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      Dating apps took over my life – so I ditched them and learned to live in the moment | Anya Ryan

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 17 June - 09:00 · 1 minute

    I used to remove myself from experiences in favour of chasing matches. Now I’m fulfilled by the company of real people

    Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. For a while I was swiping so much I was barely thinking. Dating apps had hijacked my fingers, brain and evenings. I’d swipe left, mindlessly and without even looking, under the table at group dinners or during TV ad breaks. I’d fanatically check my new matches at the end of each day. “This is modern dating,” I’d tell myself. “It’s a job. I have to keep on going. This is the key to my happy ending.”

    For months, this was my normality. But unsurprisingly, the lifelong romance I was looking for never materialised. As I sat on my sofa on yet another Sunday night ready to swipe until I ran out of steam, I decided I’d finally had enough. Even if my screen was flooded with likes or messages, my forays into dating app culture had rarely ended with in-person dates. I’d spend hours agonising over a single response – I needed to be funny, cool and captivating but not give too much away. But why was I so desperate to impress a distant stranger trapped behind a screen? What was I doing all the monotonous swiping for? I decided I needed to go cold turkey and figure out why I had been sucked in so completely.

    Anya Ryan is a freelance journalist

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      Smartphone app could help detect early-onset dementia cause, study finds

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 1 April, 2024 - 15:00

    App-based cognitive tests found to be proficient at detecting frontotemporal dementia in those most at risk

    A smartphone app could help detect a leading cause of early-onset dementia in people who are at high risk of developing it, data suggests.

    Scientists have demonstrated that cognitive tests done via a smartphone app are at least as sensitive at detecting early signs of frontotemporal dementia in people with a genetic predisposition to the condition as medical evaluations performed in clinics.

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      Wearable AI: will it put our smartphones out of fashion?

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 31 March, 2024 - 11:00 · 1 minute

    Portable AI-powered devices that connect directly to a chatbot without the need for apps or a touchscreen are set to hit the market. Are they the emperor’s new clothes or a gamechanger?

    Imagine it: you’re on the bus or walking in the park, when you remember some important task has slipped your mind. You were meant to send an email, catch up on a meeting, or arrange to grab lunch with a friend. Without missing a beat, you simply say aloud what you’ve forgotten and the small device that’s pinned to your chest, or resting on the bridge of your nose, sends the message, summarises the meeting, or pings your buddy a lunch invitation. The work has been taken care of, without you ever having to prod the screen of your smartphone.

    It’s the sort of utopian convenience that a growing wave of tech companies are hoping to realise through artificial intelligence. Generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT exploded in popularity last year, as search engines like Google, messaging apps such as Slack and social media services like Snapchat raced to integrate the tech into their systems. Yet while AI add-ons have become a familiar sight across apps and software, the same generative tech is now making an attempt to join the realm of hardware, as the first AI-powered consumer devices rear their heads and jostle for space with our smartphones.

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      Apple buys 50-year-old record label to grow Apple Music Classical app

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 6 September, 2023 - 18:01

    Apple Music Classical app screenshot on an iPhone

    Enlarge (credit: Apple )

    Apple has acquired 50-year-old record label BIS Records, the Swedish company's founder, Robert von Bahr, announced Tuesday. The purchase of the classical music-focused label follows Apple's late March launch of the Apple Music Classical app.

    Apple's BIS purchase adds to the app, which in March Apple called the "world's largest classical music catalogue" with "over" 5 million tracks. Von Bahr said the record label will be incorporated into the Apple Music Classical app and Platoon. Apple bought Platoon , which identifies new talent and helps creators make, distribute, and market their content, in 2018. Von Bahr noted his just turning 80 as part of the decision to sell. He also pointed to his interest in Apple's support for spatial audio and in bringing "classical music to new audiences all over the world."

    Neither Apple nor BIS disclosed the price of the acquisition. However, von Bahr said that he and the rest of the BIS staff will be "retained" by Apple.

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      Lawsuit accuses DoorDash of charging iPhone users more for identical orders

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 22 May, 2023 - 17:29

    Bike rider delivery DoorDash in Manhattan

    Enlarge / A class-action lawsuit claims that DoorDash makes it seem to customers like the distance and effort of a delivery change its fees, when the company's algorithm—and their phone choice—allegedly have more of an impact. (credit: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty)

    A class-action lawsuit claims that DoorDash uses hard-to-pin-down delivery fees to systematically charge the delivery service's iPhone users more than others.

    The lawsuit (PDF), filed May 5 in the District of Maryland, came in hot. Plaintiff Ross Hecox, in addition to his two children and a presumptive class of similarly situated iPhones, briefly defines DoorDash as an online marketplace with 32 million users and billions of dollars in annual revenue.

    " Yet, DoorDash generates its revenues not only through heavy-handed tactics that take advantage of struggling merchants and a significant immigrant driver workforce, but also through deceptive, misleading, and fraudulent practices that illegally deprive consumers of millions, if not billions, of dollars annually," the suit adds. "This lawsuit details DoorDash’s illegal pricing scheme and seeks to hold DoorDash accountable for its massive fraud on consumers, including one of the most vulnerable segments of society, minor children."

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      Using the Epic Store on Linux is even easier with the latest Heroic Games Launcher updates

      Liam Dawe · news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Thursday, 28 January, 2021 - 14:03 · 1 minute

    Epic Games don't support Linux with their store, so the community continues building around it with the Heroic Games Launcher that can run plenty of games from the Epic Store. It does so thanks to the power of the Wine compatibility layer, giving you as many options as possible to keep on gaming on Linux no matter where your games are from. A great free and open source project.

    New features added in recently released versions include: the ability to repair installed games, notifications support, a tray icon with the ability to close to the tray, it will remember the filters used, a warning on closing when downloading, a download time estimate on game pages, styling tweaks for light and dark themes, new options to enable extra features like MangoHud, the ability to add launch options and more.

    Here's what it currently looks like:

    1528058011611842379gol1.png

    The amount of improvements and overall work going into the Heroic Games Launcher really is impressive. It seems to be quite smooth, and makes using the EGS mostly painless.

    Note: while it currently supports the Epic Games Store thanks to using another bit of open source named Legendary , they do have plans to expand to cover other stores too so that it can become an all-in-one solution for gaming on Linux. So, eventually it might be a bit like Lutris.

    Find it up on GitHub .

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      Lutris game manager v0.5.8.3 out, requires contributors to agree to a CLA

      Liam Dawe · news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Monday, 25 January, 2021 - 11:57 · 1 minute

    For regular Linux gamers, Lutris is pretty much a household name by now. For those that aren't - Lutris is a game manager allowing you to sort through all your games from various stores.

    Not only that it also allows you to manage emulators for your favourite classics, Windows games using the Wine compatibility layer and quite a lot more. It's very useful and they continue polishing up the overall experience after a huge update went out late last year.

    5870868631611575710gol1.png

    The latest v0.5.8.3 is a small one which has these fixes:

    • Really fix popovers not showing on Wayland without making them non-modal
    • Prevent GStreamer based configuration from being applied in incompatible
      wine builds.
    • Fix crash when wine runner accesses DXVK versions before they are
      uploaded.
    • Prevent init dialog from being closed while it downloads the runtime.

    The project itself has been going through some changes recently too, and not everyone has been happy about it from all the discussions I've seen. Lutris is an open source project available on GitHub and the team ended up closing both issue reporting and pull requests for normal users last year, as explained in a Patreon post , to allow them time to sort through everything due to both the amount of requests coming in and patches being offered that didn't align with their goals and all sorts of reasoning.

    Now though it's back open as of a few days ago , although contributors who want to submit patches and pull requests now need to adhere to a Contributor License Agreement which can be seen here . Seems pretty reasonable, mostly reminding people to get their code tested properly.

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      Free and open source modern level editor LDtk has a huge new release

      Liam Dawe · news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Monday, 25 January, 2021 - 10:50 · 1 minute

    LDtk (prev called LEd) is an in-development free and open source level editor, one that's modern and designed to be as user-friendly as possible designed by a former dev on Dead Cells.

    A big release just went out out with the 0.7.0 version, which the developer explained has "many important changes to make LDtk production ready and future proof . These changes will allow better support for large projects, better API creation and maintenance, and smoother user adoption".

    8393750641611571087gol1.jpg

    Some of the bigger changes in this release include a new home layout, which is designed to focus on "what's really important". You can also now enable LDtk to separate level files to have one main project JSON file, and then one per level which sounds like a good features to prevent ending up with unreadably long files.

    For game developers and anyone tinkering with level design, you can also now avoid JSON with an option to export all supported layers as PNG images. That might even be useful for just quickly showing off your work to someone. Speaking of images, each level can now have a custom background image too.

    Backups! That's now a thing too, with LDtk making backups of your project when saving in case of issues.

    Making LDtk even more useful, you can now have an LDtk project supported and loaded up with the open source and cross-platform HaxeFlixel thanks to a new official LDtk Haxe API. There's more to the release than all that, so be sure to check over the full changelog.

    You can download LDtk 0.7.0 from GitHub , for Linux select the Ubuntu download which gives an AppImage that should run fine across any distribution. Also read more about it on the official site .

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