A few mosquitos in Florida have tested positive for the the parasite that causes malaria. The finding follows multiple confirmed human cases of the disease—four in Florida and one in Texas—believed to be the first domestically acquired instances of malaria in the U.S. in 20 years. The newly reported mosquito test…
Let’s get streaming! Welcome to io9’s latest edition of the Nerd’s Watch, where we pare down the enormous lists of new films and television shows arriving on all your favorite streaming services into the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror titles we think you’ll like most. (And sometimes, just the ones that we like most.)
The official Game Boy Camera is a treat for fans of lo-fi photography, but it’s also on the larger side, protruding from the retro console like a giant, creepy eyeball. That’s why modder and mega-fan Christopher Graves made his own version, the Game Boy Mini Camera, as originally reported via Gizmodo. This thing is tiny, as Graves managed to shrink everything down to the size of a Game Boy cartridge, with no protrusion necessary.
Graves used a custom board, the original camera’s sensor, a memory map controller and some capacitors to complete the project. He also used a lens from an iPhone XR, screwed into a custom sleeve, to keep protrusions to a minimum. Though this lens changes position to allow for new types of shots, it doesn’t impact the quality at all. In other words, you still get the grainy black-and-white look that makes the original Game Boy Camera so popular, even 25 years later.
The camera slides into the cartridge slot and can even run ROMS, if that’s your bag. It’s also been upgraded with flash memory, so your stored photos last forever (or until the drive dies.) Graves has plans to refine the design, as he’s considering swapping out the iPhone XR lens with an iPhone 14 lens, among other options.
Videoooo – just ignore any embarrassing bits pls k thx pic.twitter.com/ux5mKmcII9
— @gameboycamera@glitch.lgbt (@thegameboycam) June 30, 2023
The real treat here is miniaturization. When attached to a Game Boy Pocket, for instance, the whole thing actually fits in a pocket, saving you the embarrassment of having to sit through dumb “or are you just happy to see me” jokes.
Of course, this is a DIY project made by one person, so don’t go breaking out the checkbook just yet. It’s still neat to see how far miniaturization technology has advanced since the late 1990s when the original Game Boy Camera launched. If the creator’s name sounds familiar, he also converted a standard Game Boy Camera into a modern mirrorless version. The retro enthusiast certainly knows his stuff.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/this-nifty-fan-made-game-boy-camera-is-the-size-of-a-cartridge-185209536.html?src=rss
Congressional Democrats are looking for a workaround after the Supreme Court blocked President Joe Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness plan.
Reddit is facing a crisis both in its user base and its finances. After protests and backlashed ravaged the platform in the wake of Reddit opting to charge for access to its API, the company’s valuation has been sliced.
Casting continues for the long-awaited third Tron film and now, for the first time in a long time, we think this movie might actually be happening. No, seriously.
Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer who was sponsored by Bud Light for two Instagram posts, is speaking out after receiving hate mail and threats while reportedly receiving no support from the beer company. The sponsorship garnered a mass anti-trans response and calls for a boycott which has decimated Bud Light’s sales…
Apple TV+ viewers are in for a busy summer of sci-fi. In addition to Silo, which just wrapped its first season and was renewed for another, Foundation season two arrives July 14—and now we know Invasion season two (not to be confused with Marvel’s Secret Invasion over on Disney+) will be premiering August 23.
The technology industry isn’t thrilled with Arkansas’ law requiring social media age checks. NetChoice, a tech trade group that includes Google, Meta and TikTok, has sued the state of Arkansas over claimed US Constitution violations in the Social Media Safety Act. The measure allegedly treads on First Amendment free speech rights by making users hand over private data in order to access social networks. It also “seizes decision making” from families, NetChoice argues.
The alliance also believes the Act hurts privacy and safety by making internet companies rely on a third-party service to store and track kids’ data. State residents often don’t know or associate with the service, NetChoice claims, and an external firm is supposedly a “prime target” for hacks. The law tries to regulate the internet outside state laws while ignoring federal law, according to the lawsuit. As Arkansas can’t verify residency without requiring data, it’s effectively asking everyone to submit documents.
State Attorney General Tim Griffin tells Engadget in a statement that he looks forward to “vigorously defending” the Social Media Safety Act. The law requires age verification for all users by submitting driver’s licenses and other “commercially reasonable” methods. Anyone under 18 also needs to get a parent’s consent. There are exceptions that appear to cover major social networks and their associated categories, such as those for “professional networking” (think LinkedIn) or short entertaining video clips (like TikTok).
Arkansas’ requirement is part of a greater trend among politicians to demand age verification for social media. States like Utah, Connecticut and Ohio have either passed or are considering similar laws, while Senator Josh Hawley proposed a federal bill barring all social media access for kids under 16. They’re concerned younger users might be exposed to creeps and inappropriate content, and that use can harm mental health by presenting a skewed view of the world and encouraging addiction.
There’s no guarantee the lawsuit will succeed. If it does, though, it could affect similar attempts to verify ages through personal data. If Arkansas’ approach is deemed unconstitutional, other states might have to drop their own efforts.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tech-firms-sue-arkansas-over-social-media-age-verification-law-180002953.html?src=rss
University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “Godfather of AI” for his pioneering research on neural networks, recently became the industry’s unofficial watchdog. He quit working at Google this spring to more freely critique the field he helped pioneer. He saw the recent surge in generative AIs like ChatGPT and Bing Chat as signs of unchecked and potentially dangerous acceleration in development. Google, meanwhile, was seemingly giving up its previous restraint as it chased competitors with products like its Bard chatbot.
At this week’s Collision conference in Toronto, Hinton expanded his concerns. While companies were touting AI as the solution to everything from clinching a lease to shipping goods, Hinton was sounding the alarm. He isn’t convinced good AI will emerge victorious over the bad variety, and he believes ethical adoption of AI may come at a steep cost.
Hinton contended that AI was only as good as the people who made it, and that bad tech could still win out. “I’m not convinced that a good AI that is trying to stop bad I can get control,” he explained. It might be difficult to stop the military-industrial complex from producing battle robots, for instance, he says — companies and armies might “love” wars where the casualties are machines that can easily be replaced. And while Hinton believes that large language models (trained AI that produces human-like text, like OpenAI’s GPT-4) could lead to huge increases in productivity, he is concerned that the ruling class might simply exploit this to enrich themselves, widening an already large wealth gap. It would “make the rich richer and the poor poorer,” Hinton said.
Hinton also reiterated his much-publicized view that AI could pose an existential risk to humanity. If artificial intelligence becomes smarter than humans, there is no guarantee that people will remain in charge. “We’re in trouble” if AI decides that taking control is necessary to achieve its goals, Hinton said. To him, the threats are “not just science fiction;” they have to be taken seriously. He worries that society would only rein in killer robots after it had a chance to see “just how awful” they were.
There are plenty of existing problems, Hinton added. He argues that bias and discrimination remain issues, as skewed AI training data can produce unfair results. Algorithms likewise create echo chambers that reinforce misinformation and mental health issues. Hinton also worries about AI spreading misinformation beyond those chambers. He isn’t sure if it’s possible to catch every bogus claim, even though it’s “important to mark everything fake as fake.”
This isn’t to say that Hinton despairs over AI’s impact, although he warns that healthy uses of the technology might come at a high price. Humans might have to conduct “empirical work” into understanding how AI could go wrong, and to prevent it from wresting control. It’s already “doable” to correct biases, he added. A large language model AI might put an end to echo chambers, but Hinton sees changes in company policies as being particularly important.
The professor didn’t mince words in his answer to questions about people losing their jobs through automation. He feels that “socialism” is needed to address inequality, and that people could hedge against joblessness by taking up careers that could change with the times, like plumbing (and no, he isn’t kidding). Effectively, society might have to make broad changes to adapt to AI.
Earlier talks at Collision were more hopeful. Google DeepMind business chief Colin Murdoch said in a different discussion that AI was solving some of the world’s toughest challenges. There’s not much dispute on this front — DeepMind is cataloging every known protein, fighting antibiotic-resistant bacteria and even accelerating work on malaria vaccines. He envisioned “artificial general intelligence” that could solve multiple problems, and pointed to Google’s products as an example. Lookout is useful for describing photos, but the underlying tech also makes YouTube Shorts searchable. Murdoch went so far as to call the past six to 12 months a “lightbulb moment” for AI that unlocked its potential.
Roblox Chief Scientist Morgan McGuire largely agrees. He believes the game platform’s generative AI tools “closed the gap” between new creators and veterans, making it easier to write code and create in-game materials. Roblox is even releasing an open source AI model, StarCoder, that it hopes will aid others by making large language models more accessible. While McGuire in a discussion acknowledged challenges in scaling and moderating content, he believes the metaverse holds “unlimited” possibilities thanks to its creative pool.
Both Murdoch and McGuire expressed some of the same concerns as Hinton, but their tone was decidedly less alarmist. Murdoch stressed that DeepMind wanted “safe, ethical and inclusive” AI, and pointed to expert consultations and educational investments as evidence. The executive insists he is open to regulation, but only as long as it allows “amazing breakthroughs.” In turn, McGuire said Roblox always launched generative AI tools with content moderation, relied on diverse data sets and practiced transparency.
Despite the headlines summarizing his recent comments, Hinton’s overall enthusiasm for AI hasn’t been dampened after leaving Google. If he hadn’t quit, he was certain he would be working on multi-modal AI models where vision, language and other cues help inform decisions. “Small children don’t just learn from language alone,” he said, suggesting that machines could do the same. As worried as he is about the dangers of AI, he believes it could ultimately do anything a human could and was already demonstrating “little bits of reasoning.” GPT-4 can adapt itself to solve more difficult puzzles, for instance.
Hinton acknowledges that his Collision talk didn’t say much about the good uses of AI, such as fighting climate change. The advancement of AI technology was likely healthy, even if it was still important to worry about the implications. And Hinton freely admitted that his enthusiasm hasn’t dampened despite looming ethical and moral problems. “I love this stuff,” he said. “How can you not love making intelligent things?”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai-pioneer-geoffrey-hinton-isnt-convinced-good-ai-will-triumph-over-bad-ai-181536702.html?src=rss
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