Month: February 2023
Lenovo demos laptop that rolls from 13 to 15 inches with the flip of a switch
OLED laptops with daringly versatile form factors have been a long time coming.
Enlarge / A 12.7-inch screen unrolls from under the keyboard to grow to 15.3 inches. (credit: Lenovo/YouTube)
Lenovo’s laptop with a screen that can roll from 12.7 inches to 15.3 inches is just a proof of concept, but it looks like a pretty serious one. The company first teased the versatile OLED laptop online in October but showed it off in person before the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona this week. Marked by an OLED screen usable in two different sizes and resolutions, it’s described as subtle looking and decently polished.
As a proof of concept, Lenovo may never release a rollable screen PC like this. However, the company told Windows Central that it prefers developing “concepts that we have a hope of selling.” Plus, Lenovo is no stranger to releasing laptops with alternative screen designs. Its 2020 ThinkPad X1 Fold was the first to attempt the foldable PC and will be succeeded by the 16-inch ThinkPad X1 Fold this year. This year should also see the release of the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i, which connects two 13.3-inch OLED screens by a hinge.
The Yoga Book 9i is an actual product set to come out this year. (credit: Scharon Harding)
In its current form, the rollable-screen laptop prototype “looks and feels like a regular laptop,” Android Authority reported. The publication also backed Lenovo and called the prototype “polished” enough to show off in person. It even thought the system looked less clunky than Asus’ ZenBook 17 Fold, a 12th-gen Intel-based foldable PC currently going for $3,500.
Roger Ebert’s Review of ‘Dick Tracy’
From Roger Ebert’s 1990 review:
Another of the movie’s opening shots establishes, with glorious
excess, the Tracy universe. The camera begins on a window, and
pulls back, and moves up until we see the skyline of the city, and
then it seems to fly through the air, turning as it moves so that
we sweep above an endless urban vista. Skyscrapers and bridges and
tenements and elevated railways crowd each other all the way to
the distant horizon, until we realize this is the grandest and
most squalid city that ever was. It’s more than a place: It’s the
distillation of the idea of City — of the vast, brooding,
mysterious metropolis spreading in all directions forever,
concealing millions of lives and secrets.
Last’s night thing had me thinking I should rewatch Dick Tracy, which I’m pretty sure I’ve only seen once, in the theater back when I was in high school. Ebert’s review seals the deal.
★
From Roger Ebert’s 1990 review:
Another of the movie’s opening shots establishes, with glorious
excess, the Tracy universe. The camera begins on a window, and
pulls back, and moves up until we see the skyline of the city, and
then it seems to fly through the air, turning as it moves so that
we sweep above an endless urban vista. Skyscrapers and bridges and
tenements and elevated railways crowd each other all the way to
the distant horizon, until we realize this is the grandest and
most squalid city that ever was. It’s more than a place: It’s the
distillation of the idea of City — of the vast, brooding,
mysterious metropolis spreading in all directions forever,
concealing millions of lives and secrets.
Last’s night thing had me thinking I should rewatch Dick Tracy, which I’m pretty sure I’ve only seen once, in the theater back when I was in high school. Ebert’s review seals the deal.
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta now has a team building AI tools and ‘personas’
Image: Laura Normand / The Verge
Meta now has a team dedicated to building tools powered by artificial intelligence, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a post on Monday. This could eventually include “AI personas” designed to help people in “various ways” in addition to new AI tools across its apps and services.
More specifically, Zuckerberg says the company is working on AI “experiences” with text, such as chat with Messenger and WhatsApp, experiences with images for things like “creative Instagram filters and ad formats” as well as “video and multi-modal experiences.” According to Axios, the new AI team will be led by Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of AI and machine learning, who previously worked on Apple’s special product group.
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Mark Zuckerberg’s post about the new team.
“We’re creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area,” Zuckerberg writes. “We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I’m excited about all of the new things we’ll build along the way.”
As OpenAI’s ChatGPT surges in popularity, more companies, including Microsoft, Google, and now even Snapchat, are exploring opportunities in the generative AI space. Meta recently announced that it’s working on an AI language generator of its own, called LLaMA, which is geared more toward researchers rather than the general public. It also launched two AI chatbots — Galactica and Blenderbot — that weren’t exactly impressive, but it’ll still be interesting to see how Meta improves on and incorporates AI features within each of its apps.
Image: Laura Normand / The Verge
Meta now has a team dedicated to building tools powered by artificial intelligence, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a post on Monday. This could eventually include “AI personas” designed to help people in “various ways” in addition to new AI tools across its apps and services.
More specifically, Zuckerberg says the company is working on AI “experiences” with text, such as chat with Messenger and WhatsApp, experiences with images for things like “creative Instagram filters and ad formats” as well as “video and multi-modal experiences.” According to Axios, the new AI team will be led by Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of AI and machine learning, who previously worked on Apple’s special product group.
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Mark Zuckerberg’s post about the new team.
“We’re creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area,” Zuckerberg writes. “We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I’m excited about all of the new things we’ll build along the way.”
As OpenAI’s ChatGPT surges in popularity, more companies, including Microsoft, Google, and now even Snapchat, are exploring opportunities in the generative AI space. Meta recently announced that it’s working on an AI language generator of its own, called LLaMA, which is geared more toward researchers rather than the general public. It also launched two AI chatbots — Galactica and Blenderbot — that weren’t exactly impressive, but it’ll still be interesting to see how Meta improves on and incorporates AI features within each of its apps.
Ultimate protection for the new Samsung Galaxy S23
Once again Samsung has given customers all the specs they could ever ask for in a phone, but it’s still a slab of glass that needs protection. Check out Rokform’s newest cases for the S23 line and you could win!
Samsung’s new Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23+, and Galaxy S23 Ultra are all right in line with what everyone has come to expect from a premium Android experience with top-of-the-line phones with great specs, fantastic cameras, and a beautiful new design. And there’s nothing worse than watching your $1000 phone fall to the concrete only to pick it up and find it cracked into a thousand tiny little pieces. We’ve all seen time slow as that brand new phone leaves the warm embrace of our palm or pocket and slowly tumbles to the cold, hard concrete.
In response, ROKFORM has announced the Rugged case line for the all-new Samsung Galaxy S23, S23+ and S23 Ultra, which includes a MAGMAX™ MagSafe® compatible magnet system and strong lower magnet for mounting to any magnetic surface, plus MagSafe® accessories. Customers also get the patented RokLock® twist-lock mount system for cars, bikes, motorcycles, and more. It even works with the S23 Ultra S-Pen.
(Image credit: Rokform)
Rokform cases are designed to handle the toughest environments. Loved by the First Responder and Military communities, the Rugged case has proven itself again and again to be the most versatile and dependable case out there. Whether on the trail shredding through the hills, on the golf course relaxing after a long week, or at home with the kids throwing stuff everywhere (even your phone), the 6-foot Military Grade drop protection means the phone is safe no matter where it is.
Rokform has engineered a new MagMax magnet system that will make the Galaxy S23 series compatible with most MagSafe accessories. The magnets in the MagMax system are 3x stronger than Apple’s MagSafe and there’s a center magnet that can be used to mount the phone to any magnetic surface. This includes golf carts, the weight rack at the gym, your tool bench in the garage… anywhere you need your phone within hands reach but not in your hand. This center magnet is removable to make room for the RokLock mount system when the need arises.
All of this rugged protection and useful functionality is backed by a 2 year warranty and a 60 day money-back guarantee so both your wallet and your phone are safe. Check out the entire lineup of Rokform’s S23 cases; they’ll start shipping soon.
Enter for a chance to win
Enter below and you could win a Galaxy S23 Rugged Case (choice of model) and a $200 USD Rokform gift card so you can grab all the accessories to complement your unique needs. Entries close March 15, 2023. Open in the US only.
Whoops! Crypto company Gemini is having some trouble with fraud
Image: Alex Castro / The Verge
We’ve talked before about the problems in the early days of PayPal, which was then called X. Elon Musk, in his infinite wisdom, decided customer acquisition was the most important thing, and as a result, PayPal had to deal with rampant fraud. Don’t just take my word for it — here’s Peter Thiel, describing those days:
We had decided to give credit cards to absolutely anybody who wanted them. You got a up to $10,000 credit limit. Elon had told the woman who was rolling the service out that he wanted a million people to be using the new credit card by the end of the year. Fortunately, it was about two levels down from the front page, and so not that many people were able to discover this. Some people did; they wrote us back and said, “This is fantastic, I haven’t had credit in years. I can’t believe you’re offering me credit. I haven’t even had a checking account in 10 years.” These were people who wrote so many bad checks that banks wouldn’t allow them to have checking accounts. It turned out we ended up with something like a 50 percent charge-back rate. The worst subprime companies were like 4 to 6 percent. Then, happily, we rolled that product back very quickly.
Now, to be clear, I’ve met a lot of members of the crypto community, and many of them are avid financial history buffs. But it appears our friends, the errant sea gods Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, did not learn about the early history of PayPal, despite there being several excellent books on the subject. And so, perhaps inevitably, when they launched their crypto rewards credit card at Gemini, what they got was fraud.
“Gemini approved a surge of new customers that had signed up with stolen identities.”
Unlike Musk’s credit card for PayPal, they advertised on billboards and social media platforms. And when the card launched, “Gemini approved a surge of new customers that had signed up with stolen identities,” The Information writes, citing two anonymous sources. They had to pause the card rollout — and the fraud cost Gemini “millions of dollars,” according to three anonymous sources.
I don’t mean to pick on Gemini. Fraud is a widespread and very funny problem in the banking industry. The ideal amount of fraud in finance isn’t zero — the classic example is the husband whose porn payment is discovered by his spouse on their shared credit card statement and who calls the bank to say, lying, that it’s a fraudulent charge in order to avoid a nasty marital fight. The customer is, technically, committing fraud — he knowingly approved the payment! — but to keep him as a customer, the bank goes along with it. This “friendly fraud” can happen for a lot of reasons, but a certain amount of it is built into payment systems.
With something like cryptocurrency, though, a lot of people who are using it are using it for a reason: either they can’t access the regular banking industry or they don’t want to, for instance, because they are trying to get the ransom payment on the hack they did on some business. I mean, the first widespread use for crypto was drugs, people. This is a group that is maybe a little bit more likely to do some shady stuff than the general population, you know?
Anyway, this isn’t the only fraud problem Gemini is having. You know how a lot of financial services, for instance, PayPal, prefer you to give them your bank account number rather than your credit card number? That’s because of the Automated Clearing House, which is the system that your job might use to direct deposit your paycheck. ACH is old as hell, but it’s cheaper than credit cards because it doesn’t incur as many fees.
Because it’s cheap, a lot of fintechs, including crypto providers, prefer it. The only problem is if the account information is stolen — or, crucially, if the owner of the account disputes the transfer. Now, remember, for banks, this kind of friendly fraud is part of the cost of doing business, so they’ll just believe their customer. But Gemini, hilariously, let people withdraw their crypto before their ACH deposit cleared! Here’s The Information on how that worked out:
For example, if a user initiated a transfer of $100 to buy crypto and the value of that crypto rose to $150 before the transfer settled, the user could take out $50 worth of crypto.
This scenario made Gemini a target for fraudsters initiating ACH transfers using stolen bank account information, two people familiar with the matter said, because they could quickly exploit this loophole to take out crypto. That left the exchange with less crypto to seize if the bank transfer was eventually disputed by the real bank account owner and the exchange had to pay the transfer back, and therefore even bigger losses if crypto prices fell again.
There’s a part of me that wonders if Gemini would have avoided all of this if someone in a position of power had read, like, Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk biography, or Max Chafkin’s The Contrarian, or Jimmy Soni’s The Founders. PayPal set out to revolutionize the financial industry pretty recently, after all. I’m assuming there were people inside Gemini who had an inkling about how this would go, and they probably ripped out all their bountiful hair. But the Winklevii needed to go to band practice, and here we all are.
Image: Alex Castro / The Verge
We’ve talked before about the problems in the early days of PayPal, which was then called X. Elon Musk, in his infinite wisdom, decided customer acquisition was the most important thing, and as a result, PayPal had to deal with rampant fraud. Don’t just take my word for it — here’s Peter Thiel, describing those days:
We had decided to give credit cards to absolutely anybody who wanted them. You got a up to $10,000 credit limit. Elon had told the woman who was rolling the service out that he wanted a million people to be using the new credit card by the end of the year. Fortunately, it was about two levels down from the front page, and so not that many people were able to discover this. Some people did; they wrote us back and said, “This is fantastic, I haven’t had credit in years. I can’t believe you’re offering me credit. I haven’t even had a checking account in 10 years.” These were people who wrote so many bad checks that banks wouldn’t allow them to have checking accounts. It turned out we ended up with something like a 50 percent charge-back rate. The worst subprime companies were like 4 to 6 percent. Then, happily, we rolled that product back very quickly.
Now, to be clear, I’ve met a lot of members of the crypto community, and many of them are avid financial history buffs. But it appears our friends, the errant sea gods Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, did not learn about the early history of PayPal, despite there being several excellent books on the subject. And so, perhaps inevitably, when they launched their crypto rewards credit card at Gemini, what they got was fraud.
Unlike Musk’s credit card for PayPal, they advertised on billboards and social media platforms. And when the card launched, “Gemini approved a surge of new customers that had signed up with stolen identities,” The Information writes, citing two anonymous sources. They had to pause the card rollout — and the fraud cost Gemini “millions of dollars,” according to three anonymous sources.
I don’t mean to pick on Gemini. Fraud is a widespread and very funny problem in the banking industry. The ideal amount of fraud in finance isn’t zero — the classic example is the husband whose porn payment is discovered by his spouse on their shared credit card statement and who calls the bank to say, lying, that it’s a fraudulent charge in order to avoid a nasty marital fight. The customer is, technically, committing fraud — he knowingly approved the payment! — but to keep him as a customer, the bank goes along with it. This “friendly fraud” can happen for a lot of reasons, but a certain amount of it is built into payment systems.
With something like cryptocurrency, though, a lot of people who are using it are using it for a reason: either they can’t access the regular banking industry or they don’t want to, for instance, because they are trying to get the ransom payment on the hack they did on some business. I mean, the first widespread use for crypto was drugs, people. This is a group that is maybe a little bit more likely to do some shady stuff than the general population, you know?
Anyway, this isn’t the only fraud problem Gemini is having. You know how a lot of financial services, for instance, PayPal, prefer you to give them your bank account number rather than your credit card number? That’s because of the Automated Clearing House, which is the system that your job might use to direct deposit your paycheck. ACH is old as hell, but it’s cheaper than credit cards because it doesn’t incur as many fees.
Because it’s cheap, a lot of fintechs, including crypto providers, prefer it. The only problem is if the account information is stolen — or, crucially, if the owner of the account disputes the transfer. Now, remember, for banks, this kind of friendly fraud is part of the cost of doing business, so they’ll just believe their customer. But Gemini, hilariously, let people withdraw their crypto before their ACH deposit cleared! Here’s The Information on how that worked out:
For example, if a user initiated a transfer of $100 to buy crypto and the value of that crypto rose to $150 before the transfer settled, the user could take out $50 worth of crypto.
This scenario made Gemini a target for fraudsters initiating ACH transfers using stolen bank account information, two people familiar with the matter said, because they could quickly exploit this loophole to take out crypto. That left the exchange with less crypto to seize if the bank transfer was eventually disputed by the real bank account owner and the exchange had to pay the transfer back, and therefore even bigger losses if crypto prices fell again.
There’s a part of me that wonders if Gemini would have avoided all of this if someone in a position of power had read, like, Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk biography, or Max Chafkin’s The Contrarian, or Jimmy Soni’s The Founders. PayPal set out to revolutionize the financial industry pretty recently, after all. I’m assuming there were people inside Gemini who had an inkling about how this would go, and they probably ripped out all their bountiful hair. But the Winklevii needed to go to band practice, and here we all are.