The Insider News

Arseny Kapoulkine[^]:

A library that I work on often these days, meshoptimizer, has changed over time to use fewer and fewer C++ library features, up until the current state where the code closely resembles C even though it uses some C++ features.

Thurrott[^]:

In a stunning bit of transparency, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirmed that Cortana will never be competitive with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. So it will instead be recast as a skill for those more popular assistants, as has long been rumored.

ZDNet[^]:

List of impacted devices includes PS4, Xbox One, Samsung Chromebooks, and Microsoft Surface devices.

Ars Technica[^]:

Windows 10 Mobile will receive its last patches and security updates on December 10 this year, as Microsoft winds down the last remaining bit of development on its smartphone platform.

BBC[^]:

Private tweets sent by users of Twitter's Android app could have been exposed publicly for years.

Quote:

the “training sessions,” where the dogs did all their learning, took place within a computer. “We introduce a method for training a neural network policy in simulation,” the authors write, “and transferring it to a state-of-the-art legged system, thereby leveraging fast, automated, and cost-effective data generation schemes.” The artificial intelligence — here applied to a specific dog-sized machine named the ANYmal, but the method should work on any machine — learns all its tricks in the digital world, where there are no complicated and expensive parts to engineer and replace, then shows off its abilities in the real world.

Using this technique, the researchers improve on all previous attempts to manipulate such robots, achieving a new level of control and efficiency. In particular, ANYmal can now run up to 25 percent faster than ever, and it recovers from all fall it experienced in real-world testing. (Hence the abuse, above.)