Category: News
Adults predict they go without their phone and TV for only 5 hours
Adults predict they could only go without their phone and TV for just five hours, while they could manage three days without a laptop or tablet. A study of 2,000 Brits found 71 per cent admitted they’d struggle to manage their life if they didn’t have access to the internet. And without a phone more…
ShinyShiny snippets: Why M3GAN is the perfect AI ‘monster’
M3GAN is Hollywood's latest attempt to turn AI into a horror genre. Pic: Universal There is no shortage of robot uprising fiction in the Western canon (see: the works of Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick; classics like “The Terminator”; family-friendly spins like “The Mitchells vs. the Machines”). It’s a conceit that…
ShinyShiny snippets: Microsoft to cut 10,000 jobs worldwide
Microsoft will cut 10,000 jobs in the latest round of staff redundancies to hit the tech industry. It will affect up to 5% of its global workforce and cost the business $1.2bn (£972m) in severance and reorganisation costs. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said that while customer spending had grown during Covid, more people were…
ShinyShiny roundup: Goodbye Google Stadia
Google has just released the last ever game for the Stadia platform, ahead of its shutdown today (January 18). After much speculation, Google confirmed that the Stadia would be shutting down last September, with the cloud gaming service set to shut up shop today. Ahead of the shutdown though, Google has released one last game…
ShinyShiny snippets: Microsoft to face possible EU Antitrust warning over Activision deal
Microsoft (MSFT.O) is likely to receive an EU antitrust warning about its $69 billion bid for "Call of Duty" maker Activision Blizzard (ATVI.O), people familiar with the matter said, that could pose another challenge to completing the deal. The European Commission is readying a charge sheet known as a statement of objections setting out its concerns about…
ShinyShiny snippets: Apple Watch guilty of infringing Masimo patent
Apple infringed on one of medical technology company Masimo's pulse oximeter patents when it launched Apple Watch models that use light sensors to measure the amount of oxygen in the blood, an International Trade Commission (ITC) judge ruled on Tuesday. Masimo, which designs pulse oximetry devices, has been embroiled in an ongoing battle with Apple…
ShinyShiny snippets: Microsoft AI can replicate human voice after 3 seconds
Microsoft has unveiled an AI voice simulator capable of accurately imitating a person’s voice after listening to them speak for just three seconds. The VALL-E language model was trained using 60,000 hours of English speech from 7,000 different speakers in order to synthesize “high-quality personalised speech” from any unseen speaker. Once the artificial intelligence system has…
ShinyShiny snippets: Mastodon users fall by 30% since peak
The number of active users on the Mastodon social network has dropped more than 30% since the peak and is continuing a slow decline, according to the latest data posted on its website. There were about 1.8 million active users in the first week of January, down from over 2.5 million in early December. Mastodon, an…
ShinyShiny snippets: NASA satellite to fall to Earth after 38 years in space
Image: NASA A NASA satellite is expected to fall to Earth this weekend after nearly 40 years in space. The Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) was launched in 1984 aboard the space shuttle Challenger. It was initially sent into space with a lifespan of just two years to study how the…
ShinyShiny snippets: Apple Books launches AI-narrated audiobooks
Apple has launched a raft of audiobooks narrated by artificial intelligence to its Apple Books platform, but maintains it “remains committed to celebrating and showcasing the magic of human narration”. According to The Guardian, which said the tech giant had “quietly” uploaded the text-to-speech content in “an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook…
