How to Ensure Your Financial Security

Managing your personal finances is a tricky balancing act; on the one hand you want to be able to pay your bills without any worry, on the other you want to spend money on yourself; you work hard to earn it, so why shouldn’t you go for a meal out or take a trip to the cinema now and again? 

The problem is that however hard you try to plan for the future, fate will almost inevitably throw you a curve ball, and you’ll find yourself in a challenging situation. There are ways of preparing for these kinds of eventualities, and although you can never be entirely sure you’ve covered all the bases if you stick to some basic financial guidelines you should be able to avoid the worst types of financial problems.

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Twitter tries out conversation ‘subscriptions’

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Sometimes you want to follow a Twitter thread but don’t exactly want to reply or like a tweet. It seems the social network has a solution for that. Twitter is testing out a “subscribe to conversation” option. Twitter user and software engineer Jane Manchun Wong uncovered the prototype version of this feature in the Android app. In response to her tweet, Twitter said it’s working to make the platform more conversational.

The feature adds a button to the top right corner of the threads. If you click on it, you’ll be notified of additional tweets when they come in. It helps keep you in the loop while adding a bit of anonymity to the service. It’s just one of the many new features the social network is trying out to keep its users engaged. Earlier this year, Twitter’s Director of Product Management Sara Haider said the company is working on “some pretty big changes to the way conversations look and feel on Twitter.” So, keep expecting the service to evolve and change in the coming months.

Source: Engadget

‘No Man’s Sky’ goes online with an upcoming free update

Hello Games just announced the next chapter for its game No Man’s Sky. The developer calls this next update No Man’s Sky: Beyond, and it’ll have three parts to it. The only one they’ve announced so far is No Man’s Sky Online. We don’t know anything beyond the title, but Hello Games calls it a “radical” new multiplayer experience, where it’ll let “players everywhere in the universe to meet and play together.” Beyond this description, the game developers aren’t offering much but say the changes are a response to how players responded to the NEXT update, which was released last year. The NEXT update added multiplayer support for up to 16 players, so it isn’t clear what the Online and Beyond experience will be. But Hello Games claims it won’t turn the game into an MMO.

Source: The Verge

This Alphabet-made Chrome extension will filter out toxic comments online

Aptly called Tune, a new experimental Chrome open-source extension from Alphabet incubator Jigsaw hopes to make your online browsing experience a bit more pleasant and free of toxic comments. How does it do that? It uses machine learning. As the name suggests, it allows you to see varying levels of polite or aggressive comments online. It moderates comments on YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and Disqus. “Zen mode” turns off all comments completely, while “volume levels” let you choose from “quiet” to “blaring,” which shows you different amounts of toxicity—which include attacks, insults, profanity, etc.

The extension uses Perspective, which is an API created by Jigsaw and Google’s Counter Abuse Technology team back in 2017. News organizations like The New York Times and The Guardian to experiment with online moderation. You can see in the GIF above how Perspective sorts through comes by toxicity. Since this is an experiment, it’s expected that Tune can be inaccurate when it comes to labeling what comments are considered toxic. Jigsaw’s goal is to show how machine learning can be used to improve discussions online. Should machines get involved in the messy yet nuanced world of comment moderation? We can’t say. And the potential for it to do more harm than good is there. But perhaps it’s a good place to start for a conversation about online decorum.

Source: The Verge