WiFi 6 mesh routers are a favorite of gamers, smart home devotees and basically anyone with a lot of connected devices — but they can be pricey. Linksys has unveiled two dual-band WiFi 6 routers — the Hydra 6 and the Atlas 6 — that could be an attractive option for those who want higher speeds on a budget. Both are dual-band, so they’ll support the 5GHz and 2.4GHz frequencies. For smaller households or those with fewer devices, either of these two will likely offer more than enough coverage.
Linksys
The Hydra 6 (pictured above) is a traditional router that can also serve as a base point for mesh networking points. The Atlas 6 has a less obtrusive, vertically-oriented shape and is sold in sets of up to three, so they can be placed around the house.
Both the Atlas 6 and Hydra 6 claim to cover around 2,000 square feet and up to 25 devices — although the former can be bought in packs of two or three, with each additional router adding another 2,000 square feet and supporting 25 more devices. That expandability is sort of the whole draw of a mesh system. The somewhat wonky technical improvements made available through WiFi 6 support might also deliver faster connectivity.
Both models are less costly than many premium WiFi 6 mesh systems, including the Linksys Atlas Max 6E, which retails at $999 and its recently-released WiFi 6E system, which costs $1200 for a pack of three. The Atlas 6 is $149.99 for a single router, $279.99 for a two-pack and $349.99 for a three-node system. The Hydra 6 will retail at $179.99. Both will be available in the US early this summer, with a global release planned for the second half of 2022.
A new bill coming down the pike in the California state legislature could be a huge swing in precedent for parents’ ability to sue companies for what some consider addictive online content.
Walmart announced today in a press release that they are expanding their drone delivery fleet to bring customers their orders. The retailer is also looking to rollout more warehouse robots.
Eddie Robson was inspired to write Drunk on All Your Strange New Words the night that Bong Joon Ho accepted his Oscars for Parasite. As he watched the director on stage, he observed Sharon Choi, Ho’s translator, as she worked. In a world that is constantly pushing towards automation, even automatic translation, what…
Fans of shonen manga and anime have plenty of series they love—series we’ve talked about a few times on this site—and among the upper tier of those is Hunter x Hunter. Yoshihiro Togashi’s martial arts manga has been a commercial and critical success since it debuted in 1998, but due to Togashi’s health issues, it went…
Following a delay from 2021, Daedalic’s “cinematic stealth adventure” game The Lord of the Rings: Gollum will officially arrive on September 1st, the company announced today. The game will explore the untold story of Gollum during the first few chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring. We don’t have any new footage of the game in action yet, but the latest cinematic trailer gives us an idea of the sort of stealth gameplay expect. (It’s also nice to see that Daedaelic’s take on Gollum hews closely to Peter Jackon’s Lord of the Ring films.)
As with any story-driven game worth its salt, you’ll be able to make distinct choices—in this case, you’ll be going between Gollum’s more vicious desires and his kinder Hobbit self, Smeagol. You’ll definitely be hiding in tall grass quite a bit, but hopefully you’ll have some creative ways to torture your enemies, as the trailer implies. Daedalic also promises you’ll run into some familiar faces from Lord of the Rings, as you’d expect.
Google has shown off an artificial intelligence system that can create images based on text input. The idea is that users can enter any descriptive text and the AI will turn that into an image. The company says the Imagen diffusion model, created by the Brain Team at Google Research, offers “an unprecedented degree of photorealism and a deep level of language understanding.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen AI models like this. OpenAI’s DALL-E (and its successor) generated headlines as well as images because of how adeptly it can turn text into visuals. Google’s version, however, tries to create more realistic images.
To assess Imagen against other text-to-image models (including DALL-E 2, VQ-GAN+CLIP and Latent Diffusion Models), the researchers created a benchmark called DrawBench. That’s a list of 200 text prompts that were entered into each model. Human raters were asked to assess each image. They “prefer Imagen over other models in side-by-side comparisons, both in terms of sample quality and image-text alignment,” Google said.
It’s worth noting that the examples shown on the Imagen website are curated. As such, these may be the best of the best images that the model created. They may not accurately reflect most of the visuals that it generated.
Like DALL-E, Imagen is not available to the public. Google doesn’t think it’s suitable as yet for use by the general population for a number of reasons. For one thing, text-to-image models are typically trained on large datasets that are scraped from the web and are not curated, which introduces a number of problems.
“While this approach has enabled rapid algorithmic advances in recent years, datasets of this nature often reflect social stereotypes, oppressive viewpoints, and derogatory, or otherwise harmful, associations to marginalized identity groups,” the researchers wrote. “While a subset of our training data was filtered to removed noise and undesirable content, such as pornographic imagery and toxic language, we also utilized LAION-400M dataset, which is known to contain a wide range of inappropriate content including pornographic imagery, racist slurs and harmful social stereotypes.”
As a result, they said, Imagen has inherited the “social biases and limitations of large language models” and may depict “harmful stereotypes and representation.” The team said preliminary findings indicated that the AI encodes social biases, including a tendency to create images of people with lighter skin tones and to place them into certain stereotypical gender roles. Additionally, the researchers note that there is the potential for misuse if Imagen were made available to the public as is.
The team may eventually allow the public to enter text into a version of the model to generate their own images, however. “In future work we will explore a framework for responsible externalization that balances the value of external auditing with the risks of unrestricted open-access,” the researchers wrote.
You can try Imagen on a limited basis, though. On its website, you can create a description using pre-selected phrases. Users can select whether the image should be a photo or an oil painting, the type of animal displayed, the clothing they wear, the action they’re undertaking and the setting. So if you’ve ever wanted to see an interpretation of an oil painting depicting a fuzzy panda wearing sunglasses and a black leather jacket while skateboarding on a beach, here’s your chance.
Back in 2019, io9 shared the first look at F.C. Yee’s Avatar, The Last Airbender: The Rise of Kyoshi. The Shadow of Kyoshi followed in 2020. Next up is Yee’s third installment in the best-selling Chronicles of the Avatar series: The Dawn of Yangchen, and once again we’ve got a first peek at the story!
“I’m confident that if the truth can be found out here, she’ll find it out and present it in an unbiased manner,” said retired Army Brig. Gen. Patrick Huston.
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