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Amazon’s Echo Show 5 falls to $40 in smart display sale

Posted on October 2, 2023 by

Amazon’s Echo Show smart displays with Alexa voice control are already a good value next to the competition, but a big smart display sale is making them even cheaper. The Show 5 is the least expensive, on sale right now for just $40, or 53 percent off the regular price — a great deal for Alexa capability with a display. And if you need a larger screen, the Echo Show 8 is priced at just $60 (54 percent off) and the Echo Show 10 is $160, for a savings of 36 percent. 

The Echo Show 5 scored a very solid 85 score in our Engadget review, as it’s small size is ideal if don’t have a ton of space on your desk, nightstand or countertop. It has a 5.5-inch, 960 x 480 resolution display that shows things like weather forecasts, calendar events, photos and more. The 2MP camera can be used to video chat with friends and family, but it can also be used as a makeshift security camera of sorts. And if you prefer you’re concerned about privacy, the Show 5 has a built-in camera shutter and mic mute button. It’s on sale by itself for $40 in several colors (Charcoal, Cloud Blue and Glacier White). However, you can also grab it with a Blink Mini camera for $45 (64 percent off) and the best deal is with a Philips Hue Smart Color Bulb ($42, or 71 percent off).  
If you need a larger screen, the second-generation Show 8 is available for just $60. It earned an Engadget score of 87, thanks to its 8-inch 1,280 x 800 touchscreen, minimalist design and stellar sound quality. It differs from the first-generation device in several ways, particularly with the updated 13-megapixel camera that digitally pans and zooms to keep you in frame when you’re doing video chats on apps like Zoom. It’s a particularly nice feature if you frequently use your smart display as a stationary video-chatting device. It also works great as a photo frame, and Amazon’s updated home screen lets you see multiple items at once like the weather and sports.
Finally, the Echo Show 10 is available for $160 (36 percent off). It earned an Engadget score of 83 back in 2021, thanks to features like the unusual rotating screen that makes it easy to see information at a glance and participate in video calls while completing other tasks. It also sounds and looks great, and can double as a security camera. Those are just a few of the many deals available at Amazon’s smart display sale, for the rest, check here. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazons-echo-show-5-falls-to-40-in-smart-display-sale-083523636.html?src=rss

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Amazon’s Fire HD 8 tablet drops to $60 in early October Prime Day sale

Posted on October 2, 2023 by

Amazon has kicked off a new Fire tablet sale ahead of its Prime Big Deal Days event later this month. The discounts include the Fire HD 8 down to $60, the Fire HD 8 Plus for $70, the Fire Max 11 for $150, the previous-generation Fire HD 10 for $75 and the Fire 7 for $40, among others. All of those deals either match or come within a few dollars of the lowest prices we’ve seen, and unlike most of the offers that’ll be available during the Big Deal Days sale, they aren’t limited to Amazon Prime subscribers.

All Fire tablets still come with the usual caveats: They aren’t nearly as fast or premium-feeling as a good iPad or Galaxy Tab, their displays aren’t as vivid and their app selection is more limited. They lack official access to the Google Play Store, so there’s no Google apps like Gmail or YouTube. (It’s possible to install the Play Store with a workaround, though that’s a bit of a pain.) They also display ads on the lock screen unless you pay an extra fee or use a Kids model. 
All that said, they play well with Amazon services like Alexa and Prime Video (natch), they support most of the other major streaming apps and the better models are just quick enough for the basics. Ultimately, though, it’s all about price. If you just want a large screen for streaming video, reading ebooks and browsing the web, most Fire slates let you do so for dirt cheap, so they’re better buys when they’re on sale.
Of the models discounted now, the 8-inch Fire HD 8 and Fire HD 8 Plus may be the best values for most. Each is saddled with a 1,280 x 800 resolution display, so text and images won’t be especially sharp, but they can get decently bright, and the hardware as a whole is lightweight and fairly durable. Both devices can last more than 10 hours on a charge, and while they only come with 32GB of storage, you can expand that up to 1TB with a microSD card. Between the two, the Fire HD 8 Plus comes with an extra gigabyte of RAM (3GB total), so it’ll be a little smoother to navigate Amazon’s Fire OS if you can afford the extra $10. Neither tablet is outright fast, though, so don’t expect to do more than the essentials. At these prices, both slates are only $5 more than their respective all-time lows.
You can opt for the Fire 7 if you want a second screen for as little as possible, but it’s slower and lower-res than the Fire HD 8, so we recommend paying for the latter if possible. The last-gen Fire HD 10 is still faster than either of those and packs a 10.1-inch 1080p display, so it’s a decent value at $75, but Amazon recently launched an updated model, so it’s technically out of date. (The new Fire HD 10 isn’t included in the sale.)
 The 11-inch Fire Max 11, meanwhile, is the most premium tablet in Amazon’s lineup, with a beefier processor and an aluminum chassis; it’s an easier sell at $150, which matches its all-time low, though it has all the same software limitations as the lower-end options. 
Finally, the Kids versions of various Fire tablets are also discounted. As a reminder, those have the same hardware as the standard models, but add large protective cases, a more kid-friendly default UI, two-year warranties and one-year subscriptions to Amazon’s Kids+ content service.
Your October Prime Day Shopping Guide: See all of our Prime Day coverage. Shop the best Prime Day deals on Yahoo Life. Follow Engadget for Prime Day tech deals. Learn about Prime Day trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Fall Prime Day deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Prime Day sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazons-fire-hd-8-tablet-drops-to-60-in-early-october-prime-day-sale-074518261.html?src=rss

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Procurement is painful, so Pivot wants to simplify it

Posted on October 2, 2023 by

Earlier this year, a big French tech company started requiring an email to the CEO for every purchase above €1,000. That’s because they didn’t have the right tool to manage procurement. Meet Pivot, a new French startup that wants to overhaul spend management solutions. Pivot wants to work with young companies that are growing fast

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Sophie Turner Leans on Taylor Swift Amid High-Profile Divorce

Posted on October 2, 2023 by Livio Andrea Acerbo

Sophie Turner, known for her role as Sansa Stark in “Game of Thrones,” is currently in the midst of a high-profile divorce and custody battle with Joe Jonas. Amid these…

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Top 6 News of the Day: A Brief Overview

Posted on October 2, 2023 by Livio Andrea Acerbo

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s essential to stay informed about the latest news and events. Here’s a quick rundown of the top 6 news stories making headlines today. 1. Former…

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AI assistants boost productivity but paradoxically risk human deskilling

AI assistants boost productivity but paradoxically risk human deskilling

Posted on October 1, 2023 by

AI assistants can boost productivity if used judiciously, but we must not implement the technology in ways that degrade human capabilities.

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Apple plans to upgrade the App Store’s search engine, and it might not stop there

Apple plans to upgrade the App Store’s search engine, and it might not stop there

Posted on October 1, 2023 by

Illustration: The Verge

Apple will soon bring its powerful internal search engine to the App Store and other apps, as Mark Gurman reports in this week’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg. Apple debuted upgrades to its Spotlight search feature in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, letting users search there for web results, details from apps, documents, and much more.
According to the newsletter, former Google executive John Giannandrea’s search team is working to bake the internally-named “Pegasus” search engine more deeply into iOS and macOS and could even use generative AI tools to enhance it further. Last year Apple also launched Business Connect, a tool that helped strengthen its information database with details about businesses’ hours and locations in a way that could…

Continue reading…

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Quizzing Intel exec Sandra Rivera about generative AI and more

Quizzing Intel exec Sandra Rivera about generative AI and more

Posted on October 1, 2023 by

I had a chance to pick the brain of Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center and AI Group at Intel.

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Hitting the Books: We are the frogs in the boiling pot, it’s time we started governing like it.

Hitting the Books: We are the frogs in the boiling pot, it’s time we started governing like it.

Posted on October 1, 2023 by

Climate change isn’t going away, and it isn’t going to get any better — at least if we keep legislating as we have been. In Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation, a multidisciplinary collection of subject matter experts discuss the increasingly intertwined fates of American ecology and democracy, arguing that only by strengthening our existing institutions will we be able to weather the oncoming “long emergency.”
In the excerpt below, contributing author and Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo, Holly Jean Buck, explores how accelerating climate change, the modern internet and authoritarianism’s recent renaissance are influencing and amplifying one another’s negative impacts, to the detriment of us all.  
MIT Press
Excerpted from Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation, edited by David W. Orr. Published by MIT Press. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved.

Burning hills and glowing red skies, stone-dry riverbeds, expanses of brown water engulfing tiny human rooftops. This is the setting for the twenty-first century. What is the plot? For many of us working on climate and energy, the story of this century is about making the energy transition happen. This is when we completely transform both energy and land use in order to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change — or fail to.
Confronting authoritarianism is even more urgent. About four billion people, or 54 percent of the world, in ninety-five countries, live under tyranny in fully authoritarian or competitive authoritarian regimes. The twenty-first century is also about the struggle against new and rising forms of authoritarianism. In this narration, the twenty-first century began with a wave of crushed democratic uprisings and continued with the election of authoritarian leaders around the world who began to dismantle democratic institutions. Any illusion of the success of globalization, or of the twenty-first century representing a break from the brutal twentieth century, was stripped away with Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine. The plot is less clear, given the failure of democracy-building efforts in the twentieth century. There is a faintly discernable storyline of general resistance and rebuilding imperfect democracies.
There’s also a third story about this century: the penetration of the Internet into every sphere of daily, social, and political life. Despite turn-of-the-century talk about the Information Age, we are only beginning to conceptualize what this means. Right now, the current plot is about the centralization of discourse on a few corporate platforms. The rise of the platforms brings potential to network democratic uprisings, as well as buoy authoritarian leaders through post-truth memes and algorithms optimized to dish out anger and hatred. This is a more challenging story to narrate, because the setting is everywhere. The story unfolds in our bedrooms while we should be sleeping or waking up, filling the most quotidian moments of waiting in line in the grocery store or while in transit. The characters are us, even more intimately than with climate change. It makes it hard to see the shape and meaning of this story. And while we are increasingly aware of the influence that shifting our media and social lives onto big tech platforms has on our democracy, less attention is devoted to the influence this has on our ability to respond to climate change.
Think about these three forces meeting — climate change, authoritarianism, the Internet. What comes to mind? If you recombine the familiar characters from these stories, perhaps it looks like climate activists using the capabilities of the Internet to further both networked protest and energy democracy. In particular, advocacy for a version of “energy democracy” that looks like wind, water, and solar; decentralized systems; and local community control of energy.
In this essay, I would like to suggest that this is not actually where the three forces of rising authoritarianism x climate change x tech platforms domination leads. Rather, the political economy of online media has boxed us into a social landscape wherein both the political consensus and the infrastructure we need for the energy transition is impossible to build. The current configuration of the Internet is a key obstacle to climate action.
The possibilities of climate action exist within a media ecosystem that has monetized our attention and that profits from our hate and division. Algorithms that reap advertising profits from maximizing time-on-site have figured out that what keeps us clicking is anger. Even worse, the system is addictive, with notifications delivering hits of dopamine in a part of what historian and addiction expert David Courtwright calls “limbic capitalism.” Society has more or less sleepwalked into this outrage-industrial complex without having a real analytic framework for understanding it. The tech platforms and some research groups or think tanks offer up “misinformation” or “disinformation” as the framework, which present the problem as if the problem is bad content poisoning the well, rather than the structure itself being rotten. As Evgeny Morozov has quipped, “Post-truth is to digital capitalism what pollution is to fossil capitalism — a by-product of operations.”
A number of works outline the contours and dynamics of the current media ecology and what it does — Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Antisocial Media, Safiya U. Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, Geert Lovink’s Sad by Design, Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, Tim Hwang’s Subprime Attention Crisis, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s writing on how to understand the social relations of Internet technologies through racial capitalism, and many more. At the same time, there’s reasonable counter-discussion about how many of our problems can really be laid at the feet of social media. The research on the impacts of social media on political dysfunction, mental health, and society writ large does not paint a neat portrait. Scholars have argued that putting too much emphasis on the platforms can be too simplistic and reeks of technological determinism; they have also pointed out that cultures like the United States’ and the legacy media have a long history with post-truth. That said, there are certainly dynamics going on that we did not anticipate, and we don’t seem quite sure what to do with them, even with multiple areas of scholarship in communication, disinformation, and social media and democracy working on these inquiries for years.
What seems clear is that the Internet is not the connectedness we imagined. The ecology and spirituality of the 1960s, which shaped and structured much of what we see as energy democracy and the good future today, told us we were all connected. Globally networked — it sounds familiar, like a fevered dream from the 1980s or 1990s, a dream that in turn had its roots in the 1960s and before. Media theorist Geert Lovink reflects on a 1996 interview with John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder and Grateful Dead lyricist, in which Barlow was describing how cyberspace was connecting each and every synapse of all citizens on the planet. As Lovink writes, “Apart from the so-called last billion we’re there now. This is what we can all agree on. The corona crisis is the first Event in World History where the internet doesn’t merely play ‘a role’ — the Event coincides with the Net. There’s a deep irony to this. The virus and the network … sigh, that’s an old trope, right?” Indeed, read through one cultural history, it seems obvious that we would reach this point of being globally networked, and that the Internet would not just “play a role” in global events like COVID-19 or climate change, but shape them.
What if the Internet actually has connected us, more deeply than we normally give it credit for? What if the we’re-all-connected-ness imagined in the latter half of the twentieth century is in fact showing up, but manifesting late, and not at all like we thought? We really are connected — but our global body is neither a psychedelic collective consciousness nor a infrastructure for data transmission comprising information packets and code. It seems that we’ve made a collective brain that doesn’t act much like a computer at all. It runs on data, code, binary digits — but it acts emotionally, irrationally, in a fight-or-flight way, and without consciousness. It’s an entity that operates as an emotional toddler, rather than with the neat computational sensing capacity that stock graphics of “the Internet” convey. Thinking of it as data or information is the same as thinking that a network of cells is a person.
The thing we’re jacked into and collectively creating seems more like a global endocrine system than anything we might have visualized in the years while “cyber” was a prefix. This may seem a banal observation, given that Marshall McLuhan was talking about the global nervous system more than fifty years ago. We had enthusiasm about cybernetics and global connectivity over the decades and, more recently, a revitalization of theory about networks and kinship and rhizomes and all the rest. (The irony is that with fifty years of talk on “systems thinking,” we still have responses to things like COVID-19 or climate that are almost antithetical to considering interconnected systems — dominated by one set of expertise and failing to incorporate the social sciences and humanities). So — globally connected, yet divided into silos, camps, echo-chambers, and so on. Social media platforms are acting as agents, structuring our interactions and our spaces for dialogue and solution-building. Authoritarians know this, and this is why they have troll farms that can manipulate the range of solutions and the sentiments about them.
The Internet as we experience it represents a central obstacle to climate action, through several mechanisms. Promotion of false information about climate change is only one of them. There’s general political polarization, which inhibits the coalitions we need to build to realize clean energy, as well as creates paralyzing infighting within the climate movement about strategies, which the platforms benefit from. There’s networked opposition to the infrastructure we need for the energy transition. There’s the constant distraction from the climate crisis, in the form of the churning scandals of the day, in an attention economy where all topics compete for mental energy. And there’s the drain of time and attention spent on these platforms rather than in real-world actions.
Any of these areas are worth spending time on, but this essay focuses on how the contemporary media ecology interferes with climate strategy and infrastructure in particular. To understand the dynamic, we need to take a closer look at the concept of energy democracy, as generally understood by the climate movement, and its tenets: renewable, small-scale systems, and community control. The bitter irony of the current moment is that it’s not just rising authoritarianism that is blocking us from good futures. It’s also our narrow and warped conceptions of democracy that are trapping us.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-democracy-in-a-hotter-time-david-orr-mit-press-143034391.html?src=rss

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A tale of two research institutes

Posted on October 1, 2023 by

If you’re lucky, once a year you get to put together a panel built on pure kismet. Pairing Gill Pratt with Marc Raibert was exactly that for me. The two go back several decades, to the salad days of MIT’s Leg Lab. [A version of this story original appeared in TechCrunch’s robotics newsletter, Actuator. Subscribe

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