Love Baby Yoda, you must

Enlarge / Awwwww... (credit: Disney+)

No matter how frequently it happens, when people online love something obsessively, when they simply must stan, it always brings out the cynics. Their cynicism, in turn, will be understood as intellectual seriousness. As maturity. To wit: This week the internet pledged its fealty to Baby Yoda—the tiny alien from Disney+’s The Mandalorian—and was immediately met with the rationale of Adult Nerds eager to pronounce each fan a nerf-herding sap who doesn’t really understand the object of their affection. It’s a reality created by clicks as much as crotchetiness. Baby Yoda hype has produced beatific meme-collection posts showcasing how many adherents would die for the li'l green cherub, speculations about what role Baby Yoda will play in The Mandalorian, and beyond. Naysaying is the obvious next step. Baby Yoda backlash has already begun.

Take the bait, I will not.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

https://arstechnica.com

As we shop more online and think less about how our purchases reach our homes, a look at how our home delivery habit is reshaping the physical world (Samanth Subramanian/The Guardian)

Samanth Subramanian / The Guardian:
As we shop more online and think less about how our purchases reach our homes, a look at how our home delivery habit is reshaping the physical world  —  The great trick of online retail has been to get us to shop more and think less about how our purchases reach our homes.  By Samanth Subramanian

Jio Price Hike, Realme 5s, Vivo U20 Launch, and More Tech News This Week

Realme X2 Pro price reveal, Realme 5s launch, Redmi Note 8 Pro new variant, and Airtel price hike were some of the biggest tech news stories of the week. https://ift.tt/33f59sH

A former Facebook employee who was embedded with the 2016 Trump campaign details how he leveraged Facebook's ad-targeting tools and products to help them win (Deepa Seetharaman/Wall Street Journal)

Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:
A former Facebook employee who was embedded with the 2016 Trump campaign details how he leveraged Facebook's ad-targeting tools and products to help them win  —  James Barnes is now focused on using digital-ad strategies to try to get Trump out of office  —  After the 2016 presidential election …

Realme launches its ‘most-expensive’ phone, Vivo launches cheapest Snapdragon 675 phone, mobile bills to increase next month and more in top tech news of the week

https://ift.tt/2KQh7Tj

How to use Alexa to setup and control smart light

if you already own an Amazon Echo device and are looking to extend its usefulness by setting up smart lights with it. We are here to help you out with easy-to-use setup guide. https://ift.tt/2KOHY2a

First 25 smartphones to run on Android’s latest update

https://ift.tt/2KPgMjy

How to restart the new iPhones using this simple trick

Just follow these simple steps and you’ll have the simplest way to restart your iPhone. https://ift.tt/2MtOqws

Xiaomi patent hints at a smartphone design with a quad rear camera setup and a secondary display at the back

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has patented a new smartphone with a dual display. The second display, in this case, is at the back of the smartphone and as per the patent, design rests next to the quad-camera setup. Yup, the smartphone has four cameras at the back and none in the front. This has led many to speculate that the second display at the back can be used to clicking selfies. But how effective that will be is still questionable as people are used to the full smartphone display when clicking selfies. The second display at the back is expected to be used to show notifications when the phone is kept face down on a table. With the lack of a selfie camera in the front, the front of the display is all screen with very slim bezels surrounding it. Apart from the earpiece, the front only has the proximity sensor and notification sensor. 

Xiaomi also filed a patent for a foldable smartphone. This foldable smartphone is expected to sport 5 pop-up cameras. According to the patent, the Xiaomi foldable phone has an outward folding display. The camera setup can either be the rear camera or the front-facing camera, based on how the user holds the device. Xiaomi is expected to release a foldable phone in 2019, but since the year is coming to an end, we think this may be something the smartphone maker has planned for 2020. After all, the Mobile World Congress is just around the corner. 

In other Xiaomi news, the company is expected to launch the Mi Note 10 in India. The Mi Note 10 sports a 108MP Penta camera setup. You can read more about it here.

Source.

https://ift.tt/2D7Mlkz

Inside Vumacam's plans to build a network of AI-powered CCTV cameras across South Africa in areas where people of color are already disproportionately targeted (Michael Kwet/VICE)

Michael Kwet / VICE:
Inside Vumacam's plans to build a network of AI-powered CCTV cameras across South Africa in areas where people of color are already disproportionately targeted  —  “Beggars” and “vagrants" are not welcome in Parkhurst, South Africa, a mostly white, middle-class suburb of about 5,000 on the outskirts of Johannesburg's inner city.

Honor V30 and V30 Pro confirmed to sport Kirin 990 SoC

Ahead of the November 26 unveiling, Honor has confirmed some of the critical specifications about the V30 and V30 Pro. Both smartphones will be powered by the Kirin 990 SoC. The information comes from a short video post made by Honor on the Weibo. Honor has also confirmed that both smartphones will support 5G connectivity. There is no information on when the smartphones will launch outside China. 

An image posted on Weibo has hinted at the price of the Honor V30. It is expected to be priced at CNY4,999 which translates to roughly Rs 51,000. The smartphone is also expected to launch with a feature called Matrix Camera.

Coming to other specifications of the V30, the smartphone is speculated to sport 8GB RAM along with 256GB storage. It will run on Android 10 out of the box and will sport a Full HD+ display. From the leaked promo materials, it can be seen that there is an oval-shaped hole in the top left corner of the display to house the front-facing camera. 

Coming to other specifications, both the V30 devices are said to sport 6.57-inch IPS display with a 91.46 per cent screen-to-body ratio. The V30 is expected to come with 6GB RAM + 128GB storage and 8GB RAM + 128GB storage whereas the V30 Pro is expected to have 8GB RAM + 128GB storage and 8GB RAM + 256GB storage. Liquid cooling is another feature said to make an appearance on both the devices along with a side-mounted fingerprint sensor. The smartphones are said to support 40W fast charging

https://ift.tt/2pKxglL

iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max to sport 6GB RAM, iPhone SE2 production to begin in February: Report

If information circulating the internet is to be believed, then the iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max will sport 6GB of RAM whereas the iPhone 12 will have 4GB of RAM. To put things into perspective, the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max have 4GB of RAM. The new iPhones are expected to be unveiled in September 2020. In addition to the increased RAM, the iPhone 12 Pro and the iPhone 12 Pro Max are also expected to sport 3D sensing cameras at the back. The phones are also expected to support mmWave 5G. It is, however, unclear whether the devices will work with sub-6GHz 5G. 

Moving over to the iPhone SE2, the smartphone, which has long been rumoured is still in the works. Information circulating the internet suggests that production for the device will start in February 2020. The iPhone SE2 is expected to resemble the iPhone 8 in terms of design and will sport a 4.7-inch display. It will retain the Touch ID home button. Under the hood, the smartphone will be powered by Apple’s A13 chip, accompanied with 3GB of RAM. The iPhone SE2 is expected to be introduced in March. 

Even though Apple has its grand reveal events throughout the year planned like clockwork, there are times when the Cupertino tech giant drops a bomb on customers with a surprise reveal. The new 16-inch MacBook Pro and the AirPods Pro is a great example of this. You can read more about the 16-inch MacBook Pro here and the AirPods Pro here.

The information about the new iPhones comes from Barclays analyst Blayne Curtis and his associates. They have been known to provide reliable information in the past, but there have been times when they’ve missed the mark.

Source

https://ift.tt/2XIn5e7

Barbara Liskov, a Turing Award winner who invented some key principles of object-oriented programming, on what it takes a woman to get to the top of CS field (Susan D'Agostino/Quanta Magazine)

Susan D'Agostino / Quanta Magazine:
Barbara Liskov, a Turing Award winner who invented some key principles of object-oriented programming, on what it takes a woman to get to the top of CS field  —  Barbara Liskov pioneered the modern approach to writing code.  She warns that the challenges facing computer science today can't be overcome with good design alone.

Facebook built face recognition app that let workers identify people

Battling several privacy issues, Facebook experimented with a face recognition app among its employees that allowed them to identify their colleagues and friends by pointing smartphone cameras at them. https://ift.tt/338yJjn

As Slack gets criticism from power users for its WYSIWYG editor and plans an option to revert, a look at the history of Markdown, used by Slack's old interface (Ernie Smith/VICE)

Ernie Smith / VICE:
As Slack gets criticism from power users for its WYSIWYG editor and plans an option to revert, a look at the history of Markdown, used by Slack's old interface  —  \u003Cp\u003ESlack just updated its longtime editor for its primary interface—and \u003Ca href="https:\u002F\u002Fslack.com …