The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A team of computer scientists has created a nimbler, more flexible type of machine learning model. The trick: It must periodically forget what it knows. And while this new approach won’t displace the huge models that undergird the biggest apps, it could reveal more about … Read more
Mobile World Congress—or just MWC—isn’t one of our favorite trade shows just because it’s situated in the beautiful city of Barcelona during a seasonally appropriate time of year. (Cheap cava and tapas don’t have anything to do with it either.) No, this show is a favorite because it’s one of the easiest to navigate, and … Read more
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Holy hell, how is it Friday again? I feel like I wrote one of these newsletters just yesterday. There’s been a ton of exciting movement in … Read more
John Lamb/Getty Images Linux is a great operating system. I’ve expounded its virtues for over 20 years. I was the founding senior technology editor of the now-defunct Linux Magazine in 1999. In my professional technology career, I was a principal consultant for open-source data center technology at Unisys and IBM, and until recently, I was … Read more
On January 24, Apple’s Macintosh computer turns 40. Normally that number is an inexorable milestone of middle age. Indeed, in the last reported sales year, Macintosh sales dipped below $30 billion, more than a 25 percent drop from the previous year’s $40 billion. But unlike an aging person, Macs now are slimmer, faster, and last … Read more
Lemur Pro is not the best for graphics-intensive tasks like gaming or video editing (see below for some more powerful rigs with dedicated graphics cards), but for everything else, this is one of the nicest laptops you can get. Dell’s XPS 13 Developer Edition was one of the first big-name laptops to ship with Linux … Read more
All that power must eat away at battery life, right? Surprise: Battery performance has gone way, way up. While WIRED reported a mere 12 hours of running time on the older M2 model, I got a jaw-dropping maximum of 19 hours and 20 minutes of YouTube video playback time during my testing, which is more … Read more
I don’t usually preorder games, but I was so eager to play Starfield that I made an exception. I shelled out extra cash to play the game a meager five days early. There was just one problem. I would be out of town at a nerd con for those exact same five days. Fortunately, the … Read more
Turing’s diagonalization proof is a version of this game where the questions run through the infinite list of possible algorithms, repeatedly asking, “Can this algorithm solve the problem we’d like to prove uncomputable?” “It’s sort of ‘infinity questions,’” Williams said. To win the game, Turing needed to craft a problem where the answer is no … Read more
Hey, remember Chromebooks? Those ultra-cheap laptops that run a stripped-down operating system built on Google’s Chrome web browser? You know, the one your kid had to use for Zoom school and all that “asynchronous learning” during the pandemic? Well, Chromebooks are back, and they’re better than ever. This month, Google rolled out a big upgrade … Read more