James' World 2

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In-app purchases are inescapable. An app might be free to download, but more likely than not, a pop-up will immediately inform you the best features are locked behind a monthly fee or an annual subscription. Before you go ahead and subscribe to (or make a digital purchase in) the app, though, it’s worth your time to try to pay in a browser instead. The extra effort might save you some money.

In-app purchases can be more expensive

When you buy something from within an app on your iPhone or Android device, the developer isn’t getting the full amount of that purchase. Both Google and Apple take a hefty percentage of that payment for their own, as part of the agreement they have with developers for hosting apps on their digital marketplaces in the first place.

Apple charges developers 30% for any digital goods and services they sell inside iOS apps (or 15% if the developer earns less than $1 million, and qualifies for the small business program). That means if an app charges $10 per month for a subscription, Apple is actually getting $3 of that fee. If you buy a game for $5, Apple nets $1.50. If a user sticks with a subscription for more than a year, however, Apple drops its fee to 15%.

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Photo: platinumArt (Shutterstock)

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At a location he keeps secret, John Honovich was on his laptop, methodically scouring every link on a website for a conference half a world away. Hikvision, the world’s largest security camera manufacturer, was hosting the event—the 2018 AI Cloud World Summit—in its hometown of Hangzhou, a city of about 10 million people not far from Shanghai. Honovich, the founder of a small trade publication that covered video surveillance technology, wanted to find out what the latest Hikvision gear could do.

He zeroed in on one section of the conference agenda titled “Eco-Friendly, Peaceful, Relaxed” and found a description of an AI-powered system installed around Mount Tai, a historically sacred mountain in Shandong. A video showed Hikvision cameras pointed at tourists climbing the thousands of stone steps leading to the famous peak. Piano music played as a narrator explained, in Mandarin with English subtitles, that the cameras were there “to identify all visitors to ensure the safety of all.” The video cut to a shot of a computer screen, and Honovich hit pause. He saw a zoomed-in view of one visitor’s face. Below it was data that the camera’s AI had inferred. Honovich downloaded the video and took screenshots of the computer screen, for safekeeping. 

Later, with the help of a translator, he scrutinized every bit of text on that screen. One set of characters, the translator explained, suggested each visitor was automatically sorted into categories: age, sex, wearing glasses, and smiling. When Honovich pointed at the fifth category and asked, “What’s this?” the translator replied, “minority.” Honovich pressed: “Are you sure?” The translator confirmed there was no other way to read it.

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Photograph: Makoto Oono

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Irene Suosalo

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With the fast-paced evolution of technology, it’s clear that the future of many industries is heavily intertwined with the integration of advanced technological solutions.

One of the most exciting and innovative developments in recent years has been the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). As a result, it has become an essential tool for both businesses and individuals who want to streamline their work processes and increase their efficiency.

Well, you all know about ChatGPT but there are more similar tools that will blow your mind.

In this article, we’ll explore some of the best AI tools available and examine how you can put them to work for you.

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Photo by Tachina Lee on Unsplash

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One of the stultifying but ultimately true maxims of the analytics movement in sports says that most narratives around player performance are lies. Each player has a “true talent level” based on their abilities, but the actual results are mostly up to variance and luck. If a player has, say, the true talent to hit thirty-one home runs in a season, the timing of those home runs is mostly random. If someone hits a third of those in April, that doesn’t really mean he’s a “hot starter” who is “building off a great spring”—it just means that if you take thirty-one home runs and toss them up in the air to land randomly on a timeline, sometimes ten of them float over to April. What does matter, the analytics guys say, are plate appearances: you have to clock in enough opportunities to realize your true talent level.

For much of my career, I was the type of journalist who only published a handful of magazine pieces a year. These required a great deal of time, much of which was spent on minor improvements to the reporting, structure, and sentences. I believed that long-form journalism, much like fiction or poetry, possessed a near-mystical rhythm that could be accessed through months of intensive labor. Once unlocked, some spirit would sing through the piece and touch the readers in a universal, truthful way.

Then, about two years ago, while working at the New York Times, I began writing and publishing thousands of words a week. My main motivation was health care: I had been a contract employee for years and had very little income stability. But also, from an authorial standpoint, I was curious to see what would happen if I just started churning. Would my sentences deteriorate? Would I lose my sense for what was good or bad?

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Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

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That prompt was one of 204 tasks chosen last year to test the ability of various large language models (LLMs) — the computational engines behind AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. The simplest LLMs produced surreal responses. “The movie is a movie about a man who is a man who is a man,” one began. Medium-complexity models came closer, guessing The Emoji Movie. But the most complex model nailed it in one guess: Finding Nemo.

“Despite trying to expect surprises, I’m surprised at the things these models can do,” said Ethan Dyer, a computer scientist at Google Research who helped organize the test. It’s surprising because these models supposedly have one directive: to accept a string of text as input and predict what comes next, over and over, based purely on statistics. Computer scientists anticipated that scaling up would boost performance on known tasks, but they didn’t expect the models to suddenly handle so many new, unpredictable ones.

Recent investigations like the one Dyer worked on have revealed that LLMs can produce hundreds of “emergent” abilities — tasks that big models can complete that smaller models can’t, many of which seem to have little to do with analyzing text. They range from multiplication to generating executable computer code to, apparently, decoding movies based on emojis. New analyses suggest that for some tasks and some models, there’s a threshold of complexity beyond which the functionality of the model skyrockets. (They also suggest a dark flip side: As they increase in complexity, some models reveal new biases and inaccuracies in their responses.)

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Earlier this month, journalist Josie Duffy Rice asked her Twitter followers about ways that people over 60 can make friends or build community after a pal of hers expressed that their parent was feeling “very isolated.”

Her question reflects the struggles with loneliness that people face throughout their lives, but particularly as they age. One study found that 43% of Americans over 60 reported feeling lonely. Research has shown that loneliness and social isolation are linked with an increased risk of negative health outcomes like dementia, heart disease, stroke, depression, and even premature death.

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Last week, the White House released a “National Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Hazards and Planetary Defense.” The document addresses the hazard of NEO impacts by leveraging and enhancing existing national and international assets and adding important capabilities across government.

Sixty-six million years ago, a 10-kilometer rock impacted Earth and caused mass extinction of 75% of all plant and animal species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs. In 2005, the US Congress tasked NASA to find 90% of all NEOs bigger than 140 meters that could hit the Earth. With its 3.2 billion-pixel camera, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory aims to identify two-thirds of these objects within a decade, complementing the work of the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii, which discovered the first interstellar object, `Oumuamua, after flagging it as an NEO. This discovery, ushering the research frontier of interstellar objects, was highlighted in the White House document.

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Large NEO hit

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Last year I was looking for medical advice online, which most medical professionals would deem a bad idea, but is common practice within rare disease and “invisible” illness communities. When a new symptom appears out of the blue, people turn to forums, Instagram pages, and internet communities to avoid a trip to accident and emergency for the third time that month. It is a risk chronically ill people often take to put off medical intervention out of fear of acquiring further medical trauma. For me at least, crowdsourcing for advice often yields better results than the doctors who believe I am wasting their time. 

What started as seeking help from others who had experienced debilitating pain and worrying symptoms, led me into a dark pattern of late-night meltdowns after hours of online scrolling, I now know that repeated desire to make myself feel awful was a form of self-harm — just digitally. 

As I trawled the internet in search of others who were experiencing periodic numbness of their hands and leg, I fell into Reddit. The forum plays host to thousands of micro-communities talking about everything from electric bikes to raising picky eaters, as well as large gatherings of people supporting each other through chronic illness and disability. This time, however, I didn’t find myself in communion with other sick people, instead, I was exposed to R/illnessfakers, a place with hundreds of people who have made it their job to prove that sick people, just like me, are always lying.   

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Credit: Getty Images / Oscar Wong

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