Nvidia’s new GTX 1660 Ti and 1650 could power your next budget gaming laptop

Gaming laptops have never been so thin and yet so powerful as they are with Nvidia’s RTX graphics chips, and we believe the RTX 2060 is the sweet spot for price and performance. But if laptops with those chips are too pricey for your pocketbook, you’ll want to check out the new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and 1650 mobile GPUs, which were just announced today.
Featured in laptops starting at $1,000, Nvidia says the standard GeForce GTX 1660 Ti can deliver 100 frames per second in today’s popular battle royale games, including Fortnite, Apex Legends, and PUBG, and over 60 fps with an $800-plus laptop sporting the new GTX 1650, each at 1080p resolution and high settings.
But as is typical with many of Nvidia’s recent chips, there is one catch: each of these new Turing GPUs comes in both a full-fat and a less power-hungry Max-Q variant, which can fit into even thinner laptops (including many that do double-duty for work and play) at the expense of some performance. With an 80-watt thermal envelope, Nvidia says the standard GTX 1660 Ti is only about 5 percent slower, depending on the game, than the 80-watt RTX 2060 we liked! But the 60-watt Max-Q version of the GTX 1660 Ti might be a slightly different story.
The chips will be most compelling if your current laptop is a little bit older. The 1660 Ti isn’t hugely more powerful (1.2x to 1.5x performance) than a mobile GTX 1060 already was previously. But Nvidia says there are tens of millions of laptop gamers still rocking a GTX 960M or earlier, and those users should see up to four times the performance from the new GTX 1660 Ti in modern games. You can see some more of Nvidia’s specific performance estimates in the gallery above.
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New York City’s algorithm task force is fracturing

In 2017, New York City passed a law to keep the city’s automated systems in check. Local Law 49, the first law of its kind in the nation, established a task force to examine the hidden algorithms governing life in New York and suggested a way for experts to study those tools for error and bias.
As automated systems take over more and more decision-making in cities around the country, the new group could ask key questions about the systems that are being used in New York. Which tools decide who is first — or last — in line for government services? Does automation favor some neighborhoods more than others? If so, who’s being left behind? The new task force could examine those questions and recommend changes where necessary.
But the New York task force now shows signs of fraying, raising troubling questions for the algorithmic accountability movement nationwide. Some members have turned openly critical of the city, accusing officials of failing to provide transparent access to information, effectively turning the task force into a publicity effort instead of a source of accountability.
At a city council hearing earlier this month, city officials said they had not yet come up with a definition of automated decision systems (ADS), the tools that the task force is meant to examine, and they couldn’t identify a single instance of an automated system that the task force could study in detail. “It has taken more time than we originally thought it would take,” an official admitted at the hearing.
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Mozilla releases Firefox beta for Windows 10 ARM laptops

Mozilla is releasing an ARM version of its Firefox browser today for Windows 10. While Microsoft and Google have been working together on Chromium browsers for Windows on ARM, Mozilla has been developing its own ARM64-native build of Firefox for Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops. We got an early look at this version of Firefox late last year, and it seemed to fare well on an ARM laptop with a dozen tabs open.
This new build of Firefox is available today as part of Mozilla’s beta channel for the browser for anyone with an ARM-powered Windows 10 laptop to test. That might not be a lot of people right now, but Mozilla has been working on its Firefox Quantum technology to optimize Firefox for the octa-core CPUs available from Qualcomm. This should mean the performance is relatively solid, while maintaining all of the regular web compatibility you’d expect from Firefox.
Chromium ARM64 builds seem relatively close, too. A developer successfully built and ran a version of Chromium on an ARM-powered laptop recently, demonstrating that it should also perform well on these devices.

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The first AI-generated textbook shows what robot writers are actually good at

Academic publisher Springer Nature has unveiled what it claims is the first research book generated using machine learning.
The book, titled Lithium-Ion Batteries: A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research, isn’t exactly a snappy read. Instead, as the name suggests, it’s a summary of peer-reviewed papers published on the topic in question. It includes quotations, hyperlinks to the work cited, and automatically generated references contents. It’s also available to download and read for free if you have any trouble getting to sleep at night.
While the book’s contents are soporific, the fact that it exists at all is exciting. Writing in the introduction, Springer Nature’s Henning Schoenenberger (a human) says books like this have the potential to start “a new era in scientific publishing” by automating drudgery.
Schoenenberger points out that, in the last three years alone, more than 53,000 research papers on lithium-ion batteries have been published. This represents a huge challenge for scientists who are trying to keep abreast of the field. But by using AI to automatically scan and summarize this output, scientists could save time and get on with important research.
“This method allows for readers to speed up the literature digestion process of a given field of research instead of reading through hundreds of published articles,” writes Schoenenberger. “At the same time, if needed, readers are always able to identify and click through to the underlying original source in order to dig deeper and further explore the subject.”

Slack is now easier to use with Microsoft’s Office 365 apps

Slack is integrating Microsoft’s Office 365 services today. While apps like OneDrive and Azure Active Directory have previously been available on Slack, the messaging service will now have far deeper integration with Office apps and files, including a new Outlook calendar and mail app, an updated OneDrive app, and the ability to preview Office files directly in Slack.
The new Outlook calendar app for Slack is designed to bring all of your meetings and calendar invites into the messaging service. It will message you when a meeting invite arrives, allowing you to respond with a single click. It will also include reminders to join Skype, Webex, or Zoom meetings. The Outlook calendar app will even set your Slack status automatically based on your calendar, and it will add “out of office” to a status if you’ve enabled it in Outlook.
Slack is also adding Outlook mail integration, with the ability to bring emails straight into Slack channels. Previously, you needed a third-party solution to enable this. You’ll be able to forward emails from Outlook directly into a Slack channel or direct message alongside adding a note and even including mail attachments. Similar email functionality already exists for Gmail, and the Outlook add-in will be available today.

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Smart glasses company North announces new, essential features for Focals

North, the company behind the Focals smart glasses, announced this week that it’s updating its glasses to add new, much-needed functionality. Of most interest to me, and as I noted as a feature I’d like to see in my prior review, the company added support for Spotify controls. Users will be able to skip songs, see a track’s title/artist, and adjust the volume of their connected listening device from the glasses’ accompanying control ring, called the Loop.
The company’s also rolling out direction updates that will provide steps to take for transit, as well as delays. Users can also share their ETAs with contacts. Up until now, Focals could only provide walking directions or the ability to call an Uber. It doesn’t provide driving directions, likely because Focals shut off when they think a wearer is driving.
Additionally, the company introduced a feature called “Rewind” that takes advantage of the glasses’ built-in microphone. The glasses capture voice notes, send them back to North’s servers, which then process and transcribe them. Users will receive an email with their audio and text notes after they’ve been processed.
All these features sound nifty and are important for the company’s survival. When I reviewed the glasses in February, I specifically called out the fact that they didn’t support transit directions — essential for a New Yorker — and that they didn’t allow for music playback — a key reason I often have to check my phone.
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The Hidizs Sonata HD is the best USB-C audio dongle

One of the frustrations of my job is the difficulty of convincingly communicating differences in sound quality. If I want to inform you of a great new camera, such as the Huawei P30 Pro’s low-light heroics, I can post side-by-side photos and demonstrate exactly how much of an upgrade the latest tech is. A great new display can also be photographed to show off its strengths. New video game with awesome graphics? More visual evidence can be provided. But if I want to tell you about an amazing pair of headphones, all I have is words. So I suppose you’ll have to just trust me when I say that a $28 USB-C audio dongle by an obscure company called Hidizs is the best you can buy.
It’s 2019 and the issue of headphone dongles is very much still with us. Most people buying new headphones these days are looking to get a wireless pair, but the majority of headphones and earphones that we already own tend to have a wire terminating in a 3.5mm connector. As of right now, if you want a headphone jack on your phone, you have a choice between either getting an LG flagship, which offers easily the best sound quality in any smartphone with its quad-DAC audio setup, a Samsung Galaxy device, or a mid-ranger from some other company (such as Huawei’s P30, for instance, which sits just below the top P30 Pro model). Or you can buy a separate dongle.
The Hidizs Sonata HD is my favorite audio dongle, surpassing the quality of all the (mostly mediocre) audio adapters bundled in the box with various smartphones. The great thing about this USB-C adapter, which happens to also be a DAC and amplifier, is that it’s characterless. It doesn’t tinge your music in any direction, it doesn’t boost or deaden any frequencies, just plays things straight. It also gets plenty loud enough, which is not something that every USB-C dongle can claim.
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