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Google plans to give you more control over ‘Hey Google’ sensitivity

Sep23
by on September 23, 2019 at 11:58 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider


“Hey Google, what’s the weather like?” “OKAY Google, what’s the weather like?” “YO GOOGLE ARE YOU LISTENING?” If you’ve ever had a similarly one-sided conversation with the Google Assistant, you might appreciate an upcoming update. In a blog post detailing privacy changes to the Assistant (more on this in a bit), Google announced it plans to add an option to let you adjust the Assistant’s sensitivity to your voice: Soon we’ll also add a way to adjust how sensitive your Google Assistant devices are to prompts like “Hey Google,” giving you more control to reduce unintentional activations, or if you’d…

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Google and NASA let it slip that humans have achieved quantum supremacy

Sep23
by on September 23, 2019 at 11:35 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Google


NASA recently published a Google Research paper indicating the company’s ‘Bristlecone’ quantum computer has successfully completed a processing task in a matter of minutes that would take a classical computer some 10,000 years to complete. Then it mysteriously deleted the research and, to the best of our knowledge, neither organization’s mentioned it since. The paper’s authors claim this is the world’s first demonstration of quantum supremacy, according to a cached-version available here: Our experiment marks a milestone towards full scale quantum computing: quantum supremacy. In reaching this milestone, we show that quantum speedup is achievable in a real-world system and…

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Google Play Pass isn’t Android’s answer to Apple Arcade

Sep23
by on September 23, 2019 at 10:03 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, gaming, Google


Welp, that didn’t take long. Within days of Apple launching its Arcade game subscription services, Google’s responded with a rough Android equivalent called Play Pass. Still, while the two seem similar on the surface, they’re actually quite different — and that’s to Google’s benefit. The similarities between the two are obvious: for starters, they have the exact same price, $4.99. Google also offers a free subscription for Play Pass, albeit it’s only 10 days compared with Arcade’s month-long trial. It also promises to be “all free of ads, in-app purchases and upfront payments.” So far, so familiar. When something like…

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ICE is on the hunt for a new DevOps company thanks to a software engineer’s protest

Sep23
by on September 23, 2019 at 9:03 pm
Posted In: Around the Web


Non-profit technology company Chef has finally decided having a relationship with the US government isn’t worth alienating the developer’s community it thrives on. After spending nearly a week defending its decision to continue working with ICE and CBP, CEO Barry Crist today announced the company would not renew those contracts in the future. This comes on the  heels of last week’s controversy wherein Crist appeared ready to die on a hill defending his decision to continue doing business with the government agencies. Now he’s done a complete 180. In a company blog post entitled “An Important Update From Chef,” the CEO…

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The PS5 will have a more eco-friendly standby mode

Sep23
by on September 23, 2019 at 5:29 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, gaming


Sony today revealed a new feature of its in-development PlayStation console: a power-saving mode which will reduce the amount of energy used in each home. This is apparently an effort to reduce the carbon footprint of the general population of gamers. Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, spoke of the new feature in the context of the company’s pledge to a United Nations initiative. In speaking about Sony’s attempts to cut down on the power consumption of its consoles, Ryan gave a little hint on what the feature will mean for the upcoming console: I am also very pleased…

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