Technology

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.The VR industry has been on edge since Meta’s massive job cuts earlier this year: One exec called the layoff announcements “one of VR’s darkest weeks.” There’s talk of a VR winter, and multiple VR studios have conducted significant layoffs of their own.For Gorilla Tag maker Another Axiom, however, it’s monkey — or monke, as they’d say — business as usual. The most popular game on Meta’s Quest VR headset reached a new audience high this past weekend, when 119,000 players joined its five-year anniversary event in-game at the same time.“We broke the world record, as we understand it, of concurrent players in VR,” says Another Ax...

Une évaluation, au moins une fois par an, du fonctionnement de l’enfant ou de l’adolescent autiste par des professionnels, la formation des parents, une clarification nette s’agissant des interventions non recommandées, comme la psychanalyse… Voilà quelques-uns des messages-clés des nouvelles recommandations de la Haute Autorité de santé (HAS) sur le trouble du spectre de l’autisme (TSA), rendues publiques jeudi 12 février. Elles concernent plus précisément les « interventions et parcours de vie du nourrisson, de l’enfant et de l’adolescent », jusqu’à 20 ans. Le groupe de travail, présidé par la professeure de pédopsychiatrie Amaria Baghdadli et Sophie Biette, mère d’une jeune femme autiste, s’est appuyé sur la littérature scientifique et a auditionné de nombreux experts pour...

Big Tech’s race to leapfrog the latest AI models continues with the launch of ByteDance’s next-gen video generator. In a blog post, ByteDance – the China-based company behind TikTok – says Seedance 2.0 supports prompts that combine text, images, video, and audio.The company claims it “delivers a substantial leap in generation quality,” offering improvements in generating complex scenes with multiple subjects and its ability to follow instructions. Users can refine their text prompts by feeding Seedance 2.0 up to nine images, three video clips, and three audio clips.The model can generate up to 15-second clips with audio, while taking camera movement, visual effects, and motion into account. It can also reference text-based storyboards, according to ByteDance.In one example shared by Byt...

Classe ULIS d’une école élémentaire de Paris, en 2023. ARNAUD ROBIN/DIVERGENCE Médecin de santé publique, Etienne Pot est délégué interministériel à la stratégie nationale pour les troubles du neurodéveloppement depuis novembre 2023. Il revient sur les recommandations de la Haute Autorité de santé (HAS) sur le trouble du spectre de l’autisme (TSA) publiées jeudi 12 février. Quels sont pour vous les éléments majeurs des nouvelles recommandations de la HAS sur le trouble du spectre de l’autisme ? D’abord, elles sont très claires sur les interventions non recommandées, et c’est une grande avancée par rapport à 2012, où des approches telles la psychanalyse étaient simplement qualifiées de non consensuelles. Cette clarifica...

Amazon’s rolling out a new “Send to Alexa Plus” feature to the latest Kindle Scribe and Kindle Scribe Colorsoft owners starting February 12. The feature lets you send your notes or documents to Amazon’s AI-powered Alexa Plus assistant, which can then summarize them, turn them into to-do lists, calendar events, or reminders, as well as help brainstorm, and offer project guidance.I spent about a day or so testing it primarily to help with caregiving tasks, and it was mostly helpful despite some limitations. It works best when asked to digest information into something actionable. It accurately summarized my handwritten notes and PDF documents, even across different templates or hard-to-read text colors, and it worked well for logistics, like turning my notes about my mom’s next appointmen...

If you have a spare $7,999 (plus a $250 deposit), hate folding laundry, and happen to live in the Bay Area, one-and-a-half-year-old startup Weave has the robot for you: Isaac 0.It takes Isaac 0 around 30-90 minutes to fold a load of laundry, Weave says. That’s all it does — it’s stationary and needs a regular wall outlet — and it can’t tackle large blankets, bed sheets, or inside-out garments. It’s not fully autonomous either, with teleoperators on-hand to assist with trickier folds, though Weave says performance will improve over time.

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! Humanoid robots are no longer hiding in research labs somewhere. These days, they are stepping into public spaces, and they are starting to look alarmingly human. A Shanghai startup has now taken that idea further by unveiling what it calls the world's first biometric AI robot. Yes, it is as creepy as it sounds. The robot is called Moya, and it comes from DroidUp, also known as Zhuoyide. The company revealed Moya at a launch event in Zhangjiang Robotics Valley, a growing hotspot for humanoid development in China. At first glance, you can still tell Moya is a robot. The skin looks plasticky. The eyes feel vacant. The movements are slightly off. Then you learn more details about her, and that's when the discomfort kicks in.Sign up for my FREE...

Business laptops are typically dull computers foisted on employees en masse. But higher-end enterprise workstation notebooks sometimes get an interesting enough blend of power and features to appeal to enthusiasts. HP’s ZBook Ultra G1a is a nice example. It’s easy to see it as another gray boring-book for spendy business types, until you notice a few key specs: an AMD Strix Halo APU, lots of RAM, an OLED display, and an adequate amount of speedy ports (Thunderbolt 4, even — a rarity on AMD laptops).I know from my time with the Asus ROG Flow Z13 and Framework Desktop that anything using AMD’s high-end Ryzen AI Max chips should make for a compelling computer. But those two are a gaming tablet and a small form factor PC, respectively. Here, you get Strix Halo and its excellent integrated g...

Le Rectangle de Lascaux, de Stanislas Dehaene (Odile Jacob, 352 p., 24,90 €, numérique 19,99 €) Presque trente ans après son premier ouvrage grand public, La Bosse des maths (Odile Jacob, 1996), Stanislas Dehaene replonge aux sources de ce qui fait de nous des êtres mathématiques. Sa conviction initiale n’a fait que se renforcer : le neuroscientifique se situe du côté d’Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) et de René Descartes (1596-1650) – « l’idée véritable du triangle était déjà en nous », avançait ce dernier dans ses Méditations métaphysiques. Et pas de celui de l’empiriste John Locke (1632-1704), pour qui l’espace se construit à partir de données sensorielles. « Tout être humain vient au monde avec des concepts innés d’espace et de no...

Minneapolis was not the war zone I expected to find. Depending on who you are and where you live, things can seem, for a few fleeting moments, almost normal, like a few blocks or neighborhoods over people aren’t being tear gassed or rounded up by ICE or, in two tragic cases, being gunned down by federal agents. Even now some people walk their dogs, run errands and buy groceries, meet friends for dinner and drinks. Daily life has become sinister in its banality, because Minneapolis remains a city under siege. ICE and CBP agents roam the streets, though their tactics have shifted as of late: No longer acting like an occupying army, the Department of Homeland Security now operates like secret police. They do their best to blend in, to look like the people they terrorize, and in this, they ...