If you’ve used Cash App in the last six years, you might be entitled to compensation as part of a class-action settlement. The company set up a $15 million fund after breaches enabled a trove of user personal data to leak. You can file a claim through a dedicated settlement website, and depending on what you can prove, you could receive up to $2,500. If there’s a downside beyond having your private financial data leaked, it’s that you’ve only got until November 19 to file.
Google is reportedly developing an AI agent for Chrome to act as a live assistant for your daily browsing. Codenamed Jarvis, because of course it is, it will help you with common tasks, like research, shopping and booking flights. Perhaps you could ask it to look at every price comparison website, collate the results and select the cheapest option. Maybe, in future, it could even buy, use and enjoy the thing you’re looking to purchase while you sit at your computer.
If you’ve used Cash App in the last six years, you might be entitled to compensation as part of a class-action settlement. The company set up a $15 million fund after breaches enabled a trove of user personal data to leak. You can file a claim through a dedicated settlement website, and depending on what you can prove, you could receive up to $2,500. If there’s a downside beyond having your private financial data leaked, it’s that you’ve only got until November 19 to file.
Google is reportedly developing an AI agent for Chrome to act as a live assistant for your daily browsing. Codenamed Jarvis, because of course it is, it will help you with common tasks, like research, shopping and booking flights. Perhaps you could ask it to look at every price comparison website, collate the results and select the cheapest option. Maybe, in future, it could even buy, use and enjoy the thing you’re looking to purchase while you sit at your computer.
It’s easy to assume we’ll see those models getting pushed from variants of the M3 to the M4. Given the M4’s focus on AI, expect plenty of attention on Apple Intelligence, which comes to users as part of iOS 18.1’s update at the same time. That each model is likely to be announced piecemeal across the week, rather than at one glitzy event, suggests we won’t see too many other big changes.
The rumor suggests only the Mac Mini will get a major hardware revision, shrinking its chassis to a far smaller footprint. If I’m honest, I’m secretly hoping the Mac Mini doesn’t become the same size as an Apple TV model, which has been hinted at. Especially if it means saddling us with a beefy power brick to clutter the floor instead.
Essentially, back in 2021, Qualcomm bought an AI chip company, Nuvia, which was also an Arm licensee. Qualcomm has used Nuvia’s technology inside its AI PC chips, but Arm feels Qualcomm never sought its blessing to transfer those licenses.
In response, Arm sued Qualcomm in 2022 to try to get what it was owed, with the battle due to go to trial this December. But unless someone backs down in the interim, Qualcomm might not be able to make the chips — the basis for its multi-billion dollar business.
I wouldn’t worry too much, given how high the stakes are for both companies in this situation. It’s likely someone will cut a hefty check days before the license is withdrawn, and everyone can go back to gently tolerating each other.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-arm-doubles-down-in-its-qualcomm-fight-111513704.html?src=rss
Some folks have properties too vast to be covered by the fanciest of mesh Wi-Fi sets, especially if they’ve got vast tracts of land. It’s an issue Eero is looking to tackle with the Outdoor 7, an add-on to its Eero 7 series of mesh Wi-Fi nodes that’s built to live outdoors. The hardware is IP66 rated and the company says it’ll keep working in temperatures ranging from -40F to 130F, no matter the weather.
With a range of 15,000 square feet, Eero says the Outdoor 7 should suit everyone from cafe owners with patios to land owners looking to keep their security cameras connected. Each unit supports Wi-Fi 7 with speeds up to 2.1Gbps, works with Thread, Zigbee and Matter devices, and has a 2.5Gb ethernet port with support for Power Over Ethernet. You’ll also get a mounting kit that’ll help you screw it into stucco, vinyl, wood or fiber cement walls.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/eero-launches-a-weatherproof-extender-for-outdoor-wi-fi-140010463.html?src=rss
NASA has shown off a prototype telescope that can detect gravitational waves to help better understand the building blocks of the universe. The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is expected to launch in the mid-2030s, with three linked satellites orbiting Earth. The trio will keep track of each other’s precise location, monitoring when gravitational waves shift from their expected pattern. If successful, it could offer useful insights into black holes and the Big Bang, which are difficult to study using other means.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-our-verdict-on-the-ipad-mini-7-111546869.html?src=rss
It’s another high-profile stumble for Ford, especially since this adapter was delayed several times already due to supplier issues. Plus, it’s not as if these adapters are toys, given they’re hooking up to Superchargers capable of pumping out 250kW. Ford must also be smarting that it had to sign a charging pact with Tesla in the first place and will adopt NACS as its charging standard in 2025.
Yet another round of newspapers versus AI startups.
TheWall Street Journal and The New York Post are suing Perplexity AI for using their content without permission. It comes just a week after The New York Times did the same, with all three arguing that Perplexity is stealing their content. Let another round of AI vs. newspaper courtroom skirmish begin!
Nintendo is such a storied company that even its silly side projects get a deep level of rigorous scrutiny. Devindra Hardawar has reviewed Alarmo, Nintendo’s attempt to bring a little bit of extra joy to waking up. It’s designed to rouse you from your slumber with sounds from a variety of Nintendo titles, including Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild. Whether it’s worth the $100 asking price, you’ll have to read the review to learn why it’s both charming and frustrating.
Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the company’s newest premium smartphone system on chip. It’s packing the Oryon CPU found in last year’s X Elite laptop chip and uses a 3nm process, which should offer significant leaps in performance. It’ll be interesting to see which devices this pops up in and how much faster it is compared to its immediate predecessors.
If you’re after a high-resolution mirrorless camera, most folks in the know will point you to the Sony’s A1. Canon, annoyed at not being everyone’s first choice, is fighting back with its new EOS R5 Mark II, a 45-megapixel mirrorless with plenty of bells and whistles.
Engadget’s Steve Dent knows a thing or two about high-end cameras, and he’s spent the last few weeks using the $4,300 shooter. It isn’t perfect, but he was impressed by the faster shooting and better autofocus, especially given the A1 is a lot more expensive.
To learn all about the new R5 II and decide if it’s the camera to put at the top of your wish list, read our in-depth review.
The following article discusses the fifth season of Star Trek: Lower Decks and older Treks.
There’s no such thing as “dead” in Star Trek, the sprawling, perpetual opus that has thrived in spite of itself for almost sixty years. What started as a cornball space-ships and punch-fights show for atomic-age kids and their parents has become (gestures around) all this. So I’m not writing too much of an obituary for Star Trek: Lower Decks despite its fifth season being its last. Given Paramount’s fluid leadership right now, I can easily imagine that decision being reversed in the future. So this isn’t so much of a goodbye as a farewell for now.
Lower Decks’ fifth season picks up not long after the fourth left off, with Tendi still repaying her debt to the Orions. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to suggest the status-quo reasserts itself soon after given, you know, all the other times this has happened. The crew of the Cerritos is then thrust into the usual sort of high-minded, lowbrow yet full of heart hijinks that we’ve come to expect. Naturally, I’m sworn to secrecy, but the fifth episode — where its title alone is a big spoiler — is a highlight.
I’ve seen the first five episodes of the season and as with any sitcom, there are a few misses in between the hits. One episode in particular is trying to reach for an old-school Frasier plotline, but it falls flat given the thinness of the characters in question. Thankfully, Lower Decks is able to carry a weak show on the back of its central cast’s charm. Sadly, as it tries to give everyone a grace note, some characters you’d expect would get more focus are instead shunted to the periphery.
You can feel Lower Decks straining against its own premise, too. A show about people on the lowest rung of the ladder can’t get too high. As a corrective, both Mariner and Boimler use this year as an opportunity to mature and grow. I won’t spoil the most glorious running gag of the season, but their growth comes in very different ways. If there’s a downside, it’s that the show still relies too much on energy-sapping action sequences to resolve its episodes.
But that’s a minor gripe for a show that grew from the would-be class clown of the Trek world to the most joyful interpretation of its ethos. I’ve always loved how, when the chips are down, Lower Decks delights in the bits plenty of newer Treks would rather ignore. The show is, and has been, a delight to watch and something for the rest of the franchise to aspire toward.
Paramount+
I’ve been looking for a way to describe Lower Decks’ target audience for years, but only now has it hit me. It’s a show written by, and for, the people who grew up watching Star Trek in the VHS era. Creator Mike McMahan is just four years older than me, barely a teenager when The Next Generation went off-air. So while he’d have encountered Deep Space Nine and Voyager as first-run, everything else would have been discovered through re-runs and tapes.
You can almost track that timeline of discovery as Lower Decks broadened its range of hat-tips each year it ran. Of course we got a parody of the first two Trek films in the first season — both were ever-present on Saturday afternoon TV when I was a kid — but it’s not until the third that we get a nod to First Contact. As Enterprise ran out of gas, you can feel McMahan and co’s delving into the behind-the-scenes lore and convention gossip about those later series.
If you’ve seen the series five trailer, you’ll spot the gag about Harry Kim’s promotion, something the character never got on Voyager. If you’re fluent with Trek’s behind-the-scenes drama you’ll know the handful of reasons why, and why it’s funny to nod toward that now. But that’s not the only subtle gag that points a sharpened elbow into the ribs of major figures from the series creative team. I’m sure if you don’t spot them all, Reddit will have assembled a master list half an hour after each episode lands on Paramount+.
Paramount+
I won’t indulge in theorizing as to why a popular and successful show like Lower Decks is ending (it’s money, it’s always money). But, as we’ve seen countless times before, it’s not as if it’s hard to revive a successful animated show when wiser heads prevail. Hell, even McMahan told TrekMovie he’s prepared for that, and even has some spin-off ideas in the works. But for now, let’s raise a toast to Lower Decks, the animated sitcom that became the cornerstone of modern Star Trek.
The first two episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks season five will arrive on Paramount+, Thursday, October 24, with an additional episode landing each week for the successive eight weeks. The series and season finale will air on December 19.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/star-trek-lower-decks-bows-out-on-business-as-usual-200017641.html?src=rss
London’s W1 is somewhere to go if you’ve got too much money to spend on something. Within minutes of each other, you can visit the city’s priciest private doctor, buy a Steinway and a pair of designer glasses that cost more than my mortgage. Wigmore Street is also where the ultra rich go to buy a kitchen that Thorstein Veblen would weep at the sight of. It’s also the new home of Moley Robotics, a company selling luxury kitchens and the robot arm that’ll kinda/sorta do all of the cooking for you, too.
Moley is the brainchild of Dr. Mark Oleynik and is one part kitchen showroom and one part robot lab. It’s a spartan space with three demo kitchens, a wide dining table and some display units showing you the different types of artisan marble you can have for your countertop. The point of interest is the working X-AiR robot just behind the front window that acts as a lure for would-be consumers. It’s got its own cooktop, shelves, oils and utensils and, with the proper help, can even whip up a meal.
Moley
Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget
Oleynik explained he wanted to create something to help people eat better food with less reliance on preservatives. His dislike of reheated and processed food sent him looking for alternatives, which led him to finding a way to automate fresh cooking. If you’re coming back late from work, the obvious temptations are microwave meals or delivery food. He believes people would much rather healthy recipes where you just prep the raw ingredients and let the robot do the rest. The focus on health extends to the database of potential meals, many of which have been created by the SHA Wellness Clinic.
Moley has its own in-house chef, James Taylor, who adapts each recipe so it can be made by a one-armed robot. The company says it hopes to add two or three new recipes each month, and that if you have a family dish you’d love to see automated, you can send it in. Oleynik said the movements are mapped onto the robot after watching a human chef prepare the same meal. And that, once it had learned what to do, the robot would be far less error-prone than its human counterpart.
The initial demonstration of Moley’s vision (above) used a two-armed chef that ran on overhead tracks that earned the company so many plaudits initially. Unfortunately, Oleynik admitted the cost for such a robot would have likely reached north of £250,000 (Around $330,000). Which is probably too rich even for the sort of people who frequent Wigmore Street for their kitchen appliances. To reduce the price, the company stripped down the project from a mobile, two-armed version to a single arm. The robot that Moley is actually selling is bought off-the-shelf from Universal Robots, an industrial robotics company.
The robot
Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget
The one-armed version that’s currently up for pre-order is known as the X-AiR, which is what sits in the front of Moley’s showroom. If you want one for yourself, you’ll need to buy a new countertop, two custom shelving units, a cooktop, control tablet and the robot itself. The prices are in the “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” range but the price to get in the door is £80,000 (around $105,000). So far, Moley hasn’t installed a single robot, but expects the process to begin in the next three to six months. But there are people who have already laid down cash to get one of these in their homes, and the kitchen that goes around it.
X-AiR has no built-in vision or sensing technology enabling it to perceive or engage with its environment. The system does come with a camera, embedded in one of the shelves, that I understand is more for technical support than to aid cooking. Instead, the robot arm moves around its space from memory, knowing where all of the ingredients, oils and tools should be. The saucepans are held in place over the jobs on the cooktop to keep the environment as controlled as possible.
I was present to witness Moley’s now standard demonstration using an SHA Clinic recipe for Asian Tofu Saute. Staff members had pre-prepared the ingredients and placed them in the pots necessary for the robot to grab. In order to start the process, the user needs to tell the system which ingredients are in which sections. There’s even a little diagram of the shelf layout, so you can tap “Bean Sprouts” and tap that the pot with them is seated in position A1, for instance. Once you’ve done that, you can set the machine going and theoretically leave it be until it’s time to eat.
The system is set up to call out every instruction from the recipe so it’s easy to follow along with it. In the video, you should be able to see why it’s an interesting thing to watch as the arm starts its ballet to start cooking your food. It almost theatrically turns on the cooktop before pouring a liberal quantity of oil into the pan to begin warming. After that, it begins adding the ingredients as and when commanded to, and stirring the mixture in between. The stirring is more of a back and forth pushing of the mix, which is obviously less thorough than a human would be. After each stir, the robot scrapes its spatula on the side of the pan before returning it to its hook.
There are similar touches when the robot adds the next ingredient from its dedicated bin, double tapping the pot on the side to ensure everything falls out. I noticed, however, that there were a few ingredients still attached to the spatula and the pots when they were returned to the shelf. This is the big issue with a robot that lacks any sort of vision to perceive its local environment. During my demonstration, a few strips of leek clung to the spatula and fell off, onto the cooktop itself, while in motion. It was quickly wiped away, but I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if it’d landed a millimeter closer to the burner and pan and started burning.
What it can’t do
Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget
I’m much happier tending to a pan and actually cooking than I am peeling carrots and trying to dice onions. The obvious question, then, is why Moley sought to automate the ostensibly fun part of cooking rather than the bit people dislike? Oleynik said it might be possible in a far-flung future but there are just too many variables to make a carrot-peeling robot work. Not to mention, he added, the safety risks inherent in giving a robot a bladed instrument to wield.
Moley’s first-generation robots are also limited by the volume of food they can cook in a single session. Depending on the meal, they can make between eight and ten portions, enough for a dinner party but nothing more extravagant. Not to mention the robots can’t make much of any adjustment if you don’t have exactly the right ingredients ready for use. You can remove any you don’t have, naturally, but there’s no ability to improvise beyond that, or to variate its program to take into account seasonal differences in ingredient quality.
The food
Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget
When I was told the robot was making me tofu, I had to work hard to keep myself standing upright. If they could have seen my soul, they’d have watched my shoulders droop so hard they fell through the floor, through the basement, and into the subway line below. Friends, I cannot stand tofu and grimace my way through it whenever my vegan chums insist we go to a meat-free restaurant. Even when they insist I’m eating “really good” tofu, it just tastes like stringy matter, devoid of any inherent flavor as I try to mash it in my mouth. So bear that in mind when I say that the tofu the robot cooked me was actually delicious. It had a nice texture and tasted pretty delicious, meshing beautifully with the vegetables.
The future
Oleynik believes his robots will find a variety of niches to fill, first with money-rich, time-poor folks in London and beyond. The internet tells me that a private chef would set you back around £300 a day, so you’d burn through that £80,000 in less than a year. Naturally, it’s likely anyone who can drop £80,000 on a cooking robot can probably afford to buy their ingredients pre-prepared, so they could just dump them in the bins and set things going.
After that, Oleynik believes the technology could be used to prepare fresh meals for business and first-class airline passengers. Or in small kitchens where one employee supervises a production line of robots all making fresh dishes. His vision stretches to any situation where there may be a desire for fresh-cooked food, but the economics of a trained chef won’t allow it.
He cited the example of a hotel with 24/7 room service, where people are paid to wait around on the off-chance someone wants food. Or service stations in remote areas where there’s potential demand for meals but no need to hire a professional chef. Similarly, Oleynik cited care homes where there’s a similar conflict between a desire to produce good food but limited budgets.
Of course, it’s not clear, given there would need to be a human preparing the raw ingredients and dishing up, how much labor is being saved. And anyone who is involved with food would likely need to be trained and paid accordingly, which may eliminate any potential savings. But Oleynik is certain that a business can expect to see a return on its investment within its first year of service.
As for the price, Oleynik believes the technology will refine to the point that the cost will fall quite far. He gestured to one of the demo kitchens in the showroom, which had a Miele-branded oven and fridge, saying each model cost £5,000 (around $6,500) each. He hopes he’ll be able to sell a cooking robot for £10,000 to the sort of people who don’t blink when spending £5,000 on an oven and another £5,000 on a fridge. But, if nothing else, it’s entirely in keeping with everything else you can buy on Wigmore Street.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/kitchen-tech/a-105000-robot-arm-nobody-needs-cooked-me-a-delicious-lunch-140050065.html?src=rss