#76- 🖼 Van Gogh in Lego, cardless Mastercard and AI-generated vacation photos
Greg Taieb · · 3 min read
Hello,
I hope you are well. This week small selection of topics in tapas mode and next week I offer you a unique subject on an app that I have used several times/month for years and which comes from an actor who will surprise you...a lot.
Have a good read!
🖼 A Van Gogh in your living room for 169$
Even if I haven't bought any for a few years, I must admit that I am a huge fan of what Lego does.
Indeed, the brand never stops renewing itself by offering ever more varied kits.
Latest example on kit representing Van Gogh's starry night from the Lego Ideas a selection of creations proposed and created by Lego fans.
In this case we owe this creation to Truman Cheng, a 25-year-old fan whose contribution received 10,000 votes.
Available from June 1st on the Lego website.
💳 Mastercard will allow you to pay with your face...or your finger
Biometric payment is not new, it's exactly what is used when you try to pay with Apple Pay: your face or your fingerprint unlocks the function payment on your phone.
Mastercard, the famous bank card operator, wants to go further by allowing you to do without the phone.
Biometric payments are exploding and we plan to go from 700 million users in 2020 to 1.4 billion in 2025.
How does it work?
Mastercard records your biometric data (face and fingerprints) via an app or payment terminal and links it with your bank card.
Once this link is made, you will be able to pay directly without your card from compatible terminals.
Mastercard plans to make the program available in the US, Europe, Asia and Middle East.
I admit that I no longer use my credit card from Apple Pay and as I still have my cell phone, this novelty interests me little except in cases where the smartphone runs out of battery.
However, making payment methods transparent and omniscient is a great innovation and it will change a lot of things.
YouTube improves its video player
YouTube is the #1 video player so every change made to its interface or its features is worth paying attention to.
A few days ago Google launched a series of new features for its video player with the main aim of making long videos easier to play.
- 1st new feature: a thumbnail which tells you which was the most popular place in a video (especially if readers have returned to it several times).
- 2nd new feature: the arrival of video chapters which were previously limited to smart TVs and consoles.
Finally if you want to listen to or watch a video in a loop (clike those of this channel) a new loop playback option is now accessible via the player settings.
Drunk, he deceives his friends thanks to Dall-E
Dall-E is an AI model based on pretty crazy machine learning that allows you to generate incredible images from a simple text query.
If you want to know more, Remi and I explain how it works with lots of examples in a recent episode of our podcast 👇.
Well if you are looking for another illustration of the power of Dall-E I present to you Matt Bell who recently tried an experiment: slide into the recent photos of his vacation in Roatan in Honduras some images generated by Dall-E to see if his Facebook contacts saw something there. Well, against all expectations, they didn't notice anything.
This raises questions about the potential risks introduced by Dall-E and this is precisely one of the reasons why the program is currently not freely accessible.
To be continued but count on me to talk to you about it very quickly and once again if it hasn't been done and the subject interests you, go ahead and listen to our podcast on the subject or the dedicated video.