When can we find opportunities to cultivate “being mode”? In principle, this mode of mind can be practiced in all situations. In being mode, the mind has nothing to do, nowhere to go and can focus fully on moment-by-moment experience, allowing us to be fully present and aware of whatever is here, right now. But the tendency to enter “doing mode” is pervasive, where the present moment is boiled down to a narrow, one-dimensional focus: “What does this have to say about my progress in reaching my goals?...

For those of you getting excited that we’ve appeared to make some sort of headway in introducing nuance into our gender stereotypes, you’ll have to hold those horses. The catalogue is only published in Sweden. Further, not all images in the catalogue are gender neutral. This publicity stunt, beyond being an excellent selling tool that could theoretically harness the buying power of both sexes for toys previously categorized for “just boys” or “just girls,” points to what could be in store for our shopping future....

The company has been testing out a live shopping feature in several European countries since last year. There would be live events where people could buy products from their favorite brands. The brand would enlist popular TikTokers and popular brands for live streams. The point of them would be to entice people to buy a whole bunch of products. This model proved to be a smash hit in the Asian market, and TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, thought that the same model would apply to other markets....

Alexa will use one-minute voice clips to create high-quality and longer voice clips aided by AI Alexa will use one-minute voice clips to create high-quality and longer voice clips aided by AI The feature requires at least one minute of audio from the source, which Prasad claims can offer decent audio output. Alexa would effectively synthesize the audio clips provided by the user and turn them into lengthier speech, TechCrunch reports (via Gizmodo)....

OnePlus’ co-founder Pete Lau stated that both operating systems are going to continue to work off of the same codebase, which the company established with OxygenOS 12. This is of course, due to the merger between OPPO and OnePlus. Originally, OnePlus and OPPO were set to have a merged OS starting with the OnePlus 10 series. OnePlus’ OxygenOS 13 software will be more stock Google than OxygenOS 12 was OnePlus’ OxygenOS 13 software will be more stock Google than OxygenOS 12 was...