Is the Pixel 7 Pro as good as a "real" camera? With @madebygoogle bragging of its "pro-level zoom" and AI smarts, I wanted to see how close it got to my $10,000 of DSLR gear. Answer: closer than any other phone. Here's my assessment & a thread. 1/ cnet.com/tech/mobile/i-… You won't get as much detail from a 12-megapixel Pixel 7 Pro photo as from a 30-megapixel Canon 5D Mark IV in ordinary light, but it does well with color and sharpness. Left is P7P, right is 5D4, the second pair of images cropped to equivalent framing for pixel peeping. 2/

Interesting brain-machine interface research from UC Davis' Weijian Yang. Elon Musk's Neuralink is going for electrodes, but Yang is working on using photons to stimulate specific neurons more precisely. Can now manipulate up to 50 specific neurons simultaneously in a mouse brain Now moving from light to sound. Mikhail Shapiro from Caltech, using ultrasound to image brain activity — based on blood flow and microbubbles (from cyanobacteria). Also less invasive than electrodes. Much higher resolution than functional MRI (magnetic field) for imaging.

Qualcomm CEO @cristianoamon just said @Qualcomm's future automotive business is now $30 billion worth of deals, up from $19B a couple months ago. "ADAS is becoming more material in our pipeline," referring to advanced driver assistance systems like lane keeping, auto braking. Two of Qualcomm's car chip customers making appearances at the company's automotive day saying they're happy with Snapdragon car chips: General Motors CEO Mary Barra and Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares. 2/

After tons of pixel peeping, I say the iPhone 14 Pro is a big step up that serious photographers will appreciate. I love the 48-megapixel sensor for detail & cropping. Image quality like dynamic range is noticeably better. My assessment (and a thread). 1/ cnet.com/tech/mobile/wh… Here's one example comparison, showing the same night view with iPhone 13 Pro and 14 Pro (12 megapixels, night mode), overexposed +1.3EV in editing to show better where noise is a problem. 13 Pro at left shows worse noise, detail and color. 2/

Interesting stats from @California_ISO from today's extremely hot weather and overtaxed electrical grid. You can see here power demand spiked at 50GW at 5:50 p.m. PT, while solar generation was tailing off for the day. caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/… thread 1/ Natural gas is what kept the lights on and the air conditioners running tonight. Natural gas power plans supplied about 26GW of power steadily since 6 p.m. PT. 2/

Wondering, without much of a sense of optimism, whether upgrading from Quicken Willmaker 2021 to 2022 will fix the bugs that I've wasted hours fighting today. (v2023 comes out in October and apparently goes online only. How long until it's only available via subscription?) The biggest problem is I can't divide property in unequal shares among various people. The UI changes the % numbers I've already entered in crazy ways.

And here's the error message if I try deleting the duplicate entry for myself in the contacts section.

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 VW is now micromanaging its chips supply chain. "We need to run it because we depend on it. If we don't have it, we don't build vehicles," VW's Hellenthal says. 2/n

Both the $600 Pixel 6 and $900 Pixel 6 Pro are great after 10 days of testing. P6 is a good value, P6P fulfills the "flagship" promise. I generally agree with @Batteryhq's take on Pixel 6 Pro, but here are further thoughts in thread, esp. re. cameras 1/ cnet.com/tech/mobile/go… The main reason to get the Pixel 6 Pro is the 4x camera, equivalent focal length 104mm. It's super useful if you like photography, though many mainstream folks may find it too much telephoto. Some photos at 4x here: 2/

Samsung Foundry, one of the big three when it comes to building chips, has delayed its next-gen manufacturing process. The gate-all-around technique increases performance and cuts power but won't arrive until 2022. cnet.co/2YqTaeZ A little more detail from the Samsung Foundry keynote: the 3GAE (first incarnation of 3nm gate all around chip manufacturing technology) will arrive in first half of 2022. 3GAP (mature version for high-vol manufacturing) in 2023. 2GAP (2nm GAA refinement) in second half of 2025.

Intel CEO @PGelsinger 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/ $20B investment in a new chipmaking fab in Arizona, and more Intel capacity will come later, Gelsinger said. 2/

You can watch Iceland doing its volcano thing live. Love this! ruv.is/frett/2021/03/… The helicopter on the lower edge of the screen just took off and flew away, but the people are still there at the bottom end of the lava flow.

I rented a Canon R5 to see if I like it. So many thoughts after an hour fooling with it, starting with:
1. Boy do I hate customizing controls and my personal menus to get it working how I like
2. Electronic viewfinder is nice sometimes but plagued by discontinuity at telephoto That above shot taken with Canon's wacky new 800mm f11 lens. F11 doesn't let much light through, but the price, the weight, the size, the ability to shoot handheld easily... I'm impressed. 1/125 sec, ISO 100

I'm tuning in to #HotChips2020 today, the 32nd year of the IEEE conference. My favorite graphic so far is AMD's 8-core Ryzen 4000 family of chips, the subject of a later presentation today. Thread/ I watched the quantum computing presentations yesterday from IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Google. Pretty interesting if you can handle the high gorpiness factor. The technology is very green, but is maturing. Here's that thread:

https://twitter.com/stshank/status/1295117839108431872

I learned a lot digging into FIDO2 and U2F standards for hardware key authentication after today's big Microsoft embrace (cnet.com/news/microsoft… — log in without a password). But there are lots of caveats. Thread: 1/ Security key maker @yubico doesn't support Bluetooth for reasons of security (30m range means danger of connecting to wrong device) and engineering (pairing sucks, battery required). Some discussion here: yubico.com/2016/06/yubike… 2/