Pablo Samuel Castro, Staff Software Engineer at Google Research, writes on Google AI blog: It is widely accepted that the enormous growth of deep reinforcement learning research, which combines traditional reinforcement learning with deep neural networks, began with the publication of the seminal DQN algorithm. This paper demonstrated the potential of this combination, showing that it could produce agents that could play a number of Atari 2600 games very effectively. Since then, there have been several approaches that have built on and improved the original DQN. The popular Rainbow algorithm combined a number of these recent advances to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the ALE benchmark. This advance, however, came at a very high computational cost, which has the unfortunate side effect of widening the gap between those with ample access to computational resources and those without. In "Revisiting Rainbow: Promoting more Insightful and Inclusive Deep Reinforcement Learning Research," to be presented at ICML 2021, we revisit this algorithm on a set of small- and medium-sized tasks. We first discuss the computational cost associated with the Rainbow algorithm. We explore how the same conclusions regarding the benefits of combining the various algorithmic components can be reached with smaller-scale experiments, and further generalize that idea to how research done on a smaller computational budget can provide valuable scientific insights.

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Apple is working on a new service that will let consumers pay for any Apple Pay purchase in installments over time, rivaling the "buy now, pay later" offerings popularized by services from Affirm and PayPal. From a report: The upcoming service, known internally as Apple Pay Later, will use Goldman Sachs Group as the lender for the loans needed for the installment offerings, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Goldman Sachs has been Apple's partner for the Apple Card credit card since 2019, but the new offering isn't tied to the Apple Card and doesn't require the use of one, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing unannounced products. The buy now, pay later system could help drive Apple Pay adoption and convince more users to use their iPhone to pay for items instead of standard credit cards. Apple receives a percentage of transactions made with Apple Pay, driving additional revenue to the company's more than $50 billion per year services business.

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Firefox 90 introduces the next version of SmartBlock, the browser's tracker blocking mechanism built into its private browsing and strict modes, which now has improvements designed to prevent buttons that let you log into websites using your Facebook account from breaking, Mozilla announced on Tuesday. From a report: SmartBlock was first introduced with Firefox 87 in March, and if you aren't familiar, here's Mozilla's description of how it works, from the company's blog: "SmartBlock intelligently fixes up web pages that are broken by our tracking protections, without compromising user privacy. SmartBlock does this by providing local stand-ins for blocked third-party tracking scripts. These stand-in scripts behave just enough like the original ones to make sure that the website works properly. They allow broken sites relying on the original scripts to load with their functionality intact." Sometimes, though, the feature would break Facebook login buttons. In a new blog post, Mozilla's Tom Wisniewski and Arthur Edelstein explain why this would happen, using an example of trying to log in to Etsy.

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Google has rolled out support for the new Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) standard to all Gmail users as part of an effort to improve email-sender authenticity. From a report: The new standard is hard to comprehend for non-technical users, but it basically allows companies that have implemented email security standards like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF for their email domains to show "authenticated logos" inside email clients. Since all these security protocols rely on digital certificates and advanced cryptography, the verified logos will only appear for a company's real email domain and not for spoofed emails sent by scammers or cybercrime groups.

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The Russia-linked ransomware gang REvil has seemingly vanished from the dark web, where it maintains several pages documenting its activities including one called the "happy blog." From a report: It's not yet known if the sites were down temporarily or if the group -- or law enforcement -- took its websites offline. "It's too early too tell, but I've never seen ALL of their infrastructure offline like this," said Allan Liska, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, in a text message. "I can't find any of their infrastructure online. Their extortion page is gone, all of their payment portals are offline, as is their chat function." Liska said the websites went offline around 1 a.m. Eastern time. The sudden outage comes just days after President Joe Biden said he pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin to act against hackers in his country blamed for recent ransomware attacks.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're an iPhone user, the weather is always a particularly nice 70 degrees. Or 68 degrees. Any temperature but 69 degrees, actually, because it turns out that the built-in weather app on some versions of iOS -- including the current version, iOS 14.6 -- will refuse to display the internet's favorite number, even if the actual temperature in a given location is, in fact, 69 degrees. It's not clear if this is a bug or an intentional attempt from Apple to cut down on 69-related humor. The rounding is only visible in the weather app itself: clicking through to Apple's source data from Weather.com will show the proper temperature, as does Apple's home screen widgets.

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Microsoft took the wraps off Windows 11 recently, and we expect the new OS to arrive later this year. Upgrading to a new version of Windows is often a painful process, and in the past, you were stuck even if the new software ruined your workflow. It's different this time: Microsoft says you'll be able to go back to Windows 10 if you don't like Windows 11. You'll only have 10 days to decide, though. From a report: How will you know if Windows 11 is worth using? There's a preview program for Windows 11, but the preview builds are still missing some elements of the final release. You don't have to mess with the Insiders builds at all -- you can install the final version when it's available, and take it for a spin. This news comes by way of a PDF that Microsoft has provided to PC manufacturers. It's an FAQ format, and among the various redundant queries is this gem: "Can I go back to Windows 10 after I upgrade if I don't like Windows 11?" The answer is a resounding yes... for 10 days. You'll have that long to decide to roll back to Windows 10. Wait any longer, and you're locked into Windows 11 unless you reformat your system.

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How To Geek: To run Windows 3.1 on your iPad, you'll need to buy an app called iDOS 2 that's available in the App Store. Currently, it costs $4.99, which seems like a bargain considering what it can do. iDOS has a spotty history on the App Store. Way back in 2010, Apple pulled an earlier version of the app because it allowed people to run unapproved code loaded through iTunes. Last year, its author updated the app to pull DOS files from iCloud or the Files app, and Apple approved it. So far, it's still listed, so let's hope that it sticks. After purchasing and installing iDOS 2 on your iPad, run it once to make sure that it creates whatever folders it needs to work in your Files app. It will create an "iDOS" folder in your "On My iPad" area in Files. That's important. Before diving into the Windows setup process below, you might want to familiarize yourself with how iDOS works. In a vertical orientation, you'll see a window near the top of the screen that includes the video output of the emulated MS-DOS machine. Below that, you'll see a toolbar that lets you load disk images (if you tap the floppy drive), check the DOSBox emulation speed (a black box with green numbers), and take a screenshot or change Settings (by tapping the power button). At the bottom of the screen, you'll find an onscreen keyboard that lets you type whatever you want into the MS-DOS machine. If you flip your iPad horizontally, the MS-DOS display area will take over the screen, and you can pull up a toolbar that lets you access the keyboard, mouse, and gamepad options at any time by tapping the top center of the screen.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: When Microsoft updated its Teams communication app with a more sophisticated way to give PowerPoint presentations in January, the company published a 500-word blog post on the feature. People could read the blog post and try to figure out how to use it, or they could consult YouTube. On the video service owned by arch-rival Google, a former Microsoft employee named Kevin Stratvert published a video on Presenter Mode to his more than 800,000 subscribers, garnering more than 180,000 views and hundreds of comments. Microsoft itself had not published a video on the topic. "I've built a Microsoft audience," Stratvert said in an interview with CNBC. "Microsoft content drives a lot more viewership than non-Microsoft content. I've done Gmail and a few others, but they haven't done quite as well." [...] Historically, developing and maintaining products has been the core of Microsoft. Today nearly 50% of employees work in engineering. Marketing is a considerably smaller part of the business, and employees work on ads, materials for Microsoft's website, events and other methods of promotion. In the past few years, a group inside Microsoft began focusing more on YouTube. "On YouTube specifically, we're starting to explore the concept of what it looks like to do something native to YouTube," Sonia Atchison, a market research lead who worked on the Microsoft Creators Program, said on a podcast last year. People often turn to YouTube when they want to get a better understanding of Microsoft software, and while Microsoft has plenty of its own videos available on YouTube, they don't always come up at the top of the site's search results, Atchison said. Videos from outsiders can receive higher rankings. Sometimes a video from a Microsoft employee might be there. The company does have employees with large audiences, including Mike Tholfsen, a 26-year company veteran whose videos show how teachers and students can use Teams and other applications.

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Goldfish released into the wild can grow much bigger and cause major disruption to ecosystems.

Marcin Wichary, Design Manager at Figma, writes in his newsletter: At this point it's probably clear that every time I say "the worst keyboard ever made," I am being cheeky. These are not the worst keyboards ever made. There is no worst keyboard; the world of keyboards is just too complex for this to be possible. Even more importantly, though, I believe there is always something you can learn from a keyboard you don't like. Sure, the Ukrainian keyboard has an atrocious build quality, the TI calculator keypad is weird to press, and the abKey is far from a Revolution. But there are things in either of them that can surprise and delight.

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Something very scary just happened. There's a bug in Drummer that sometimes updates the wrong outline when an I/O update comes in. This can result in hilarity when somehow the updates overwrite the file for Scripting News, and it seems there is no backup. It's a bug. And bugs hurt! I looked everywhere and kicked myself virtually for not maintaining a backup of this vital file. Every time I publish there should be a copy preserved. Well, it turns out that was happening. I post the outline to the instantOutlines repo, and thanks to the power and elegance of GitHub, there's a snapshot of every update, going back to when I started doing this on June 17. Catastrophe averted. Whew. And wow GitHub is starting to turn into a very nice network file system.

We're finding that the LogSeq people and I have the same values re software and users. In yesterday's Twitter thread, they asked what would be the perfect storage system. I said: "my answer, for now, is daveappserver. But it isn't perfect, it's what we can do now that meets the criteria for now and the near future (the vision, the direction I want to go in). I think we share that. We want users to be as independent as possible, and to empower all levels of technical interest. I don't want the responsibility of keeping the world's ideas online. I want that distributed with rock-solid interop." I think that's about as concise a definition of why I do things the way I do them. As I was sure they would, the Logseq folk agreed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: By making alterations to the plastic manufacturing process, scientists hope to produce forms of the ubiquitous material that can break down far more safely and quickly in the environment than current versions do. Researchers in China have now demonstrated a new example of this that degrades in just a week when exposed to sunlight and oxygen, which they believe could make for electronics that are easier to dispose of at the end of their lives. The new material came about when study author Liang Luo from China's Huazhong University of Science and Technology was working on an advanced type of chemical sensor, as reported by PNAS. The materials scientist was developing a novel polymer film that changed color in response to pH levels. This process was driven by the material's unique molecular structure, with the chains of monomers giving the film its deep red color, and taking it away when these bonds were broken. Through his team's experiments, Luo found that the deep red color of the film quickly faded away and the material broke apart after several days in the sunlight. Breaking apart these bonds is a common objective in research efforts to better recycle plastics, and in doing so Luo may have inadvertently conjured up a promising, environmentally friendly version of the material. The molecular makeup of the plastic means it wouldn't be suited for use in soda bottles or shopping bags, as it is only stable as a functional material in the dark and without oxygen. But exposed to sunlight and air, it disintegrates rapidly and completely decomposes within a week, leaving no environmentally damaging microplastic fragments behind. A byproduct of the process is naturally occurring succinic acid, however, which could potentially be upcycled for commercial use in pharmaceuticals or food.

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The best approach to solving our problems is to spread the gospel of journalism, to everyone who wants to learn. Teach elementary school students. Make a semester of journalism required for all college grads. The model of journalism of the past no longer works. That's why lies are winning, people have no idea of the elements of good journalism.Teach senior citizens how to do good journalism.