TechRadar

In the aftermath of a typically loud and boisterous Fourth of July celebration in the US, our feeds were filled with countless photos and videos of fireworks. They're all bright, brilliant, colorful, and sharp – and many were taken with the best smartphones. I've been photographing fireworks, or at least trying to, for nearly 20 years. Digital photography, with its endless supply of files in place of film, meant I could experiment with lenses, aperture settings, and shutter speeds to capture distant explosions and spectacular cascades of lights, usually in red, white, and blue. Most of my early success came from my Canon EOS Digital Rebel. I'd crank the IOS to 400, set my aperture at 5.6 to pull in as much light as possible, and give the shutter 8 seconds or more to capture the full effect… #iphone #apple #photography #tech #fireworks

Some day, there may be an Artificial Intelligence Olympics, where generative AIs face off to create the wildest images, videos, and hallucinative text responses. In the meantime, we have the real Olympics, starting July 26 in Paris, France. They will feature flesh and blood athletes, but behind the scenes will be AI chatting with athletes, chunking up highlight reels, and telling attendees which Olympic sport they're best equipped to compete in (at least in their fantasies). "Our big focus for these games, which makes sense as it's really the hot topic right now, is artificial intelligence, and so we are the official artificial intelligence platform provider for the Olympic Games," said Sarah Vickers, who leads Intel's Olympic and Paralympic Games Office. I spoke to Vickers just as she was about to fly off for Paris, where she'll spend the next two months overseeing more than 100 Intel employees building and integrating Intel's Olympics AI strategy… Intel Corporation #intel #olympics #technology #ai #artificialintelligence #sports

Is Gen Z really different from the rest of us? The alchemy of being born between 1997 and 2012 has delivered a generation of not exactly non-conformists but some seemingly disengaged youths. I mean, they must be disengaged because they see everything differently. Or is it more clearly? Jigsaw, which is part of Google and tasked with researching "threats to open societies," studied the increasingly influential Gen Z generation to understand how they consume information, what they trust and don't trust, and how they divine facts and truth, according to a detailed report in Business Insider. The results were startling to Google and Jigsaw, but I could've saved them time and trouble by detailing my ongoing research involving my Gen Z relation. My non-binary child is 26 and has been schooling me for years on what people their age do and don't do. I understand how they connect or do not connect with peers, gather information, reach consensus, and mostly not take action that they'd perceive as pointless anyway… #genz #socialmedia #tech

The squirrel parked itself in my bird feeder, greedily consuming every seed. I wished, not for the first or last time, that I could shout at the furry pet to get him off the perch and give my beloved feathered friends a chance at a snack. I ran out my back door and shooed the rodent who launched himself off my Bird Buddy and sent most of the seeds flying out onto the ground. Aside from the frustration that Bird Buddy, a smart bird feeder with a built-in camera that you can hang from a tree or screw into a perch, does not include a tiny speaker that could carry my voice from the app to right where the squirrel is staring into the camera, I love this gadget… #gadget #birdwatcher #birding #tech #smarthome

The new era of CoPilot+ PCs is upon us, bursting onto the scene at your local Best Buy with a bevy of laptops all designed to do AI tasks locally. To be clear, there are two classes of these new AI PCs. All have a new, almost indescribable Copilot keyboard button (it looks nothing like a copilot on an airplane), but only Copilot+ PCs with new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite or X Plus chips are ready to perform a variety of local AI tricks and tasks. On June 18, 2024 – the official launch day – I subwayed downtown to a huge Best Buy to see, touch, and play with all those new Copilot+ PCs. There are a lot of them. Five manufacturers are rolling out these laptops, including Lenovo, Samsung, HP, Dell, and Microsoft… #aipc #ai #qualcomm #lenovo #dell #copilot #microsoft #windows

Google is search. It has competitors, but they're like barnacles on the base of a mighty ship, slicing through the internet. No one does search better and yet, Google insists on mucking up its stellar results with, naturally, artificial intelligence. If you know me – and by now I assume you do – I'm no Luddite. I love new technology and am especially intrigued by AI, which I've been covering for almost 20 years. Granted the last two years have been almost nothing like the preceding 18, where AI was understood as a powerful and growing tech sector that could automate processes, manage simple tasks behind the scenes, and to a very limited degree power chatbot conversations. Now, AI is like the Frank's Red Hot Sauce tagline: "I put that sh*t on everything." The algorithm and machine-learning-driven technology is everywhere, an inescapable fact of modern life and a potential disrupter to the established way of doing almost anything… #google #search #ai #tech

The dirty secret about Google Gemini (and probably all AI) is that it's built for lazy people like me. At the Google I/O keynote on Tuesday, Google spent hours showing us the myriad ways Gemini and its associated technologies could pick up the slack for us – or, more specifically, me, the laziest person you'll ever meet. I know what you're thinking, "No, no, Lance, you seem like a real hardworking guy." It's a lie. I've spent my decades-long career finding shortcuts - and AI is my white whale. Instead of riding a giant vessel into an uncertain fate, Google has handed me the whale...er...AI on a platter the size of a typical smartphone. In Google's developing vision, there are so many things I no longer have to do for myself. This is laziness nirvana… #google #googleio #ai #gemini #tech