Technology

During a hearing before a Senate subcommittee on Wednesday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the company is working on a version of its feed that would show users’ posts in chronological order, unlike its current ranking algorithm that sorts posts based on user preferences. The company’s algorithmically sorted feed, introduced in 2016, and then updated in 2017 to include recommended posts, is widely disliked by users who prefer to have their posts and their friends’ posts surface in a timely manner. The current feed uses AI to create what Instagram considers a more personalized feed, based on users’ activity. But it has remained generally unpopular among a vast swath of users, despite the company’s assertions otherwise. Mosseri appeared before the Senate subcommittee where he was gri...

Twitter has purchased and shut down Quill, a messaging platform that rivaled Slack. The service has immediately ceased its operations and plans to delete all of its data come Saturday, December 11. Designed for workplace communications. Quill emerged earlier this year as a Slack alternative with a few additional tools built-in. As part of the acquisition, the Quill team will join Twitter to work on its messaging features, especially its DMs. In his announcement of the acquisition on the app, Twitter’s General Manager for Core Tech, Nick Caldwell, described Quill as a “fresher, more deliberate way to communicate.” “We’re bringing their experience and creativity to Twitter as we work to make messaging tools like DMs a more useful and expressive way people can have conversations on the servic...

Language generation is the hottest thing in AI right now, with a class of systems known as “large language models” (or LLMs) being used for everything from improving Google’s search engine to creating text-based fantasy games. But these programs also have serious problems, including regurgitating sexist and racist language and failing tests of logical reasoning. One big question is: can these weaknesses be improved by simply adding more data and computing power, or are we reaching the limits of this technological paradigm? This is one of the topics that Alphabet’s AI lab DeepMind is tackling in a trio of research papers published today. The company’s conclusion is that scaling up these systems further should deliver plenty of improvements. “One key finding of the paper is that the progress...

Ready. Steady. Go. If you’re still looking for a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, Walmart Plus members will be able to queue up for the console beginning at 12PM EST on Wednesday, December 8th. Walmart will open the digital queue for the standard PlayStation 5 ($500), the disc-less, digital-only version ($400), and the Xbox Series X ($500). This paywall doesn’t guarantee that you’ll have success in snagging a console, but it’s currently the only way to be in the running at this particular retailer. You have to be logged into your Walmart Plus account to even attempt to add a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X to your cart, so if you haven’t done so already, make sure you log in ahead of time and have your credentials saved to keep things moving along. If you aren’t already a Walmart Plus member...

Over 40 million people in the United States had their personal health information exposed in data breaches this year, a significant jump from 2020 and a continuation of a trend toward more and more health data hacks and leaks. Health organizations are required to report any health data breaches that impact 500 or more people to the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, which makes the breaches public. So far this year, the office has received reports of 578 breaches, according to its database. That’s fewer than the 599 breaches reported in 2020, but last year’s breaches only affected about 26 million people. Since 2015, hacks or other IT incidents have been the leading reason people have their health records exposed, according to a report from security com...

Twitter is piloting a new feature that will let users add specific content warnings to individual photos and videos sent out in tweets. The platform noted that the feature would be available to “some” users during the test. People use Twitter to discuss what’s happening in the world, which sometimes means sharing unsettling or sensitive content. We’re testing an option for some of you to add one-time warnings to photos and videos you Tweet out, to help those who might want the warning. pic.twitter.com/LCUA5QCoOV — Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) December 7, 2021 Although Twitter currently has a way to add content warnings to tweets, the only way to do it is to add the warning to all your tweets. In other words, every photo or video you post will have a content warning, regardless of whethe...

To elevate the golf-related buy-and-sell shopping game, MULLIE Golf has developed an app which focuses on an alternative experience of a modern-day marketplace approach. MULLIE Golf, launched on November 15, is the first-ever community-curated marketplace, similar to fashion-focused platforms like Grailed. The platform is designed for golfers by golfers as a “social-commerce” forum to buy and sell golf products with zero fees, ultimately allowing goods to be more accessible, inexpensive, and educational. MULLIE Golf also acts as a strong foundation for beginner golfers currently look for ways to link with others in the golf community, all the while being able to purchase new or pre-owned equipment or apparel that may fit to a player’s specifications. Users can also organize their feed base...

More than other recent years, in 2021 the tech industry focused a great deal of its energy on a single question: who will build and own the next generation of the internet? In one corner you have the scrappy upstarts eager to topple the existing world order and rebuild it from scratch on the blockchain. These companies give their effort the aspirational name “Web3.” In the other corner you have the existing tech platforms, who envision the next generation of the internet as a slightly more interoperable version of the existing web. What will set it apart is new hardware: augmented reality glasses and virtual reality helmets that will bring us together in a series of linked experiences that occupy an ever-increasing share of our waking hours. Platforms have taken to calling this “the metave...

Microsoft has released a OneDrive sync app for Windows on Arm and Apple’s M1 Macs for its cloud-based storage service. The public preview of the updated OneDrive app is available as an opt-in download for both Windows on Arm and macOS, and allows the app to run natively on these devices. This should improve the performance of the OneDrive sync app, as the OneDrive process will no longer run emulated on Windows on Arm. The jump to 64-bit is also useful for OneDrive users with lots of files or large files. Microsoft’s OneDrive support for Apple’s M1 Macs and Windows on Arm comes after Dropbox revealed it’s testing its own native app. Dropbox is currently supported on Apple’s M1 Macs through Rosetta, but an updated app is arriving next year. “We have an internal build for native Apple M1 supp...

Ana* and her three-year-old son arrived at the shelter for migrant and refugee women in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey in early October. Every morning, the 14 women at the shelter — mainly from El Salvador and Honduras — share the house chores: sweeping, cooking, and babysitting the children of their compañeras working informal jobs to save enough money to cross into the United States. The majority of them, traveling alone with as many as three children, spent days unable to communicate with their families after crossing Mexico’s southern border. Not having a local SIM card, they said, made the uncertainty and anxiety of their journey that much worse. For a family crossing the border, a working phone is critical. It lets asylum-seekers stay connected to family, receive money, and a...

Reddit is taking a look back at some of the site’s biggest moments and trends from 2021, and perhaps unsurprisingly, posts from r/wallstreetbets were the most upvoted posts of the year. r/wallstreetbets became hugely popular after GameStop’s stock price skyrocketed in January and as people followed updates from Keith Gill (aka DeepFuckingValue / Roaring Kitty), the trader who invested heavily in GameStop ahead of the stock’s surge. Here are the top five most upvoted posts, according to Reddit: On r/wallstreetbets, a user bought a billboard in Times Square reading “$GME GO BRRR” and got more than 433K upvotes A screenshotted tweet on r/wallstreetbets alleging Robinhood hid popular meme stocks and encouraging users to “take all the cash you can afford to lose and buy buy buy” had more than 3...

Oppo has released a brief video hinting at a new type of camera design for smartphones. The company’s “self-developed retractable camera” is shown extending from the phone’s body before retracting back inside. The video suggests that the mechanism is waterproof and that it’ll automatically retract the camera if the phone is dropped. Unlike pop-up selfie cameras that hide themselves inside a phone until needed, moving the camera back and forth on the Z-axis could have implications for image quality, though Oppo hasn’t yet claimed anything about any optical advantages of this design. It doesn’t appear to be a zoom lens, given it’s marked simply as 50mm, but it could theoretically help improve telephoto performance. The markings on the camera module show that the sensor is 1/1.56 inches and t...