After buying Twitter, Elon Musk is all set to relaunch Vine, a short video platform. He held a poll on Twitter on October 31st that asked users if they would want Vine back. The poll received 4.9 million views which specify 69.6% of people voting for yes and 30.4% for no.
As per the Axios report, Elon Musk has asked Twitter engineers to bring back Vine by the end of this year. He had informed his engineers to access the Vine code that had been left untouched since 2016 when the Vine services were shut down.
Sara Beykpour, the former Vine employee, tweeted that the codebase of Vine is about six years old, and it also has elements that are old than a decade. This means that the engineers of Vine will have to work extra hard to make Vine as good as TikTok and YouTube shorts.
Besides Vine, Elon Musk is also planning a series of changes on Twitter. He wants to bring verification badges in the limitations of Twitter’s monthly paid service.
Qiskit, an open-source software development kit platform, has recently started the ‘Understanding Quantum Information and Computation’ course series on YouTube. The course is said to be at par with University programs across the world for advanced undergraduate or introductory graduate students.
Richard Feynman and Yuri Manin both originally presented the concept of quantum computing in the 1980s. By using principles from quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to process data, quantum computing offers processing capabilities that are vastly superior to those of classical computing. Applications range from economics to machine learning, forecasting the weather, and genetic research. It is anticipated that a fault-tolerant universal quantum computer would further both scientific and economic advancement to new horizons.
Even at this nascent point in the development of the quantum computing industry, the accelerating development of the creation of quantum applications and architecture will only expedite the potential applications being discovered in mainstream industries. As a result, the quantum computing field is ripe with opportunities. Thus, students with knowledge of quantum computing are in great demand.
The ‘Understanding Quantum Information and Computation’ course series by Qiskit will be taught by John Watrous, Technical Director of Education at IBM Quantum. In the overview YouTube video, Watrous reveals to have started learning about quantum computing in 1994 and has been imparting his expertise on the subject since then. The main objective behind the Qiskit quantum computing series is to offer educational content to those interested in learning about this emerging technology.
Watrous mentions that students need to have pre-requisite knowledge about mathematical concepts like linear algebra, including vectors and matrices, complex numbers, sets and functions. He adds that students need not have a specialized background in quantum physics nor quantum computing before starting this course.
Unit 1 of the ‘Understanding Quantum Information and Computation’ series will focus on the basics of quantum information, including quantum states, measurements and operations, quantum circuits, and examples like quantum teleportation. Unit 2 will be centered around explaining quantum computing algorithms like Shor’s algorithm and other key quantum algorithms in use today. In Unit 3, Watrous will offer deeper insight into quantum information and how it can be described using density matrices and the relevance of density matrices in quantum information. Lastly, in the final Unit, viewers will get an understanding and mitigation of the effects of noise on quantum computers.
Researchers at Meta AI have developed a new model,ESMFold, that predicts over 600 million protein structures from lesser-studied sources. ESMFold framework is a first-of-its-kind and is known to accelerate the performance of protein-folding AI by 60x.
Our research team developed ESMFold’s new approach using a large language model that allowed us to accelerate folding by up to 60x — an improvement that has the potential to accelerate work in medicine, green chemistry, environmental applications, & renewable energy.
Additionally, Meta has provided a platform, ESMFold Metagenomic Atlas, where users can instantly retrieve protein sequences.
Announcing the ESM Metagenomic Atlas — the first comprehensive view of the ‘dark matter’ of the protein universe. Made possible by ESMFold, a new breakthrough model for protein folding from Meta AI.
Numerous databases published by NCBI, Joint Genome Institute, and a few others have already aided in cataloging newly uncovered protein structures. While breakthroughs in genomics have made it possible to identify the sequences of many unique proteins, this data alone cannot explain how proteins fit together to form a functional molecule.
Meta AI’s new protein-folding approach will utilize large language models to represent an initial comprehensive view of protein structures in a metagenomics database containing millions of proteins. This model allows scientists to analyze structural relationships and discover new combinations that benefit medicine and other fields.
ESMFold works in a two-fold manner. Initially, the network is trained with an intuitive understanding of protein structures and sequences. The second step combines this information with the information containing possible protein combinations/relationships.
The model closely resembles DeepMind’s AlphaFold AI, which came earlier this year. AlphaFold AI predicted more than 200M cataloged proteins using a protein’s 1D amino acid sequence. While the ESMFold is not as accurate, it is about 60x faster in making predictions, allowing researchers to scale protein structure cataloging to much larger databases.
Twitter’s Chief of People and Diversity Dalana Brand and Chief Consumer Officer Sarah Personette have resigned from their respective positions. Personette and Brand announced their resignations in respective Twitter threads on Tuesday.
Personette, former in charge of Twitter’s ad sales business, said she resigned on Friday, and her work access was cut off by Tuesday. Brand also resigned on Friday. After Twitter’s takeover, Musk fired four key executives immediately: CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, Head of Legal Policy Vijaya Gadde, and General Counsel Sean Edgett.
With Personette and Brand out, the number of remaining executives at Twitter is dwindling, with more key executives rumored to be leaving soon. Twitter’s head of product, Jay Sullivan, deleted the bio on his Twitter account, which earlier denoted his role at the company. The previous head of product, Kayvon Beykpour, was let go by former CEO Agrawal in May.
Brand joined Twitter in 2018, previously serving as VP of People Experience and Head of Inclusion & Diversity. According to Ebony, she was appointed to her most recent role in February of this year, making her the first Black woman to work in Twitter’s c-suite.
A former Facebook marketing VP, Personette has worked at Twitter since October 2018, when she joined as a VP of Global Client Solutions, per LinkedIn. She was promoted to chief customer officer in August 2021. That role is crucial to Twitter’s business since most of its revenue comes from ad sales.
After some uncertainty around Twitter Blue’s revamp, Elon Musk has finally laid out the company’s approach. He said the new paid plan would cost $8 per month, which he mentioned in reply to Stephen King’s tweet. Moreover, the price will be adjusted based on the country’s purchasing power parity, hinting toward a global launch of Twitter Blue.
Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.
Musk’s tweet also says that the social network’s current verification system is akin to a “lords & peasants” system. His tweet about the new paid plan indicated offering verification to subscribers.
You will also get: – Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam – Ability to post long video & audio – Half as many ads
Musk also noted some of the features that will roll out with this new plan, including fewer ads, priority in replies, mentions, and searches (something which verified handles get through the “Verified” notification channel). They will also be able to post longer videos than the current limit of 2 minutes and 20 seconds.
Musk tends to change his mind quickly, so we should take this announcement with a grain of salt. These might not be the final features when Twitter rolls out its new subscription plan.
Earlier this week, reports noted that Musk and Twitter are revamping the verification process, which might involve a fee as high as $20 per month. However, the billionaire has seemed to settle on the $8 per month pricing for now.
The reports also noted that the current verified users would lose their blue checkmark if they do not pay for the new paid plan. Musk has not mentioned any such measure in the new Twitter thread about the subscription plan.
It has been almost a week since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, and he has already started to revamp the platform. According to The Verge, the new CEO of Twitter has plans to charge users $20 per month for a blue check that indicates verified on a Twitter account.
This new feature would be a part of Twitter Blue, which is the existing subscription feature launched last year. Musk has not been very subtle about his disregard for the monthly $4.99 product, which, according to him, is not very appealing to anyone beyond power users. Currently, subscribing to Twitter Blue gets users early access to features like the edit button and the feature to change the design of the app icon for Twitter on their phones. You can also get ad-free access to specific news sources and a feed of the most talked-about articles from the people you follow.
Elon Musk and venture capitalists Jason Calacanis — who changed his Twitter bio to ‘Chief Meme Officer at Twitter’ — have been hinting at paid user verification since April. As per the leaked texts, Calacanis laid out a five-part plan for Elon Musk that includes the concept of a membership team, which will remove bots while making users pay for actual name membership. Calacanis also complained that no one is setting priorities at Twitter and that 12,000 people work on whatever they like.
Musk’s desire to “authenticate all humans” has been part of his plan since his initial takeover bid. Even if we keep the potential security flaws aside, this plan still ignores the fundamental difference between verification of someone’s identity and giving anyone a blue check to convey that they are who they are saying they are.
“Why should the blue check marks be limited to the celebrities, elite, and press? How is that democratic?” Calacanis texted Musk. Musk and his companions see this plan as a way to give money to Twitter. But by monetizing the blue tick symbol that currently has some value, they will ultimately remove all of that current value. Here’s how.
Blue checks on social platforms are a means of combating misinformation. Today, if someone makes a fake account pretending to be a celebrity, world leader, and journalist, it’s easy to tell it’s fake if the account does not have a blue check. But under this newly proposed system, there is not much incentive to pay $20 per month to remain verified, especially when the once-coveted symbol will be available to anyone willing to pay. It is possible that bad actors posing as journalists to spread fake information would be more inclined to pay the $20 than actual journalists.
Musk, however, doesn’t seem to care very much about misinformation’s dangers. According to the sources, just this weekend, Musk tweeted and later deleted a fake conspiracy theory about the attack on the husband of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.
One alternative for this feature could be to charge only corporations like Netflix or Steak-umm (which have a significant Twitter presence) to be verified. Corporate clients are more willing than a local nonprofit newsroom to pay $20 monthly per account to prove their legitimacy. Yet this still does not solve the misinformation issue. If anything, it only pressures companies into buying a product they’ve gotten free for years to prevent a possible PR problem.
How much would you pay to be verified & get a blue check mark on Twitter?
For now, it does not seem like Twitter users are very enthusiastic about this plan that Musk has concocted. Recently, Calacanis posted a poll asking how much people would pay to be verified, and at the time of publication, about 81.6% of more than a million respondents said they would not pay. However, considering the recent developments, Musk might devise a different verification tactic altogether. Hopefully, that plan is a bit more thought-through than this one.
Researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and MIT are experimenting with spatial acoustic information. They plan to use sound to model physical spaces with a new machine-learning model. The ML model can simulate how sound will propagate within a room and how listeners perceive it at different locations.
The researchers used a model similar to the Implicit Neural representation model (used to generate smooth 3D reconstructions) and captured how sound waves travel through space. The system will model spatial acoustics and then learn the underlying geometry of the space. With this information, the model builds visual renderings of the space, similar to how humans use sounds to estimate their physical environment.
Until now, researchers have only modeled vision using the property of photometric consistency. But with sound, this property is inconsistent as changing locations also changes how sound is perceived.
To overcome such limitations in acoustic modeling, the researchers focused on two properties: sound’s reciprocal nature and the impact of geometric objects. To incorporate these, the model uses Neural Acoustic Fields (NAFs). NAFs are grid-based neural networks that capture architectural features of space.
Researchers can provide the NAF with visual data about a scene and a few spectrograms that illustrate how audio might sound when the emitter and listener are situated at specific points around the room.
The new technique of mapping physical spaces using sound will open opportunities for “immersive multimodal experiences in metaverse applications.” For more detailed information, refer to the research paper “Learning Neural Acoustic Fields.”
The centralized instant messaging platform WhatsApp banned 26.85 lakhs Indian accounts in September 2022. This included 87,200 accounts that were blocked before being flagged by users on Tuesday.
As per the WhatsApp Users Safety Reports, the number of accounts blocked in September was 15% more than the 2,32,8000 Whatsapp accounts that were banned in August. Out of these accounts, 100,800 accounts were proactively blocked before any reports from users.
According to the report of September 2022, WhatsApp banned 26.85 lakhs Indian accounts. Of these, 87,2000 accounts were proactively banned before any reports from users. WhatsApp received 666 grievances in September but took action against 23 only. In this report, only ban appeal grievances were addressed, other grievances like account support, product support, and safety were not addressed.
The complex IT rules that came into practice last year make the authorized digital platforms with over 50 lakh users publish compliance reports monthly that mention the details of the complaints received and action taken against them.
In the past, social media platforms have opposed misinformation, hate speech, and fake news circulation. Concerns are made by some quarters over various digital platforms that pull down content and ‘de-platforming’ users.
In the last week, the government announced rules to set up a grievance appeal mechanism against arbitrary content moderation or takedown decisions of big tech companies.
Besides user complaints, WhatsApp has resources and deploy tools to prevent harmful behavior on the platform. WhatsApp believes in preventing harmful activity on the platform rather than detecting it.
Twitter discreetly rolled out a feature that will enable users to exchange NFTs from several NFT Marketplace via tweets while the world had set its eyes on Elon Musk taking over Twitter. The feature, known as NFT Tweet Tiles, contains a button that allows users to link through to a marketplace item while also displaying an NFT’s artwork in a dedicated panel within a tweet.
Users will be able to purchase, sell, and display NFTs directly through tweets thanks to a collaboration between Twitter and four leading marketplaces: Magic Eden, Rarible, Dapper Labs, and Jump.trade. These marketplaces support several blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Flow, Polygon, Tezos, and Immutable X – thus implying that the new Twitter feature is Blockchain agnostic.
Twitter previously tested the ‘Tweet Tiles’ interactive, customizable widget in association with the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and The Guardian. In other words, the new feature resembles past tweet tiles initiatives, allowing renowned newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal to have tweet cards with in-app link expansion. In its announcement of tweet tiles in August, Twitter stated that it hoped the feature would encourage future innovation among the company’s developer community.
The timing of this announcement is indeed intriguing, particularly in light of the fact that Musk is notorious for regularly making fun of cryptocurrencies and NFTs in particular. It’s certainly possible that the world’s richest man has changed his opinion regarding NFTs, or at least since he announced plans to own Twitter. It will be interesting to see how this will play out in the future.
Twitter stated that the NFT Tweet Tiles is not just for Blue premium users and that it is testing the interface with select Twitter users across iOS and the web. Prior to this, premium Twitter users had access to another test feature that let them link their accounts to their cryptocurrency wallets. Once they’ve completed this, they’ll be allowed to set an Ethereum NFT as their profile photo, which will appear with an icon indicating that they are the legitimate owner of the digital work.
Twitter is not the only social media company leveraging blockchain technology. The use of cross-post NFTs on Facebook and Instagram by Meta has also garnered attention this year.
The largest video game retailer in the world, GameStop, unveiled a public beta of their NFT (non-fungible token) marketplace on July 11. The gaming-focused decentralized marketplace was built on top of the Ethereum blockchain and processes transactions using the layer 2 scaling solution Loopring. On Monday this week, the GameStop NFT Marketplace went officially live on the blockchain platform ImmutableX.
The interactive NFT products for a number of ImmutableX-based games, including Gods Unchained, Illuvium, and Guild of Guardians, are now accessible through the GameStop shop. This includes tokenized, exchangeable goods like digital trading cards and customizable land plots, among others.
ImmutableX is based on Ethereum, the most popular platform for decentralized applications. By shifting transactions to a second-layer blockchain, ImmutableX, in contrast to Ethereum, allows quicker and less expensive game, app, and NFT interactions. According to its developers, the layer-2 scaling network ImmutableX can enable 100% gas-free and carbon-neutral minting and trading on the GameStop NFT marketplace, making it a desirable option for new users of Web3 gaming.
The release of GameStop NFT Marketplace falls on scheduled deadlines. In a prior statement, the company projected that the marketplace would be released to the market by the end of the second quarter of the next fiscal year.
Over the past year, GameStop has strived to expand its array of Web3 integrations. In February, the company initially disclosed its collaboration with ImmutableX. The companies announced a $100 million token incentive fund for Web3 game producers and GameStop’s participation in a $500 million fund, including investment and grants for NFT and ImmutableX game developers. Next, GameStop debuted its non-custodial cryptocurrency and NFT wallet in May. The non-custodial cryptocurrency wallet allows customers to store, transmit, and receive cryptocurrency and NFTs. The marketplace is also compatible with other non-custodial wallets like WalletConnect and MetaMask.
The retailer made $7.2 million in sales within the first week of its beta marketplace debut in July after partnering with Loopring to handle transactions. In its most recent venture, the company disclosed plans for a forthcoming collaboration with cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
