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Well, hello! I just want you to know that if I find out more than 5% of you are bots, I’m not going to buy…tomorrow’s morning latte. More on Elon Musk’s battle of the bots below and how we all can find out if our precious Twitter followers are really human. Also, more on crypto, styluses and how 10—yes, 10!—iPods power the music of one of my favorite shows, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” But first…COMPUTERS!
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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: CHAYA HOWELL/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the “What’s a computer?” girl—the young lady in the Apple iPad Pro commercial who seems to go through life solely to use her iPad.
I’m intrigued by her ignorance of traditional, computer-shaped computers because the big tech companies, specifically Amazon and Google, have been talking up ambient computing.
I gave Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, a chance to explain what that means on stage at our Future of Everything festival this week. “It's all around you in all different form factors. It is just there waiting,” he told me. “It is easy to use, there is no training manual.”
Rick Osterloh—who has nearly the same title as Mr. Limp but at Google—said something similar a few weeks ago when introducing a new smartwatch and other gadgets: “Ambient gets the tech out of your way so you can live your life while getting the help you need.”
The idea, which has been building for the last decade or so, is that computers with more advanced (often cloud-connected) intelligence vanish into the woodwork. It’s an aspect of the “internet of things” revolution—all those “smart” products—but it’s really about computers being available when we need them, without us having to tote them around. And thanks to voice and touch, we interact with them in more natural ways than a mouse or keyboard:
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Home:
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Smart speakers, TVs, doorbells. These are the best examples we have so far of ambient computing. We talk to Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri in a speaker or a TV remote. Mr. Limp was clear that robots are going to be in this category, too, predicting that in the next five to 10 years, every home will have some form of a robot.
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Cars:
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What better place to talk to a computer than in a car, where our hands aren’t free. But think even further out: All the tech giants are working on turning cars into self-driving computers on wheels.
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Body:
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We’ve already got earbuds and smartwatches that we talk to—and that talk back to us. Next come the glasses that will display digital information in our real world. Mr. Limp is clearly interested in that space: “Nothing against this metaverse but I want to try to work on technologies that bring people’s heads up—get them to enjoy the real world,” he said. (He wouldn’t spill the beans to me about Amazon’s augmented-reality glasses plans.)
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CREDIT: KENNY WASSUS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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You know some of those cartoons we’ve featured in this newsletter? Well, the guy behind them is Kenny Wassus, my über-talented video producer. He has produced a video of his own on the best tablet-stylus combos for drawing and note-taking. Watch it here!
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A Is for Accessibility
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Apple plans to roll out more accessibility features for users with disabilities. A really cool one? Door Detection. Using the iPhone’s camera and depth sensors, it helps blind or low-vision users locate doors by describing their distance and physical attributes. Then there’s Live Captions, which help people who are deaf and hard of hearing by providing real-time subtitles from any audio source, including video calls. It even works with someone you’re having an in-person conversation with. These features and more are coming to Apple devices later this year.
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Crypto Oh No!
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Cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, have stumbled big time in the past few weeks. The low prices have investors bowing out, wiping out more than $1 trillion of digital money since November. To make matters worse, cryptocurrency TerraUSD, whose one job was to maintain its value at $1 per coin, collapsed unexpectedly last week. Coinbase, the largest U.S.-based crypto company, announced this week that it will slow its pace of hiring.
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TikTok Gives Credit
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The popular social-media app wants creators to cite their sources. Someone posting a video on TikTok now has the option to directly tag, mention or credit specific videos that inspired their work, be it a viral trend, dance move or sound. This is TikTok’s way of building a “culture of credit” following backlash from Black creators who have said they were overlooked as other TikTok stars rose to fame on the app.
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This week on the Elon Musk/Twitter soap opera: OMG Bots! Mr. Musk has said that he is putting his Twitter purchase plans on hold until the company confirms that less than 5% of the users are bots (AKA fake spam accounts, not actual humans).
It all got me thinking: Are my Twitter followers bots? So I tried some tools to help me find out.
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CREDIT: JOANNA STERN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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BotSight, an iOS and web app from security company NortonLifeLock, was the best I’ve tried. Log in to Twitter in the app—or in the web browser where the extension is installed—and it annotates each Twitter handle with a bot-probability score. Most of the people in my timeline, including Elon Musk, got a 98%, meaning there’s a 98% chance that account is a human. (The company says 100% probability doesn’t leave room for error.) Mr. Musk didn’t respond to my tweet where I asked if he was in fact a bot.
If you don’t want to install an app or extension, you can also try the Botometer website.
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PHOTO: LINDA YAYOI KELSO
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Linda Yayoi Kelso from Jacksonville, Fla.
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Being able to expand the capacity of my Treo PDA. My goal was to get as much of my life as possible on the PDA, including calendar, contacts, grocery shopping lists, to-do lists, reminders, etc.
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Using the card, I could fit an entire Jane Austen novel on my Treo!
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Pristine, but obviously TOO SMALL! It won’t even hold a 26-second video that I took with my iPhone the other day.
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This is bananas! Today, you can buy an SD card the same exact physical size as this with 1TB of storage. That’s 31,250 times the space!
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📷 Got an idea for a throwback? Reply to this email with a photo of your old tech and tell us why you loved—or hated—it. 📷
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Apple discontinued the iPod last week, shattering the hearts of those who held onto the music player during its 21-year run. Among them, Daniel Palladino, Wall Street Journal reader and executive producer responsible for making you laugh and cry while watching “Gilmore Girls” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”
For nearly two decades, Mr. Palladino has been ripping his CDs onto iPods. His current iPod Touch lineup includes 10 devices, each home to a different category of music: rock, hip-hop, jazz, you name it.
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CREDIT: DANIEL PALLADINO
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Every song you’ve heard on “Mrs. Maisel” was on one of these iPods first. Mr. Palladino brings the iPods into the editing room and he and his wife Amy Sherman-Palladino choose which songs get into the show. Together they have won three Emmys in music supervision. He credits the iPods.
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Reply to this email and share your feedback and suggestions.
User-submitted content has been edited for clarity and length. This week’s newsletter was curated and written by Joanna Stern and Cordilia James in New York.
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