Technology

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced on Friday that it is working on a new social network whose description seems to make it a potential future competitor to Twitter.

“We are thinking regarding a decentralized and independent social network allowing the sharing of written messages in real time,” said the group in a statement sent by AFP, confirming information revealed by the Platformer site.

According to the latter, the new application would be designed to be interoperable with other networks of the same type, such as Mastodon, which has gained relative popularity since the takeover of Twitter by billionaire Elon Musk last October.

Mastodon operates through decentralized servers, with no central management or decision-making authority.

This would therefore be a major break with the strategy hitherto employed by the tech giants, which have always preferred to operate in a closed environment and with their own rules of use.

This announcement comes as Twitter has been losing momentum since the takeover by Mr. Musk, who laid off more than half of the employees.

Among the decisions taken by the main shareholder of Tesla and SpaceX, the return to the platform of controversial personalities who had been banned for remarks deemed offensive worried most of the main advertisers of the site, who have since announced to distance themselves.

The network is also regularly the victim of technical breakdowns.

The choice of interoperability envisaged by Meta also stands out from Twitter’s approach to the matter: in December, Elon Musk briefly blocked the accounts of several users who shared links to other social networks, including Facebook, Instagram or Mastodon.

After the hot water bottle belt, here is the name of the innovation to fight once morest period pain: Myoovi. This wireless box, designed by a British doctor, Adam Hamdi, attaches to the skin and uses transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) technology to relieve menstrual cramps.

“I have seen many patients with menstrual pain and endometriosis for which painkillers were of no help,” Adam Hamdi told the online magazine “Dezeen”. With his device, the pain decreases immediately, unlike medication. Indeed, the TENS technology sends small electrical impulses, which block or reduce the pain signals transmitted to the spinal cord and the brain.

Portable and discreet, the device is worn under clothing. Thanks to an adhesive pad, it holds despite body movements. “The device is very light, so you don’t notice it until you turn it on. Once you turn it on, you feel tiny pulses in the area where you placed the device,” says its creator. The device, sold for the equivalent of 139 euros, is equipped with a battery of 10 hours of autonomy which is recharged by USB and three control buttons which allow you to adjust the intensity and the rhythm of the pulses.

If, while testing ChatGPT, you felt smug with conversational artificial intelligences (AIs) of this type, your skills may be in demand. In the jargon of this emerging technology, the professionals occupying this function are called “prompt engineers”, the word “prompt” meaning the way in which one initiates and directs a conversation with a machine of this type. There are still very few of them, but their job description is as futuristic as the generative AI they are working on.

Their role is to discuss with it in their mother tongue (in “natural” language), and therefore without necessarily knowing how to code or master the computer science of artificial intelligence. The goal is twofold: to guide the conversational robot in its future interactions – and therefore in particular to teach it to avoid making inappropriate comments -, but also to find the best ways to obtain the best possible answers.