This is highly ironic, given Elon musk's completely baseless claims that humanity is facing an existential risk from the threat of AI superintelligence. Literally all that we are building today, even using deep learning, amounts to nothing more than fancy statistical regression.

This doesn't show we are winning at creating AI. It simply shows that the game of Go is more tractable than we previously thought. Claims about the number of positions in Go being vastly greater than the number of atoms in the universe (something like the number of atoms squared) completely miss the point: this is a straw man argument for why algorithms weren't good at Go until recently, since (obviously) humans are not searching the entire space of all possible board positions either. It stands to reason that once a sufficiently flexible fuzzy hierarchical pattern matching algorithm were produced, it would be able to play Go much better than a human.

This is not Chrome-only. Variable fonts (OpenType Font Variations) were jointly developed by Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Adobe. It's part of version 1.8 of the OpenType font format specification. It will be built into a Windows release this year, and Apple will also release support in the near future.

The same types of people that sign up for Mensa may feel that it is a badge of honor to identify as being on the autism spectrum.

There is (almost certainly) a DAC in the USB-C plug. But I still think they could make this for about a dollar in China. You can get one that allows you to charge while listening to music, but it costs $45 from a third party.

Not when you can cram 100,000 of these into one container.

Fun fact: they include the dongle in the box, but they do not include a set of headphones. And the adapter probably costs them at most $1 to buy in bulk. For a phone that is $850, I would hardly give them serious credit for their generosity towards their customers here.

Duarte was right: Google is really bad at design. And design at Google got much worse once Duarte took the helm. Material design is a major step backwards for user interfaces: gratuitous animation is freaking annoying, and adds pointless latency, which incurs cognitive cost.

Newsflash: Google drops price of headphone adapter from 2% to 1% of the price of the phone. I agree that $20 is way too steep for the adapter, and $9 seems more reasonable (though it should probably be more like $5). However, Google's original attitude towards pricing of the dongle really just underscores how overpriced the phone is in the first place.

Same problem with Android Oreo 8.0 public beta. It may have been due to a Bluetooth bug. Seems fixed in 8.0 final though.

Somebody noticed this and filmed it.

SSNs, birthdates and associated names should all be considered public knowledge, since none of them are revokable (or realistically revokable, in the case of SSNs and names). Relying on an SSN and/or birthdate as a password is madness.

Not true, the average age at Google has increased a lot.

This is not new. Every "AI" bot since Eliza has been chattering away in an unintelligible "language". If it's happening more frequently now, it just means the bots are becoming more and more capable of generating random gibberish.

"Woke" is a self-aggrandizing term used by those with ultra-liberal political views to describe people who feel the same way as they do about social and political issues. It has the connotation of "someone who has become enlightened and woken up". It's as self-serving a term as "tolerant", which is a term I have heard some of the most intolerant people apply to themselves.