Companies have rushed to embrace deep learning’s potential in their efforts to automate their enterprises, often with an eye towards replacing as much of their human workforce as possible or to scale their operations without expanding their hiring. An endless stream of success stories tout AI’s success in replacing an ever-growing array of traditionally automation-resistant jobs, while developers are hard at work finding ways to replace the rest of them. Yet social media platforms give pause to this idea that deep learning is quite at the inflection point of causing a wave of job displacement. Silicon Valley has been at…
Author: Loknath Das
Social media is a living organism. Things change all the time. They change in response to developers’ ideas, user requests, scandals, politics and the rise of social awareness. People behind social media networks never sleep. They test new features, algorithms, ads and designs. They are doing their best to keep you attached to your phone, even though one would assume it’s literally impossible to spend more time on social media than we do already. For marketers, it’s vital to stay up-to-date with how social media develops. Every feature and every update might become crucial to us. Then again, it might…
Everyone, who’s anyone, has been saying India’s information technology (IT) sector needs to shift its focus from services to products. That the two are chalk and cheese, and it isn’t easy to make the leap, is an understatement. Amit D. Mishra learnt this the hard way after he sold his seven-year-old business automation services company in Pune to build a software product. Mishra started his software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, Interview Mocha, in November 2012 when funding had just started to flow, and software products like Freshdesk were competing with the best in the world. Mishra, an ex-IBM-er, had struggled to find candidates with…
A Calgary man convicted of a sexual assault has been given an unusual sentence. Along with probation and community service, Zach Welch was ordered to make a public apology to his victim over social media. “You will disable the ability of anyone to comment on that posting and it will remain on your Facebook account for one month,” Justice Lynal Doerksen wrote in her probation order. The assault happened in March 2018 during a weekend getaway to Fairmont Hot Springs, B.C. Melanie Ykema says a group of friends, all couples, had rented a house to celebrate her birthday. The 30-year-old Calgary…
An unopened copy of a 1987 cult-classic video game that a Nevada man found in the attic of his childhood home is expected to sell for up to $10,000 at an online auction. The boxed game cartridge of Nintendo’s “Kid Icarus” was still in the bag with the receipt for $38.45 from J.C. Penney’s catalog department three decades earlier. Scott Amos of Reno told the Reno Gazette Journal he initially thought it might be worth a couple hundred dollars. But Valarie McLeckie, video game consignment director at Heritage Auctions, says it’s one of the hardest Nintendo titles to find in…
Early adopters of Peloton’s fitness bikes are in for a pricey upgrade: this week, the company announced via an email to users that it will stop sending updates to bikes using the first generation of its touchscreen monitor. This model was sold in 2014 when Peloton first launched its bike before releasing a second iteration in 2016 that allows users to cast their screen to a smart TV. Peloton says users with the first-generation screen on their bikes will still be able to ride and access live stream and on-demand content as usual, but they will stop receiving support for new features.…
Today’s social media platforms are premised upon the concept of “post first, moderate later.” Their billions of users flood their platforms with material in real-time, with no pre-review to determine whether the content actually meets the site’s acceptable speech guidelines beyond a few small hash-based blacklists. Moderation comes only in the form of post-review in which content is flagged after it has been posted and subjected to review and potential removal. This runs contrary to nearly all other forms of traditional publication, in which content is reviewed for acceptability prior to publication. Could restoring such pre-review to the online world…
PNB Housing Finance Ltd on July 29 said it has raised $100 million (around Rs 690 crore) from International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, to finance the purchase of affordable housing projects. “The investment was made under the central bank’s automatic route in the revamped external commercial borrowings (ECB) framework,” PNB Housing Finance Ltd said in a regulatory filing. PNB Housing Finance Managing Director Sanjaya Gupta said this is the first ECB disbursement during the current financial year under the RBI automatic route. Several other ECB proposals are in the pipeline. “The RBI has allowed…
NORFOLK — Hampton University said Friday that it has fired nine of its police officers for sharing “misogynistic, racist and other offensive remarks via social media.” Hampton’s statement did not detail the remarks the officers made. But it said they were fired for “egregious violations of the university’s code of conduct.” The school employs 25 officers, according to the department’s website. Hampton University Police Chief David Glover did not immediately respond to a phone message and email seeking comment on Friday. WAVY-TV reported it had obtained a copy of a termination letter that one of the officers received. In it,…
It is not a stretch to say that there has never been a truly good Harry Potter video game. Yes, some of the movie tie-in games were better than others, but with the possible exception of the Lego adaptations (and my own personal love for Quidditch World Cup), most of them are forgettable. But after the recent disappointments of the free-to-play adventure Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery and the Pokémon Go-style Wizards Unite, there’s finally a truly great Harry Potter game. It manages to check all the boxes: magical wizard school, epic story, and deep, personal drama. The only problem is that it’s actually a Fire Emblem game. I’m talking about Fire Emblem: Three Houses,…