is.

The downside has been that you need to put up with an older design. In the case of the current iPhone SE and the one before that, that has meant a phone with the same 4.7-inch screen and basic dimensions as the iPhone 6, a design that will be a decade old next year. The SE has waterproofing, wireless charging, a better camera, a faster chip, and some other features that the iPhone 6 never had, but the body-to-screen ratio is much worse than pretty much any other modern smartphone.

For the last year, people who are normally mostly right about Apple rumors have been saying that the next iPhone SE is the one that will graduate to an iPhone X-style design, with a much larger screen and a display notch for the FaceID sensor and webcam. MacRumors published a report yesterday that purports to fill in a few more of the gaps.

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Reddit rolled out some changes this week as its continues its push for revenue and profitability jumpstarted by its API rule changes in July. Among the most controversial, the company will no longer allow users to opt out of ad personalization based on their Reddit activity and started a program that lets users exchange virtual rewards for their posts for real money.

On Wednesday, Reddit announced plans to "improve ad performance," including by preventing users from opting out of personalized ads except for in "select countries." Reddit didn't specify which countries are excluded, but the exceptions could include countries falling under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. Reddit spokesperson Sierra Gamelgaard declined to provide further clarification when reached by Ars Technica for comment.

Reddit's announcement, authored by Reddit's head of privacy, going by "snoo-tuh" on the platform (Reddit has refused to confirm the identity of admins representing Reddit on the site), said that its advertisers look at "what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals" to gauge your interests.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The Elon Musk-owned social network formerly named Twitter has reportedly cut half of its election integrity team just weeks after saying it would expand the group.

Now operating under the name X, Musk's firm "is cutting around half of the global team devoted to limiting disinformation and election fraud on the platform, including the head of the group, according to three people familiar with the situation," The Information reported yesterday, adding:

X management notified employees of the layoffs last Friday. The cuts hit all four Dublin-based members of the team, including Aaron Rodericks, its leader, who is based in Ireland, the people familiar with the matter said. X executives told the team that having elections integrity employees based in Europe wasn't necessary, according to one of the people. The team, which was instrumental in handling coordinated spam and bot networks, had around two dozen members before Musk bought Twitter last year and is now down to less than half a dozen based primarily in North America.

NBC News later reported that it also confirmed the cuts with a source.

Enlarge / Timelapse photo of the "microflier" falling in its unfolded state, which makes it tumble chaotically in the wind. "Snapping" into a folded state results in a stable upright descent. (credit: Mark Stone/University of Washington)

University of Washington scientists have built a battery-free flying robot that stabilizes its descent by changing shape in mid-air—a design that was inspired by origami, according to a recent paper published in the journal Science Robotics. These microfliers weigh just 400 milligrams, and if there's a nice light breeze, they can travel the length of a football field when dropped by a drone from an altitude of 40 meters (131 feet).

Miniature robotics is a very active area of research. For instance, earlier this year, we reported on how engineers built a soft robot in the shape of a Lego minifig. The robot changes shape by "melting" into liquid form in response to a magnetic field, oozing between the bars of its cage before re-solidifying on the other side—just like the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. That robot belongs to a class known as magnetically actuated miniature machines, typically made of soft polymers (like elastomers or hydrogels) embedded with ferromagnetic particles that have programmed magnetization profiles. These kinds of robots can swim, climb, roll, walk, and jump, as well as change their shape simply by altering the corresponding magnetic field.

As for flying robots, back in 2017, we reported on Dutch scientists who built a flying robot capable of executing the impressive aerodynamic feats flying insects like bees, dragonflies, and fruit flies, particularly when said insects seek to evade predators or the swatting motion of a human hand. Even though the robot was much larger than the average insect, it could hover and fly in any direction (up, down, forward, backward, and sideways), as well as perform banked turns and 360-degree flips, akin to loops or barrel rolls. It also boasted excellent power efficiency, capable of hovering for five minutes or flying more than a kilometer on a single charge.

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Effective compression is about finding patterns to make data smaller without losing information. When an algorithm or model can accurately guess the next piece of data in a sequence, it shows it's good at spotting these patterns. This links the idea of making good guesses—which is what large language models like GPT-4 do very well—to achieving good compression.

In an arXiv research paper titled "Language Modeling Is Compression," researchers detail their discovery that the DeepMind large language model (LLM) called Chinchilla 70B can perform lossless compression on image patches from the ImageNet image database to 43.4 percent of their original size, beating the PNG algorithm, which compressed the same data to 58.5 percent. For audio, Chinchilla compressed samples from the LibriSpeech audio data set to just 16.4 percent of their raw size, outdoing FLAC compression at 30.3 percent.

In this case, lower numbers in the results mean more compression is taking place. And lossless compression means that no data is lost during the compression process. It stands in contrast to a lossy compression technique like JPEG, which sheds some data and reconstructs some of the data with approximations during the decoding process to significantly reduce file sizes.

Enlarge / This is a prototype of the new Kia EV9 electric SUV, which goes on sale in the last quarter of 2023. (credit: Kia)

Kia has announced pricing for its next electric vehicle as it gets closer to release toward the end of this year. It's the EV9, a three-row SUV that uses the company's E-GMP architecture, also used to good effect in smaller EVs like the Kia EV6 and Hyundai Ioniq 5. When the EV9 arrives in showrooms, the range will start at $54,900 (plus destination charge).

"We knew we had to get the EV9 pricing right, and we believe today's announcement will be a wake-up call to the industry," said Kia America's COO, Steve Center.

"A well-equipped three-row SUV EV doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive. It should offer the perfect balance of standard features, the ability to fast charge, and be equipped with the technology savvy EV buyers are looking for. The EV9 provides all of this, and we can’t wait for it to go on sale later this year," he said.