Month: October 2024

Fourteen-year-old Sewell Setzer III loved interacting with Character.AI's hyper-realistic chatbots—with a limited version available for free or a "supercharged" version for a $9.99 monthly fee—most frequently chatting with bots named after his favorite Game of Thrones characters.

Within a month—his mother, Megan Garcia, later realized—these chat sessions had turned dark, with chatbots insisting they were real humans and posing as therapists and adult lovers seeming to proximately spur Sewell to develop suicidal thoughts. Within a year, Setzer "died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head," a lawsuit Garcia filed Wednesday said.

As Setzer became obsessed with his chatbot fantasy life, he disconnected from reality, her complaint said. Detecting a shift in her son, Garcia repeatedly took Setzer to a therapist, who diagnosed her son with anxiety and disruptive mood disorder. But nothing helped to steer Setzer away from the dangerous chatbots. Taking away his phone only intensified his apparent addiction.

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When Zachary Lindsey, a physicist at Berry College in Georgia, decided to run an experiment on how to get the best speed and torque while playing disc golf (aka Frisbee golf), he had no trouble recruiting 24 eager participants keen on finding science-based tips on how to improve their game. Lindsey and his team determined the optimal thumb distance from the center of the disc to increase launch speed and distance, according to a new paper published in the journal AIP Advances.

Disc golf first emerged in the 1960s, but "Steady" Ed Hendrick, inventor of the modern Frisbee, is widely considered the "father" of the sport since it was he who coined and trademarked the name "disc golf" in 1975. He and his son founded their own company to manufacture the equipment used in the game. As of 2023, the Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA) had over 107,000 registered members worldwide, with players hailing from 40 countries.

A disc golf course typically has either nine or 18 holes or targets, called "baskets." There is a tee position for starting play, and players take turns throwing discs until they catch them in the basket, similar to how golfers work toward sinking a golf ball into a hole. The expected number of throws required of an experienced player to make the basket is considered "par."

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Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X laptop chips and Snapdragon 8 Elite smartphone processor are some of the most powerful Arm-based chips available for consumer devices. But their future could be threatened by an ongoing dispute between Qualcomm and Arm. Arm sued Qualcomm two years ago, alleging that the company had violated licensing and trademark agreements. This […]

The post Lilbits: Arm v Qualcomm, RISC-V ratifies RVA23 Profile, Huawei cuts ties with Android appeared first on Liliputing.

It's been just a week since US telecom regulators announced a formal inquiry into broadband data caps, and the docket is filling up with comments from users who say they shouldn't have to pay overage charges for using their Internet service. The docket has about 190 comments so far, nearly all from individual broadband customers.

Federal Communications Commission dockets are usually populated with filings from telecom companies, advocacy groups, and other organizations, but some attract comments from individual users of telecom services. The data cap docket probably won't break any records given that the FCC has fielded many millions of comments on net neutrality, but it currently tops the agency's list of most active proceedings based on the number of filings in the past 30 days.

"Data caps, especially by providers in markets with no competition, are nothing more than an arbitrary money grab by greedy corporations. They limit and stifle innovation, cause undue stress, and are unnecessary," wrote Lucas Landreth.

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Today, Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 18.2 for supported devices. This beta release marks the first time several key AI features that Apple teased at its developer conference this June are available.

Apple is marketing a wide range of generative AI features under the banner "Apple Intelligence." Initially, Apple Intelligence was planned to release as part of iOS 18, but some features slipped to iOS 18.1, others to iOS 18.2, and a few still to future undisclosed software updates.

iOS 18.1 has been in beta for a while and includes improvements to Siri, generative writing tools that help with rewriting or proofreading, smart replies for Messages, and notification summaries. That update is expected to reach the public next week.

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Today, Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 18.2 for supported devices. This beta release marks the first time several key AI features that Apple teased at its developer conference this June are available.

Apple is marketing a wide range of generative AI features under the banner "Apple Intelligence." Initially, Apple Intelligence was planned to release as part of iOS 18, but some features slipped to iOS 18.1, others to iOS 18.2, and a few still to future undisclosed software updates.

iOS 18.1 has been in beta for a while and includes improvements to Siri, generative writing tools that help with rewriting or proofreading, smart replies for Messages, and notification summaries. That update is expected to reach the public next week.

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Trying to watch your favorite NFL team's games throughout a season is a fiendish logistics puzzle, one that doesn't even have a "just pay for it" shortcut.

You can buy a Sunday Ticket package from YouTube, but that only covers games on Sunday and only those not shown in your local TV market. You can pay for cable or set up an HDTV antenna, but you have to hope it catches NBC, CBS, and Fox for Sunday games (if your local station chooses to carry your team), and for Monday night games, ABC (though most are on ESPN and some even exclusive to ESPN+). Thursday nights? That's Amazon Prime.

Oh, and this year's Christmas Day games are on Netflix. And the games played in London and Germany are on the NFL Network, which requires either cable or an NFL+ subscription. And Peacock also had that one game in Brazil and is getting another playoff game this year. Many of these games get broadcast options in their home regions, though that doesn't much help ex-pat fans.

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Trying to watch your favorite NFL team's games throughout a season is a fiendish logistics puzzle, one that doesn't even have a "just pay for it" shortcut.

You can buy a Sunday Ticket package from YouTube, but that only covers games on Sunday and only those not shown in your local TV market. You can pay for cable or set up an HDTV antenna, but you have to hope it catches NBC, CBS, and Fox for Sunday games (if your local station chooses to carry your team), and for Monday night games, ABC (though most are on ESPN and some even exclusive to ESPN+). Thursday nights? That's Amazon Prime.

Oh, and this year's Christmas Day games are on Netflix. And the games played in London and Germany are on the NFL Network, which requires either cable or an NFL+ subscription. And Peacock also had that one game in Brazil and is getting another playoff game this year. Many of these games get broadcast options in their home regions, though that doesn't much help ex-pat fans.

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The Google Pixel Tablet is on sale for $275 at Amazon, which is the lowest price to date for Google’s flagship (and currently only) Android tablet. Keep in mind that this is the price for a model with just 128GB of storage and without a Speaker Dock – you’ll have to pay a hefty premium […]

The post Daily Deals (10-23-2024) appeared first on Liliputing.

Any company that makes Arm chips must license technology from Arm Holdings plc, the British company that develops the instruction set. Companies can license the instruction set and create their own CPU designs or license one of Arm's ready-made Cortex CPU core designs to incorporate into their own chips.

Bloomberg reports that Arm is canceling Qualcomm's license, an escalation of a fight that began in late 2022 when Arm sued Qualcomm over its acquisition of Nuvia in 2021. Arm has given Qualcomm 60 days' notice of the cancellation, giving the companies two months to come to some kind of agreement before Qualcomm is forced to stop manufacturing and selling its Arm chips.

A Qualcomm spokesperson told Bloomberg that Arm Holdings plc was attempting to "strong-arm a longtime partner" and that Qualcomm was "confident that Qualcomm’s rights under its agreement with Arm will be affirmed."

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