Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 48

Leica Pioneers the Anti-AI Camera That Fights Deepfakes by Certifying Every Picture

This week, German camera maker Leica introduced their new M11-P professional camera, which includes new digital watermarking technology that allows the camera to digitally verify that an image has not been manipulated and even track its future use. The tech is built using standards set by the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), an initiative built by Adobe as an open-source method for certifying content authenticity. 

It is an interesting idea to certify content as authentic directly from the ...

WSJ Just Killed Its Bestseller List. Do These Lists Even Matter Anymore?

Books are an anomaly when it comes to how “bestsellers” are ranked. Movies are judged by their total box office numbers. Music is rated based on listens and album sales cumulatively. By contrast, a bestselling book generally earns that designation after a single great week of sales. Or in the case of an Amazon bestseller, maybe just $3 and 5 minutes.

When the Wall Street Journal announced earlier this week that they would be dropping their bestseller lists, it induced a fireball of angst within t...

Announcing the 2023 Inc. Non-Obvious Business Book Awards Longlist!

For the past several months our team at Non-Obvious has been quietly devouring all the books that have come in as submissions for our annual book awards program. It’s always a magical time to have so many books coming in every day and to see just how diverse the topics happen to be.

This year’s selections for the Longlist are our widest range of titles yet, from another hugely competitive year. We considered more than 1000 books published this past year (our award window runs from 11/01/22 to...

Do People Vote for Candidates Who Look Like Them?

There have been several studies in the past that found people tend to prefer going to doctors who share their same ethnic background. This doesn’t seem to be true when it comes to politics, as an interesting article from TIME magazine points out this week by focusing on politicians of Indian origin who are part of the Presidential race of 2024. The South Asian community is anything but aligned when it comes to Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy:

“Neither Harris nor Haley nor Ramaswamy...

Doritos Creates AI That Silences the Sounds of Crunching While Gaming

Listening to someone crunchily eating Doritos is probably high on many lists of annoying behavior but imagine how much worse it must be to listen to the crunching in a headset while playing against a Dorito-eating opponent in a video game. In a beautiful example of knowing their audience, Doritos commissioned an AI company to quantify more than 5000 types of crunching sounds so they could build “crunch canceling” technology that would let users mute it out.

While reading about this, it was hard n...

How Barnes & Noble Is Winning by Rethinking the Usual Retail Conventions

The Barnes & Noble store location in Oviedo, Florida may be a bit harder to locate than others because it has a different name. As a throwback to a brand the bookseller acquired decades ago, this store location is now the one and only B. Dalton Bookseller location in the world. It’s a symbol of B&N Chief Executive James Daunt’s “idiosyncratic approach to mass retail.”

Over the past several years, the resurgent bookseller has abandoned typical branding guidelines, killed the “racetrack checkout” u...

Flushless Toilets, Plastic Reuse, and More Ideas From the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale

Imagine a toilet that never needs to be flushed. Arid desert land converted into abundant living spaces. Plastic yellow gallon oil containers upcycled into chairs and houses. These are just a few of the dozens of ideas from across the world that are on display right now at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 Show which will be open to the public for another month. The festival is meant to be an “agent of change” and this year’s theme is the Laboratory of the Future.

Curated by Ghanaian-Scottish...

The Blue Pumpkin Debate

If you see a child carrying a blue pumpkin this Halloween, consider that they may have autism and be nonverbal or have difficulty communicating or may not be dressed up like other kids. For several years now, a movement has been on the rise from parents and autism advocates to use the blue pumpkin as both a way for kids with autism to communicate a condition that may not otherwise be visible as well as a way to raise awareness about autism itself.

Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea. Some cr...

Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment

Self-checkout is not a delightful experience. Goods don’t always scan properly. The system stalls if you don’t put a scanned item in the right place. Double scanning an item, or buying something that requires validation, or getting an error requires waiting for a human employee to help you anyway. Self-checkout, in other words, usually sucks.

A growing number of retailers have begun to realize this and made moves to compensate for it. “Walmart has removed the kiosks entirely from a handful of sto...

The World’s Hottest Pepper Will Never Succeed for This Reason

A list of the world’s hottest peppers before 2023 includes some scary names. The Carolina Reaper. The Ghost Pepper. The Trinidad Scorpion. The Infinity Chili. Those are respectable, intimidating names for peppers that can melt your face starting with your taste buds. Apparently this year for the first time since 2017, there is a new pepper that must be declared the world’s hottest at more than 2.69 million SHU.

So what has the pepper world decided to call this dangerous new winner? Pepper X. I ca...