
Marie and friends continue to pursue heroic education in the sophomore season for 'Gen V.'
The flip phone foldable is a popular form factor, but Google has yet to make its own “Pixel Flip.” After a few weeks using the Motorola Razr Ultra, I’ve got a few ideas on where Google could do better.
more…A team of Purdue University students recently set a new Guinness World Record with their custom robot that solved a Rubik's Cube in just 0.103 seconds. That was about a third of the time it took the previous record-setting bot. But the new record wasn't achieved by simply building a robot that moves faster. The students used a combination of high-speed but low-res camera systems, a cube customized for improved strength, and a special solving technique popular among human speed cubers.
The Rubik's Cube-solving robot arms race kicked off in 2014, when a robot called Cubestormer 3 built with Lego Mindstorms parts and a Samsung Galaxy S4 solved the iconic puzzle in 3.253 seconds - faster than any human or robot could at the time. (The current world record for a human solving a Rubik's Cube belongs to Xuanyi Geng, who did it in just 3.05 seconds.) Over the course of a decade, engineers managed to reduce that record to just hundreds of milliseconds.
Last May, engineers at Mitsubishi Electric in Japan claimed the world record with a robot that solved a cube in 0.305 seconds. The record stood for almost a year before the team from Purdue's Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer …
Father's Day rules. It's a day to celebrate all that dads have contributed to the people, homes, and communities that they're a part of. Being a dad is a lot of work - something I can vouch for, being a relatively new one myself - so for Father's Day, why not give dear old dad a token of appreciation and love? Whether your dad prefers practical or clever gifts, we think you'll be pleased with the selection of picks below.
As usual, we lean pretty heavily on tech, but there are several non-tech suggestions that most dads will be happy to receive, all of which come courtesy of the thoughtful staff here at The Verge. If a fast-charging portable battery or Sony's collapsible WH-1000XM6 headphones won't do the trick, perhaps Kurt Vonnegut's recently discovered two-player board game or a mountable Lego van Gogh replica will?
Every few weeks, it seems like there's a new headline about a lawyer getting in trouble for submitting filings containing, in the words of one judge, "bogus AI-generated research." The details vary, but the throughline is the same: an attorney turns to a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT to help them with legal research (or worse, writing), the LLM hallucinates cases that don't exist, and the lawyer is none the wiser until the judge or opposing counsel points out their mistake. In some cases, including an aviation lawsuit from 2023, attorneys have had to pay fines for submitting filings with AI-generated hallucinations. So why haven't they stopped?
The answer mostly comes down to time crunches, and the way AI has crept into nearly every profession. Legal research databases like LexisNexis and Westlaw have AI integrations now. For lawyers juggling big caseloads, AI can seem like an incredibly efficient assistant. Most lawyers aren't necessarily using ChatGPT to write their filings, but they are increasingly using it and other LLMs for research. Yet many of these lawyers, like much of the public, don't understand exactly what LLMs are or how they work. One attorney who was sa …
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 85, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, sorry in advance that this week is a tiny bit politics-y, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I've been reading about Sean Evans and music fraud and ayahuasca, playing with the new Obsidian Bases feature, obsessing over every behind-the-scenes Final Reckoning video I can find, listening to MGK's "Cliche" more times than I'm proud of, installing some Elgato Key Lights to improve my WFH camera look, digging the latest beta of Artifacts, and downloading every podcast I can find because I have 20 hours of driving to do this weekend.
I also have for you a very funny new movie about tech CEOs, a new place to WhatsApp, a great new accessory for your phone, a helpful crypto politics explainer, and much more. Short week this week, but still lots going on. Let's do it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / playing / watching / listening to / shopping for / doing with a Raspberry Pi this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else wh …
Long-time 9to5Mac readers will remember that the native Shortcuts app started as an indie project called Workflow, a clever, approachable tool that made automation fun and accessible to less technical users.
Today, Shortcuts remains a powerful utility, particularly on the Mac. However, compared to how agentic AI tools have reshaped how we think about automation, it’s feeling a bit stagnant. That may be about to change.
more…
According to Mark Gurman in his latest Power On newsletter, Apple insiders “believe that the conference may be a letdown from an AI standpoint,” highlighting how far behind Apple still is. Still, Apple has a few AI-related announcements slated for June 9.
more…If something about Google Maps on Android and iOS looks different to you, it’s because the logo that appears in the bottom-left corner of every single map has been updated.
more…