in Bytesize |

Bytesize 0x19 (2015).

I clicked, I read, I thought “Hm, that’s interesting.”

  1.  This Oil Extraction Process Is Causing Earthquakes In Oklahoma by Matthew Francis, Forbes – Look at that chart and tell me again how drill, baby, drill is good.
  2. BMW and Chinese tech giant Baidu are launching a self-driving car this year by Rich McCormick, The Verge – All I need to do is highlight the obvious: “It’s here [legislation] that China may be able to be more flexible in the approval of new laws, allowing its tech giants to start producing autonomous models while US and European governments try to work out who is to blame if one robot car crashes into another.”
  3. SoftBank’s emotion-reading robot Pepper to go on sale in Japan starting tomorrow by Ansh, GSMArena.com – I fink u freeky and I like you a lot! Fun #techfact: the robot uses an Intel Atom CPU.
  4. Yes, androids do dream of electric sheep by Alex Hern, The Guardian – Google’s image recognition neural network has seen things we people wouldn’t believe.
  5. Six15’s INFINITY.1 is a less conspicuous smartglass by JC Torres, SlashGear – I used to wear (dumb) glasses in high school. Let’s say my fashion senses haven’t been exactly tingling at the sight (sic!) of some of the recently released smartglasses – and the same can be said for smartwatches too. Six15 seems to have mastered the art of cool design though; it would be interesting to learn more about the functionality aspect.
  6. GFXBench 3.0 Metal available on the App Store, Kishonti – It will be interesting to see how benchmarks compare and evaluate the three emerging low level APIs (Metal, Vulkan, DirectX 12) and the devices using them. When you get that close to the hardware, optimization is everything.
  7. New $10 Bill Will Be a Major Win for Women Leaders by Issie Lapowsky, Wired – Dollar bills, y’all! I’d throw in a Georgia O’Keeffe painting on the back to make sure man-money lovers are really getting the full value for their notes. I also realize this is progress but what I’d really like to see is true and fair representation. Speaking of which: I hope putting a woman on the front will make every $10 bill worth only $7.8 on the market; then (maybe) we can have a more realistic discussion about pay inequality.
  8. The Creator of Linux on the Future Without Him by Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg – DON’T CALL IT LINUX! 

Oh, and by the way: WE HAVE TAPED OUT THE POWERVR RAY TRACING GPU!

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