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Big Tech &
Startups
Samsung's CES 2021 robots will clean your house and pour you a glass of wine (6 minute read)
Samsung unveiled three new robots at its virtual CES press conference on Monday. This year, the company emphasized the importance of AI to all of Samsung's products. Many of Samsung's AI applications run in the background, with the goal of being more personal and predictive. The JetBot 90 AI Plus is a robot vacuum that uses object recognition technology to identify the best cleaning path. It can empty itself, and it doubles as a home monitoring device. Bot Care is a robot assistant and companion that can learn about you and send you reminders throughout the day. The Samsung Bot Handy was designed to be an extra hand around the house. It can pick up and move objects and do things like sort dishes after a meal.
This is Sonyโs Airpeak drone (1 minute read)
Sony unveiled its new Airpeak drone at CES 2021. It is the smallest drone capable of carrying an Alpha camera. The drone was designed for video content creation and professional photography. It has a quadcopter design that features two retractable landing gear extensions. A video that shows off its capabilities as a chase camera is available in the article.
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Science &
Futuristic Technology
Synthetic Celebrity: Cloning A Billion Digital Selves For Fun And Profit (5 minute read)
Reface is a platform for making deepfake videos using celebrity likenesses. It has grown to three million active users from 10,000 in just six weeks. The company has been working on technology that enables near-infinite content personalization using anyone's face and body. Reface focuses on the fun aspect of creating deepfakes, with intentionally lower quality videos and techniques embedded in the videos to help identify them as deepfakes in case anyone tries to pass off one of its videos as real. The company aims to eventually allow people to license their likenesses for brands.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
Docker BuildKit: faster builds, new features, and now itโs stable (7 minute read)
Docker BuildKit is a new backend for building images. It features faster builds using parallelism, support for securely passing build secrets, upgradeability, and more. There are still some issues with it, but workarounds are available. BuildKit is enabled by default on new macOS and Windows installs, so developers should make sure their builds work correctly on it.
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Miscellaneous
A โno mathโ (but seven-part)
Quantum mechanics have entered into our everyday experience with modern technology, and the importance of quantum effects will only grow in the decades to come. This article is part of a seven-part series that introduces quantum mechanics and explains how it applies to our everyday world. The series promises no maths, no philosophy, and only experimentally verified information. This part of the series answers the deceptively simple question, "How do particles move?"