Technology

This past week I’ve been watching eBay, trying to decide if I should sell my PS5. I wouldn’t dream of becoming a scalper, but it’s getting hard to ignore just how much it’s worth. My daughter and I had beaten Astro Bot and Miles Morales, so I thought I’d peek at the resale market. Wow, are they worth a lot! And it’s not just the PlayStation 5 — I found that Xbox Series X and S, Nvidia’s RTX 3090, 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti graphics cards, and AMD’s rival RX 6800 and 6800 XT GPUs are all commanding incredibly high prices on the resale market. It no longer surprises me how each big ticket holiday gaming gadget sells out nigh-instantly anytime they’re restocked; the incentive for scalpers is just too high. They’re so high even folks like me, who bought one intending to use it, might have to thin...

China’s Chang’e-5 mission completed a tricky docking maneuver on Saturday, as it prepares to return the soil samples it collected from the Moon’s surface back to Earth. Chang’e 5 launched on November 23rd atop a Long March 5 rocket, with four main spacecraft. The mission entered the lunar orbit on November 28th, and its lander and ascent vehicle landed on the Moon December 1st, while its service module remained in lunar orbit. The lander gathered rocks and soil, and on Saturday, docked in orbit with the service module. Those samples will now be put in a return capsule for the trip home, expected to land in Inner Mongolia later in December. If the mission is successful, it will make China only the third country to return samples from the Moon, more than 50 years after the US Apollo missions...

I’m here to tell you that cheap tablets are good. I’m not here to tell you that they are the future of computing or will replace your laptop for getting work done. But I will tell you they are great entertainment devices. The best way to experience a cheap tablet is to just install the apps you use for entertainment and relaxation: Kindle, Hulu, Prime Video, HBO Max, Pocket, whatever your vice of choice is. Don’t install or set up things like Twitter, Slack, The New York Times app, email, or anything that’s going to take away from leisure time and suck you into work or the dreaded doomscroll. This is a tablet you buy to watch video and read things, not to try to replace your laptop. I’ve been testing Samsung’s Galaxy Tab A7 for the past few months and found that it is an excellent example ...

A paper co-authored by former Google AI ethicist Timnit Gebru raised some potentially thorny questions for Google about whether AI language models may be too big, and whether tech companies are doing enough to reduce potential risks, according to MIT Technology Review. The paper also questioned the environmental costs and inherent biases in large language models. Google’s AI team created such a language model— BERT— in 2018, and it was so successful that the company incorporated BERT into its search engine. Search is a highly lucrative segment of Google’s business; in the third quarter of this year alone, it brought in revenue of $26.3 billion. “This year, including this quarter, showed how valuable Google’s founding product — search — has been to people,” CEO Sundar Pichai said on a call ...

After spending six years in space, a Japanese spacecraft just landed in the desert of southern Australia, bringing a small cache of asteroid rocks to the surface of Earth. It’s only the second time in history that materials from an asteroid have been returned to our planet. Eventually, scientists will open the spacecraft up, uncovering the precious rocks within to learn more about the asteroids that permeate our Solar System. The landing is the culmination of Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission, aimed at bringing samples of an asteroid back to Earth. After launching from Japan in 2014, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft spent four years journeying to an asteroid named Ryugu. The vehicle spent a year and a half hanging around the asteroid, mapping the rock’s surface and grabbing samples of material before head...

Tesla published its first-ever diversity report on Friday, which shows the automaker’s US leadership is 83 percent male, and 59 percent white. The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Impact report shows that men represent 79 percent of Tesla’s workforce, and women 21 percent. “While women are historically underrepresented in the tech and automotive industries, we recognize we have work to do in this area,” the report states. “Increasing women’s representation at all levels, especially in leadership, is a top priority in 2021.” The company also acknowledges in the report that Black employees are underrepresented— only 10 percent of the workforce and 4 percent of leadership at Tesla are Black or African-American. “We know that our numbers do not represent the deep talent pools of Black and Afric...

In the US, COVID-19 vaccines are just around the corner, leaving the entire country peering out the window in anticipation of their arrival. Officials and healthcare systems, already taxed by skyrocketing case counts are making sure that everything is prepared when they show up. Here’s a few things still on their vaccine to-do lists: Save the dates: In the next few weeks, committees with the Food and Drug Administration will meet to decide whether or not to authorize vaccine candidates for Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna. The Pfizer vaccine is up first, with a meeting scheduled for December 10th. Moderna’s meeting will happen a week later, on December 17. The committee will meet to discuss the mountains of data from the clinical trials, and decide if they are safe and effective enough to be ...

There haven’t been many musicians like Selena Quintanilla: she was a Tejano superstar who managed to find major label mainstream success as one of the music industry’s first Latin artists to top the charts. Her dazzling career was cut tragically short when she was murdered by a fan in the spring of 1995, just before her 24th birthday. A 1997 film, Selena, which starred Jennifer Lopez in the titular role, solidified her legend — anointing her as a pop culture saint and a bridge between cultures. The real Selena Quintanilla, however, was a complex person with an interior life beyond her star persona and her tragic death. She’s a person whose life is worth diving deeper into, beyond the constraints of a two-hour Hollywood picture. In another world, Netflix’s Selena: The Series, now streaming ...

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is planning to move from California to Texas, a move that would potentially save him from a huge personal income tax bill, CNBC reported. Musk announced in July that Tesla was building its next US factory in Austin, where it will produce its Cybertruck, Model Y, Model 3, and Semi vehicles. The company received tens of millions of dollars in local property tax breaks to build the plant on 2,100 acres east of Austin’s airport, over the objections of some local residents. The factory is expected to begin delivering its first vehicles in 2021. Musk’s Boring Company already has operations in Austin, and SpaceX has a facility in Boca Chica, Texas. Earlier this year, Musk tweeted that he was “selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.” Musk battled ...

This weekend, you can enjoy the last of the leftovers — not Thanksgiving leftovers. (There’s still no end in sight for those at my house.) I’m talking about the deals left over from Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It’s a relative drought compared to the number of sales we saw last weekend in the thick of it all, but you can still get some of this year’s best prices on headphones, video games, and smart speakers. Here are this week’s best deals. Headphones The headphones with arguably the most effective noise cancellation tech and best sound quality for the price are the Sony WH-1000XM4. They were down to $278 during Black Friday, but their current $298 price is still a good buy if you missed that. Sony WH-1000XM4 wireless noise-canceling headphones $298 $350 15% off Prices taken at time of ...

WarnerMedia is making a clear bet for 2021: its slate of movies won’t generate the revenue its studio division needs, but it can help boost HBO Max’s long-term success. The company announced yesterday that every one of its 2021 movies will debut on HBO Max in the United States at the same time they play in theaters. They’ll be available for one month, at no extra charge, and available to stream in 4K HDR. It feels like an inevitable shift; COVID-19 cases are surging around the world again, new content on streaming services is drying up, and WarnerMedia needs to figure out a way to keep revenue coming in. Looking at a year where cinemas might not open beyond 25 percent capacity in the United States and where people may not want to sit in a room full of strangers until a vaccine is released,...

It may be time to pour one out for the streaming service trial. CNET reports that HBO Max is no longer offering users a free week of watching its content, following both Disney Plus and Netflix’s examples earlier in the year. This change, probably not coincidentally, comes just weeks before December 25th, when Wonder Woman 1984 is set to launch on the service (as well as in theaters, but you should probably stay home). While it can’t compete with free, the $14.99 you’ll now have to pay to see the movie still compares favorably to the price of a theater ticket (and it’s a month of entertainment as opposed to two-ish hours). It’s not the first streaming service to nix a free trial before a big release: Disney Plus did it just a few weeks before it started streaming Hamilton. The logic is sou...