Complicated Cucumber Cutting
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
| Complicated Cucumber Cutting | |
| Number | 3501 |
| Broadcast Date | APRIL 2, 2019 |
| Episode Length | 29:57 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Roger Chang |
| Guests | Patrick Beja |
Is Google hammering consumer trust in its constant shutdown of various services like Google+, support for IFTT, and Goo.gl URL shortener.
Guest
Quick Hits
- Walmart is letting customers add grocery items to their online shopping carts by voice starting this month. You say “Google, talk to Walmart” to a Google Assistant device. The system will use prior purchases to choose correct brands and sizes.
- Valve accidentally posted unfinished web pages about its upcoming Index VR headset, mentioning a June 15th ship date which Engadget confirmed with Valve. The Index appears to include its own headphones and Cameras on the outside point to "inside-out" tracking similar to the Oculus Rift S. Valve will make an official announcement May 1.
- Microsoft refreshed its Surface Book 2 base model today, with Intel’s latest 8th Gen quad-core i5 processor for the 13-inch Surface Book 2 model, and discounting the existing dual-core 7th Gen model to $1,299. Microsoft is holding a Surface event on April 17th in New York City, which is expected to include detail pricing and availability for its Surface Hub 2 hardware, plus accessories and office furniture from Steelcase.
- Spark Email has launched on Android with most of the same features as the iOS version. Among other things, Spark lets users customize menu icons, notification options and quick access widgets.
Top Stories
- Ahead of elections in India, WhatsApp has introduced a tip line to send forwards, rumors, and suspicious-sounding messages and have them verified. You'll receive a response informing you whether the information is true, false, misleading, disputed, or presently unverifiable. The system accepts text, pictures, links, and video in English, as well as in Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, and Malayalam. It's operated by a startup called Proto, in collaboration with Dig Deeper Media, and Meedan. Proto will create a database of information for further study by a research project called Checkpoint.
- Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University developed a method for combining prior task knowledge and experience-based learning to have a robot cut cucumbers and tomatoes into slices. Cutting vegetables is complex because objects deform into different shapes and then create new objects, aka the slices. The team used two robotic arms and an Intel RealSense camera. One arm picks, places and holds the vegetables and the other arm does the slicing. Humans used the arms to make some cuts to establish parameters and then they trained an embedding network to handle varying thickness of the slices. The learned representations could be generalized across different shapes and sizes.
- Patrick Clarifies EU Copyright Directive
- And if you are looking for more opportunities to laugh at governments and legislation, an ad campaign by the French government meant to encourage voting in the upcoming EU elections was just blocked on Twitter because of an "anti fake news" law passed by... the French government in December of last year. The reason for the decision is not the campaign's nature however, but rather the requirements the law places on social networks. Indeed, they should provide information on financing and origins for political ads, and Twitter claims they do not have the technical capability of surfacing that information, and made the decision to refuse the ad campaign altogether.
Discussion
- Google shuts failed social network Google+
- Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand
- Killed by Google
- The Google Cemetery
Thing of the Day
- Nate Lanxon has a preview of what's coming on the next Tech Message including chatbots abuse.
Mailbag
- Graham O'Reilly CEO at EveryCloud included a nice mention of Daily Tech News Show in the IT Pro Tuesday newsletter. Thanks Graham! (and thanks John for letting us know about it)
YouTube
Links
| Preceded by: "Facebook Turning Over A New Tree" |
Complicated Cucumber Cutting |
Followed by: "Content Aware Phil" |