Quick Overview
- AI: New AI on the block lets you generate infinite faces that look completely real
- COMPUTING: Samsung gives some love to older S8 phones, rolls out Android Pie
- COMPUTING: Gmail finally adds scheduled emails after 15 damn years!
- CRYPTO: Ledger rolls out OTG support for Nano S and their Ledger Live Mobile App
- CRYPTO: Elon Musk gets forcibly elected as the new CEO for Dogecoin
- ENERGY: 1/3rd of Global Power Capacity is now Renewable! Woooo!
- ENERGY: The Australian Greens party releases their plan to actually help Climate Change!
- ROBOTICS: Boston Dynamics releases Pick, its sweet ass depalletizing robot arm
- ROBOTICS: Boston Dynamics also releases Handle, a truly… weird… robot thing???
- TRANSPORT: For the first time in history, more electric cars sold in Norway than fossil
- STUPIDITY: The EU has actually signed off on their idiotic new Copyright law…
We believe that everyone’s future can be richer, happier and more efficient, but you can’t embrace that future unless you take the first most crucial step, being informed of it.
Welcome to The Tipping Point, news from the most critical future industries curated for you every week so you can stay informed and prepared. No need to waste hours everyday researching, stay on top of it all with one post and then get back to doing what you do best.
The Tipping point is named after the point at which a new technology goes from being disappointing, expensive and buggy to exciting, exponential, cheap and mainstream. This point of change often sneaks up on and surprises everyone including industry experts!
No matter if you’re personally employed in the industry or just a lurker, The Tipping Point is vital to staying up to date and being ready to transition smoothly rather than getting caught off guard.
This Weeks News!
AI: New AI on the block lets you generate infinite faces that look completely real
Think you know the difference between a real human face and a totally fictional, AI generated one? Well check out this new GAN that spits them out like a candy machine! There’s even instructions for you to train and run the neural network yourself at home (assuming you’ve got the GPU’s punk!). At any rate, besides being a fun game and project it really does drive home just how easy it is for someone – anyone! – to produce completely fake, lifelike imagery now.
COMPUTING: Samsung gives some love to older S8 phones, rolls out Android Pie
With Samsung’s huge launch of their Galaxy S10 line up along side their very welcome “One UI” software refresh, it’s easy to get lost and not acknowledge some really top notch other work of theirs. They have, in a very timely manner, rolled out the One UI refresh and Android 9 update to many other, older phones right back to the Galaxy S8 and S8+ lines. This is excellent support of what is now a 2+ year old phone line and should be thoroughly congratulated. Damn nice work Sammy, keep it up! Also, if you’ve got yourself a S8/S8+/S9/S9+/Note 9 etc Samsung phone, be on the look out for your update too!
COMPUTING: Gmail finally adds scheduled emails after 15 damn years!
After launching 15 years ago on April Fools day none the less, Gmail is finally allowing its users to schedule their email sending. While the feature has been available for a few years now through third party add-ons, it’s always nice to see these sorts of core features built in. They’ve also improved their Smart Compose feature but still haven’t quite ported all the features from their other email program, Inbox… which has now been brutally murdered by Google. RIP Inbox.
CRYPTO: Ledger rolls out OTG support for Nano S and their Ledger Live Mobile App
While the new Ledger Nano X and its Bluetooth connectivity to your smartphone is a great solution for on the go, crypto hardware wallet use, Ledger has also managed to make their Ledger Live Mobile App work with their older line Nano S product too. Simply download the app, buy an OTG USB cable and plug your Nano S into your Android mobile. From here you’ll be able to send and receive crypto just as you would on your main PC.
CRYPTO: Elon Musk gets forcibly elected as the new CEO for Dogecoin
He may not have asked for it, he may not have even ever thought about asking for it, but that hasn’t stopped the Internet from deciding it for him. The official Dogecoin Twitter account put it to their followers and their decision was clear. Elon Musk was the run away favourite and is now officially the CEO of Dogecoin. Who knows, maybe with his SpaceX contacts and rocket propulsion knowledge he can get it to the Moon?
ENERGY: 1/3rd of Global Power Capacity is now Renewable! Woooo!
While there’s a lot of hugely concerning news about how bad Climate Change is and how quickly we now must act due to decades of inaction, there is a bit of positive news. A full one third of the worlds global power capacity is now powered by renewables! Hopefully it continues to accelerate even more rapidly from here and we can get most of the worlds power off fossil fuels by 2030 or so.
ENERGY: The Australian Greens party releases their plan to actually help Climate Change!
Some other excellent work is also coming out from the Greens party here in Australia weeks before the nation is set to go to its Federal Election. While the other parties push for 26% or 50% targets by 2030 that don’t properly deal with the realities of Climate Change, they’ve gone full hog and set out their vision called Renew Australia. It details a real plan to reach 100% renewable energy and to end coal exports and to ban new petrol and diesel cars all by 2030. It’s definitely worth a look given literally everyones future depends on it.
We have a choice, we can create those groundbreaking clean technologies at home and sell them to the world, or we can prop up the polluting exports of the past and wait until they are replaced by someone else.
We can plan for this inevitable transition and to support coal workers and their communities, or we can leave it up to the boardrooms of multinational energy companies to decide when those workers will lose their jobs and when their communities are forced to transition.
ROBOTICS: Boston Dynamics releases Pick, its sweet ass depalletizing robot arm
Do you have a huge amount of random boxes that are sitting on pallets and need to be depalletized? I know I do! That’s why Boston Dynamics has taken time out of its busy schedule creating the T-800 to build Pick, their new sweet ass robot arm.
As you can see, it can palletize or depalletize boxes basically at the speed of a fit human. The difference is that Pick can keep up that speed 24/7/365 and do it for free too, all without throwing out its back! What will those robots think of next?
ROBOTICS: Boston Dynamics also releases Handle, a truly… weird… robot thing???
Not being content with one relatively normal looking robot arm, Boston Dynamics have gone ahead and also announced Handle, their more mobile… bobbing robot suction pet type thing. Honestly I don’t know how the hell to describe it!
Like Pick it uses suction cups to pick up and put down packages, but it can also use its wheels and super odd butt weight thing to move around the wharehouse too. Personally I think they just wanted to make the worlds biggest, scariest Drinking Bird robot.
TRANSPORT: For the first time in history, more electric cars sold in Norway than fossil
With the help of Tesla’s Model 3 swamping Europe with deliveries Norway has passed a very special milestone. More electric new cars were sold than fossil fuel cars. In all 58% of new cars sold in the country last month were all-electric, a fantastic effort and shows just how far ahead of the rest of the world they really are. Looking at the slew of soon to be released EV’s it’s also doubtful if this number will ever drop back below 50% again. You heard it in Norway first, the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) car is dead. Long live the far superior EV car!
STUPIDITY: The EU has actually signed off on their idiotic new Copyright law…
Yes you read that right. Stupidity has taken full control over in the EU with them actually signing into law the horrible, disastrous Copyright law. Over five million people petitioned against it online, over 100,000 physically protested against it IRL, even huge powerful companies, academics, technologists and human rights experts all tried to stop it! But no. The consequences?
EU Directives have to be transposed: written into each member country’s national law. Countries have until 2021 to transpose the Copyright Directive, but EU rarely keeps its members to that deadline, so it could take even longer.
Clearly, we’re going to see this idiocy play out in super-slow mo… fun.
See you next week and let us know in the comments if you’ve seen some other great new tech news!
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