Author: Geek Planet

The holiday shopping season is the Super Bowl for most consumer brands. But in order to succeed, brands need to be training all year long, according to Traackr CEO Pierre-Loïc Assayag. “This is a year-long effort. There’s no such thing as succeeding during a period of time without having done the legwork beforehand,” he said. “For a creator post to resonate with their audience, there needs to be a sense of authenticity.” For its 2025 Holiday Shopping Report, the influencer marketing platform tracked the top brands according to VIT, Traackr’s proprietary metric for visibility, impact and trust, for the 2024…

Samsung is pushing lock screen customization a step further on Galaxy phones. A fresh LockStar update expands Samsung unlock animations, giving you a quick way to make your phone feel different every time you unlock it. It’s simple, and it’s instantly noticeable. The Galaxy Store notes for LockStar 8.5.00.8 highlight added “Unlock Animation” effects and One UI 8.5 support, alongside a few quality of life tweaks. There’s one catch, Samsung doesn’t spell out which models get every feature, or when it lands everywhere. Unlock animations take center stage The headline change is the new unlock effects menu inside LockStar, with…

The public unveiling of OpenAI’s ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, was met with justified astonishment along with unjustified hopes and fears that computers might be on the verge of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the ability to perform cognitive tasks as well as or better than humans. It is now apparent that AGI is not imminent and is not going to be achieved by scaling up ChatGPT or other large language models (LLMs). The core problem is that LLMs are stochastic text predictors—nothing more—and using more data, more parameters, and more compute is not going to give LLMs an understanding of…

Heavens! Are You an AI Denialist? Source link

Using the Gemini overlay on Android today comes with a major limitation that breaks the flow of multitasking. When you trigger Gemini using the hotword or by long pressing the power button, the assistant appears on top of whatever app you are using. But despite looking like an overlay, it does not behave like one. The moment you tap the background to return to another app, Gemini shuts down entirely. When you bring it back, the conversation is gone, and you have to start over, making longer or slower tasks frustrating to use. Google is now working on a fix…

This article, Journal of Medical Ethics: Let Organ Harvesting Surgeons Kill Patients | National Review, is republished from National Review with the permission of the author. The “dead donor rule” (DDR) is a legal and ethical mandate that requires vital organ donors to be truly dead before their body parts are procured. A corollary to the rule holds that people cannot be killed for their organs. The DDR promotes trust in the system and protects the vulnerable — but is flexible enough to permit living donations of one kidney and parts of a liver from altruistic donors. Utilitarian bioethicists have…

I’m always surprised how many nerds play musical instruments. There’s a lot of math in music. The western scale is based on natural acoustic harmonics from the physics of vibrating strings and resonant acoustics from sound columns. The ratio of the frequency of two adjacent notes on the piano or guitar is the twelfth root of 2. The spacing of the bridge to adjacent frets on a guitar has the same ratio. Changing frequencies forms melodies. There’s also rhythm. I’ve heard it said that our fondness of rhythm comes from listening to Mommy’s beating heart as a baby. (I read…

The latest chatter around Samsung’s next flagship lineup has one standout detail for budget buyers. A new tip says Galaxy S26 45W charging is headed to the base model, a jump that would make quick top-ups noticeably easier. The same post, shared by leaker on X, also claims the Galaxy S26+ sticks with 45W, while the Galaxy S26 Ultra reaches 60W. It even points to a February 25 Unpacked date, which helps explain why spec talk is heating up now. Samsung hasn’t confirmed any of this. Key anchors are still missing, including battery size, how charging speed holds up over…

Disney kicked things off by announcing that Disney+ subscribers will soon be able to spin up their own content using its characters. A former video game studio head chimed in to note that younger audiences are already using this stuff. And TikTok added more fuel by confirming its testing controls that lets users adjust the amount of AI-generated material in their feeds — an update that landed alongside the revelation that more than 1.3 billion videos on the platform now carry an AI label.  All of it points to an entertainment pipeline being retooled in real time, where the separation…

Doug Smith has been a software developer for three decades. He writes extensively about the impact of technology on culture, especially within the Christian church. He is an anti-LLM absolutist, and from what I can tell also an anti-AI absolutist. Large language models, or LLMs, being a subset of artificial intelligence, or AI, it’s strictly speaking possible to be entirely against LLMs and still allow some positive room for AI. But in my reading of Smith’s work, I can discover nothing positive from him about either. Smith, whose website is thatdougsmith.com, has for some time now been calling attention to destructive…