Lifeboat Foundation

One tip that I always give to family members, friends, and passersby when asked, “How can I make my phone faster?” is straightforward yet typically hidden, and that’s adjusting the animation speed. The method of doing so is quick, simple, and absolutely free. And as a bonus, you’ll feel like the “guy behind the computer” from every action movie. Just follow the steps below.

A few taps and a swipe are all it takes to make your Android phone feel like new again.

Continue reading “Change this Android setting to instantly give your phone twice the speed” »

Quantum computing could revolutionize our world. For specific and crucial tasks, it promises to be exponentially faster than the zero-or-one binary technology that underlies today’s machines, from supercomputers in laboratories to smartphones in our pockets. But developing quantum computers hinges on building a stable network of qubits—or quantum bits—to store information, access it and perform computations.

Yet the qubit platforms unveiled to date have a common problem: They tend to be delicate and vulnerable to outside disturbances. Even a stray photon can cause trouble. Developing fault-tolerant qubits—which would be immune to external perturbations—could be the ultimate solution to this challenge.

A team led by scientists and engineers at the University of Washington has announced a significant advancement in this quest. In a pair of papers published June 14 in Nature and June 22 in Science, the researchers report that in experiments with flakes of semiconductor materials—each only a single layer of atoms thick—they detected signatures of “fractional quantum anomalous Hall” (FQAH) states.

Satellite-to-phone connectivity provider Lynk has made its debut in Palau, where the nation’s hundreds of islands make traditional cell coverage difficult to achieve. The company’s “cell towers in space” now cover the entire country — intermittently, but that’s a lot better than nothing, and service will improve as more satellites are added to the constellation.

Lynk is among the first of a new wave of direct satellite-to-phone providers, replacing the bulky, dedicated satphones of yore by connecting ordinary mobile devices to low Earth orbit. It’s difficult to engineer for many reasons, as you can imagine.

Apple’s SOS has the most high-profile use case, with the distinguishing characteristic of having to actually point your phone at an unseen satellite, but Lynk’s service requires no special behavior by the user — it just works like a roving cell tower, connecting when it passes overhead.

I’ve covered quite a few thermal cameras over the years, some standalone units and others that are built into smartphones. For the average user, they offer a performance and sensitivity that’s more than adequate.

But sometimes you need something that goes beyond more than adequate.

This is where the Xinfrared T2S Plus comes into play.

Continue reading “This thermal camera is so sensitive it can see you breathe” »

When I’m asked to check a box to confirm I’m not a robot, I don’t give it a second thought—of course I’m not a robot. On the other hand, when my email client suggests a word or phrase to complete my sentence, or when my phone guesses the next word I’m about to text, I start to doubt myself. Is that what I meant to say? Would it have occurred to me if the application hadn’t suggested it? Am I part robot? These large language models have been trained on massive amounts of “natural” human language. Does this make the robots part human?

AI chatbots are new, but public debates over language change are not. As a linguistic anthropologist, I find human reactions to ChatGPT the most interesting thing about it. Looking carefully at such reactions reveals the beliefs about language underlying people’s ambivalent, uneasy, still-evolving relationship with AI interlocutors.

Continue reading “The Boundary Between Human Language and ChatGPT Is Fuzzier Than You Think” »

The A17 Bionic chip initially used in the iPhone 15 Pro and ‌iPhone 15 Pro‌ Max later this year will fundamentally differ from a version of the same chip set to be manufactured in 2024, a new rumor claims.

The A17 Bionic is expected to be Apple’s first chip manufactured with a 3nm fabrication process, resulting in major performance and efficiency improvements over the 5nm technique used for the A14, A15, and A16 chips. The initial version of the A17 Bionic chip will reportedly be manufactured using TSMC’s N3B process, but Apple is planning to switch the A17 over to N3E sometime next year. The move is said to be a cost-cutting measure that could come at the expense of reduced efficiency.

Humane, the top-secret tech startup founded by ex-Apple vets Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, just showed off the first demo for its projector-based wearable at a TED talk. Axios’ Ina Fried broke the news, and Inverse has seen a recording of the full TED talk given by Chaudhri.

Humane founder and ex-Apple designer Imran Chaudhri shared the first look at the company’s AI-powered wearable projector. Here’s an exclusive first glimpse of Humane’s screen-less iPhone killer in action and details on its many functions including making and receiving phone calls, summarizing notifications, and translating your voice in real-time.

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims that Apple will “aggressively upgrade” its iPhone hardware to better integrate with the new Apple Vision Pro.

It’s only to be expected that Apple sees its Vision Pro as part of the company’s ecosystem of devices and services, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims to know the specifics of Apple’s hardware plans.

Speaking of both the 2023 and 2024 iPhone releases, Kuo says that “Apple will aggressively upgrade hardware specifications to build a more competitive ecosystem for Vision Pro.”

A new model will allow robots to mimic human actions fast. Scientists are using this model to train robots so that they could do daily chores just like the way we do.

Are you among those who often dream of a day when a robot will do all the everyday household chores for you? A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has figured out how to turn your dream into reality.

Continue reading “Robots have developed the skill to learn by watching videos, study reveals” »