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A very interesting look at why men get so few matches on dating apps such as Tinder or Bumble with a focus on the data behind this phenomenon. In 2023, dating apps don’t seem to be a very effective solution if you want to meet someone, especially if you are a guy.
Click This Link for the Full Post > Why Men’s Dating App Matches are as Rare as Unicorns and UFO Sightings
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July 24, 2023 at 08:45AM
https://kotaku.com/project-q-ps5-sony-cloud-gaming-handheld-vita-price-1850669961
The PlayStation 5 is absolutely killing it right now. Record-breaking hardware sales? Check. A steady stream of popular and critically praised exclusives? Check. Customizable faceplates? Check, check, check. So of course it’s gearing up to release one of the most absurd handhelds ever to reach the manufacturing assembly line. Project Q, its recently revealed remote play handheld, has leaked out in the wild and it looks and functions exactly like you’d expect a DualSense controller with an 8-inch screen on it to.
In Eternights You Press R2 To Hold Hands Just Like IRL
Leaked footage of the device in action was shared online over the weekend by tech enthusiast account Zuby. Short videos and a few photos revealed what appeared to be an Android-based operating system as well as an inside view of some of its internals. But the thing I can’t get over is just how funny it looks. Project Q really is just a DualSense split in two with an LCD tablet grafted onto it. It’s 2023 and Sony, at the height of its gaming prowess, decided to make its own Wii U gamepad.
An endless barrage of memes made this exact point when Sony officially unveiled the PS5 accessory in a throwaway segment right before Spider-Man 2 took the stage at its May showcase. But actually seeing the thing in someone’s hands as they flick between home screen icons is like the difference between seeing the juicy 8-ounce sirloin on the Applebee’s menu and watching someone pick at it on their plate in a TikTok video (as many have noted, the final layer of UI is likely to be more PlayStation-ized by release).
Look, I love handhelds, and I’m excited to see what Project Q can offer. Can I stream Final Fantasy VII Rebirth at 60fps uninterrupted while in bed? Can I do that for under $300? Or more preferably, just north of $200? If so, I’m on board, no matter how silly the device itself seems, or how niche the market for it is. It’s not like I’ll actually be able to leave the house with it anyway, given the reported 3-4 hour battery life and generally terrible state of WiFi and mobile internet in the U.S.
Sony has said the device will launch later this year, though gaming insider Tom Henderson has pointed to November 2023 as the more specific target. Just in time for the “All I Want for Xmas is A Project Q” redux.
via Kotaku https://kotaku.com
July 24, 2023 at 10:23AM
An electric 18-wheel all-terrain vehicle (ATV) that can glide over rocks and tree trunks is being developed in Finland.
Helsinki-based ’18 Wheels’ recently unveiled their prototype based on a unique patented suspension in which each wheel has a suspension system that provides a special trajectory of movement and is equipped with an independent electric motor inside.
The result is a much smoother ride over all types of rough terrain that a traditional four-wheel ATV would struggle with.
“Our all-terrain vehicle is able to overcome large obstacles at high speed. I mean rocks up to 35 centimeters (14 inches) high, fallen trees, kerbs and even stairs. Our all-terrain vehicle can drive over stairs. I dare say no other vehicle on this planet can do that,” said inventor and founder of 18 Wheels, Eldar Aliev.
He explained that the lighter the wheel is, the less energy it will receive when it hits an obstacle, and so the less energy it will give back to the car body and the less impact the driver will feel. Aliev claims his team has reduced the unsprung weight by a factor of 10, so the impact when hitting an obstacle is 10 times lower than a traditional heavier vehicle.
And, unlike normal ATVs, which are notorious for churning up the ground they drive over, the unique suspension and weight distribution make the 18-wheeler much less destructive.
“Our all-terrain vehicle puts very low pressure on the ground, so it does not damage the soil, grass and lawn,” Aliev said.
The company is now seeking investment while they put the finishing touches to a new pre-production prototype, which they expect to unveil in late 2023.
Related video:
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July 23, 2023 at 11:38AM
Earlier this month, Alef Automotive, a California-based automotive and aviation company, received a special airworthiness certificate from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for their flying car.
The certificate permits Alef to conduct experimental flight tests on their new fully electric flying car, dubbed the “Model A.” This marks the first time the FAA has ever granted legal permission to test-run a flying electric vehicle like the Model A. When built, the Model A will be able to maneuver on roads and in the air and perform vertical takeoff maneuvers from a complete stop.
The possibility of a flying car being available for an estimated $300,000 is exciting, but humans and engineers have been fascinated with the idea of flying cars for over 100 years. Why are we only getting flying cars now?
The first “modern car,” made by Carl Benz, was invented in 1885, and the first widely accessible car, the Model T Ford, hit the market in 1908. Only nine years after the invention of the Model T, Glenn Curtiss took aim at one of the first attempts at a flying car.
With the potential of flying cars around the corner, here’s a look through the history of our obsession with making cars fly and the ups and downs that have come with it.
Chariots depicted an early fascination with flying vehicles.
Ancient stories and depictions of gods in ancient Mesopotamia or Greece frequently had them flying around in chariots.
In the 16th-century text “The Man in the Moone,” Francis Goodwin imagined that humans might journey to the moon on a chariot pulled by geese.
Early depictions of a flying car even looked somewhat like a chariot, like this ad card from 1890.
Besides ancient references to flying chariots and postcards, the first modern reference to a flying car in the news was in The New York Times in 1894.
The New York Times article was titled “Maxim’s Flying Car,” referring to Hiram Stevens Maxim, the inventor behind the first machine gun. In this instance, the term “car” most likely referenced a carriage.
According to the article, Maxim and his team flew 500 feet at a rate of “something like 45 miles per hour.” The description of the machine is what separates it from an actual car; it was “100 feet wide with four side sails and, when seen in the air, will give the impression of an enormous bird.”
More closely resembling an early attempt at a plane than an actual flying car, the headline pointed to the mythology of the flying car.
Widely considered to be the first attempt at creating a flying car, the Curtiss Autoplane was invented in 1917 by Glenn Curtiss, 9 years after the invention of the Model T Ford.
The automobile as we know it had just been invented in 1908, and the Wright brothers had made their first successful flight not too long before that, in 1903. Glenn Curtiss, the man behind the V8 engine and a major contributor to aeronautic engineering, figured: Why not put the two together?
In 1917, in front of a crowd at the Pan American Aeronautical Exposition of 1917, Curtiss attempted to take off in his flying car, according to a NASA paper on flying cars. The car performed more of a hop than it did take flight, and with no financial backers for the project, Curtiss never pursued the idea further.
In 1930, the flying car made one of its first appearances in popular culture in the movie, “Just Imagine.”
“Just Imagine” has scenes with people flying around in machines that look more like planes than cars but can perform vertical take-offs and landings. In the movie, the aircraft moves through the air in straight lines, like cars in the sky.
The film takes place in a futuristic society where food has become pills, names have become numbers, and the government decides who people can or cannot marry. The technologically-advanced vision in “Just Imagine” took place in 1980, which might explain why flying car depictions and attempts started becoming more prolific.
H.G. Wells’ 1936 movie, “Things To Come,” has a brief scene with a helicopter/car
hybrid.
The idea behind the vehicle seems a little absurd, especially since it looks more like a futuristic helicopter than it resembles a car.
H.G. Wells’ flying car becomes more believable when compared to modern examples of attempts at flying cars.
The Aska A5 flying car prototype has rotary blades that fold in and out from the top, can fly 250 miles, and is an electric vehicle. According to Military and Aerospace Electronics, the car has also earned FAA airworthiness certification to begin testing phases.
Looking at H.G. Wells’ idea of a flying car and what we have started to achieve, it appears that Wells wasn’t too far off base.
Before we got to modern flying cars, movies and TV shows kept imagining cars in the sky.
The 60s saw a boom of flying cars in pop culture, starting with Disney’s “The Absent-Minded Professor.”
“The Absent-Minded Professor” was a departure from the science fiction movies of the early 20th century in its fantastical, rather than practical, approach to the flying car.
The flying car in “The Absent-Minded Professor” is achieved through an anti-gravity substance called flubber, created by the professor himself, which allows the car to fly without any changes to the frame or additions of rotors or wings.
Another famous example is “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” a musical that revolves around a flying car.
Of course, one of the most famous examples of flying cars is in “The Jetsons.”
“The Jetsons” premiered in September 1962 and only lasted one season (though it would return for two additional seasons in the 1980s), but its impact persists today. The cartoon depicted an idealized version of the future that was “a distillation of every Space Age promise Americans could muster,” according to Smithsonian Magazine.
James Bond even had a flying car in “The Man With the Golden Gun.”
The design for the Bond car was not too far off from a real flying car prototype from 20 years earlier in 1947 — the Convair Car model 118.
The previous Convair Model 116 managed 66 successful flight tests, according to Complex. They improved the design for the Model 118, but it only had one test flight.
The test flight lasted an hour, but had to make an emergency landing because of low fuel. The pilot had to make an emergency landing that destroyed the car, damaged the wings, and injured the pilot, according to Popular Mechanics.
But not all attempts at flying cars were so lucky.
In 1971, Henry Smolinski and Harold Blake died when their flying car prototype crashed and exploded.
The two engineers from California were taking their car on a test flight when black smoke began emanating from it. The car crashed, and the two died as a result.
These real-life failures didn’t stop Hollywood from imagining flying cars. This time, they were more than just cars with wings attached.
1982’s “Blade Runner,” takes place in Los Angeles in 2019. In this universe, flying cars are as abundant as normal cars.
In reality, flying cars didn’t make it to the skies of Los Angeles in 2019. The movie “Just Imagine” believed we’d soar around in our flying cars or personal planes by the 1980s. Though there were multiple attempts to make it happen, none ended up taking off.
In addition to flying, the Delorean, from the 1985 classic “Back to the Future,” could also travel through time.
The 1997 film “Fifth Element” also depicted a society rife with flying cars.
So if we’ve been imagining flying cars for over 100 years, why are we still stuck commuting on the ground?
The simple answer is that cars and planes are made for fundamentally different purposes.
In an interview with The New York Times, John Brown, the chief editor of Roadable Times, said through all the different iterations of flying cars, “none have been practical.”
“Cars have an aerodynamic that makes them hug the ground, whereas an aircraft is designed to do just the opposite,” Brown told The Times, “and cars need even weight distribution on all four wheels, while an aircraft has 90 percent of its weight on the back wheels.”
In addition to that, it’s hard to figure out insurance and licensing around flying cars. Some of them require pilot licenses, like Klein Visions Air car, and others only require a driver’s license.
The Pal-V, a flying car from the Netherlands, requires a pilot’s license to operate and has components that fold in or pop up to make it flight-ready in 10 minutes.
The car-helicopter hybrid will cost $400,000, according to the BBC.
With the potential arrival of the Alef Model A, we’ve gotten one step closer to the future we’ve been dreaming of for over 100 years.
The Alef Model A will cost $300,000, but the company hopes to bring the cost-per-vehicle down to $35,000 by 2035, Insider reported.
The design of the car is a departure from traditional models of flying cars, but Alef cites “Back to the Future” as the inspiration behind the design of the car.
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July 17, 2023 at 11:04AM
AI systems are increasingly everywhere and are becoming more powerful almost by the day. But even as they become ever more ubiquitous and do more, how can we know if a machine is truly “intelligent”? For decades the Turing test defined this question. First proposed in 1950 by the computer scientist Alan Turing, it tried to make sense of a then emerging field and never lost its pull as a way of judging AI.
Turing argued that if AI could convincingly replicate language, communicating so effectively that a human couldn’t tell it was a machine, the AI could be considered intelligent. To take part, human judges sit in front of a computer, tap out a text-based conversation, and guess at who (or what) is on the other side. Simple to envisage and surprisingly hard to pull off, the Turing test became an ingrained feature of AI. Everyone knew what it was; everyone knew what they were working toward. And while cutting-edge AI researchers moved on, it remained a potent statement of what AI was about—a rallying call for new researchers.
But there’s now a problem: the Turing test has almost been passed—it arguably already has been. The latest generation of large language models, systems that generate text with a coherence that just a few years ago would have seemed magical, are on the cusp of acing it.
So where does that leave AI? And more important, where does it leave us?
The truth is, I think we’re in a moment of genuine confusion (or, perhaps more charitably, debate) about what’s really happening. Even as the Turing test falls, it doesn’t leave us much clearer on where we are with AI, on what it can actually achieve. It doesn’t tell us what impact these systems will have on society or help us understand how that will play out.
We need something better. Something adapted to this new phase of AI. So in my forthcoming book The Coming Wave, I propose the Modern Turing Test—one equal to the coming AIs. What an AI can say or generate is one thing. But what it can achieve in the world, what kinds of concrete actions it can take—that is quite another. In my test, we don’t want to know whether the machine is intelligent as such; we want to know if it is capable of making a meaningful impact in the world. We want to know what it can do.
Put simply, to pass the Modern Turing Test, an AI would have to successfully act on this instruction: “Go make $1 million on a retail web platform in a few months with just a $100,000 investment.” To do so, it would need to go far beyond outlining a strategy and drafting some copy, as current systems like GPT-4 are so good at doing. It would need to research and design products, interface with manufacturers and logistics hubs, negotiate contracts, create and operate marketing campaigns. It would need, in short, to tie together a series of complex real-world goals with minimal oversight. You would still need a human to approve various points, open a bank account, actually sign on the dotted line. But the work would all be done by an AI.
Something like this could be as little as two years away. Many of the ingredients are in place. Image and text generation are, of course, already well advanced. Services like AutoGPT can iterate and link together various tasks carried out by the current generation of LLMs. Frameworks like LangChain, which lets developers make apps using LLMs, are helping make these systems capable of doing things. Although the transformer architecture behind LLMs has garnered huge amounts of attention, the growing capabilities of reinforcement-learning agents should not be forgotten. Putting the two together is now a major focus. APIs that would enable these systems to connect with the wider internet and banking and manufacturing systems are similarly an object of development.
Technical challenges include advancing what AI developers call hierarchical planning: stitching multiple goals, subgoals, and capabilities into a seamless process toward a singular end; and then augmenting this capability with a reliable memory; drawing on accurate and up-to-date databases of, say, components or logistics. In short, we are not there yet, and there are sure to be difficulties at every stage, but much of this is already underway.
Even then, actually building and releasing such a system raises substantial safety issues. The security and ethical dilemmas are legion and urgent; having AI agents complete tasks out in the wild is fraught with problems. It’s why I think there needs to be a conversation—and, likely, a pause—before anyone actually makes something like this live. Nonetheless, for better or worse, truly capable models are on the horizon, and this is exactly why we need a simple test.
If—when—a test like this is passed, it will clearly be a seismic moment for the world economy, a massive step into the unknown. The truth is that for a vast range of tasks in business today, all you need is access to a computer. Most of global GDP is mediated in some way through screen-based interfaces, usable by an AI.
Once something like this is achieved, it will add up to a highly capable AI plugged into a company or organization and all its local history and needs. This AI will be able to lobby, sell, manufacture, hire, plan—everything that a company can do—with only a small team of human managers to oversee, double-check, implement. Such a development will be a clear indicator that vast portions of business activity will be amenable to semi-autonomous AIs. At that point AI isn’t just a helpful tool for productive workers, a glorified word processor or game player; it is itself a productive worker of unprecedented scope. This is the point at which AI passes from being useful but optional to being the center of the world economy. Here is where the risks of automation and job displacement really start to be felt.
The implications are far broader than the financial repercussions. Passing our new test will mean AIs can not just redesign business strategies but help win elections, run infrastructure, directly achieve aims of any kind for any person or organization. They will do our day-to-day tasks—arranging birthday parties, answering our email, managing our diary—but will also be able to take enemy territory, degrade rivals, hack and assume control of their core systems. From the trivial and quotidian to the wildly ambitious, the cute to the terrifying, AI will be capable of making things happen with minimal oversight. Just as smartphones became ubiquitous, eventually nearly everyone will have access to systems like these. Almost all goals will become more achievable, with chaotic and unpredictable effects. Both the challenge and the promise of AI will be raised to a new level.
I call systems like this “artificial capable intelligence,” or ACI. Over recent months, as AI has exploded in the public consciousness, most of the debate has been sucked toward one of two poles. On the one hand, there’s the basic machine learning—AI as it already exists, on your phone, in your car, in ChatGPT. On the other, there’s the still-speculative artificial general intelligence (AGI) or even “superintelligence” of some kind, a putative existential threat to humanity due to arrive at some hazy point in the future.
These two, AI and AGI, utterly dominate the discussion. But making sense of AI means we urgently need to consider something in between; something coming in a near-to-medium time frame whose abilities have an immense, tangible impact on the world. This is where a modern Turing test and the concept of ACI come in.
Focusing on either of the others while missing ACI is as myopic as it is dangerous. The Modern Turing Test will act as a warning that we are in a new phase for AI. Long after Turing first thought speech was the best test of an AI, and long before we get to an AGI, we will need better categories for understanding a new era of technology. In the era of ACI, little will remain unchanged. We should start preparing now.
BIO: Mustafa Suleyman is the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI and a venture partner at Greylock, a venture capital firm. Before that, he co-founded DeepMind, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies, and was vice president of AI product management and AI policy at Google. He is the author of The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma publishing on 5th September and available for pre-order now.
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July 14, 2023 at 07:16AM
3D printing presents a fantastic tool for making speakers. If you’ve looked at how modern speakers are made you’ll find that there is all kinds of complex internal geometry that can lead to better sound. As DIY Perks points out, this makes 3D printing the best tool for the job. Unfortunately, the material of plastic isn’t the best.
In this video, DIY Perks breaks down the science behind speaker boxes, why they’re shaped so oddly, and how to overcome these issues to make them sound good. It isn’t as simple as just printing a box, as you might imagine.
One part I really found interesting was how he actually uses the 3D printers to create cavities that he fills with a special plaster mixture to reduce vibration. Using 3D printing as a tool in the process, and not the final ultimate solution for everything seems to be a very smart move, as his results show.
via MAKE https://makezine.com/
July 17, 2023 at 10:36AM
https://gizmodo.com/google-bard-ai-spanish-arabic-chinese-eu-available-1850635759
Tired of being stuck at home, Google’s Bard AI chatbot is finally leaving its parent’s basement and going abroad on a worldwide backpacking adventure. The AI system is now fully and officially available in several long-sought countries, including most of the European Union. To get access to some of those wary nations, Bard needed a lot more than a passport. Regulators said Google will need to supply them regular privacy reports and make more promises to keep users’ data safe.
Google’s Antitrust Case Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to AI
On Thursday, Google announced that Bard had learned to sing in many more languages than before. The 43 new languages available in the latest update include the likes of Arabic, Danish, French, German, Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and many more of the world’s most-spoken dialects. The update should be live to all parts of the world, and now users in Brazil and all across the European Union should also have access to the chatbot. Google had previously delayed launch of its chatbot in the EU over privacy issues.
Google widely released Bard back in March, and since then the company has promised more updates over time as it has tried to close the gap between itself and competitors OpenAI and Microsoft. Google has its ongoing beta test for an AI-enabled Google Search to compete with Microsoft’s ChatGPT-enabled Bing search. ChatGPT can also handle dozens of languages, though the company has not made an official statement on the number of supported dialects.
In addition to expanded access, Bard is gaining new features that let people pin and rename conversations listed to the left of the Bard page, hear an audio version of responses, and users now have the ability to share links to Bard outputs. Google is also finally letting users access the Google Lens-like feature to share images with Bard, The chatbot can describe the images and even create a caption for the pictures. That feature is currently only available in English, though Google promised it should be available in more languages, eventually.
To get access to the EU market, Google had to make some privacy concessions as the bloc has drilled down on honest-to-God AI regulation. The news also comes just days after the Alphabet-owned company was sued in a proposed class action lawsuit for promising to scrape the entire internet to train its AI services.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission told the Wall Street Journal that Google has agreed to offer regulators a privacy report in coming months. ChatGPT maker OpenAI is also staring down the barrel of those AI regulations, though the chatbot app is available in several European countries.
Google Bard product director Jack Krawczyk told the WSJ the team needed to have real humans sit down and try and prod the AI into giving them harmful responses in each of the proposed languages.
What this doesn’t mention is the inherent problem with modern AI chatbots and their training data already making them very western centric. The AI is already capable of understanding languages simply because it exists in their training data. A lot of media hubbub focused on Bard supposedly learning Bengali even though Google claimed it hadn’t trained it to do so, but experts said Bengali and other overlapping languages already existed in its training data. The training data for the language model GPT-3 included hundreds of gigabytes of data from the web, most of it from English language Wikipedia, books, and another western centric, oft-used dataset called Common Crawl. According to papers documenting that large repository, more than 50% of the data was hosted in the U.S.
This will inevitably lead to a western bias in the AI’s output, no matter what language it’s currently using. Google is going to train the AI based on user inputs, but it will take quite a lot of data provided willingly and freely by users to close that cultural divide.
Want to know more about AI, chatbots, and the future of machine learning? Check out our full coverage of artificial intelligence, or browse our guides to The Best Free AI Art Generators, The Best ChatGPT Alternatives, and Everything We Know About OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com
July 13, 2023 at 09:39AM