Human-level performance. Human-level accuracy. Those are terms you hear a lot from companies developing artificial intelligence systems, whether it’s facial recognition, object detection, or question answering. And to their credit, the recent years have seen many great products powered by AI algorithms, mostly thanks to advances in machine learning and deep learning. But many of…

Enlarge / A Cessna Grand Caravan, flown by a pilot as photographed. But... The conditions are not ideal for our landing. A hard wind is blowing over the low hills east of San Francisco, and at just the wrong angle—straight across the runway where we’re set to touch down. But as we ease into our…

“GPT-3 is not a mind, but it is also not entirely a machine. It’s something else: a statistically abstracted representation of the contents of millions of minds, as expressed in their writing.” Regini Rini, Philosopher  In recent years, the AI circus really has come to town and we’ve been treated to a veritable parade of…

An Apple engineer who helped launch the iPod said he helped the US government build a secret version of the device that could covertly collect data. David Shayer, the second software engineer hired for the iPod project in 2001, said he first learned of the project in 2005, when he received an office visit from…

A robot beetle goes the distance on its own thanks to a methanol-fueled micromuscle. Scientists envision that swarms of robotic insects could assist search-and-rescue operations (SN: 5/19/16). But tight spaces are out of reach for robots that must be tethered to an energy source. The new bot, described August 19 in Science Robotics, carries its…

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook looks on as the iPhone X goes on sale at an Apple Store on November 3, 2017 in Palo Alto, California. Apple's market capitalization hit $2 trillion on Wednesday, making Apple the first company outside Saudi Arabia to reach that milestone. Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco, was…

Ransomware operators are continuing their blitz on corporations with deep pockets, with Jack Daniel’s distiller Brown-Forman and cruise line behemoth Carnival being two of the latest to be hit. In a statement, Brown-Forman officials wrote: Brown-Forman was the victim of a cybersecurity attack. Our quick actions upon discovering the attack prevented our systems from being…

4ocean crews celebrate another successful shoreline cleanup 4ocean The folks at 4ocean have hit the mark, raking in 10 million pounds of ocean trash with a campaign funded by selling bracelets. Now the Florida-based “public benefit corporation” is rolling out items made from 100% ocean plastic. 4ocean has been selling $20 bracelets since 2017, pledging…

Enlarge / Removing the scissor switch in a 16-inch MacBook Pro, courtesy of iFixit. Today, Apple announced that it will expand a program that gave third-party repair shops access to its own proprietary tools, diagnostics, and parts. Launched last year, the program initially only provided the resources for servicing iPhones. Now it will apply to…

Interacting with GitHub We can use APIs to interact with GitHub too. Keeping it simple, we’ll use the POST request to create a new repo called api_test. Authorization First, as always, we need an authorization token. Fortunately, we can get this set up much faster than we did with the Google Maps API — you…