The leak comes in the form of a CPU-Z screenshot. The first line is L1D (Data), the second line is L1I (Instructions), the third and fourth lines are L2 and L3 cache respectively. Excluding the L1 cache, the L2 and L3 add up to 68MB, more than 70MB if we add in the L1 too.

If this screenshot is accurate, we can also simultaneously gauge the core and thread count of the 13900K. The SKU is seemingly a 24 core 32 thread processor where eight of the cores are big Raptor Cove P-Cores while the remaining 16 cores are little Gracemont E-Cores.

Hence compared to the Core i9-12900K and the other Alder Lake-S Core i9 variants, Raptor Lake-S seems to be doubling the E-cores while keeping the P-core count unchanged at eight.

Source and images: Raichu (Twitter), Olrak (Twiter)

Alleged details of Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake-S 24 core 32 thread Core i9-13900K leak

AMD announced that it has integrated Qualcomm's FastConnect technology, version 6900 to be precise, in its Ryzen PRO 6000 processors. While FastConnect is present in only the PRO APUs for now, the company does slightly hint that the technology could be heading elsewhere in the future.

The press release says:

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM), today announced a collaboration to optimize the Qualcomm® FastConnect™ connectivity system for AMD Ryzen™ processor-based computing platforms, starting with AMD Ryzen™ PRO 6000 Series processors and the Qualcomm® FastConnect™ 6900.

Qualcomm's FastConnect 6900 enables Wi-Fi speeds of up to 3.6 Gbps. This is a 50% improvement compared to the previous MediaTek RZ600 Series modules. While both the new Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 and earlier MediaTek modules are based on Wi-Fi 6E, the former features four-stream Dual Band Simultaneous (DBS) which basically means it can run both 2.4GHz and 5GHz/6GHz bands at the same time.

DBS is leveraged by Microsoft's new Wi-Fi Dual Station which is a native Windows 11 capability that promises faster and low-latency internet connectivity. In terms of support, Wi-Fi Dual Station is already supported by Valve's Steamworks SDK. The release notes that:

In collaboration with Microsoft, next-generation Windows 11 PCs, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad Z Series and HP EliteBook 805 Series, can harness the full potential of Windows 11 Wi-Fi Dual Station through Qualcomm® 4-Stream Dual Band Simultaneous. Multiple Wi-Fi bands outperform traditional single band connections for improved video conferencing experiences, reduced latency, and enhanced connection robustness. Leveraging the 6 GHz band, next-gen laptop users can take full advantage of its bandwidth and speed improvements without competing with any non-6E devices.

The image below summarizes all the new features that FastConnect 6900 brings to Ryzen 6000 PRO APUs:

You can find the official press release here.

Faster Wi-Fi to bless Windows 11 Ryzen PCs with help from Microsoft's Wi-Fi Dual Station

Twitter board tells Elon Musk: We will not alter the deal

In terms of performance, the report expects the 1630 to be slower than the three year old GTX 1650 though precise performance details aren't available at the moment. This means that Nvidia will be launching a last-gen Turing-based GPU in 2022. That said, it should be enough to compete with the AMD Radeon RX 6400, which is a Navi 24 GPU and is hamstrung by the lack of PCIe lanes, though to a degree far lower than the RX 6500 XT. Alongside the RX 6500 XT and 6400, AMD is also allegedly preparing a third Navi 24 variant in the form of the 2GB RX 6300.

The $159 RX 6400 on a PCIe 3.0 keeps up with a GTX 1650 GDDR5 variant which means a GT 1630 with GDDR6 on-board may be able to keep up with the RX 6400, provided it isn't massively cut-down from the 1650.

Source: VideoCardz

Report: Nvidia prepping GTX 1630 based on last-gen tech to take on AMD's budget cards

Musk says Twitter must show data behind spam estimate or he’ll kill the deal

Intel DG1 dev kit

Intel is almost ready to take a swing at AMD and Nvidia with its first-gen Arc Alchemist GPUs and the entire lineup recently leaked out courtesy of Intel's own driver. However, tests have suggest there are many teething issues and bugs that must be ironed out before Intel's discrete GPUs are ready to join the arena.

The latest bug was discovered by Twitter user Löschzwerg who has been testing the Intel Xe LP-based DG1 graphics card for a while. The bug pertains to PCIe 4.0 throughput wherein the Gunnir Index V2 DG1 is unable saturate the PCIe 4.0 lanes using 3DMark's PCI Express feature test.

The Index V2 seems to work well on all the previous PCIe interfaces up to the 3.0 standard. But on PCIe 4.0, the card is performing the same as PCIe 3.0 even though it should get around double that score. This indicates either some form of bottleneck or a bug on DG1.

PCIe 4.0

PCIe 3.0

PCIe 2.0

PCIe 1.1

Moving on to Arc Alchemist, which is based on Xe HPG architecture, the successor to Xe LP, the first review for Arc A350M have also shown that Intel's Dynamic Tuning Technology (DTT), a feature similar to AMD's SmartShift technology, is hurting the performance of the Arc GPU. When DTT is turned off there is nearly a doubling of the framerates as can be seen in the images below:

The DTT should be fairly easy for Intel to fix if it hasn't already been as it likely only needs some optimization to the power states (P-states). Meanwhile, fixing the PCIe bug might be a bit more difficult as the issue isn't generally such a common one among AMD Radeon or Nvidia GeForce GPUs. However, the bug so far has only been noticed on the older DG1 cards which is rarely on anyone's purchase radar as it was never officially released for the DIY market.

Sources and images: Löschzwerg (Twitter) and BullsLab Benchmarks (YouTube)

Intel's Arc Alchemist and DG1 discrete GPUs are buggy with problems in DDT and PCIe 4.0

Lenovo’s 16-inch ThinkPad claims desktop-like performance with 55 W Intel CPU

Testing shows AMD’s FSR 2.0 can even help lowly Intel integrated GPUs

Asus says the card is the quietest in its class. Image: Asus

Asus has teamed up with renowned fan manufacturer Noctua once again to make a large brown and tan graphics card that should pump out frames while staying relatively quiet. The two companies’ last collaboration was an RTX 3070, but now they’ve announced a decidedly enthusiast tier card: an RTX 3080.

According to Noctua’s press release, the card features two 120mm fans and a custom heatsink, making it “the quietest air-cooled graphics card in its class.” Apart from the fancy cooling, it’s a relatively standard Asus graphics card with two BIOS profiles, a backplate, and 10GB of GDDR6X RAM. There are 3080s with 12GB of memory, but that doesn’t seem to be an option with the Noctua heatsink.

The card will go on sale “starting early June 2022,” though whether you’ll be able to buy one is another question entirely, with chip shortages and stock wonkiness still plaguing the GPU market. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to compete with crypto miners for the card — like most Nvidia cards nowadays it’s a Lite Hash Rate model with reducing mining capabilities. Though, given that hackers have found a way around that, the bets may be off there.

There is one way the card isn’t quite standard: it is big. For one, Noctua’s “custom-engineered unified heatsink” is thicker than Asus’ standard one, according to a webpage breaking down its performance versus regular cards. It’s also got literal desktop fans in it: Noctua’s NF-A12x25 PWM model. This leads to it being around 3.25-inches thick, according to Asus’ spec sheet, almost an inch thicker than the company’s triple-fan Strix 3080. That means it’ll take up a whopping four slots in your PC — and still have a tiny bit of overhang into the next slot’s space.

You have to be down with the thickness if you want this card. Image: Asus

For some people, that may not be worth it. One of my co-workers, for example, feels like there has to be a more interesting or better solution than just sticking some full-size fans on it and calling it a day. He probably wouldn’t be particularly impressed looking at the performance specs either; the Noctua 3080 has an “OC Mode” boost clock of 1815MHz and a “Gaming Mode” boost clock of 1785MHz. That’s pretty much the same as Asus’ standard 3080s, but the Strix model puts out significantly higher numbers: 1935MHz in OC Mode and 1905MHz in Gaming Mode.

Noctua isn’t usually about redline performance, though; it’s about good performance while making as little noise as possible. Noctua says that “at typical auto-speed fan settings” its 3080 will be 4.5 dB(A) quieter than Asus’ TUF-series model, while running 3 degrees Celsius cooler on the GPU cores. When the cooler’s running all out, it says, Noctua’s will be 1 degree Celsius cooler and 8.6 dB(A) quieter.

 Noctua’s color scheme is an acquired taste, but pretty much anybody can appreciate the company’s cooling expertise. Image: Asus

For people who want performance but don’t want to hear it (hi, it’s me), it could be a good option — or at least that was the consensus with the 3070 version of this card. We’ll likely have to wait until independent testers get their hands on it to see if Noctua’s cooler can stay quiet while trying to contain the 3080’s significant power.

As for pricing, Noctua’s press release says to “contact your local ASUS representative for further information on pricing,” and Asus’ website doesn’t have pricing info. Asus’ “entry-level” 3080s are going for around $850, and the fancier models can cost close to $1,100.

Based on the pricing of the 3070 edition, the Noctua edition will likely come with a price premium; on Newegg, an Asus Dual RTX 3070 V2 OC goes for around $760, where the Noctua OC Edition goes for $854. Asus’ Strix model, which has higher boost clocks than both models, goes for $806. Do take these comparisons with a grain of salt; they’re third-party store prices (though the same third-party store), and we’re not quite out of the bizarre-o GPU pricing woods quite yet.

There’s also the question of whether you should even be buying a high-end 30-series card at this point. There are rumors that Nvidia’s going to release the 4090 in July, kicking off its next generation of cards. Given how long it’s been since the 3080 was launched, it could be quite a while before we see a Noctua-equipped 4090.

Noctua stuck its big brown desktop PC fans on an RTX 3080

For more than two decades, dial-up bulletin board systems, or BBSs, were a primary form of popular networked computing in North America. The creators and maintainers of BBSs, known as system operators or “sysops,” stood at the forefront of computer-mediated communication, carving out a space between nationwide commercial services and subsidized university systems. From the moral economy of shareware to the cooperative networks of HIV/AIDS activists, BBS communities adapted the simple idea of a “computerized bulletin board” to an array of socially valuable purposes. Their experiments with file sharing and community building during the 1980s provided a foundation for the blogs, forums, and social network sites that drove the popularization of the World Wide Web more than a decade later. But today the systems that made up this “modem world” are almost totally absent from the internet’s origin story.

Instead of emphasizing the role of popular innovation and amateur invention, the dominant myths in internet history focus on the trajectory of a single military-funded experiment in computer networking: the ARPANET. Though fascinating, the ARPANET story excludes the everyday culture of personal computing and grassroots internetworking. In truth, the histories of ARPANET and BBS networks were interwoven—socially and materially—as ideas, technologies, and people flowed between them. The history of the internet could be a thrilling tale inclusive of many thousands of networks, big and small, urban and rural, commercial and voluntary. Instead, it is repeatedly reduced to the story of the singular ARPANET.

The tales that we tell about ARPANET and the Cold War, Silicon Valley, and the early web have become a founding mythology for the internet—narrative resources that we rely on to make sense of our computer-mediated world. Activists, critics, executives, and policy makers routinely call on this mythology to advance arguments on issues related to technology and society. In debates about censorship, national sovereignty, privacy, net neutrality, cybersecurity, copyright, and more, advocates refer to a few oft-repeated tales in search of fundamental truths about how the internet ought to be governed. The stories that people—especially people in power—believe about the internet of the past affect the lives of everyone who depends on the internet in the present.

Forgetting has high stakes. As wireless broadband approaches ubiquity in many parts of North America, the stories we tell about the origins of the internet are more important than ever. Faced with crises such as censorship and surveillance, policy makers and technologists call on a mythic past for guidance. In times of uncertainty, the most prominent historical figures—the “forefathers” and the “innovators”—are granted a special authority to make normative claims about the future of telecommunications. As long as the modem world is excluded from the internet’s origin story, the everyday amateur will have no representation in debates over policy and technology, no opportunity to advocate for a different future.

The modem world refuses to be a single, stable object of analysis. In life and in memory, it was multiple, different, conflicting networks at the same time. This complexity was written into the architecture of the networks themselves. Before 1996, the modem world was not yet the internet, not yet a single, universal information infrastructure bound together by a shared set of protocols. In the days of USENET and BBSs and Minitel, cyberspace was defined by the interconnection of thousands of small-scale local systems, each with its own idiosyncratic culture and technical design, a dynamic assemblage of overlapping communication systems held together by digital duct tape and a handshake. It looked and felt different depending on where you plugged in your modem.

The standard history of the internet jumps from ARPANET to the web, skipping right past the mess of the modem world. A history that consists of mostly ARPANET and the web isn’t incorrect or not valuable. There is much to learn from these networks about informal collaboration, international cooperation, public-private partnerships, and bottom-up technical innovation.

But we’ve been telling the same story about ARPANET and the web for 25 years, and it isn’t satisfying anymore. It doesn’t help us understand the social internet we have now: It doesn’t explain the emergence of commercial social media, it can’t solve the problems of platformization, and it won’t help us to imagine what comes after.

Today’s social media ecosystem functions more like the modem world of the late 1980s and early 1990s than like the open social web of the early 21st century. It is an archipelago of proprietary platforms, imperfectly connected at their borders. Any gateways that do exist are subject to change at a moment’s notice. Worse, users have little recourse, the platforms shirk accountability, and states are hesitant to intervene.

Before the widespread adoption of internet email, people complained about having to print up business cards with half a dozen different addresses: inscrutable sequences of letters, numbers, and symbols representing them on CompuServe, GEnie, AOL, Delphi, MCI Mail, and so on. Today, we find ourselves in the same situation. From nail salons to cereal boxes, the visual environment is littered with the logos of incompatible social media brands. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Instagram are the new walled gardens, throwbacks to the late 1980s.

In recent years, it has become commonplace to blame social media for all our problems. There are good reasons for this. After decades of techno-optimism, a reckoning came due. But I am troubled by how often people—not platforms—are the object of this criticism. We’re told that social media is making us vapid, stupid, intolerant, and depressed, that we should be ashamed to take pleasure from social media, that we are “hardwired” to act against our own best interest. Our basic desire to connect is pathologized, as if we should take the blame for our own subjugation. I call shenanigans.

People aren’t the problem. The problem is the platforms. By looking at the history of the modem world, we can begin to extricate the technologies of sociality from what we’ve come to call “social media.” Underlying many of the problems we associate with social media are failures of creativity and care. Ironically, for an industry that prides itself on innovation, platform providers have failed to develop business models and operational structures that can sustain healthy human communities.

Silicon Valley did not invent “social media.” Everyday people made the internet social. Time and again, users adapted networked computers for communication between people. In the 1970s, the ARPANET enabled remote access to expensive computers, but users made email its killer app. In the 1980s, The Source and CompuServe offered troves of news and financial data, but users spent all their time talking to one another on forums and in chat rooms. And in the 1990s, the web was designed for publishing documents, but users created conversational guest books and message boards. The desire to connect with one another is fundamental. We should not apologize for the pleasures of being online together.

Commercial social media platforms are of a more recent origin. Major services like Facebook formed around 2005, more than a quarter-century after the first BBSs came online. Their business was the enclosure of the social web, the extraction of personal data, and the promise of personalized advertising. Through clever interface design and the strategic application of venture capital, platform providers succeeded in expanding access to the online world. Today, more people can get online and find one another than was ever possible in the days of AOL or FidoNet.

Yet commercial social media failed to produce equitable, sustainable business models. Despite massive user populations, remarkable engineering, and pervasive cultural influence, all major social media platforms depend on a revenue stream that has not changed for two decades: the exploitation of personal data for the purposes of advertising. This was true when Google launched Adwords in the year 2000. It was true when Google acquired YouTube in 2006. It was true when Facebook and Twitter went public in 2012. And it was still true in 2021. Despite the “moonshots” and “big bets,” these firms draw an overwhelming proportion of their revenue from the mundane business of placing ads on screens.

The modem world shows us that other business models are possible. BBS sysops loved to boast about “paying their own bills.” For some, the BBS was an expensive hobby, a money pit not unlike a vintage car. But many sysops sought to make their BBSs self-sustaining. Absent angel investors or government contracts, BBSs became sites of commercial experimentation. Many charged a fee for access—experimenting with tiered rates and per-minute or per-byte payment schemes. There were also BBSs organized like a social club. Members paid “dues” to keep the hard drive spinning. Others formed nonprofit corporations, soliciting tax-exempt donations from their users. Even on the hobby boards, sysops sometimes passed the virtual hat, asking everybody for a few bucks to buy a new modem or knock out a big telephone bill.

The other key, and closely related, failure of the social media industry is in its disregard for the needs of the communities that rely on it. In public debate, commercial social media providers like Facebook portray themselves as “tech” firms rather than “media” publishers, merely “neutral platforms.” This allows them to disclaim liability for the things that people do on their platform and entitles them to regulate user behavior through capricious “Terms of Service” agreements. Users who rely on these platforms for social support and economic opportunity click through the inscrutable terms without reading them. When harmed, they are left with no recourse, no avenues for redress, and no practical pathways to exit. Of course, the platforms want it both ways. At the same time that they deny responsibility for their users, they promote themselves as places for people to gather and share the intimate details of their lives. These are undemocratic, private spaces masquerading as a public square.

The modem world, again, offers different models. The stewardship of an online community takes work. The literature of the modem world is replete with textfiles, magazine articles, and how-to books about cultivating communities, moderating discussions, handling troublesome users, and avoiding burnout. The role of the bulletin board system operator required a unique mix of technical acumen and care for the community. Former BBS sysops recall late nights spent answering email, verifying new users, tweaking software settings, cleaning up messy files, and trying to quell flame wars.

This work is still being done on platforms like Facebook and Reddit. But unlike the sysops who enabled the flourishing of early online communities, the volunteer moderators on today’s platforms do not own the infrastructures they oversee. They do not share in the profits generated by their labor. They cannot alter the underlying software or implement new technical interventions or social reforms. Instead of growing in social status, the sysop seems to have been curtailed by the providers of platforms. If there is a future after Facebook, it will be led by a revival of the sysop, a reclamation of the social and economic value of community maintenance and moderation.

Platforms didn’t invent the social use of computer networks. Amateurs, activists, educators, students, and small business owners did. Silicon Valley turned their practices into a product, pumped it full of speculative capital, scaled it, and so far refuse to treat the lives we live through it with care. The stories we tell about the early internet must disentangle the grassroots origin of social media from its capture and commodification. I do not expect that new models for online sociality will look exactly like the BBSs did in the 1980s, but the history of the modem world centers on the interests of everyday people, a reorganization of narrative resources from which to envision alternative futures.

The extraordinary history of the modem world allows us to imagine an internet beyond the platforms. But turning to the past for help with the present is risky. Misogyny, homophobia, and white supremacy were problems on networks of the 1980s, just as they are today. To appreciate the moments of brilliance and possibility, we must also see the complex—often ugly—circumstances within which they unfolded. Historian Joy Lisi Rankin urges us to “overwrite” the narrow mythology of Silicon Valley exceptionalism with an account of the many different worlds of computing that have existed since the 1960s. And indeed, there is an abundance of history that remains unwritten.

From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, millions of people living and working in cities and towns throughout the continent collectively transformed the personal computer into a medium for social communication. They were the first to voluntarily spend hours in front of a computer, typing messages to strangers. Their experiments in community building and information sharing provided a foundation for the practices that now compel us to our computers and smartphones each day: love, learning, commerce, community, and faith.

In the words of one former sysop, the BBS was the original cyberspace. The stories from this era remind us that many different internets have already existed. An internet after social media is still possible; the internet of today can still become something better, more just, equitable, and inclusive—a future worth fighting for.

The Internet Origin Story You Know Is Wrong

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“There was no propulsion system that worked,” he recalls with a sigh. Sure, people had been trying to make personal flying devices for decades—most notably jetpacks. But jetpack physics was a nightmare. Strapping an explosive tank of fuel to your body and trying not to burn your legs off? Not really a scalable solution to personal mobility.

So Ternström shelved his youthful dream and went on to become a dotcom millionaire by building an online learning platform and the Swedish version of Mailchimp. Flying cars, not gonna happen.

Except that technology evolves in a funny way. While Ternström was doing those dotcom firms, a different flying technology was emerging, one that didn’t have the problems of jetpacks: drones.

When they first went mainstream in the ’00s, drones were mere toys, wobbly and difficult to fly, with batteries that died in minutes. But as demand from hobbyists and enthusiasts grew, so did the quality of the parts. Motors got better, and batteries became longer-lasting. Tilt sensors became cheap and high quality, and open-source coders wrote software that made drones self-stabilizing and thus easy to fly with zero training.

In 2012, Ternström met up with an old friend who’d been building drones to carry cameras for Hollywood movie production. Ternström joined him to work on some of the shoots, and as he watched the drones fly around, Ternström started thinking: Huh, why not just make a really big drone, strap a seat on it, and carry a human?

So he and his partner did. They formed Jetson, a company that is now selling its first model of an honest-to-goodness, hovering personal aircraft: the Jetson ONE, a $92,000 contraption made of lightweight aluminum and carbon fiber, eight drone propellers, and scores of batteries. In videos, Ternström zooms along the Italian countryside about six feet aboveground, looking eerily like that Endor speeder he’d once dreamed of.

“Flying it is a profoundly ecstatic experience,” he tells me. “All your bird DNA from from millions of years ago kicks in and goes, ‘Whoa, wait a second, I've done this before!’” His company has 320 pre-orders, he adds, which he aims to begin delivering by the end of 2023. The buyers are mostly “high-profile people from California. I’m not going to say ’Mark Zuckerberg,’ but, you know, around that circle.”

Courtesy of Jetson

Ternström is one of the first to have a drone-style flying machine for sale, but he’s hardly alone. Dozens of firms worldwide are now making “electrical vertical takeoff and landing” (eVTOL) vehicles. Their goal is to introduce vehicles and gradually improve them such that, in 10 years, you could zip from downtown to the airport in one—since unlike planes they need no runway, and are so heavily software-guided that pilots would need little skill. (A few of these firms aim to have their crafts remotely piloted, or to fly autonomously.) Some models shift the propellers sideways once in flight, so they cruise airplane-style.

For eons, sci-fi illustrations depicted people zipping around cities in little flying vehicles. Now those Golden Age fliers might finally be arriving—and “they’re just big drones,” says Chris Anderson, a longtime drone pioneer and COO of eVTOL firm Kittyhawk (and WIRED’s former editor in chief).

Consider this a lesson in innovation: Big breakthroughs don’t always come from where you’d expect.

We often think the biggest innovations spring from brilliant people gathered in a lab or corporation—designers at Apple crafting the smartphone, the wonks at OpenAI coding GPT-3, the Tesla engineers building a truly elegant electric car. But just as often, maybe more often, innovation is the result of hobbyist weirdos tinkering on stuff that seems silly or toylike. It’s precisely because those environments are low-stakes that hackers and enthusiasts can gradually improve the core technologies, until suddenly they’re ready to do wildly more ambitious things.

Drone-car experiments burbled up in this way. Jeff Elkins, an electrical engineer and founder of Dragon Air, built his own flying device back in 2011 by arranging drone propellers on a platform. You stand on it, hold onto a couple poles, and lean to steer it. “As unintuitive as it sounds, it's actually a great way to fly,” he tells me. His test pilot has done flights lasting as long as 20 minutes.

The idea of humans piloting flying cars might seem nuts—we’re lousy enough drivers in two dimensions. Adding a third seems ill advised. But software innovations from years of making drones easy to pilot has automated away most of the hard stuff of flying, says Volocopter CEO Florian Reuter.

“Our first test pilot, on his first flight, his comment was, ‘This was the most boring maiden flight ever,’” Reuter tells me. You don’t have to worry about keeping stable or reacting to sudden gusts of wind; the software takes care of that. You just use the joystick-like controls to point where you want to go. “You don't need any piloting skills,” he says.

Making a flier out of drone parts has other advantages, which is safety through redundancy: A single propeller can fail while the others keep going. And if something goes really wrong? Several firms put ballistic parachutes in their machines. The HEXA, a flying machine by Lift Aircraft, has one that executives say will pop out so fast it’ll save passengers from a height as low as 40 feet. The Jetson ONE also has a ballistic parachute, though Ternström says you’d have to be at least 100 feet in the air for it to really save you. He expects most Jetson ONE riders will stick close to the ground, where in an accident you’d be saved not by the parachute but by the roll cage.

“You're going to break an arm. It's going to be painful, but you're not going to die,” Ternström says.

So: Sci-fi flying vehicles can be built. Will they really change how we travel around, though? That’s a different question, because it’s not about technology but regulation—which necessarily moves a lot more slowly.

Right now, the only drone cars you could legally fly are the ones so lightweight that they qualify as “ultralights.” (The Jetson ONE, the HEXA, and Jeff Elkins’ craft all count.) With an ultralight you don’t even need a pilot’s license, though they can’t be flown over congested areas. So the first crop of drone cars is essentially for joyrides.

For now, anyway. Many firms such as Kitty Hawk, Volocopter, or China’s EHang are already building bigger vehicles that hold many passengers—some that fly fully autonomously—with the intent of creating full-on air taxis that flit us around cities. The Federal Aviation Administration will spend a decade or more approving those, mind you, assuming they ever do. But in the meantime, one thing is clear: Drones have grown up—into something quite unexpected.

Drones Are Turning Into Personal Flying Machines

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While opening the self-made 5G Test Bed at the silver jubilee celebrations of TRAI, the prime minister of India said:

 “Connectivity will determine the pace of progress in 21st century India. Therefore, connectivity has to be modernised at every level.”

It's not entirely clear whether Modi was talking in terms of early commercial deployment or a more widespread rollout of 6G. Many industry experts believe that 6G services could be in action by the end of this decade. And now that the Indian government is also eyeing the same launch window, it might become one of the first few countries to launch the services to its people.

Modi revealed no further details about its 6G rollout plans, but neighboring country China is a few years ahead of India as China's Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) began the research and development work on 6G way back in 2019.

The Republic of India is yet to roll out 5G services. With 5G spectrum auctions happening in the country from next month, telecom companies may need another six months to bring the service to the people. Long story short, 5G services should arrive in India from early next year.

Apart from India and China, South Korea, the USA, Japan, Europe, and Russia are working on the 6G technology.

Source

Next-gen Nvidia RTX 4000-series GPUs are reportedly coming in the next few months

However, the latest report suggests that this isn't the case as the RTX 4090 allegedly features only a 450W TGP, which is a very significant reduction of 25%. The report comes via prolific Nvidia GPU leakster and Twitter user kopite7kimi.

Alongside the alleged power consumption number, supposed details regarding CUDA core count and performance were also shared by the leaker.

According to the report, the RTX 4090 will have the AD102-300 GPU die and pack 16128 FP32 cores or 126 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). The card will have 21Gbps GDDR6X memory, which is also present on the current Ampere flagship, the RTX 3090 Ti. But the 4090 will be much faster than the the 3090 Ti as kopite7kimi alleges the it will be twice as fast the RTX 3090, which provides around 90% of the performance of the 3090 Ti.

For achieving this excellent power efficiency improvement, Nvidia is said to be using the TSMC N5 or N5P, the latter being a performance enhanced version of the regular 5nm (N5) node from the foundry.

Source: kopite7kimi (Twitter)

Nvidia's Ada Lovelace RTX 4090 is reportedly much better than previously rumored

At the end of March earlier this year, Intel took the wraps of its highly anticipated Arc discrete graphics cards. Initially, mobile GPUs will be arriving (image above), followed by desktop parts later in the year. But perhaps to the disappointment of many people worldwide who were looking forward to Intel's discrete GPUs, the firm has confirmed that it its only certain Asian markets where the mobile and desktop Alchemist (First gen Arc codename) SKUs will be available, and only via OEMs and system integrators.

Still if you are looking forward to getting an Arc desktop GPU later in the year when its finally available, you can already plan ahead from today into which SKU you would prefer buying. That's because the entire Arc Alchemist A-series lineup has leaked courtesy of the latest Intel beta driver.

As you can see in the image below, a list of unreleased Arc models have been listed by Intel, alongside the couple of already available models.

Intel Arc, like its Core series CPUs, will be available in three flavors. The entry-level parts will comprise the Arc 3 (A3) lineup. And similarly, the higher SKUs will be under Arc 5 (A5) and Arc 7 (A7).

This isn't the first time Intel's drivers have provided insight into future unannounced products. Information on alleged future Intel Arc Elasti architecture also leaked out via a driver too. Elasti might be the successor to Intel's fourth-gen Arc design, codenamed Druid.

Via: momomo_us (Twitter)

Entire Arc Alchemist GPU lineup has leaked thanks to Intel's own driver

Windows builds galore

This week, we had Patch Tuesday, during which Microsoft pushes out updates for its supported Windows versions.

Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 received KB5014012 and KB5014011. As usual, these updates focus on minor improvements, with the focus this time being on the Key Distribution Center (KDC) and the Primary Domain Controller (PDC). Although the changelogs for both the operating systems are the same, their known issues are different.

Meanwhile, Windows 10 was handed KB5013942 for version 20H2, 21H1, and 21H2, bumping the builds to 19042.1706, 19043.1706, and 19044.1706. The focus was on security updates but there are a bunch of known issues too. May's Patch Tuesday was also available to some older SKUs covered by Enterprise, Education, IoT, and LTSC licensing.

Finally, Windows 11 received KB5013943, bumping the OS build to 22000.675. Security issues were plugged and improvements were made to the .NET 3.5 framework's compatibility with the OS. There is one known issue too, so don't miss out on the details here.

We should also shine a light on some issues that the latest Patch Tuesday is calling. There have been several reports of KB5013943 causing BSODs, and issues with Teams, Discord, and more on Windows 11. Microsoft has also confirmed authorization issues that the update is causing on Windows 10 and Windows 11 for select services. The problem is being investigated with some workarounds available. The firm even confirmed an issue breaking DirectX 9 in applications running on specific GPUs, the current mitigation involves rolling back a recent KB5012643 update.

On the Windows 11 Insider channels, we first received build 22616.100 (KB5014650), but this was just a servicing update. Microsoft also said that its previous build 22616 makes it mandatory to have a Microsoft Account and internet during the initial OOBE setup for Windows 11 Pro, but fret not, we already have a workaround for this requirement.

But coming over to the stuff that should actually matter, Microsoft finally split off the development branches in the Beta and Dev channels. The former received build 22621 with minor improvements to the Taskbar and Smart App Control, but there's also a known issue with Live Captions. There are also rumors that this is the build that will hit RTM status for Windows 11 22H2, Microsoft has neither confirmed nor denied this.

Meanwhile, the Dev Channel was handed build 25115, which is the first Sun Valley 3 release for Insiders. For now, it only contains one new feature called "Suggested Actions" to make your PC smarter. It also includes a preview for the new Sound Recorder app (more on that later) and a bunch of improvements and bug fixes. You can check out all the details here, but note that the update isn't available for ARM64 PCs.

Finally, version 1909 and 20H2 of Windows 10 have reached end of servicing which means that they are not entitled to security updates and support. As such, it is highly recommended that you update your PCs if you're running these versions of the OS. Meanwhile, those wanting a clean install path through a Windows 11 license can also take a gander at some pretty retail boxes that Microsoft is now selling for its latest OS.

An updated Sound Recorder

As mentioned earlier, build 25115 for the Windows 11 Dev Channel contains a preview of the new Sound Recorder app. It is important to note that this effectively replaces the "Voice Recorder" app present since Windows 10 and revamps it with Windows 11-like controls and icons. Microsoft also added the option to change the recording device and select file format within the app. If you have several microphones connected to your PC, you can choose the one you need directly on the app's main screen. Sound Recorder also allows you to change audio quality and select the theme.

Do you remember the leaked Outlook client that started working a few days ago? Microsoft doesn't want customers to use it in its current state and has asked people to wait for the beta version with more features. Here are the commands that IT admins can use within their respective organizations to restrict its usage.

In terms of features coming to Microsoft apps soon, Teams is set to get a multitasking panel on the iPad this month. This will enable a richer chat experience during an ongoing meeting. In the same vein, Microsoft 365 Apps have received an update in the Current Channel with improvements all around for Excel, Outlook, and Word. The preview version of Windows Package Manager (winget) has been updated to include a better progress bar with more fine-grained blocks, a setting for always using verbose logs, and an improved winget --info command that now displays the system architecture.

Microsoft has promised some new accessibility features for Windows 11 as well. These include a more immersive Focus experience and system-wide Live Captions, among other things. Similarly, it has also announced a series of Adaptive Accessories that can be used to create personalized input devices.

A VPN for Microsoft Edge

Following news about it last month, Microsoft has finally made a preview of Edge's native VPN official. It's dubbed "Secure Network" and is available for some users on Edge Canary. In a nutshell, it is a basic VPN - powered by Cloudflare - that does not require installing third-party software or extensions. Unlike traditional VPN services that allow selecting servers in specific countries, Secure Network automatically picks servers in your local area. This is useful if you want to view content relevant to your region.

Edge Dev received a couple of updates too. First, there was a version bump for Edge Dev 102 that added the ability to add passwords manually from Settings, support for xCloud Clarity Boost by default, and new APIs for developers. It's a pretty big update so there are other changes and fixes in store too.

Then, we got the first build of version 103 in the Dev Channel. This is a notable build too with support for natural language in search history, the ability to pin Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) as apps in the Taskbar from their three-dot menu, and a new management policy. Check out all the details here.

Microsoft made a couple of announcements in the cybersecurity space this week too. It issued an advisory about human-operated ransomware becoming more common. Further, it unveiled its Security Experts service that combines technologies and humans to serve the cybersecurity needs of its customers.

Git Gud

Gamers looking forward to Bethesda games this year were treated to some bad news that Starfield and Redfall have been delayed to the first half of 2023. Originally slated for a release in this year, both of these titles are Microsoft platform exclusives, which means that gamers on that side of the fence may need to wait up to a year before they can get their hands on the games.

Some other popular games did receive notable updates in this week though. Grounded's The Bug Strikes Back update offers more bug combat opportunities and new base defenses. Meanwhile, Arkane's Deathloop has added support for new accessibility options, a photo mode, and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0 support. Finally, the Knights of the Mediterranean expansion has been announced for Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition too.

There are some updates on the Xbox side too. The Xbox App for Windows has received a new preview release (2205.1000.17.0) that brings improved search results for all PC Game Pass titles and fixes issues related to cloud gaming.

The Xbox One and Series X|S received an OS update bringing stability and performance improvements. There was also a preview update for Alpha Skip-Ahead that introduced noise suppression in party chats and squashed some bugs.

And if you're on the lookout for deals, this week's Deals with Gold slashes the prices of several major titles including Cyberpunk 2077 and Dark Souls II. But if you belong exclusively to the PC master race, don't forget to check out this curated list of deals across multiple storefronts, combined in one nifty article by our editor Pulasthi Ariyasinghe. In related news, the Steam Deck has also received proper audio drivers if you're running it on Windows.

Dev Channel

• Microsoft will help cover its American employees' travel costs to bypass anti-abortion laws
• Visual Studio 2022 17.2 and 17.3 Preview 1 are now out, and so is Visual Studio 2022 RC2 for Mac
• The original Surface Duo has received some camera enhancements in its latest update
• Microsoft will now deliver some Exchange Server updates in .exe packages too
• Azure tenants in India to get Universal Print service this month

Under the spotlight

This week, News Reporter Taras Buria curated a list of the top 10 features that people are requesting for the Microsoft Store. It's a pretty interesting list where people are asking for better uninstall options, a tabbed UI, and more. And if you're an active user of the storefront, don't forget to vote for your favorite Microsoft Store apps either.

I also wrote an editorial on how much I miss the Nokia Lumia Windows phones of yesteryear with their vibrant polycarbonate shells and relatively daring designs. You can take a trip down this memory lane here.

Finally, as mentioned in an earlier section, Neowin co-founder Steven Parker wrote a guide detailing the method to bypass Microsoft's latest Windows 11 Pro requirement about having a Microsoft Account (MSA) and connectivity to the internet while setting up the operating system. Check out the details here.

Logging off

Our most interesting news item of the week isn't directly related to Microsoft. It's actually about Elon Musk's highly publicized $44 billion Twitter takeover being put on hold as his team examines the number of spam and bot accounts that make up its userbase. In its public filings, Twitter had stated that the figure is around 5% but Musk believes that it could be more. One would think that you would investigate and clarify this sort of potential hurdle prior to announcing a $44 billion takeover, but what do we know? We're not billionaires.

Microsoft Weekly: Sound Recorder, a VPN for Edge, and Windows builds galore

Now, Musk has confirmed that the deal has been put on hold. According to Musk's latest tweet, the Twitter acquisition has been put on hold as he verifies Twitter's claim that less than 5% of the users are bot/fake accounts. Last week, Twitter disclosed that it estimates fake or spam account count to be less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter.

According to the terms of the agreement, Musk will have to pay a billion dollar penalty if he backs out of the Twitter deal. In a subsequent tweet, Musk said he is committed to acquiring Twitter:

Furthermore, Musk said he will be taking a random sample of 100 follows of Twitter's official account to verify the company's claim that less than 5% of the users are fake or spam accounts:

Meanwhile, Wall Street did not like the news of acquisition being put on hold as share prices of Twitter fell more than 10% during the pre-trade window on Friday.

Twitter's share closed at $40.60 on Friday, down from $45.07 on Thursday and roughly 23% down from Musk's buying price of $54.20.

Elon Musk puts Twitter deal on hold because of bots

The release of official audio drivers for the Steam Deck means those tinkering with Windows on their consoles can now use built-in speakers and the audio jack. Previously, the only audio output on the Steam Deck with Windows was Bluetooth.

Although the Steam Deck now has all the needed drivers to run Windows 11 and 10 like any computer, replacing SteamOS is not perfect or user-friendly. The Steam Deck does not officially support dual-boot, so you need to wipe the console's drive before installing Windows. That is something Valve is working on, and the company promises to fix it with the release of SteamOS 3 in the future.

Not every Steam Deck user cares about swapping SteamOS with Windows, so Valve is naturally more interested in improving SteamOS (the company recently added the option to change the refresh rate per game). The company wants its console to be flexible and experiment-friendly, but it will take time to fix all the needed parts.

You can download the latest Windows drivers for the Steam deck from the official Steam Support website.

Some Steam Deck owners go beyond just replacing SteamOS with Windows. Recently, a YouTuber decided to see what happens when you connect a flagship GPU to the Steam Deck.

Steam Deck finally receives proper audio drivers for Windows

However, in what appears to be some early benchmark runs for a 5.2+GHz 8 core 16 thread AMD Ryzen RDNA 2 desktop APU engineering sample, the chip has put up a disappointing show. Compared to the performance of the last-gen Ryzen 7 5700G flagship desktop APU, the scores obtained by the AMD Engineering sample are average at best. The RDNA 2 graphics portion of the chip appears to have the codename "GFX1036".

Here's how it compared to the Vega 8 on the Ryzen 5700G (via Phoronix😞

While we don't have the 4K Tesseract score for the Vega 8, the result for the GFX1036 RDNA 2 IGP is interesting in itself as it suggests that there is some sort of bottleneck on the RDNA 2 system which is why both the 1080p and the 2160p (4K) scores are nearly identical.

This indicates a lot of optimization still remains to be done for the Ryzen RDNA 2 APU at least on Ubuntu 20.04, where it was tested. In fact, there could be some really big gains to be had as recent testing showed very positive results for Ryzen 4000 APUs on Ubuntu 22.04 when compared against 20.04. Linux 5.16 also leads to significant gains for AMD's Ryzen APUs.

Source and images: OpenBenchmarking via Petykemano (Twitter)

8 core 16 thread AMD Zen 4 RDNA 2 desktop APU puts up sorry figure in leaked early benchmark

It is a day of delays it seems, but this time, at least it's not a game being affected. Techland has revealed it will be taking more time developing upcoming story content for Dying Light 2 Stay Human. Originally slated for early summer, the game's first major story DLC drop is now aimed at a September release.

"We will still need a bit more time to develop the first story DLC," Techland explains in a Twitter post today. "Your feedback always has the highest priority for us, and we want to be honest and transparent with you."

The studio has five years of updates planned out for the zombie survival RPG, and at least two story DLC packs are incoming in the future, with an additional expansion pack also in the cards. Since launch, Techland has delivered numerous bug fixes as well asnew features like New Game+ for better replayability, co-op improvements, and more.

To make the wait for new story slices a little easier though, the studio is planning smaller, free updates from June through August. These will contain new missions and bounties, a photo mode, community events, and new enemy types, among other elements, to spice up the gameplay. Check out the updated roadmap above.

Dying Light 2 is currently available on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. After years of support, Techland just recently released its final update to the original Dying Light, and as an added surprise, gave away Enhanced Edition content to all base game owners.

Dying Light 2's first major story DLC delayed to September

While recovering, DeGray, who was 53 at the time, learned from his doctors that he was permanently paralyzed from the collarbones down. With the exception of vestigial twitches, he cannot move his torso or limbs. “I’m about as hurt as you can get and not be on a ventilator,” he told me. For several years after his accident, he “simply laid there, watching the History Channel” as he struggled to accept the reality of his injury.

Some time later, while at a fund-raising event for stem-cell research, he met Jaimie Henderson, a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University. The pair got to talking about robots, a subject that had long interested DeGray, who grew up around his family’s machine shop. As DeGray remembers it, Henderson captivated him with a single question: Do you want to fly a drone?

Henderson explained that he and his colleagues had been developing a brain-computer interface: an experimental connection between someone’s brain and an external device, like a computer, robotic limb or drone, which the person could control simply by thinking. DeGray was eager to participate, eventually moving to Menlo Park to be closer to Stanford as he waited for an opening in the study and the necessary permissions. In the summer of 2016, Henderson opened DeGray’s skull and exposed his cortex — the thin, wrinkled, outermost layer of the brain — into which he implanted two 4-millimeter-by-4-millimeter electrode arrays resembling miniature beds of nails. Each array had 100 tiny metal spikes that, collectively, recorded electric impulses surging along a couple of hundred neurons or so in the motor cortex, a brain region involved in voluntary movement.

After a recovery period, several of Henderson’s collaborators assembled at DeGray’s home and situated him in front of a computer screen displaying a ring of eight white dots the size of quarters, which took turns glowing orange. DeGray’s task was to move a cursor toward the glowing dot using his thoughts alone. The scientists attached cables onto metal pedestals protruding from DeGray’s head, which transmitted the electrical signals recorded in his brain to a decoder: a nearby network of computers running machine-learning algorithms.

The algorithms were constructed by David Brandman, at the time a doctoral student in neuroscience collaborating with the Stanford team through a consortium known as BrainGate. He designed them to rapidly associate different patterns of neural activity with different intended hand movements, and to update themselves every two to three seconds, in theory becoming more accurate each time. If the neurons in DeGray’s skull were like notes on a piano, then his distinct intentions were analogous to unique musical compositions. An attempt to lift his hand would coincide with one neural melody, for example, while trying to move his hand to the right would correspond to another. As the decoder learned to identify the movements DeGray intended, it sent commands to move the cursor in the corresponding direction.

Brandman asked DeGray to imagine a movement that would give him intuitive control of the cursor. Staring at the computer screen, searching his mind for a way to begin, DeGray remembered a scene from the movie “Ghost” in which the deceased Sam Wheat (played by Patrick Swayze) invisibly slides a penny along a door to prove to his girlfriend that he still exists in a spectral form. DeGray pictured himself pushing the cursor with his finger as if it were the penny, willing it toward the target. Although he was physically incapable of moving his hand, he tried to do so with all his might. Brandman was ecstatic to see the decoder work as quickly as he had hoped. In 37 seconds, DeGray gained control of the cursor and reached the first glowing dot.

Within several minutes he hit dozens of targets in a row.

Only a few dozen people on the planet have had neural interfaces embedded in their cortical tissue as part of long-term clinical research. DeGray is now one of the most experienced and dedicated among them. Since that initial trial, he has spent more than 1,800 hours spanning nearly 400 training sessions controlling various forms of technology with his mind. He has played a video game, manipulated a robotic limb, sent text messages and emails, purchased products on Amazon and even flown a drone — just a simulator, for now — all without lifting a finger. Together, DeGray and similar volunteers are exploring the frontier of a technology with the potential to fundamentally alter how humans and machines interact.

Scientists and engineers have been creating and studying brain-computer interfaces since the 1950s. Given how much of the brain’s behavior remains a mystery — not least how consciousness emerges from three pounds of electric jelly — the aggregate achievements of such systems are remarkable.

Paralyzed individuals with neural interfaces have learned to play simple tunes on a digital keyboard, control exoskeletons and maneuver robotic limbs with enough dexterity to drink from a bottle. In March, a team of international scientists published a study documenting for the first time that someone with complete, bodywide paralysis used a brain-computer interface to convey their wants and needs by forming sentences one letter at a time.

Neural interfaces can also create bidirectional pathways of communication between brain and machine. In 2016, Nathan Copeland, who was paralyzed from the chest down in a car accident, not only fist-bumped President Barack Obama with a robotic hand, he also experienced the tactile sensation of the bump in his own hand as the prosthesis sent signals back to electrodes in his brain, stimulating his sensory cortex. By combining brain-imaging technology and neural networks, scientists have also deciphered and partly reconstructed images from people’s minds, producing misty imitations that resemble weathered Polaroids or smeared oil paintings.

Most researchers developing brain-computer interfaces say they are primarily interested in therapeutic applications, namely restoring movement and communication to people who are paralyzed or otherwise disabled. Yet the obvious potential of such technology and the increasing number of high-profile start-ups developing it suggest the possibility of much wider adoption: a future in which neural interfaces actually enhance people’s innate abilities and grant them new ones, in addition to restoring those that have been lost.

In the history of life on Earth, we have never encountered a mind without a body. Highly complex cognition has always been situated in an intricate physical framework, whether eight suction-cupped arms, four furry limbs or a bundle of feather and beak. Human technology often amplifies the body’s inherent abilities or extends the mind into the surrounding environment through the body. Art and writing, agriculture and engineering: All human innovations have depended on, and thus been constrained by, the body’s capacity to physically manipulate whatever tools the mind devises. If brain-computer interfaces fulfill their promise, perhaps the most profound consequence will be this: Our species could transcend those constraints, bypassing the body through a new melding of mind and machine.

On a spring morning in 1893, during a military training exercise in Würzburg, Germany, a 19-year-old named Hans Berger was thrown from his horse and nearly crushed to death by the wheel of an artillery gun. The same morning, his sister, 60 miles away in Coburg, was flooded with foreboding and persuaded her father to send a telegram inquiring about her brother’s well-being. That seemingly telepathic premonition obsessed Berger, compelling him to study the mysteries of the mind. His efforts culminated in the 1920s with the invention of electroencephalography (EEG): a method of recording electrical activity in the brain using electrodes attached to the scalp. The oscillating patterns his apparatus produced, reminiscent of a seismograph’s scribbling, were the first transcriptions of the human brain’s cellular chatter.

In the following decades, scientists learned new ways to record, manipulate and channel the brain’s electrical signals, constructing ever-more-elaborate bridges between mind and machine. In 1964, José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado, a Spanish neurophysiologist, brought a charging bull to a halt using radio-controlled electrodes embedded in the animal’s brain. In the 1970s, the University of California Los Angeles professor Jacques Vidal coined the term brain-computer interface and demonstrated that people could mentally guide a cursor through a simple virtual maze. By the early 2000s, the Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis and his collaborators had published studies demonstrating that monkeys implanted with neural interfaces could control robotic prostheses with their minds. In 2004, Matt Nagle, who was paralyzed from the shoulders down, became the first human to do the same. He further learned how to use his thoughts alone to play Pong, change channels on a television, open emails and draw a circle on a computer screen.

Since then, the pace of achievements in the field of brain-computer interfaces has increased greatly, thanks in part to the rapid development of artificial intelligence. Machine-learning software has substantially improved the efficiency and accuracy of neural interfaces by automating some of the necessary computation and anticipating the intentions of human users, not unlike how your phone or email now has A.I.-assisted predictive text. Last year, the University of California San Francisco neurosurgeon Edward Chang and a dozen collaborators published a landmark study describing how a neural interface gave a paralyzed 36-year-old man a voice for the first time in more than 15 years. Following a car crash and severe stroke at age 20, the man, known as Pancho, lost the ability to produce intelligible speech. Over a period of about 20 months, 128 disk-shaped electrodes placed on top of Pancho’s sensorimotor cortex recorded electrical activity in brain regions involved in speech processing and vocal tract control as he attempted to speak words aloud. A decoder associated different patterns of neural activity with different words and, with the help of language-prediction algorithms, eventually learned to decipher 15 words per minute with 75 percent accuracy on average. Although this is only a fraction of the rate of typical speech in English (140 to 200 words a minute), it is considerably faster than many point-and-click methods of communication available to people with severe paralysis.

In another groundbreaking study published last year, Jaimie Henderson and several colleagues, including Francis Willett, a biomedical engineer, and Krishna Shenoy, an electrical engineer, reported an equally impressive yet entirely different approach to communication by neural interface. The scientists recorded neurons firing in Dennis DeGray’s brain as he visualized himself writing words with a pen on a notepad, trying to recreate the distinct hand movements required for each letter. He mentally wrote thousands of words in order for the system to reliably recognize the unique patterns of neural activity specific to each letter and output words on a screen. “You really learn to hate M’s after a while,” he told me with characteristic good humor. Ultimately, the method was extremely successful. DeGray was able to type up to 90 characters or 18 words a minute — more than twice the speed of his previous efforts with a cursor and virtual keyboard. He is the world’s fastest mental typist. “Sometimes I get going so fast it’s just one big blur,” he said. “My concentration gets to a point where it’s not unusual for them to remind me to breathe.”

Achievements in brain-computer interfaces to date have relied on a mix of invasive and noninvasive technologies. Many scientists in the field, including those who work with DeGray, rely on a surgically embedded array of spiky electrodes produced by a Utah-based company, Blackrock Neurotech. The Utah Array, as it’s known, can differentiate the signals of individual neurons, providing more refined control of connected devices, but the surgery it requires can result in infection, inflammation and scarring, which may contribute to eventual degradation of signal strength. Interfaces that reside outside the skull, like headsets that depend on EEG, are currently limited to eavesdropping on the collective firing of groups of neurons, sacrificing power and precision for safety. Further complicating the situation, most neural interfaces studied in labs require cumbersome hardware, cables and an entourage of computers, whereas most commercially available interfaces are essentially remote controls for rudimentary video games, toys and apps. These commercial headsets don’t solve any real-world problems, and the more powerful systems in clinical studies are too impractical for everyday use.

With this problem in mind, Elon Musk’s company Neuralink has developed an array of flexible polymer threads studded with more than 3,000 tiny electrodes connected to a bottlecap-size wireless radio and signal processor, as well as a robot that can surgically implant the threads in the brain, avoiding blood vessels to reduce inflammation. Neuralink has tested its system in animals and has said it would begin human trials this year.

Synchron, which is based in New York, has developed a device called a Stentrode that doesn’t require open-brain surgery. It is a four-centimeter, self-expanding tubular lattice of electrodes, which is inserted into one of the brain’s major blood vessels via the jugular vein. Once in place, a Stentrode detects local electric fields produced by nearby groups of neurons in the motor cortex and relays recorded signals to a wireless transmitter embedded in the chest, which passes them on to an external decoder. In 2021, Synchron became the first company to receive F.D.A. approval to conduct human clinical trials of a permanently implantable brain-computer interface. So far, four people with varied levels of paralysis have received Stentrodes and used them, some in combination with eye-tracking and other assistive technologies, to control personal computers while unsupervised at home.

Philip O’Keefe, 62, of Greendale, Australia, received a Stentrode in April 2020. Because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (A.L.S.), O’Keefe can walk only short distances, cannot move his left arm and is losing the ability to speak clearly. At first, he explained, he had to concentrate intensely on the imagined movements required to operate the system — in his case, thinking about moving his left ankle for different lengths of time. “But the more you use it, the more it’s like riding a bike,” he said. “You get to a stage where you don’t think so hard about the movement you need to make. You think about the function you need to execute, whether it’s opening an email, scrolling a web page or typing some letters.” In December, O’Keefe became the first person in the world to post to Twitter using a neural interface: “No need for keystrokes or voices,” he wrote by mind. “I created this tweet just by thinking it.

Thomas Oxley, a neurologist and the founding C.E.O. of Synchron, thinks future brain-computer interfaces will fall somewhere between LASIK and cardiac pacemakers in terms of their cost and safety, helping people with disabilities recover the capacity to engage with their physical surroundings and a rapidly evolving digital environment. “Beyond that,” he says, “if this technology allows anyone to engage with the digital world better than with an ordinary human body, that is where it gets really interesting. To express emotion, to express ideas — everything you do to communicate what is happening in your brain has to happen through the control of muscles. Brain-computer interfaces are ultimately going to enable a passage of information that goes beyond the limitations of the human body. And from that perspective, I think the capacity of the human brain is actually going to increase.”

There is no technology yet that can communicate human thoughts as fast as they occur. Fingers and thumbs will never move quickly enough. And there are many forms of information processing better suited to a computer than to a human brain. Oxley speculated about the possibility of using neural interfaces to enhance human memory, bolster innate navigational skills with a direct link to GPS, sharply increase the human brain’s computational abilities and create a new form of communication in which emotions are wordlessly “thrown” from one mind to another. “It’s just the beginning of the dawn of this space,” Oxley said. “It’s really going to change the way we interact with one another as a species.”

Frederic Gilbert, a philosopher at the University of Tasmania, has studied the ethical quandaries posed by neurotechnology for more than a decade. Through in-depth interviews, he and other ethicists have documented how some people have adverse reactions to neural implants, including self-estrangement, increased impulsivity, mania, self-harm and attempted suicide. In 2015, he traveled to Penola, South Australia, to meet Rita Leggett, a 54-year-old patient with a very different, though equally troubling, experience.

Several years earlier, Leggett participated in the first human clinical trial of a particular brain-computer interface that warned people with epilepsy of imminent seizures via a hand-held beeper, giving them enough time to take a stabilizing medication or get to a safe place. With the implant, she felt much more confident and capable and far less anxious. Over time, it became inextricable from her identity. “It was me, it became me,” she told Gilbert. “With this device I found myself.” Around 2013, NeuroVista, the company that manufactured the neural interface, folded because it could not secure new funding. Despite her resistance, Leggett underwent an explantation. She was devastated. “Her symbiosis was so profound,” Gilbert told me, that when the device was removed, “she suffered a trauma.”

In a striking parallel, a recent investigation by the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum revealed that, because of insufficient revenues, the Los Angeles-based neuroprosthetics company Second Sight had stopped producing and largely stopped servicing the bionic eyes they sold to more than 350 visually impaired people around the world. At least one individual’s implant has already failed with no way to repair it — a situation that could befall many others. Some patients enrolled in clinical trials for Second Sight’s latest neural interface, which directly stimulates the visual cortex, have either removed the device or are contemplating doing so.

If sophisticated brain-computer interfaces eventually transcend medical applications and become consumer goods available to the general public, the ethical considerations surrounding them multiply exponentially. In a 2017 commentary on neurotechnology, the Columbia University neurobiologist Rafael Yuste and 24 colleagues identified four main areas of concern: augmentation; bias; privacy and consent; and agency and identity. Neural implants sometimes cause disconcerting shifts in patients’ self-perception. Some have reported feeling like “an electronic doll” or developing a blurred sense of self. Were someone to commit a crime and blame an implant, how would the legal system determine fault? As neural interfaces and artificial intelligence evolve, these tensions will probably intensify.

All the scientists and engineers I spoke to acknowledged the ethical issues posed by neural interfaces, yet most were more preoccupied with consent and safety than what they regarded as far-off or unproven concerns about privacy and agency. In the world of academic scientific research, the appropriate future boundaries for the technology remain contentious.

In the private sector, ethics are often a footnote to enthusiasm, when they are mentioned at all. As pressure builds to secure funding and commercialize, spectacular and sometimes terrifying claims proliferate. Christian Angermayer, a German entrepreneur and investor, has said he is confident that everyone will be using brain-computer interfaces within 20 years. “It is fundamentally an input-output device for the brain, and it can benefit a large portion of society,” he posted on LinkedIn last year. “People will communicate with each other, get work done and even create beautiful artwork, directly with their minds.” Musk has described the ultimate goal of Neuralink as achieving “a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence” so that humanity is not obliterated, subjugated or “left behind” by superintelligent machines. “If you can’t beat em, join em,” he once said on Twitter, calling it a “Neuralink mission statement.” And Max Hodak, a former Neuralink president who was forced out of the company, then went on to found a new one called Science, dreams of using neural implants to make the human sensorium “directly programmable” and thereby create a “world of bits”: a parallel virtual environment, a lucid waking dream, that appears every time someone closes their eyes.

Today, DeGray, 68, still resides in the Menlo Park assisted-living facility he chose a decade ago for its proximity to Stanford. He still has the same two electrode arrays that Henderson embedded in his brain six years ago, as well as the protruding metal pedestals that provide connection points to external machines. Most of the time, he doesn’t feel their presence, though an accidental knock can reverberate through his skull as if it were a struck gong. In his everyday life, he relies on round-the-clock attention from caregivers and a suite of assistive technologies, including voice commands and head-motion tracking. He can get around in a breath-operated wheelchair, but long trips are taxing. He spends much of his time reading news articles, scientific studies and fiction on his computer. “I really miss books,” he told me. “They smell nice and feel good in your hands.”

DeGray’s personal involvement in research on brain-computer interfaces has become the focus of his life. Scientists from Stanford visit his home twice a week, on average, to continue their studies. “I refer to myself as a test pilot,” he said. “My responsibility is to take a nice new airplane out every morning and fly the wings off of it. Then the engineers drag it back into the hangar and fix it up, and we do the whole thing again the next day.”

Exactly what DeGray experiences when he activates his neural interface depends on his task. Controlling a cursor with attempted hand movements, for example, “boils the whole world down to an Etch A Sketch. All you have is left, right, up and down.” Over time, this kind of control becomes so immediate and intuitive that it feels like a seamless extension of his will. In contrast, maneuvering a robot arm in three dimensions is a much more reciprocal process: “I’m not making it do stuff,” he told me. “It’s working with me in the most versatile of ways. The two of us together are like a dance.”

No one knows exactly how long existing electrode arrays can remain in a human brain without breaking down or endangering someone’s health. Although DeGray can request explantation at any time, he wants to continue as a research participant indefinitely. “I feel very validated in what I’m doing here,” he said. “It would break my heart if I had to get out of this program for some reason.”

Regarding the long-term future of the technology in his skull, however, he is somewhat conflicted. “I actually spend quite a bit of time worrying about this,” he told me. “I’m sure it will be misused, as every technology is when it first comes out. Hopefully that will drive some understanding of where it should reside in our civilization. I think ultimately you have to trust in the basic goodness of man — otherwise, you would not pursue any new technologies ever. You have to just develop it and let it become monetized and see where it goes. It’s like having a baby: You only get to raise them for a while, and then you have to turn them loose on the world.”

Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for the magazine. He has previously written about groundbreaking discoveries in neuroscience and medical interventions that may significantly extend the human life span.

The post The Man Who Controls Computers With His Mind appeared first on New York Times.

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And it looks like the the Santa Clara company wasn't exagerrating in its marketing talks as TPU is indeed mostly impressed by what AMD has been able to do with FSR 2.0. Here's what the site remarks in its conclusion:

AMD has achieved the unthinkable—the new FidelityFX Super Resolution FSR 2.0 looks amazing, just as good as DLSS 2.0, actually DLSS 2.3 (in Deathloop). Sometimes even slightly better, sometimes slightly worse, but overall this is a huge win for AMD.

[..] there's a huge improvement when comparing FSR 1.0 to FSR 2.0. The comparison to "Native" or "Native+TAA" also always looks worse than FSR 2.0, which is somewhat expected. When comparing "DLSS Quality" against "FSR 2.0 Quality" it is possible to spot minor differences, but for every case that I found I'd say it's impossible to declare one output better than the other, it's pretty much just personal preference, or not even that.

There are still some things like low resolution upscaling, which happens in Performance mode (image below), that isn't quite as good as DLSS since some AI-based image recreation maybe necessary at these lower pixel counts (50% of native in the case of Performance mode). There are also some minor issues with thin geometry.

Things look a bit different at the lower end of the spectrum, comparing "DLSS Performance" to "FSR 2.0 Performance". Here I would say that DLSS is slightly better, especially when it comes to textured surfaces. Thin geometry also looks a little bit more detailed with DLSS, but it's a very close outcome overall, especially considering that NVIDIA has had a lot of time to fine-tune DLSS, whereas FSR 2.0 is on its first iteration.

The video below shows the image quality comparison of FSR 2.0 against FSR 1.0 and DLSS 2.3:

You can find the full review of AMD's FSR 2.0 on TPU's site here.

AMD also announced yesterday that FSR 2.0 is coming to more titles including Asterigos, Delysium, EVE Online, Farming Simulator 22, Forspoken, Grounded, Microsoft Flight Simulator, NiShuiHan, Perfect World Remake, Swordsman Remake, and Unknown 9: Awakening.

First review of AMD FSR 2.0 shows it's indeed the Nvidia DLSS killer, most of the time

Google has wrapped up its two-hour-long I/O keynote, which was absolutely packed with news. We heard about AI, Android, and, of course, a plethora of Pixel hardware. Here are the biggest announcements we saw on Wednesday.

Google isn’t bumping the price of its A lineup. Image: Google

The Pixel 6A features Google’s flagship chip but not its best camera

Google announced its new mid-tier phone, the Pixel 6A, which will cost $449 when it’s available for preorder on July 21st. The company seems to be flipping its usual script for this phone — previous A models have featured a camera comparable to the one found on Google’s flagship Pixels but had weaker processors. The 6A, though, has the Pixel 6’s Tensor chip and design but opts for a 12-megapixel camera versus the 50MP one on the standard 6.

Oh, and despite the fact that Google released a two-minute ad about the Pixel 5A’s headphone jack last year, the 6A doesn’t have one. Womp womp.

Hey, look at that. The screen is on. Image: Google

The Pixel Watch is coming later this year

The Pixel Watch’s hardware was thoroughly leaked, so it’s no surprise that it’s showing up on this list, but Google’s finally given us a look at what the software will be like. The wearable will run an updated version of Wear OS 3 and will feature a Fitbit integration that lets you keep track of your health metrics. There are still some unanswered (and very important) questions about the watch, though: we don’t know what kind of chip it’ll be powered by nor do we know how much it’ll cost. It’s slated to launch later this fall alongside the Pixel 7.

Wait, Pixel 7?

Oh right. Yes, Google teased the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro with a few renders, showing that the phones will have some slightly different camera cutouts and back panel. Like Google’s current Pixels, the 7 and 7 Pro will have two and three cameras, respectively. The pink color will apparently be gone, though, so I’ll never be happy again.

Google’s Pixel Buds Pro have active noise cancellation

Let’s not beat around the bush here: Google has announced its version of Apple’s AirPods Pro. The Pixel Buds Pro will cost $199, feature active noise cancellation, and have an estimated seven hours of battery life when you’re using ANC. Google says the Buds have a custom audio chip and that they’ll support Bluetooth multipoint, letting them connect to two devices at once. That’s a neat trick and one that’s not particularly common in the earbud world. They’ll also come in several colors, including black, red, and green, and will be available to preorder on July 21st.

A preview of the Pixel tablet coming next year. Image: Google

A Tensor-powered tablet is coming

Google announced that it plans to release an Android-powered tablet next year to act as a “perfect companion for Pixel with a larger form factor.” The writing for this one has been on the wall for a while. (Android 12L focused on large-screen experiences, and there have been some tablet-related hires over in Mountain View.) But it’s good to hear that Google is looking to get into tablets again. The only real hardware detail we have about Google’s upcoming device is that it’ll have a Tensor chip in it.

Google Glass 2? Image: Google

Google’s working on AR Glasses

Right at the end of its presentation, Google showed off a pair of AR glasses that were capable of real-time translation during a conversation. There are pretty much no details on whether this will be a product people can buy, but it’s certainly interesting to see more hints of Google’s plan for joining companies like Snap and Meta in the race to put AR on your face.

Google Lens will be able to help you pick out chocolate. Image: Google

Google’s AI power is growing

As is often the case, Google’s I/O presentation was chock-full of AI news. Perhaps the biggest is that it’s going to start letting people test its language model. Not just anyone will be able to try out LaMDA 2, but eventually, Google hopes to bring the tech to search and its other products (though it wants to do so very slowly).

There were a bunch of smaller AI-related stories as well. Google announced that its auto-generated translations are coming to YouTube on mobile, that you’ll be able to just look at your Nest Hub Max and start talking to the assistant, and that your phone will be able to look at a shelf full of chocolate bars and pick one out for you based on what you’re looking for. That last one Google described as “a supercharged Ctrl-F for the world around you.”

The company’s also expanding its multisearch feature, which lets you search along multiple axes. For example, you can give Google a picture of a specific type of cuisine you’re looking for and ask it where you can find that nearby.

Google tries to show it’s serious about user privacy

Google had a whole set of security and privacy announcements, including plans for the My Ad Center interface: a hub that will let users customize the types of ads they see by selecting from a range of topics they are interested in or opt to see fewer ads on a given topic. It also said the company is focused on implementing additional security features for its products by default, in addition to the concept of “protected computing” to do more processing on-device rather than sending data elsewhere.

The next version of Android is available in Beta today. Image: Google

Android 13 doubles down on Android 12’s features

Google went over its plans for Android 13, and the next version of its mobile OS seems to be going further with the ideas introduced in Android 12. The company is adding Material You themes to more places, letting you set apps to use different languages, and adding a few security and privacy features. That doesn’t add up to an earth-shattering release, but as my colleague Jon Porter points out, that’s probably a good thing. Android 12 has been a bit messy, so a year of refinements and small improvements is probably warranted.

For those who want to try it out, the beta is available today.

Google Wallet is back

Google is bringing back its Wallet app as a place to hold not just your payment cards, but your passes, rewards program memberships, vaccination records, and more. Google says the app is built for the age of digital identity. While I realize that’s probably the future, that knowledge doesn’t make me miss my physical Google Wallet debit card any less.

London is one of the cities Immersive View is debuting in, along with San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. Image: Google

Google Maps is getting an “Immersive View”

Google’s adding a new mode to Maps, which is basically Street View from the sky — in select cities, you’ll be able to get an overview of a location to get a better view of the geography before getting lost in the streets below.

Update May 11th, 3:25PM ET: Added Google’s surprise AR glasses preview.

Google’s biggest announcements at I/O 2022

Intro to Tech Skills sessions at Microsoft Build 2022

Microsoft Build 2022 will be from May 24 to 26, and the event will be packed with a handful of informative discussions through “Intro to Tech Skills.” The sessions are specifically aimed at students and individuals hoping to learn new information about the latest technologies.

“From May 24 through May 26, Intro to Tech Skills sessions will give you the opportunity to learn about new technologies or areas of interest, figure out which ones are right for you, learn what to expect and how to get started,” says Microsoft in its blog post announcing the details of Intro to Tech Skills sessions. “You’ll get a better understanding of how developer technologies and tools work along with learning resources that can help you further your career in tech. And speaking of your career in tech, we have tips for you on that too!”

Generally, Intro to Tech Skills will be divided into 10. Each one will focus on certain topics that participants can choose to have. Nonetheless, there will also be other engaging student-centered activities aside from the main sessions, such as the “Minecraft time machine,” “AI match game,” and “Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge.”

Meanwhile, here is the complete list of session titles to expect and the topics they will be covering:

“Intro to Tech Skills”? Tell me more!

Hosted by Microsoft contributor Salman Chishti and Microsoft Regional Cloud Advocate Gwyn Peña-Siguenza, this session will last for two days for students and all kinds of tech learners. It will present valuable information about resources, programs, and upcoming sessions.

A peek inside the developer’s toolkit

The sessions will cover the basics of GitHub, Visual Studio Code, and other tools that developers are using to write and share code. This will be a helpful session for those new to the concept.

So many programming languages, so little time–which should I learn?

A handful of popular programming languages will be discussed in this session, such as C#, TypeScript, Python, and low-code programming.

“Hello, World!” in 3 programming languages

Perfect for new coders, this session will present a few popular programming languages.

A guided journey into AI

Speakers will give clear definitions and specific characteristics of AI, machine learning, and deep learning.

Driving inclusion and accessibility with dev tooling and AI services

The audience will receive recommendations on what actions to take to properly inject the concepts of inclusion and accessibility into the products they are building. 

Tackling the technical interview

Learners will be armed with knowledge on how to handle technical interviews. Questions and coding problems that are likely to be asked during interviews will be leaked.

Microsoft technologies and the dev community: Who’s building what? Get inspired!

Real-life scenarios produced by students, MVPs, and Cloud Advocates using Microsoft Azure, Power Platform, and Microsoft 365 will be presented.

Build your own resume website and stand out to recruiters

It is a 2-in-1 session that will help participants create an impressive resume and a website to attract clients and potential employers effectively.

The New Developer’s Guide to the Cloud

The fundamentals of the cloud will be tackled from .NET to Java to Node.js to Python.

To participate in the Microsoft Build 2022 from May 24 to 26, 2022, click here to register.

“Intro to Tech Skills” at Microsoft Build 2022 to offer 10 different sessions

But actually buying a new electric car? That's another matter entirely.

Volkswagen, the largest car manufacturer in the world, recently announced it had sold out of electric vehicles in the US and Europe for the rest of 2022. Ford's E-Transit sold out before it had even started making them.

Even the most basic (lower specification) version of Tesla's Model 3 vehicle will now not be delivered for over a year, despite the company being capable of the largest production volumes in the world—a recent halt in production in China notwithstanding.

Turn the clock back to 2019, just when the electric vehicle revolution was really getting going in terms of sales figures, and Tesla had stockpiles of cars in the U.K. they could deliver to customers within days. Now, even though they can produce vastly more vehicles, you will likely wait a long time for delivery of a new one.

For now, then, motorists who aspire to own a brand new electric vehicle will struggle to move forward. So too will those governments who have plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. In Norway for example, a ban is due to come into force in 2025; in the U.K., it is 2030.

These targets rely in large part on the usual cycle of vehicle replacement. And for old vehicles to be replaced by new ones, the supply needs to be at a level that can replenish those being scrapped, as well as allowing for some growth in demand.

At the moment, there are simply not enough electric vehicles being made to meet that demand. I am involved in ongoing research looking into how and when various firms are replacing their old internal combustion engine vehicles with electric ones—and one of the major barriers seems to be sourcing them. Government targets for roads full of electric vehicles may soon seem hopelessly unrealistic.

End of the road?

So what has gone wrong? To begin with, in the early days of electric vehicles, manufacturers were playing their cards safe. This was a new and unknown world for them, and it wasn't clear if other competing technologies (such as hydrogen power) might be more popular with consumers. But batteries won out, and consumer demand—helped along by those plans to ban petrol and diesel—soared.

Current issues have been brought on in part by COVID-19 affecting global supply chains and a shortage of semiconductors, a vital component of modern vehicles.

In spring 2022, Tesla had to close its Shanghai factory for three weeks due to lockdowns in China. Before that, it was producing around 2,000 cars per day for the Asian and European markets, so may have lost production of around 42,000 vehicles.

This equates to around three months' supply for a market like the UK. And just when it got the factory back open, it had to reduce production due to supply chain issues.

This is because Tesla doesn't make all the parts to build the cars in the one factory (although it produces more than the industry average), so as the factories that supply Tesla also shut due to lockdowns, the necessary parts do not arrive. CEO Elon Musk has now suggested his company may stop taking orders, telling the Financial Times: "The frustration we're seeing from customers is being unable to get them a car."

He added: "We are actually probably going to stop taking orders beyond a certain period of time because some of the timing is a year away."

Again, it is certainly not just Tesla that is affected. Semiconductor issues are ongoing, and many vehicles are being shipped without features, or parked in fields waiting for parts.

These backlogs will take a long time to clear, and will be a major headache for everyone concerned. Manufacturers and customers will be frustrated, while politicians relying on electric vehicles for the future of transport policy may need to adjust their expectations and demands.

Most importantly, the current situation is a terrible blow for global efforts to reduce carbon emissions and deal with climate change.

Pushing back important targets on road vehicles could be catastrophic for the planet, but we still need vehicles. We may now have to shift towards using fewer cars through more ride-sharing, or look to alternative forms of transport, and even converting older cars to electric. If we don't, the drive to net-zero could soon be running on empty.

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