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Lyft commits to all electric vehicles by 2030

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“We’re going to be working with the Environmental Defense Fund, policy makers and auto makers to … make electric vehicles make sense,” Lyft President John Zimmer said in a Wednesday media briefing. “It’s all about making it work for the drivers.”

The shift to EVs in the Express Drive program, which provides rental vehicles to drivers who don’t wish to use their own cars, will take place over the next five years, Lyft said. The company has already launched EVs for Express Drive programs in Atlanta, Denver and Seattle. The goal is to only acquire EVs for the program by 2026, and for all Express Drive vehicles to be electric by 2028. 

To encourage drivers to use EVs as a personal vehicle, Lyft said it’s working with lawmakers and auto industry officials to make EVs more accessible. Lyft officials said “conversations are underway” with unspecified automakers, and that the company sees opportunities to “tweak some [EV] models to make them ideal [for rideshare].” Lyft didn’t directly answer whether, come 2030, drivers of internal combustion vehicles will be prohibited from driving for Lyft. Zimmer instead stated that Lyft will push “extremely hard” on incentives for electric vehicles.

A Union of Concerned Scientists study published earlier this year estimated that services like Uber and Lyft actually generate about 69 percent more CO2 emissions than the transportation options they displace. Lyft challenged the study, telling Engadget earlier this year that it made “misleading claims about rideshare.” However, Lyft officials now seem more ready to admit rideshare’s environmental impact — it said in a Wednesday statement that ridesharing has increased greenhouse gas emissions.

The electric vehicle switch is Lyft’s latest step toward making the business more sustainable. In 2017 Lyft hired environmentalist Paul Hawken to act as the company’s environmental advisor. In 2018, the company promised to make all rides carbon neutral by spending millions on carbon offsets.

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Walmart tests a cashierless store to prevent coronavirus spread

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Walmart — which is America’s biggest source of employment — is cutting cashiers from one of its stores. The company’s Fayetteville, Arkansas location is removing not just its clerks, but also its checkout line conveyor belts, according to a local Fox affiliate. Walmart says that this is a strategy to limit human interaction, but could also help customers pay and leave the store faster. If all goes well, the company could expand the concept to more locations.

While it’s ideal to limit human contact during the coronavirus pandemic, large retailers have been hoping to reduce or remove their cashiers for years. Whether this move is truly done in the name of public safety — or if it’s a way to cut costs — isn’t clear.

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Lucid Motors will finally reveal its luxury electric sedan in September

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Once again, Lucid Motors is ready to unveil a production version of its electric sedan, the Lucid Air. The company originally planned to debut the luxury EV in April at the New York Auto Show, but due to the pandemic, those plans were put on hold. Now, Lucid Motors says it will host an online reveal on September 9th and plans to be production-ready by late 2020.

In addition to showcasing the vehicle’s final interior and exterior designs, Lucid Motors will share new details on production specifications, available configurations and pricing info. Originally, the company said Lucid Air will come with a 100 kWh battery (with a 130 kWh option) and have a range of 400 miles per charge. In videos, we’ve seen it reach 235 MPH on a test track.

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DoJ will reportedly limit social media companies’ speech protections

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For example, the proposal would not give companies legal immunity in cases involving acts like terrorism, sexual abuse and cyberstalking. Another part of the proposal would also reportedly limit what protection tech companies have in civil cases involving the federal government.

The Wall Street Journal reports the proposal also suggests striking a clause that allows online platforms to delete content they “merely deem objectionable.” The paper explains the aim of this part of the proposal is to impose significant limits on how companies like Twitter and YouTube moderate their platforms. The Justice Department reportedly wants to push companies to adhere to their terms of service, as well as any public claims they make about how they police their websites. In cases where they do action, companies would have to provide “reasonable” explanations detailing their decisions.      

Currently, Section 230 gives internet companies broad immunities. The clause, for instance, protects YouTube from being held accountable for the actions of some of its biggest stars. In the last year, both Democrats and Republicans have called for lawmakers to reopen and reexamine the Communications Decency Act. Earlier this year, Joe Biden said he would immediately repeal Section 230 if he were elected president. But as we wrote earlier this year, rolling back the clause, without care and consideration, is likely to fundamentally change the nature of the internet.   

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‘Pokemon Smile’ uses AR to get kids to brush their teeth

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The Pokémon Company announced a bunch of games and updates this morning and somehow we still didn’t get a release date for Pokémon Sleep. In fact, it wasn’t mentioned at all. However, the company did showcase at least one lifestyle/health-related app, Pokémon Smile. It’s a game that helps your kids brush your teeth. Yes, it’s as cute as it sounds.

It’s an augmented reality application that will put a Pokémon cap on your kid’s head, and then task them with rescuing creatures like Pikachu, Eevee and Bulbasaur by brushing all the purple gunk off a set of teeth on screen. The Pokémon can then be captured and leveled up, because well, it is still a Pokémon game. 

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‘DeepFaceDrawing’ AI can turn simple sketches into detailed photo portraits

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As the paper explains, “Recent deep image-to-image translation techniques allow fast generation of face images from freehand sketches. However, existing solutions tend to overfit to sketches, thus requiring professional sketches or even edge maps as input. To address this issue, our key idea is to implicitly model the shape space of plausible face images and synthesize a face image in this space to approximate an input sketch. Our method essentially uses input sketches as soft constraints and is thus able to produce high-quality face images even from rough and/or incomplete sketches.” 

It’s not clear how the software will handle race. Of the 17,000 sketches and their corresponding photos created so far, the majority have been Caucasian and South American faces. This could be a result of the source data (bias is an ongoing problem in the world of AI), or down to the complexity of face shapes — the researchers don’t provide any further details.

In any case, the technology is due to go on show at this year’s (virtual) SIGGRAPH conference in July. According to the project’s website, code for the software is “coming soon,” which suggests we could see its application in the wild in the coming months — not only as a fun app to play around with, but also potentially in law enforcement, helping to rapidly generate images of suspects.

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Qualcomm’s latest 5G-powered RB5 robotics platform is aimed at drone makers

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Since the chip is geared towards machine vision and robotics applications, it can process up to 8K or 4K HDR video and 200 megapixel photos while dealing with up to seven cameras at once. On the software side, it comes with SDKs for neural processing, machine vision, localization, feature recognition and obstacle detection.

To help developers get going, the robotics development kit includes a 12-megapixel main camera, along with tracking, depth, time-of flight and other cameras. It’s also equipped with magnetic, pressure, temperature, ultrasonic, and numerous other sensors. Qualcomm has also promised “vault-like” security so devices can’t be compromised.

The tech works with consumer tech like toys and robotic vacuums or lawn mowers, but is also designed for commercial and industrial applications. The biggest potential appears to be with drones, where the machine vision and 4G/5G connectivity could be particularly useful, according to some of the developers on board. “[The RB5] platform will enable new autonomous drone experiences, such as navigating quickly through tight spaces while mapping the environment for objects of interest,” said CEO Chad Sweet with drone maker ModelAI.

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Quibi is reportedly looking into smart TV apps for Roku, Fire TV

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Quibi is in talks with Roku and Amazon in a bid to reach more audiences, according to Variety. The company, which has been working double time to support screens bigger than a phone’s, is reportedly in talks to build native apps for Roku’s streaming devices and Amazon’s Fire TVs. Its Amazon negotiations “recently picked back up,” the publication says, suggesting that the company talked with the e-commerce giant in the past. Meanwhile, its negotiations with Roku are still in the very early stages and could still fizzle out, depending on the revenue—sharing scheme Quibi offers.

Quibi launched its service in April with shows created specifically for mobile devices. The idea behind it was to provide people with bite-sized entertainment meant to be consumed while, say, lining up for morning coffee or during commute. The company always intended to make its shows watchable on TVs, but it wasn’t a priority until coronavirus-related lockdown orders took effect. Since then, the company has accelerated its plans: it rolled out AirPlay support for iPhones in May and then Chromecast support for iOS and Android devices earlier this month.

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T-Mobile offers an explanation for its twelve-hour outage on Monday

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As Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince pointed out that day, internet exchanges didn’t show the increase in traffic that would’ve suggested an attack under way, revealing the “boring” explanation of what happened. Throw in DownDetector highlighting reports from highly-populated areas where T-Mobile customers live and reported the outage, along with customers for other carriers who couldn’t get through to people on T-Mobile, and you get the storm of misinformation and confusion that surrounded the outage.

The questions that remain to be answered are whether T-Mobile will do anything for the customers left without service for such a long period, and whether or not these answers will satisfy the FCC’s investigation.



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‘Fortnite’ Chapter 2 Season 3 features Aquaman and rideable sharks

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As you’ll see in the video above, one of the new ways to get around that Epic is referring to are cars, which are set to join boats and helicopters as the main modes of transport on the island. But that isn’t all. With less actual landmass, whirlpools have been dotted all over the island, allowing players to rotate out of areas using their glider. Oh, and there are “item hungry and dangerous” sharks that will attack you unless you use a fishing rod to hitch a ride.

With every new season there’s a new Battle Pass. Last time around the banner skin was Marvel favorite Deadpool, but this time it’s a (super relevant) DC character: Aquaman. Players can unlock new drifter skins, spacesuits and Kit, a kitten that rides a motorcycle that turns into a mech suit.

There’s plenty of new items, like shotguns, drum guns and burst weapons, but fan-favorite guns like the Hunting Rifle have returned. Chug Jugs and Chug Splashes are also back, giving players plenty of options when they run up against one of the many enemies dropping into the new map.

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