Reddit is back after a major outage forced the entire site offline. All told, the outage lasted under an hour before company techs fixed the backend problem, according to an official status page. This outage impacted each and every page of the internet's favorite collection of disparate community forums. Reddit's fix looks to be working just fine, as everything is loading on my end.
The site experienced another outage last year, which also was patched in under an hour. Those Reddit engineers do good work.
Update, April 25 2024, 1:39PM ET: This story has been updated to include the fact that Reddit engineers have fixed the problem and that the site is back.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/reddit-is-completely-down-so-good-luck-finding-cute-cat-pictures-172755445.html?src=rss Parents throughout the country just breathed a sigh of relief at the prospect of allowing more screen time for their kids that doesn’t revolve around some really loud and annoying YouTube dude. PBS just launched a new free ad-supported channel called PBS Retro, as reported by The Wrap. As the name suggests, this is a repository for all of your favorite edutainment classics from the 1980s, 1990s and beyond. The nostalgia is strong with this one.
PBS Retro is available via The Roku Channel, which is a streaming service on smart TVs and, of course, Roku devices. The 24/7 channel airs all of the shows you’re likely picturing right now, including Reading Rainbow and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. You’ll also be able to introduce your kids to Thomas and Friends, Zoboomafoo and Kratt's Creatures, among others. It’s a collection of old-school classics.
This isn’t the only PBS-adjacent channel available on Roku’s platform. It’s home to other ad-supported channels like PBS Antiques Roadshow, Antiques Road Trip, PBS Food, Julia Child and PBS Nature. There are also plenty of PBS-related channels available via subscription, including PBS Masterpiece, PBS Kids, PBS Living, PBS Documentaries and PBS America. Some of these are available on Hulu+ Live TV.
PBS may become an even bigger fixture in the free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) space in the future. The organization says it's in the “early days of experimentation” with a goal of making PBS content “available in new places.” It will “continue to consider additional opportunities” if these FAST channels increase revenue and brand awareness. In the meantime, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood makes for some mighty fine ASMR.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/pbs-retro-is-a-new-fast-channel-playing-just-the-classics-173125500.html?src=rss The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have been something of a pleasant surprise. They make videos, take photos, livestream and act as an adequate replacement for headphones, all while looking like a normal pair of sunglasses. However, everyone’s been waiting for the addition of multimodal AI after early access testing began in January. Now it’s here.
What is multimodal AI? Simply put, it’s a toolset that allows an AI assistant to process multiple types of information, including photos, videos, text and audio. It’s an AI that can view and understand the world around you in real time. This is the underlying concept behind Humane’s maligned AI Pin. Meta’s version is more conservative with its promises and, honestly, we came away impressed during our initial hands-on.
Multimodal Meta AI is rolling out widely on Ray-Ban Meta starting today! It's a huge advancement for wearables & makes using AI more interactive & intuitive.
— Ahmad Al-Dahle (@Ahmad_Al_Dahle) April 23, 2024
Excited to share more on our multimodal work w/ Meta AI (& Llama 3), stay tuned for more updates coming soon. pic.twitter.com/DLiCVriMfk
Here’s how it works. The glasses have a camera and five microphones, acting as the AI’s eyes and ears. With this in mind, you can ask the glasses to describe anything you are looking at. Do you want to know a dog’s breed before you go up and give it a good pet? Just ask the glasses. Meta says it can also read signs in different languages, which is great for traveling. We enjoyed exclaiming “Hey Meta, look at this and tell me what it says” and listening as it did just that. There’s even a landmark identification feature, though that wasn’t available to test.
There are some other potential use case scenarios, like staring at loose ingredients on a kitchen counter and asking the AI to whip up a relevant recipe. However, we need a few weeks of real people running the tech through its paces to gauge what it's actually good at. Real-time translation is going to be something of a killer app, particularly for tourists, but here's hoping it keeps the hallucinations to a minimum. Mark Zuckerberg has shown the AI picking out clothes for him to wear but, come on, that’s about as pie in the sky as it gets.
Multimodal AI wasn’t the only update for the smart glasses announced today. Meta revealed hands-free video call integration with WhatsApp and Messenger. There are also some new frame designs for the fashion-conscious. These new styles can be fitted with prescription lenses and are available for preorder right now. The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses start at $300, which isn’t chump change but is certainly better than $700 for a clunky pin.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ray-ban-meta-smart-glasses-do-the-ai-thing-without-a-projector-or-subscription-175403559.html?src=rss X just announced a smart TV app for streaming video. Or, more accurately, that it claims it's building one, with absolutely no launch date mentioned. The appropriately-named X TV wants to be “your go-to companion for a high-quality, immersive entertainment experience on a larger screen.” By high-quality entertainment, X likely means that one Tucker Carlson video where he’s really impressed by grocery carts in Russia. That’s not a joke. Carlson is featured prominently in the little teaser video.
Coming soon to a television near you: X TV 👀 pic.twitter.com/C7VWNa7jG5
— News (@XNews) April 23, 2024
X CEO and marketing robot Linda Yaccarino promises “real-time” content and wide availability, but other than that details are scanter than scant. There’s some corporate speak nonsense about AI, of course, and boasts about “effortless casting” from a mobile device to a TV. Wait, I thought this was a TV app? So it’s also a mobile app that casts to a TV? Is there another word for less than half-baked? Does raw work?
In other words, we don’t know much. This is X. All we get are word salads that don’t really mean anything and then, one day, the app may or may not actually appear. If it does, it’s likely to be hopelessly broken. That sounds harsh, but there’s plenty of proof-laden pudding to go around. We got receipts.
Back when Twitter first rebranded to X, the company promised the whole thing would soon be “powered by AI.” X eventually did create a chatbot, Grok, but it’s not exactly the sharpest algo in the shed. It also doesn’t look to be “powering” the site anytime soon. Elon Musk promised that X would soon become a payments and banking platform, which thankfully hasn’t materialized. Remember when Musk said that all major X decisions would be conducted via user poll? When was the last time you’ve seen one of those? There’s also the whole ongoing blue check fiasco.
The long-promised job search tool did launch, but it’s just kind of crappy. X did pursue original video content for a while, but things seem to have cooled off ever since the Don Lemon/Elon Musk debacle. Two years after Musk purchased the site, it’s still far from being the “everything app.”
There’s also the question of what kind of content will be streaming on this platform. Again, this is X. I’m just not sure how many people want to sit on their living room couch and watch a guy scream into the void about how the video game site Kotaku is ruining American society. The ad spotlights Carlson, as mentioned above, which indicates an endless stream of videos of people complaining about the word woke without actually defining it. Call me crazy, but I’d rather watch actual TV.
Heck. Even if I wanted to watch a vlog of impotent rage, YouTube is right there. It’s on smart TVs now and it works just fine. It has everything Yaccarino promises that one day will come to X TV. Plus, YouTube can teach you stuff, beyond how to block folks with a blue check next to their name.
X TV may or may not release in the near or far future on some or all smart TVs. It may be an actual app on the TV or an app on a phone that casts to a TV. It may be powered by AI, or not. It may have “tailored search” or it may just show you endless loops of Jordan Peterson bursting into tears. Who the heck knows. Be on the lookout for this latest pivot to video… or not.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/elon-musk-says-its-his-turn-to-have-the-remote-161914334.html?src=rss