Technology

Autumn is edging closer, and the return to a more regular office schedule looms for many people — and with it, the waiting time for transportation, meetings and appointments. Games, reading, social-media scrolls or just zoning out are common ways to spend these spells, but if you want more mental stimulation, why not boost your brain with brief lessons in subjects that interest you? Here’s a guide to finding Android and iOS apps that turn your smartphone into a traveling pocket tutor.Learn a LanguageWeb-based academic courses and music lessons have boomed in the past few years, especially as remote learning became a part of pandemic life. Although Apple and Google have their own free translation apps, some people also found online language lessons useful. No one wants to hear you practice ...

“¿Qué dijo?”.Esas son algunas de las palabras más pronunciadas en mi casa. No importa cuánto le subamos el volumen del televisor mi esposa y yo, cada vez es más difícil entender a los actores de las películas y series que se transmiten en emisión en continuo. Al final, solemos poner los subtítulos, aunque no tenemos problemas de audición.No somos los únicos. En la era de la emisión en continuo, ahora que el consumo de video pasa de las salas de cine a un contenido que se adapta para televisores, tabletas y teléfonos inteligentes, lograr que los diálogos sean nítidos y claros se ha convertido en el mayor desafío tecnológico del mundo del entretenimiento. Según las encuestas, cerca del 50 por ciento de los estadounidenses —y la mayoría de los jóvenes— ven videos con subtítulos la mayoría de ...

At the end of a 15,000-word Twitter thread he never posted, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, offered a blunt assessment of his predicament.“I’m broke and wearing an ankle monitor and one of the most hated people in the world,” he wrote. “There will probably never be anything I can do to make my lifetime impact net positive.”He added: “And the truth is that I did what I thought was right.”After Mr. Bankman-Fried was arrested, charged with fraud over FTX’s collapse and placed in home detention in December, he wrote hundreds of pages of sometimes rambling self-justifications, ranging from childhood memories to mathematical calculations.In a draft of his unsent posts, which he formatted as a series of tweets spanning roughly 70 typed pages, he criticize...

The iPhone 15 (technically, the 17th iteration of the iconic Apple phone) has arrived with a big change that is sure to annoy many of us. Eventually, however, we’ll breathe a sigh of relief.Allow me to unpack that. To comply with recent European regulations, the iPhone 15, unveiled Tuesday, will abandon the Lightning connector that has been the method for charging iPhones for 11 years. In its place will be a different oval-shaped connector: USB-C.For the average tech user, change isn’t fun. This all means that when Apple customers buy their next iPhones, they will no longer be able to plug in all the Lightning accessories they have collected, such as charging cables, speaker docks and earbuds. They will have to replace those with new products that use USB-C connectors to plug into the new ...

Elon Musk warned of civilizational risks posed by artificial intelligence. Sundar Pichai of Google highlighted the technology’s potential to solve health and energy problems. And Mark Zuckerberg of Meta stressed the importance of open and transparent A.I. systems.The tech titans held forth on Wednesday in a three-hour meeting with lawmakers in Washington about A.I. and future regulations. The gathering, known as the A.I. Insight Forum, was part of a crash course for Congress on the technology and organized by the Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York.The meeting — also attended by Bill Gates, a founder of Microsoft; Sam Altman of OpenAI; Satya Nadella of Microsoft; and Jensen Huang of Nvidia — was a rare congregation of more than a dozen top tech executives in the same room. I...

Ashley Kozich, 30, who works for a community foundation and lives in Fort Lauderdale, has a group chat with her eight best friends she met as a student at the University of Mississippi. In the last year a lot of them have had babies, so they now highlight the most recently born as the group photo.But the group name it here to stay: “The Sorry People.” “In college we were a really rowdy group of girls, and we would cause chaos and trouble wherever we went,” Ms. Kozich said. “In the mornings we would have to go on these apology tours and say sorry for whatever we did.”The name, she said, has developed a life of its own. “It’s been our name for over 10 years, and people ask us, ‘How are the Sorry People?’” she said. “I don’t think we could be called anything else.”Indeed, many names that star...

The United Auto Workers union, which represents about 150,000 workers at U.S. car plants, could strike against three of the country’s largest automakers on Friday if the union and the companies are unable to reach new contracts.The three automakers — General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, which owns Chrysler, Jeep and Ram — could be forced to stop or slow production if an agreement isn’t reached by midnight on Thursday. The president of the U.A.W., Shawn Fain, said that Thursday was the “deadline, not a reference point.”The union is negotiating a separate four-year contract with each automaker. The U.A.W. has never struck against all three companies at once, preferring to target one at a time. But Mr. Fain has said he and his members are willing to strike against all three this time.Wh...