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Stephen Shankland
@stshank
CNET, full stack journalist (I'm joking, kind of). Covering green energy, chips, drones, photography, AI, new tech. @stshank@mstdn.social, .bsky.social
SF Bay Area, CAcnet.com/profiles/shank…Joined June 2007

Stephen Shankland’s posts

Here comes a new Easter egg in for 10th birthday of Google's browser: a birthday cake & party hat in 404 page-not-found error message dinosaur game. On display in Chrome in September. Try it out by switching off your network and trying to load a site.
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BREAKING: Apple and Samsung just settled their 7-year patent lawsuit. Apple won the first rounds, Samsung got an important ruling from the Supreme Court, but in the resulting damages trial, ended up paying $140 million more than before. #appsung
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I was expecting good times kayaking in Elkhorn Slough (California coast) because of the ~150 sea otters. But the highlight by far was this black sea hare (Aplysia vaccaria, a kind of slug). Gigantic! Amazing! And yes slimy.
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“The team’s analysis showed that the Hiawatha crater was nearly 1,000 feet deep and 20 miles in diameter, placing it among Earth’s 25 largest impact craters, although much smaller than the 90-mile crater left by the dino-busting Chicxulub impact.”
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“This is the first impact crater found beneath one of our planet’s ice sheets” nyti.ms/2QF3aZ8
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Microsoft CEO : "Today we are making the commitment that by 2030 Microsoft will become carbon negative. By 2050, we will remove from the environment all the carbon we have emitted since our company's founding in 1975." News event now:
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Step 1. Install password manager Step 2. Embrace strings of 32 random alphanumeric characters for good security Step 3. Oh god I have to type it with TV remote control
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For Volkswagen, semiconductors used to be just a relatively inexpensive component. Now it's the gating factor that keeps the company from selling cars, says engineering leader Berthold Hellenthal at Semicon West. A Porsche Taycan now has 8000 chips inside. Thread 1/n
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A bobcat mom and two bobkittens came by the house. First time I've ever seen three! Giant paws and tufted ears and stubby tails. Kittens very diligent about washing themselves.
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Google's new Supreme Court filing vs Oracle re. Java programming interfaces: "Imagine a world in which every time you went to a different building, you needed a different plug to fit the proprietary socket, and no one was allowed to create adapters."
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15.4 million monthly users: brave.com/15-million/ 700,000 verified creators (YouTubers, website operators, Twitch streamers, etc) who can receive BAT payments through Brave Rewards. Among those with the ad system enabled (pays users in BAT), people click 9% of ads.
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At Q2B conference, Caltech quantum computing giant warns against hype: "There is a line between setting ambitious goals and fanning inflated expectations... For us as a community, we'll be better off if we try to stay on the right side of that line." #QuantumComputing
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Whoa. Once you get to the right place, you *can* take astrophotography photos with Pixel 4. This was in New Mexico, very cold 10°F with clear air, the Orion constellation above juniper trees lit faintly by my sister's bedroom light. 4 minutes of combined exposures.
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The browser is almost to 1/10 of Mozilla in terms of monthly active users. It's hard to get people to switch browsers, but Brave numbers are still increasing.
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@brave August stats: MAU: 18.3M DAU: 6.1M (high water mark; 5.8M 28-day mean) Updated now on brave.com/transparency. @attentiontoken primary ecosystem top of funnel ~879K creators, half YouTubers, per batgrowth.com & bat.watch. twitter.com/BrendanEich/st
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Holy moly, wind turbines are getting enormous. You slot 115m blades into the 3 big holes at the front; they sweep an area of 43,742 square meters and produce up to 15 megawatts of power. prototype installation starts this year. Photo shows blades. vestas.com/en/products/of
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Please meet my new favourite mediaeval windmill, the @Vestas V236-15.0. It may only be able to reach its 60% design capacity factor in great wind locations, but each one of these that gets built anywhere is a chunk less gas and coal that gets burned.
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That overhaul of the ad-blocking browser that we told you about last night is now available. The new Brave Core version now can run Chrome extensions and gets a 3-week update cycle. 4 million people now use Brave monthly. cnet.com/news/brave-ad- tip
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Microsoft President : "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century and I can say that about me personally. The good news is that, if life is long enough, you can learn … that you need to change."
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Intel CEO just announced Intel is going to become an open foundry for US and European customers. Intel Foundry Services business unit wins support from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco, others. Thread/
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The browser's system for paying website owners in $BAT (supplied by grants from the startup now; subsidized by ads later) can now be activated on Android. Already there on Windows/Mac/Linux PCs, but this is the first time it's on mobile, too.
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With today's update, we've brought Brave Rewards to the Android platform. You can enable it in a few easy steps!
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For those unaware, there is a collegial tradition in the browser world in which rivals send each other cakes for shipment milestones. I've always found it quite heart-warming.
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Thanks for the yummy cake and kind words, @googlechrome! It's great to be a part of the browser cake-giving tradition. 🍰
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Do we now spend more $ emulating analog-era photography flaws (inaccurate color, vignetting) than analog industry spent trying to fix them?
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