When the Cybertruck was first announced in 2019, Musk said it would have up to 500 miles of range and start at $40,000, both of which were huge promised improvements over any available or forthcoming competitor. Instead, the Cybertruck base model has half that range—250 miles—and starts at $60,990, or $20,000 more than people expected.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a35ed/the-cybertruck-is-a-disappointment-even-to-cybertruck-superfans
Tech companies continue to insist that AI-generated content is the future as they release more trendy chatbots and image-generating tools. But despite reassurances that these systems will have robust safeguards against misuse, the screenshots speak for themselves.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88xdez/generative-ai-is-a-disaster-and-companies-dont-seem-to-really-care
Meta has started slowly rolling out its new AI-generated stickers for Messenger, and the results so far are totally unhinged. It is somewhat staggering that a company as large as Meta would release AI tools into the wild with, apparently, so few guardrails that they generate images that could start an international incident.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a37qd/metas-ai-stickers-wa
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is set to begin human trials, and the company is announcing that it’s looking for human applicants to test its controversial brain-computer interface. “The PRIME Study (short for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface)…aims to evaluate the safety of our implant (N1) and surgical robot (R1) and assess the initial functionality of our BCI for enabling people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts,” the company wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxjp9q/neuralink-monkey-deaths-human-trials
In July, the Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify unveiled an internal tool that struck a chord with people online. The way it worked was simple enough: Using a few metrics, like compensation, the number of people involved, and length of time, the tool was able to calculate and display the estimated cost of a proposed meeting by any of its employees.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9wqn/meeting-bloat-has-taken-over-corporate-america-can-it-be-stopped
Oppenheimer may be one of the biggest box office events of the year and the IMAX version appears massively popular, with some theaters already sold out for the next few weeks. The IMAX version may also be on the biggest physical film reels ever produced. According to Cinemark, the 70mm print of the film is 11 miles long and 600 pounds. To get this movie ready for theaters, IMAX used technology that’s run by an iPad emulating a 20 year old piece of hardware—a PalmPilot.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88x5gb/imax-still-runs-on-palmpilot-operating-system
Those not closely watching might be wondering: All this effort to save a bunch of porn? Seglegs, in their post on the matter, made it clear that, while there may be adult content in the mix, the real goal is to help save content from online communities like Something Awful and Reddit—non-explicit content that might have been uploaded anonymously and could disrupt large parts of the internet if deleted.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ak3ew4/archive-team-races-to-save-a-billion-imgur-files-before-porn-deletion-apocalypse