Category: Tech news

Everything from glitter hair spray and nail polish remover to bear repellent will soon ship out of specially designed fulfillment centers.

Tardar Sauce was an avatar of the days of the goofy web.

The toxins that leach into seawater severely affect bacteria that provide perhaps 20 percent of Earth’s oxygen. That’s where things get complicated.

Ahead of the release of ‘John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum’ this weekend, players in the battle-royale game can now play as the cinematic assassin.

Ten years after the original Minecraft swept the planet, Microsoft unveils an ambitious, global, augmented-reality version.

A lot of blood has been shed, and surely there’s more to come.

Yes, the world needs to reduce carbon emissions, but that’s not enough. Technologists need to step in and start developing work-arounds of all kinds.

Sony’s Alpha A7II is a mirrorless, full-frame workhorse of a camera, and a steal at less than $1,000.

As the state passed its anti-abortion bill, protestors evoked Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel.

It’s a lot to ask of one episode, but here’s what should happen.

Update: An Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch “This afternoon we had an issue that impacted some Alexa customers’ ability to interact with the service. The Alexa service is now operating normally.”

If your requests to Alexa are being met with answers like “I’m having some trouble, please try again later,” you are not alone. Multiple users are reporting connection issues with Amazon’s voice assistant. According to Down Detector’s outage tracker and live outage map, issues are currently being detected around the world, with user reports starting around 7PM EST.

@amazon Hey, alexa is down. what’s going on?

— Jordan McCrea (@ShiningArmoire) May 15, 2019

@amazon Hey, alexa is down. what’s going on?

— Jordan McCrea (@ShiningArmoire) May 15, 2019

Also down over here she says “I’m having some trouble, please try again later” multiple devices in my house doing the same thing

— Jefferson James (@Jeffjames696969) May 16, 2019

We’ve reached out to Amazon and will update this post when more information is available.

Forget all those whiskey brands from musicians and celebs — there’s A.I. whiskey now. Microsoft this week announced it has teamed up with Finnish tech company Fourkind and Sweden-based distillery Mackmyra Whisky to create the “world’s first whisky developed with artificial intelligence.”

Oh no!

Here’s how it will work.

As part of the distillation process, whiskey first spends time — typically years — sitting in charred wooden casks. This turns the clear liquor a darker color, and gives it a unique flavor. How long it stays in the casks, and what the casks held before — like bourbon, wine, sherry, etc. — helps create a specific recipe. Master distillers tweak all these variables along with the different ingredients used to create the whiskey in the first place to come up with a variety of blends.

Until now, this entire process is done by humans with a specialized set of skills. For the A.I. blend, Mackmyra is turning part of the job over to the machines.

The distillery is feeding its existing recipes, sales data and customer preferences to machine learning models, so the A.I. can suggest what recipes it should make next.

The A.I., Mackmyra says, is capable of generating over 70 million different recipes. And it will highlight those it predicts will be most popular and of the highest quality, based on the cask types that are currently on hand.

These models are powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and Azure cognitive services. Fourkind developed the A.I. algorithms involved, explains Microsoft in its announcement.

However, the distillery notes it’s not actually replacing its Master Blenders with A.I. Instead, it’s using the A.I. to create the recipes which are then curated by the (still human) experts.

“The work of a Master Blender is not at risk,” insists Angela D’Orazio, Mackmyra’s Master Blender. “While the whiskey recipe is created by A.I., we still benefit from a person’s expertise and knowledge, especially the human sensory part, that can never be replaced by any program. We believe that the whiskey is A.I.-generated, but human-curated. Ultimately, the decision is made by a person.”

Microsoft says this is the first time A.I. has been used to augment the process of making whiskey. The finished product will be available in Autumn 2019.

Despite not knowing how the juice turns out, Fourkind wants to turn its algorithms to other industries where complex recipes are involved — including those for other beverages, and also things like perfumes, sweets, or sneaker designs.

This would not be the first time that A.I. has been put to work in a more artistic field.

For example, at Google’s I/O developer conference this month, the company showed off how A.I. could be used in artistic endeavors — including music, visual art, and even fashion.

Of course, when A.I. is tasked with making art, the end results tend to be strange, unworldly and sometimes a little frightening.

Which begs the question: how the hell will an A.I. whiskey taste?

(via TNW) 

 

About a year ago, Valve announced that it was building an application called Steam Link. It’d let you play Steam games built for Mac/Windows/Linux on your iOS or Android devices through the magic of streaming, with a computer on your local network doing all the actual heavy lifting.

Then Valve submitted it to the iOS App Store and… Apple rejected it. At the time, Valve said that Apple pinned the rejection on “business conflicts”.

A year later, it seems said conflicts have finally been resolved. Steam Link for iOS just hit the App Store.

Because there’s no way most PC games would be fun on a touchscreen, you’ll probably want a controller — Valve says that Made for iPhone-certified controllers should work, as will its own Steam-branded controller. The company also notes that for best performance, the computer doing the streaming should be hardwired to your router, and your iOS device should be running on your WiFi network’s 5Ghz band.

SpaceX’s launch tonight is being performed for a very important client: itself. Yes, the Falcon 9 that will lift off at 7:30 PM Pacific time is loaded not with government or commercial payloads, but the first of SpaceX’s own Starlink orbital communications satellites. You can watch this first-of-its-kind launch here.

In the launch press kit (PDF), SpaceX provided new details of the launch, the deployment process and the Starlink satellites themselves, which have only been described in roundabout fashion via regulatory filings and such.

Weighing 500 pounds each, the 60 Starlink satellites add up to around 30,000 lbs of payload, considerably less than the Falcon 9’s upper limit of over 50,000 lbs. I wouldn’t have guessed they were quite as heavy as that — some communications satellites are small enough you could easily lift them with one hand, though others, like OneWeb’s and of course geosynchronous ones, are much larger.

Although that leaves plenty of unused lift capacity, the satellites and their deployment platform take up practically every cubic inch of the Falcon 9’s usable interior. This launch is limited by volume, not mass.

The satellites have a “flat-panel design featuring multiple high-throughput antennas and a single solar array.” They use krypton-fueled Hall thrusters to get around, which will come in handy during the last part of the deployment, as we shall see. In addition, as SpaceX explains:

Each spacecraft is equipped with a Startracker navigation system that allows SpaceX to point the satellites with precision. Importantly, Starlink satellites are capable of tracking on-orbit debris and autonomously avoiding collision. Additionally, 95 percent of all components of this design will quickly burn in Earth’s atmosphere at the end of each satellite’s lifecycle—exceeding all current safety standards—with future iterative designs moving to complete disintegration.

This should help assuage concerns that SpaceX and others aiming for thousand-strong constellations are going to end up filling orbit with junk.

The launch window opens at 7:30 PM Pacific time, 10:30 local time in Florida, and lasts for an hour and a half. There’s currently an 80% chance of fair weather, so unless there’s mechanical trouble, a delay is not particularly likely.

After liftoff, the Falcon 9 (previously flown in September of last year and January of this one) will take the Starlink stack to 440 kilometers, at which point (at about T+1 hour) they will begin to deploy, like kernels popping off a giant space corncob. They’ll then use their onboard thrusters to ascend to their operational altitude of 550 kilometers. The first stage, meanwhile, will descend and attempt to land on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

This is quite a low orbit; OneWeb’s satellites, which are aiming to fulfill a similar purpose, are about twice as high. Anything at or below 1,000 kilometers, however, makes for fast and easy de-orbiting as well as easier tracking from the ground.

While everyone hopes for 100%  success on this mission, the simple fact is that it’s the first of its kind — there have been plenty of launches with dozens of payloads to deploy, but this is the first time these satellites and this method have been used. “Much will likely go wrong,” CEO Elon Musk stated bluntly on Twitter.

Here’s hoping as little goes wrong as possible. You can follow along minute by minute in the live video SpaceX always provides. Here it is below; expect it to go live about 15 minutes before takeoff.

Dave Arnold, Tesla’s senior director of communications, is leaving the company after two-and-half years, according to sources familiar with the move.

Tesla confirmed to TechCrunch that Arnold was leaving in June.

“We’d like to thank Dave for his work in support of Tesla’s mission, and we wish him well,” a Tesla spokesperson said in a company-issued statement. “Dave will remain with the company for the next month to help transition his responsibilities to Keely Sulprizio, Tesla’s director of Global Communications.”

Arnold became senior director of communications at Tesla in July after the departure of Sarah O’Brien. O’Brien, who was previously at Apple, held the position at Tesla for two years. She later took a position at Facebook.

The top communications job at Tesla is a high-profile and critical role for the company, which unlike other automakers, doesn’t have a traditional advertising strategy. And thanks to the near-frenetic amount of attention that Tesla and CEO Elon Musk receives from investors and the press, it also can be a challenging and exhausting one. 

The typical stint for the role has been about two years.

Musk reaches his fervent fan base — and critics — via Twitter. His account now has some 26.5 million followers. Musk’s tweets, along with other announcements and controversies, translate to constant news coverage of the company.

That coverage has been largely responsible for driving sales. Tesla’s relationship with the media might be rocky at times. However, the attention by the press has also helped drive sales. The company has said in previous regulatory filings that “media coverage and word of mouth have been the primary drivers of our sales leads and have helped us achieve sales without traditional advertising and at relatively low marketing costs.”