April 2025 – Page 22 – news.buyenne.com

Review: Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft is something less than “a Paperwhite with color”

It’s a decent e-reader, but it offers too few benefits for too many drawbacks.

It has been a bumpy start for Amazon's $280 Kindle Colorsoft, the company's first E-Ink book reader with a color screen. The company delayed shipments for a few weeks to correct a problem where a faint yellow band would appear across the bottom of the screen, something that has apparently been fixed for current versions of the reader (Amazon says it has made "the appropriate adjustments" to fix the problem but hasn't been specific about what those adjustments are).

Amazon didn't send us a Colorsoft for review at the time, maybe in part because of this problem early reviewers had, but we finally got one a few weeks ago and have been using it since then.

My main takeaway is that I don't mind the Colorsoft, but it also doesn't solve any problems I was having with the monochrome Kindle Paperwhite, and it doesn't meaningfully solve the big problems with color E-Ink. It also makes the experience of reading regular text subtly worse, which accounts for the vast majority of my Kindle activity. I'm curious to see future riffs on the idea, but this initial implementation leaves me cold.

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Gemini is an increasingly good chatbot, but it’s still a bad assistant

Google’s generative AI is not ready to serve as your virtual assistant.

Google announced its intention to unify its generative AI efforts under the Gemini brand at the tail end of 2023, and it's been full steam ahead ever since. In 2025, Google Assistant is being phased out and replaced with Gemini. As Google, Amazon, and others move toward a world in which all virtual assistants are based on generative AI, it's reasonable to consider if this is actually a good idea. Despite promises of "smarter" AI and ever-increasing token limits, these robots still have a fundamental flaw that may make them bad Assistants: They lie.

They don't set out to lie, of course, because they don't know what a "lie" is. These systems attempt to generate the most plausible next token to build an output. Because of this, generative AI is non-deterministic—you can't predict the output, and even running the same prompt multiple times will offer varying responses.

This can look impressively like thinking sometimes, but it also leads to frequent hallucinations. That's why the iPhone said Luigi Mangione was dead and Google told people to put glue on pizza. GenAI proponents like Google and Apple have been trying to curb the chaos of confabulations, but this may always be a problem because of the nature of the underlying technology.

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Bundesnetzagentur: Bahn muss Deutsche Telekom an ihr Leerrohr lassen

Die Regulierungsbehörde hat einen Streit zwischen der Deutschen Bahn und der Telekom geschlichtet. Ob es wirklich zur Einigung kommt, wird sich erst zeigen. (Bundesnetzagentur, Telekom)

Four private astronauts launch on first human mission to fly over the poles

“I call it the last frontier of unexplored territory in low-Earth orbit.”

Four adventurers suited up and embarked on a first-of-a-kind trip to space Monday night, becoming the first humans to fly in polar orbit aboard a SpaceX crew capsule chartered by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire.

The private astronauts rocketed into orbit atop a Falcon 9 booster from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:46 pm EDT Monday (01:46 UTC Tuesday). Instead of heading to the northeast in pursuit of the International Space Station, the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft departed Launch Complex 39A and arced to the southeast, then turned south on a flight path hugging Florida's east coast.

The unusual trajectory aligned the Falcon 9 with a perfectly polar orbit at an inclination of 90 degrees to the equator, bringing the four-person crew directly over the North or South Pole every 45 minutes.

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