Computers and the Internet

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Honey, I Love You. Didn’t You See My Slack About It?

      by

      Some couples are using professional project-management software to maintain their relationships. Why does it bother other people?Ben Lang didn’t expect to get so much hate just for being organized. For the past three years, he and his wife, Karen-Lynn Amouyal, have been using Notion, a popular software tool, to optimize their household and relationship. His version of the tool, commonly used by businesses to manage complex projects, functions like a souped-up Google Doc, with sections for a grocery list, to-do lists and details of upcoming trips.More unusual is a section Mr. Lang, a venture capital investor who previously worked at Notion, created about principles (“what’s important to us as a couple”). Another section, called “Learnings,” outlines things the couple have discovered about each other, such as their love languages and Myers-Briggs test results. There’s a list of friends they want to set up on dates. They also maintain a log of memories from their date nights. Mr. Lang, 30, was so proud of the creation that last month, he started promoting a template of the setup to others. “My wife and I use Notion religiously to manage our day-to-day life,” he wrote on X. “I turned this into a template, let me know if you’d like to see it!”The internet responded with a venomous outrage. “People have told me my wife is cheating on me, people have told me I have a dead body in my basement, people have told me I’m autistic,” he said.But his approach isn’t entirely unusual, especially among people who work in the tech industry and want to manage their personal lives the same way they manage their professional lives. For a class of young workers, it’s only rational to apply the tools of the corporate world to their relationships and families. Businesses have goals and systems for achieving them, the thinking goes. They get things done.Anastasia Alt, 35, uses Kanban boards — a visual tracking system where tasks progress from left to right — in Trello, a project management tool, for “literally everything.” This includes work at Yana Sleep, her e-commerce start-up, but also planning trips and events with her partner. The two of them also have a dedicated Slack work space, named after a mash-up of their surnames with a logo created using the artificial intelligence software Midjourney. She acknowledged, in jest, that some of her systems were “a little psychopathic,” but said she’s always been an optimizer.Ms. Alt said the Slack work space has emotional benefits for her relationship, too: freeing up their text messages and in-person conversations for the fun stuff.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Apple’s New iPad Ad Leaves Its Creative Audience Feeling … Flat

      by

      An ad meant to show how the updated device can do many things has become a metaphor for a community’s fears of the technology industry.The trumpet is the first thing to be squished. Then the industrial compressor flattens a row of paint cans, buckles a piano and levels what appears to be a marble bust. In a final act of destruction, it pops the eyes out of a ball-shaped yellow emoji.When the compressor rises, it reveals Apple’s latest commodity: the updated iPad Pro.Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, posted the advertisement, called “Crush,” on Tuesday after the company held an event to announce new tablets. “Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created,” Mr. Cook wrote, adding, “Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.”Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create. pic.twitter.com/6PeGXNoKgG— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) May 7, 2024

      For decades, Apple has been the toast of the creative class. It has won over designers, musicians and film editors with promises that its products would help them “Think Different.”But some creators took a different message from the one-minute iPad ad. Rather than seeing a device that could help them create, as Mr. Cook suggested, they saw a metaphor for how Big Tech has cashed in on their work by crushing or co-opting the artistic tools that humanity has used for centuries.The image was especially unnerving at a time when artists fear that generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry and create movies, might take away their jobs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Google Unveils A.I. for Predicting Behavior of Human Molecules

      by

      The system, AlphaFold3, could accelerate efforts to understand the human body and fight disease.Artificial intelligence is giving machines the power to generate videos, write computer code and even carry on a conversation.It is also accelerating efforts to understand the human body and fight disease.On Wednesday, Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s central artificial intelligence lab, and Isomorphic Labs, a sister company, unveiled a more powerful version of AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence technology that helps scientists understand the behavior of the microscopic mechanisms that drive the cells in the human body.An early version of AlphaFold, released in 2020, solved a puzzle that had bedeviled scientists for more than 50 years. It was called “the protein folding problem.”Proteins are the microscopic molecules that drive the behavior of all living things. These molecules begin as strings of chemical compounds before twisting and folding into three-dimensional shapes that define how they interact with other microscopic mechanisms in the body.Biologists spent years or even decades trying to pinpoint the shape of individual proteins. Then AlphaFold came along. When a scientist fed this technology a string of amino acids that make up a protein, it could predict the three-dimensional shape within minutes.When DeepMind publicly released AlphaFold a year later, biologists began using it to accelerate drug discovery. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, used the technology as they worked to understand the coronavirus and prepare for similar pandemics. Others used it as they struggled to find remedies for malaria and Parkinson’s disease.The hope is that this kind of technology will significantly streamline the creation of new drugs and vaccines.A segment of a video from Google DeepMind demonstrating the new AlphaFold3 technology.Video by Google Deepmind“It tells us a lot more about how the machines of the cell interact,” said John Jumper, a Google DeepMind researcher. “It tells us how this should work and what happens when we get sick.”The new version of AlphaFold — AlphaFold3 — extends the technology beyond protein folding. In addition to predicting the shapes of proteins, it can predict the behavior of other microscopic biological mechanisms, including DNA, where the body stores genetic information, and RNA, which transfers information from DNA to proteins.“Biology is a dynamic system. You need to understand the interactions between different molecules and structures,” said Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s chief executive and the founder of Isomorphic Labs, which Google also owns. “This is a step in that direction.”Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s chief executive and the founder of Isomorphic Labs.Taylor Hill/Getty ImagesThe company is offering a website where scientists can use AlphaFold3. Other labs, most notably one at the University of Washington, offer similar technology. In a paper released on Tuesday in the scientific journal Nature, Dr. Jumper and his fellow researchers show that it achieves a level of accuracy well beyond the state of the art.The technology could “save months of experimental work and enable research that was previously impossible,” said Deniz Kavi, a co-founder and the chief executive of Tamarind Bio, a start-up that builds technology for accelerating drug discovery. “This represents tremendous promise.” More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      A New Diplomatic Strategy Emerges as Artificial Intelligence Grows

      by

      The new U.S. approach to cyberthreats comes as early optimism about a “global internet” connecting the world has been shattered.American and Chinese diplomats plan to meet later this month to begin what amounts to the first, tentative arms control talks over the use of artificial intelligence.A year in the making, the talks in Geneva are an attempt to find some common ground on how A.I. will be used and in which situations it could be banned — for example, in the command and control of each country’s nuclear arsenals.The fact that Beijing agreed to the discussion at all was something of a surprise, since it has refused any discussion of limiting the size of nuclear arsenals themselves.But for the Biden administration, the conversation represents the first serious foray into a new realm of diplomacy, which Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke about on Monday in a speech in San Francisco at the RSA Conference, Silicon Valley’s annual convention on both the technology and the politics of securing cyberspace.The Biden administration’s strategy goes beyond the rules of managing cyberconflict and focuses on American efforts to assure control over physical technologies like undersea cables, which connect countries, companies and individual users to cloud services.Yuri Gripas for The New York Times“It’s true that ‘move fast and break things’ is literally the exact opposite of what we try to do at the State Department,” Mr. Blinken told the thousands of cyberexperts, coders and entrepreneurs, a reference to the Silicon Valley mantra about technological disruption.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Congress Passed a Bill That Could Ban TikTok. Now Comes the Hard Part.

      by

      After President Biden signs the bill to force a sale of the video app or ban it, the legislation will face court challenges, a shortage of qualified buyers and Beijing’s hostility.A bill that would force a sale of TikTok by its Chinese owner, ByteDance — or ban it outright — was passed by the Senate on Tuesday and is expected to be signed quickly into law by President Biden.Now the process is likely to get even more complicated.Congress passed the measure citing national security concerns because of TikTok’s Chinese ties. Both lawmakers and security experts have said there are risks that the Chinese government could lean on ByteDance for access to sensitive data belonging to its 170 million U.S. users or to spread propaganda.The proposed law would allow TikTok to continue to operate in the United States if ByteDance sold it within 270 days, or about nine months, a time frame that the president could extend to a year.The measure is likely to face legal challenges, as well as possible resistance from Beijing, which could block the sale or export of the technology. It’s also unclear who has the resources to buy TikTok, since it will carry a hefty price tag.The issue could take months or even years to settle, during which the app would probably continue to function for U.S. consumers.“It’s going to be a royal mess,” said Anupam Chander, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media at Harvard and an expert on the global regulation of new technologies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      How Scam Calls and Messages Took Over Our Everyday Lives

      by

      Digital life is cluttered with bogus text messages, spam calls and phishing attempts. You can try to block, encrypt and unsubscribe your way out of it, but you may not succeed. Welcome to Scam World Toma Vagner Welcome to Scam World You open your eyes and grope for your phone. You check your inbox and […] More

    • 63 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      E-Commerce and the Influencer Economy

      by

      How internet shopping became choked with junk. People are bombarded online each day with ads for newfangled products that promise dramatic life improvements. Modish tumblers. Sleek pans. Miraculous cleaning solutions. Overblown air purifiers. Just click this link and — voilà! Productivity. Happiness. Nirvana.Don’t buy it.Wirecutter, The Times’s product recommendation service, tests many of the wares that clog Americans’ social media feeds. And while our testers do like some, these products are often built on empty promises. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how e-commerce, a $6 trillion global industry, became choked with junk.Paid to sellOnline shopping can expose people to a greasy influencer economy. Influencers often join affiliate-revenue networks, such as Amazon’s. When an influencer’s follower clicks a link and buys something, the influencer makes money. That’s why people on your social media feed are crowing about their 10 favorite Amazon finds or talking about how an expensive gizmo has changed their life.Many influencers have another incentive: Brands pay them to hawk stuff. Some people with large followings make deals for tens of thousands of dollars per post. Then, when enough people like or share a post, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube algorithms push it to more people. The result is a blizzard of gadgets.Consider these spin scrubbers, pitched online as the solution to all of your cleaning woes. “In videos, these devices churn up rings of soap suds, implying they are lifting away all the filth beneath them,” writes Ellen Airhart, Wirecutter’s cleaning expert.In reality, they’re the worst cleaning tools we’ve ever tested. Ellen spent six hours trying to scour a soap-scum-covered shower and a toothpaste-crusted sink with two spin scrubbers popular on TikTok. They splattered water everywhere and often cost upward of $50. Instead, Ellen recommends a humble $1 sponge.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      TikTok Bill to Be Bundled With Aid to Ukraine and Israel, House Speaker Indicates

      by

      A new measure attempts to force the Senate’s hand on passing legislation to ban TikTok or mandate the app’s sale.The House on Wednesday made another push to force through legislation that would require the sale of TikTok by its Chinese owner or ban the app in the United States, accelerating an effort to disrupt the popular social media app.Speaker Mike Johnson has indicated that he intends to package the measure, a modified version of a stand-alone bill that the House passed last month, with foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.While the new legislation would still require TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app to owners that resolved national security concerns, it includes an option to extend the deadline for a sale to nine months from the original six months, according to text of the legislation released by House leadership. The president could extend the deadline by another 90 days if progress toward a sale was being made.House lawmakers are expected to vote Saturday on a package of legislation that includes the TikTok ban and other bills popular with Republicans, a maneuver intended to induce lawmakers to vote for the foreign aid. If the package passes, the measures will be sent as a single bill to the Senate, which could vote soon after. President Biden has said he’ll sign TikTok legislation into law if it reaches his desk.The move “to package TikTok is definitely unusual, but it could succeed,” said Paul Gallant, a policy analyst for the financial services firm TD Cowen. He added that “it’s a bit of brinkmanship” to try to force an up-or-down vote without further negotiation with the Senate.The new effort is the most aggressive yet by legislators to wrest TikTok from its Chinese ownership over national security concerns. They cite the potential for Beijing to demand that TikTok turn over U.S. users’ data or to use the app for propaganda. The earlier House bill faced skepticism in the Senate over concerns that it would not hold up to a legal challenge.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More