After quietly pausing the rollout of Google Photos’ AI-powered “Ask Photos” search tool, Google is now expanding access once again and making some improvements to the feature.Google’s Gemini AI models power Ask Photos so that you can ask complex questions to help you find photos. But earlier this month, a member of the Google Photos team said on X that the feature “isn’t where it needs to be, in terms of latency, quality and UX.”In a blog post published Thursday, Google said that it has “heard your feedback” that the feature should “return more photos faster for simple searches, like ‘beach’ or ‘dogs.’” Now, “you’ll now see results right away while Gemini models continue to work in the background to find the most relevant photos or information for more complex queries,” according to Google.The company adds that the feature is now “opening up beyond early access” and is beginning to roll out to more “eligible users” in the US.

Did you know that the Blue Screen of Death has been around since Windows 3.1, back in 1993? Even before then, Windows 1 and 2 would show a 'blue screen' when it crashed, but there would be no valuable data on it, and the text would just be a jumbled mess. It wasn't until 3.1 that we had the "proper" BSOD screen, which tells you what went wrong and points to a culprit. If we're using this definition for a BSOD, then it has been plaguing computers for 32 years now.

Home Assistant is a fantastic software suite that can be used to integrate practically anything you can think of into your smart home. It's not just devices either; from cheap, ESP32-based displays to game servers and more, chances are that if it exists, you can pull data from it to Home Assistant somehow. One of the first automations I configured in Home Assistant was a simple automation to turn on my light in my room when my alarm goes off in the morning, and now I've taken that and used it to communicate something very important first thing in the morning: the weather.

During a company-wide all-hands meeting on Thursday, some of Meta's top executives were asked about the "$100 million signing bonuses" that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed they had been offering to poach his employees."Sam is just being dishonest here," Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, said at the meeting when asked about Altman's remarks. "He's suggesting that we're doing this for every single person… Look, you guys, the market's hot. It's not that hot."The "$100 million bonus" headline has rightfully become a meme on social media since Altman said the number on his brother's podcast. "What Sam neglects to mention is that he's countering all these offers, creating a small market for a very, very small number of people who are for senior, senior leadership roles" in the new superintelligence AI team Meta is building, Bosworth told Meta employees today. "That is not the general thing that's happening in the AI space. And of course, he's not mentioning what the actual terms of the offer are. It's not [a] sign-on bonus. It's all these different things."Bosworth then referenced recent stories about a handful of OpenAI researchers who are joining Meta and said there are "quite a few mo …Read the full story at The Verge.

Google introduced its AI-powered personalized research assistant at Google I/O 2023, under the codename Project Tailwind. In July 2023, Google announced that it was finally ready to begin rolling out the project as an experimental offering from Google Labs, albeit under a new name: NotebookLM. The tool was essentially designed to redesign what notetaking software would've looked like if it were built from scratch with a powerful language model at its core, and fast forward to today, it's lived up to that vision.

Fortnite is one game that I don't think I could ever stop playing. Having been a player for eight strong years now, I'm genuinely in awe of how the game manages to stay fresh and keep renewing itself. I'm yet to see a game remain this fun, so consistently, while changing so much about its gameplay, themes, environments, and mechanics with almost every update.

We've covered security cameras before, but this one has to take the top spot when it comes to battery life. It's a standard Blink Outdoor 4 which is already great on its own, but also comes with a battery pack that extends the battery life by up to four years. Perhaps most important is that this doesn't cost any more than the standard model, with a special discount for Amazon Prime members that drops it to just $45.

Redwood Materials is repurposing old EV batteries into energy storage systems that cost “substantially less” than brand new storage projects, the company said Thursday. The electric vehicle battery recycling and manufacturing venture, which was founded by Tesla’s former chief technologist, has created a new division called Redwood Energy to manage these projects. The aim is to divert “depreciated but functional” EV batteries from the recycling stream and repurpose them into “low-cost, large-scale” energy storage systems that can help plug critical gaps in the energy grid.Redwood says it receives over 20 GWh of batteries annually — the equivalent of 250,000 EVs— which represents about 90 percent of all lithium-ion batteries and battery materials recycled in North America. And often times, the batteries it receives for recycling still have a lot of usable energy capacity — up to 50 percent. These are batteries that are no longer suitable to power an electric vehicle, but still have enough life in them to serve some purpose. So rather than recycle those still functional batteries, Redwood is turning them into stationary storage systems. And the company says this will be a growing opportunity as more EV batteries reach the end of their lifespan. Redwood estimates that more than 100,000 EVs will come off the road this year alone.After recovering the battery packs, Redwoods engineers perform a diagnostics check to determine whether its a suitable candidate for recovery or recycling. If its reusable, the pack is installed into “flexible, modular storage systems” which can operate independently or connect to the grid. Redwood says it has “over a gigawatt-hour” of reusable batteries in its pipeline, a number it expects to grow by 5 GWhs in the coming year. Redwood has already deployed its first microgrid powered by upcycled EV batteries. The grid, with 12 MW of power and 63 MWh of capacity, is located at the company’s campus in Nevada and is being used to power a 2,000-GPU modular data center for AI infrastructure company Crusoe. Redwood calls it the “largest second-life battery deployment in the world” with enough energy to power “9,000 homes, support 20 Amtrak trips between New York and Washington, D.C., or charge an EV for a 240,000-mile journey—the distance to the moon.”Redwood Materials was founded in 2017 by JT Straubel. In addition to breaking down scrap from Tesla’s battery-making process with Panasonic, Redwood also recycles batteries from Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Specialized, Amazon, Lyft, Rad Power Bikes, Lime, stationary storage facilities, and others. The company also produces anodes and cathodes, critical battery components, at a facility in South Carolina.

Google launched NotebookLM as an experimental project under the code name "Project Tailwind" in 2023. It eventually made it out of the experimental phase and went viral for its Audio Overviews feature.

The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W is one of the most useful little boards I've ever worked with. At just $15, it's affordable enough to experiment with freely and powerful enough to accomplish a lot. I've used it in different roles around my home lab and for fun side projects, and it rarely disappoints. If you're wondering what you can do with one, here are six real projects I've already built.

File managers on NAS operating systems are pretty good, but they don't always cover every feature set that you're looking for. This is especially true if you're looking for a modern interface designed for speed and quick file sharing. Every power user has experienced the frustration of juggling multiple file utilities, browser-based interfaces, or built-in tools that are just a bit too slow in operation. But there are alternatives. I recently came across FileBrowser Quantum while looking for a way to easily share link-based files with other users on my network, but fell in love with the interface.

Like most 3D printing enthusiasts, I started out thinking that a filament dryer was a must-have accessory. Humidity can ruin a spool faster than you'd expect, and I've seen firsthand how wet filament can lead to poor results. So yes, I bought a dryer and used it regularly at first. However, over time, I discovered a more suitable solution that integrates more naturally into my workflow and is far less expensive to maintain.