The eye on the coin does not have lashes and is designed to resemble a camera lens. Royal MintThe United Kingdoms Royal Mint is releasing a new coin honoringGeorge Orwell on the 75th anniversary of his death. The 2 (roughly $2.45) piece pays homage to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwells famous dystopian novel exploring themes like totalitarianism, propaganda, surveillance and freedom.He was a writer concerned with poverty, class and power, writes theGuardiansDesigned by artistHenry Gray, the coins reverse features a large eye with the words Big Brother is watching you circling the iris. Orwells name is inscribed underneath. On its edge is another quote from the novel, There was truth and there was untruth.With phones and cameras being everywhere in your house, and being listened to by advertisers on your phone, you are really aware of how youre being surveyedand thats what Nineteen Eighty-Four is all about, says Gray in a statement from the Mint.Thats why the eye in Grays design isnt a realistic eye; it doesnt have eyelashes and things like that because I wanted it to be monocular, he adds. Its almost like a camera lens staring at you all the time, unblinking. Orwell is known for his fiction examining themes liketotalitarian and control. Royal MintBorn in 1903, Orwell spent his early career working with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. With time, however, he became increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer, as Encyclopedia Britannica writes. He drew on these experiences for his first novel, Burmese Days (1934).About a decade later, Orwell made a name for himself with Animal Farm (1945). The political fable, which uses anthropomorphic animals to tell a story about power and corruption, would become one of his most celebrated works.Nineteen Eighty-Four followed soon after. Published in 1949, the novel follows Winston Smith, a worker at the Ministry of Truth, as he secretly rebels against a totalitarian government and its leader, Big Brother.Orwell died at age 46 on January 21, 1950just a few months after Nineteen Eighty-Fours publication. He joins a group of celebrated British authors with commemorative coins from the Royal Mint, including William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and J.R.R. Tolkien. (Other recent coins not linked to literature have featured David Bowie, Paddington Bear and Winnie the Pooh, per Londonists Matt Brown.)For those interested in collecting the new 2 piece (which features Charles III on the obverse), it is now available for purchase on the Royal Mints website. Those who want a closer look can visit the Royal Mint Experience in Wales to strike their own Orwell coin.The works of George Orwell have influenced generations, and his most famous works are still being studied todaydecades on from their first publication, says Rebecca Morgan, director of commemorative coins at the Royal Mint, in anotherstatement. I am delighted to share this unique design with collectors and fans of Orwells work, paying tribute to one of the most world-renowned authors of the 20th century.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Books, British Writers, Coins, Collecting, Designers, Fiction, Literature, Writers

Impressively, all the motions in the example videos appear lifelike and fluid with subjects moving much faster and more naturally.Read More

Generative Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), such as LLaVA and Qwen-VL, excel in vision-language (VL) tasks like image captioning and visual question answering (VQA). However, these models face challenges when applied to foundational discriminative VL tasks, such as image classification or multiple-choice VQA, which require discrete label predictions. The primary obstacle is the difficulty in extracting useful features from generative models for discriminative tasks.Current methods for adapting LMMs to discriminative tasks often rely on prompt engineering, finetuning, or specialized architectures. Despite their promise, these approaches are limited by their dependency on large-scale trAIning data, modality-specific features, or lack of flexibility. To tackle this problem, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, Berkeley, IBM Research, and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab proposes a novel solution: Sparse Attention Vectors (SAVs). SAVs are a finetuning-free method that leverages sparse attention head activations in LMMs as features for discriminative VL tasks. Inspired by neurosciences concept of functional specificity (how different parts of the brain are specific to different functions) and recent work on transformer interpretability, this method uses fewer than 1% of the attention heads to extract discriminative features effectively. SAVs achieve state-of-the-art performance with only few-shot examples and demonstrate robustness across diverse tasks.Diving deeper into how the method works, the following steps were followed to identify and utilize Sparse Attention Vectors as shown in Figure 2:Extracting Attention Vectors: For a frozen LMM and a few-shot labeled dataset (e.g., 20 examples per label), attention vectors are extracted from each attention head in every layer. Specifically, for the final token of each input sequence, the attention vector is computed as an output of the dot-product attention mechanism.Identifying Relevant Vectors: The discriminative capability of each attention vector is evaluated using a nearest class centroid classifier. For each class, the mean (centroid) attention vector is computed across the few-shot examples. Cosine similarity is calculated between each inputs attention vector and the class centroids, and attention heads are ranked based on their classification accuracy. The top-performing heads (e.g., the top 20) are selected as the sparse attention vector set (HSAV).Classification Using SAVs: Given a query input, predictions are made using the selected sparse attention heads. For each head in HSAV, the querys similarity to class centroids is computed, and the final class label is determined by a majority vote across all heads. This approach allows the use of less than 1% of the total attention heads, making the method lightweight and efficient.For evaluation, SAVs were tested on two state-of-the-art LMMsLLaVA-OneVision and Qwen2-VLand compared against multiple baselines, including zero-shot (ZS) methods, few-shot methods, and finetuning approaches like LoRA. Evaluations spanned a wide range of discriminative VL tasks. SAVs outperformed baselines in detecting hallucinations (e.g., distinguishing hallucinating from not hallucinating) and harmful content in datasets like LMM-Hallucination and VLGuard. SAVs demonstrated superior performance on challenging datasets like BLINK and NaturalBench, which require visual and compositional reasoning. SAVs were also highly effective on datasets like EuroSAT (satellite image classification) and Oxford-IIIT-Pets (fine-grained classification of pet breeds). Results showed that SAVs consistently outperformed zero-shot and few-shot baselines, closing the gap with discriminative vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP and SigLIP. For instance, SAVs achieved higher accuracy on safety tasks and demonstrated robust performance across VQA and image classification benchmarks.Moreover, SAVs require only a few labeled examples per class, making them practical for tasks with limited training data. The method identifies specific attention heads that contribute to classification, offering insights into the models inner workings. SAVs are adaptable to a variety of discriminative tasks, including those involving interleaved image-text inputs. By leveraging a sparse subset of attention heads, the method is computationally lightweight and scalable.While SAVs provide a significant advancement, they rely on accessing the internal architecture of the LMM. This dependency limits their applicability to open-source models and poses challenges for broader usage. Additionally, tasks like image-text retrieval might benefit from finer-grained confidence metrics than the current majority voting mechanism. Future research could explore enhancing SAVs for tasks like multimodal retrieval, data compression, and feature embedding for downstream applications.Check out the Paper and GitHub Page. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,dont forget to follow us onTwitter and join ourTelegram Channel andLinkedIn Group. Dont Forget to join our65k+ ML SubReddit. Recommend Open-Source Platform: Parlant is a framework that transforms how AI agents make decisions in customer-facing scenarios. (Promoted)The post Revolutionizing Vision-Language Tasks with Sparse Attention Vectors: A Lightweight Approach to Discriminative Classification appeared first on MarkTechPost.

LatestMachine LearningSix Books That Changed My Attitude to Managing Engineering Teams 0 like January 15, 2025Share this postAuthor(s): Dr. Aliaksei Mikhailiuk Originally published on Towards AI. Save Time, Boost Your Leadership Skills, and Build Happy and Winning Teams!This member-only story is on us. Upgrade to access all of Medium.Image generated with Imagen3-fast by the Author.Nobody wants to be in a terrible job, nobody wants to be on a toxic team, nobody wants to have a terrible manager, and nobody wants to be a terrible manager. Why do so many people feel miserable in their workplace then?Here I go over six books that advice on becoming a better manager and turning the ship around when things go South. Each of the books helped me address workplace issues job dissatisfaction, challenges communicating with teammates, building good relationships with the managers, and reports.Each of the books has its take on how to build healthy environments at work or how to tackle the current state. While most of the books are aimed at managers, creating a better understanding of the team dynamics and mechanisms of teamwork would help any individual contributor to grow to the next level.Advice from these books goes far beyond the workplace. Building relationships at home or with friends certainly benefits from more awareness of common pitfalls and behavioural patterns.For more useful links on how to become a better team player and manager scroll to the bottom Read the full blog for free on Medium.Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming asponsor. Published via Towards AITowards AI - Medium Share this post

There's a decent chance you're currently getting (or soon will be) lashed by storms. What's the best way to get out of the rain? Grab one of the cheapest video game deals I've found for today. And heyI think any type of gaming gets elevated to exhilarating when there's the threat of a lightning strike kicking out your power when you're mid-save. Do something every day that scares you, I say. In retro news, it's been 29 years since I used an ice cream van to dispense post-apocalyptic vehicular violence with a clown instead of overpriced Cornettos. That inaugural Twisted Metal would go on to spawn 10 titles produced by a variety of developers, plus a surprisingly decent TV series that should still be available on Stan.Happy Bday Twisted Metal This Day in Gaming Aussie birthdays for notable games.- Twisted Metal (PS) 1996. eBay- Sly Raccoon (PS2) 2003. eBay- Street Fighter V (ARC) 2018. GetTable of ContentsNice Savings for Nintendo SwitchNBA 2K252K25s core gameplay feels familiar, and a handful of improvements such as Go-To Moves, Rhythm Shooting, and Shot Timing Profiles also make it feel more novel and challenging.GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon (-33%) - A$46.55MySims: Cozy Bndl (-18%) - A$49New Super Mario Bros Del. (-14%) - A$69Children of Morta (-80%) - A$6.59This War of Mine Complete (-95%) - A$3Moonlighter (-90%) - A$3.74Expiring Recent DealsDonkey Kong Country Returns HD (-15%) - A$684 in 1 Charging Dock (-21%) - A$18.99MGS: Master Col. (-28%) - A$64.95Persona 5 Royal (-36%) - A$64.25Mortal Kombat 1 (-60%) - A$23.98Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 (-85%) - A$8.24Or gift a Nintendo eShop Card.Switch Console PricesHow much to Switch it up?Switch OLED + Mario Wonder: $539 $499 | Switch Original: $499 $448 | Switch OLED Black: $539 $479 | Switch OLED White: $539 $479 | Switch Lite: $329 $299 | Switch Lite Hyrule: $339 $299See itBack to topPurchase Cheap for PCMotorsports Humble BndlIncludes TT Isle of Man: Ride on the Edge 1+2+3, Overpass 2,WRC Generations - The FIA WRC Official Game, WRC 7 + 8 FIA World Rally Championship, Monster Truck Championship, V-Rally 4, FIA European Truck Racing Championship, Truck Racer.Logitech G502 X Plus (-68%) - A$178Age of Darkness: Final Stand (-65%) - A$14.34FC 25 (-60%) - A$43.98Frostpunk GOTY (-78%) - A$15.49Empire of the Ants Del. (-35%) - A$48.69Ready or Not (-40%) - A$47.99Expiring Recent DealsLethal Company (-35%) - A$9.42Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (-60%) - A$39.98Civilization VII (-12%) - A$105Ghostwire: Tokyo (-80%) - A$19.99American Truck Sim (-75%) - A$7.37Or just get a Steam Wallet CardPC Hardware PricesSlay your pile of shame.Official launch in NovSteam Deck 256GB LCD: $649 | Steam Deck 512GB OLED: $899 | Steam Deck 1TB OLED: $1,049See it at SteamBack to topExciting Bargains for XboxWD_BLACK 1TB CardThe WD Black C50 1TB is an excellent choice. It handles large game files in just a couple of minutes and is small enough to carry between locations, making it a versatile and cost-effective way to enjoy a larger library of Xbox games.Thrustmaster Ferrari 458 (-18%) - A$220Turtle Beach Stealth Pivot (-18%) - A$204FC 25 (-55%) - A$49Elden Ring: Erdtree Ed. (-17%) - A$99.99Senua's Saga Hellblade II (-15%) - A$59.46Assassins Creed Shadows (-19%) - A$89Expiring Recent DealsOr just invest in an Xbox Card.Xbox Console PricesHow many bucks for a 'Box? Series X: $799 $729 | Series S Black: $549 $545 | Series S White:$499 $471 | Series S Starter: N/ASee itBack to topPure Scores for PlayStationHyperX Cloud AlphaThe HyperX Cloud Alpha offers a winning mix of affordability, comfort, and outstanding audio quality. youd be hard pressed to find a better sounding, more comfortable headset than the Cloud Alpha for the price. 9.4/10.Pac-Man World Re-Pac (-23%) - A$42.55Gran Turismo 7 (-28%) - A$89.95Assassins Creed Shadows (-19%) - A$89FC 25 (-50%) - A$54.95Spidey Miles Morales Ult. (-45%) - A$69Persona 5 Royal (-50%) - A$49.75Expiring Recent DealsF1 24 (-46%) - A$59.95Monster Hunter Wilds (-17%) - A$99RoboCop: Rogue City (-35%) - A$55.12Sniper Elite Resistance (-21%) - A$79Cyberpunk 2077: Ult. (-29%) - A$75.50Far Cry 6 (-71%) - A$29PS+ Monthly FreebiesYours to keep from Jan 7 with this subscriptionSuicide Squad: KTJL [PS5]NFS Hot Pursuit Remastered [PS4]The Stanley Parable: Ultra [PS4/5]Or purchase a PS Store Card.What you'll pay to 'Station.PS5 Slim Disc:$799 $759 | PS5 Slim Digital:679 $678 | PS VR2: $899 | PS VR2 + Horizon: $899 | PS5 Pro $1,199 | PS Portal: $329See itBack to top Adam Mathew is our Aussie deals wrangler. He plays practically everything, often on YouTube.

Shift, a social enterprise founded by Dutch tech entrepreneur Don Ritzen, has announced its ambitious plans to construct a massive landmark designed to inspire action on climate change.Shift aims to attract 1 million annual visitors to the New World Wonder, which it estimates will cost up to $250mn. The startup plans to build the monument in the Netherlands, and if thats successful, construct one on every continent.Civilisations before us built grand monuments to celebrate gods, momentous events or industrial progress, Ritzen told TNW over the phone. I truly believe that our generation needs something equally big and extraordinary to drive people to take action on climate.To turn its vision into reality, Shift has kicked off an international architecture competition with a total prize pool of 250,000. Architects from around the world will battle it out to create a winning design for the landmark.The of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!The Shift team is open to fresh ideas, but it does have a basic outline of what the World Wonder will offer. According to a brief seen by TNW, the startup envisions a striking physical structure that features immersive experiences that engage all the senses.The landmark will serve as a hub for sustainability education, showcasing stories of climate heroes and providing visitors and non-visitors access to thousands of green initiatives via an accompanying digital platform.We want it to be space that inspires awe, said Ritzen. But most importantly, one that ignites hope and empowers people to change their behaviours over the long term.Ritzens vision might seem like a load of hot air, but its a serious proposal coming from a well-respected figure in the Dutch tech scene. Ritzen is the co-founder of Rockstart, a startup incubator that has guided over 350 early-stage companies to a collective net worth of 1.7bn.Shift has a financial roadmap in place and relationships with institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals to develop the design and realise the first landmark, the company said in a statement. It also said it is in discussion with several municipalities in the Netherlands to secure a location for the structure.Ticket sales will constitute the main revenuefor the monument and its accompanying digital platform. The entry fee is expected to start at 20 per person.Shift operates a social enterprise model, with 95% of the company owned by a foundation, Stichting Shift World. The remaining 5% is held by impact investors. Residents of the municipality in which the landmark is to be built also have the option to become co-owners.The architecture competition will run across two stages, with the winning team set to be announced in November. Judges include Ben van Berkel, founder of internationally renowned design firm UNStudio, and Gke Roelink, director at the NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam. Story by Sin Geschwindt Sin is a climate and energy reporter at TNW. From nuclear fusion to escooters, he covers the length and breadth of Europe's clean tech ecos (show all) Sin is a climate and energy reporter at TNW. From nuclear fusion to escooters, he covers the length and breadth of Europe's clean tech ecosystem. He's happiest sourcing a scoop, investigating the impact of emerging technologies, and even putting them to the test. Sin has five years journalism experience and holds a dual degree in media and environmental science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Get the TNW newsletterGet the most important tech news in your inbox each week.Also tagged with

The market share of Apple TV+ in the US has been fairly consistent over the last few quarters, at least thats what the latest research from JustWatch shows. Now 9to5Mac has seen exclusive data on the market share of streaming platforms during Q4 2024 and the situation for Apple remains stable.During the third quarter of 2024, Apple TV+ accounted for 8% of the market share in the US. But in the last quarter of the year, the platform lost ground to other platforms and its market share fell to 7%. Its not a significant drop and the figures are fairly consistent considering previous reports, but they do show that Apple is still struggling to compete with larger players.JustWatch notes that Apple TV+ is still seen as a secondary choice for most viewers, as the streaming market has become very competitive and most people still prefer major platforms like Netflix and Max.In 2024, Apple TV+ maintained a modest but consistent market share compared to its competitors, lagging behind larger platforms like Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, and Max. Despite steady performance, Apple TV+ struggled to close the gap with Paramount+ and fell well short of Disney+s early-year momentum, the report says.As usual, first and second place in the ranking are disputed by Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, respectively. Max comes in third with 13%, with Disney+ following close behind with 12% of the market share in the US.You can take a look at the full market share ranking provided by JustWatch below:Amazon Prime Video: 22%Netflix: 21%Max: 13%Disney+: 12%Hulu: 11%Paramount +: 9%Apple TV+: 7%Peacock: 1%Others: 4%Launched in 2019, Apple TV+ has around 300 titles available far less than its competitors have. Thats because Apples platform focuses exclusively on original content. Over the years, some of Apples original films and shows have been nominated and won important awards, but the competition is tough.During the first weekend of 2025, Apple promoted Apple TV+ by giving free access to the platform to everyone for a limited period. However, well have to wait until the next quarter to see if the campaign has paid off for Apple.Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.Youre reading 9to5Mac experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Dont know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Apple has come under intense scrutiny for rolling out an underbaked AI-powered feature that summarizes breaking news while often butchering it beyond recognition.For over a month, roughly as long as the feature has been available to iPhone users, publishers have found that it consistently generates false information and pushes it to millions of users.Despite broadcasting a barrage of fabrications for weeks, Apple has yet to meaningfully address the problem."This is my periodic rant that Apple Intelligence is so bad that today it got every fact wrong in its AI a summary of Washington Post news alerts," the newspaper's tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler wrote in a post on Bluesky this week.Fowler appended a screenshot of an alert, which claimed that Pete Hegseth, who's been facing a confrontational confirmation hearing for the role of defense secretary this week, had been fired by his former employer, Fox News which is false and not what the WaPo's syndication of an Associated Press story"It's wildly irresponsible that Apple doesn't turn off summaries for news apps until it gets a bit better at this AI thing," Fowler added.The constant blunders of Apple's AI summaries put the tech's nagging shortcomings on full display, demonstrating that even tech giants like Apple are failing miserably to successfully integrate AI without constantly embarrassing themselves.AI models are still coming up with all sorts of "hallucinated" lies, a problem experts believe could be intrinsic to the tech. After all, large language models like the one powering Apple's summarizing feature simply predict the next word based on probability and are incapable of actually understanding the content they're paraphrasing, at least for the time being.And the stakes are high, given the context. Apple's notifications are intended to alert iPhone users to breaking news not sow distrust and confusion.The story also highlights a stark power imbalance, with news organizations powerless to determine how Apple represents their work to its vast number of users."News organizations have vigorously complained to Apple about this, but we have no power over what iOS does to the accurate and expertly crafted alerts we send out," Fowler wrote in a followup.In December, the BBC first filed a complaint with Apple after the feature mistakenly claimed that Luigi Mangione, the man who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself an egregious and easily disproven fabrication.Last week, Apple finally caved and responded to the complaint, vowing to add a clarifying disclaimer that the summaries were AI-generated while also attempting to distance itself from bearing any responsibility."Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback," a company spokesperson told the BBC in a statement. "A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence.""We encourage users to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary," the company continued.The disclaimer unintentionally points to the dubious value proposition of today's AI: what's the point of a summarizing feature if the company is forced to include a disclaimer on each one that it might be entirely wrong? Should Apple's customers really be the ones responsible for pointing out each time its AI summaries are spreading lies?"It just transfers the responsibility to users, who in an already confusing information landscape will be expected to check if information is true or not," Reporters Without Borders technology and journalism desk head Vincent Berthier told the BBC.Journalists are particularly worried about further eroding trust in the news industry, a pertinent topic given the tidal wave of AI slop that has been crashing over the internet."At a time where access to accurate reporting has never been more important, the public must not be placed in a position of second-guessing the accuracy of news they receive," the National Union of Journalists general secretary Laura Davison told the BBC.Share This Article

eSalon is an LA-based beauty brand, creating custom home hair color from scratch for each one of our clients. We're a 10x winner of Allure's Best Hair Color, and we've custom crafted over 310,000 unique color variations so far.We are hiring a Temporary Bilingual Customer Service Representative (English & Spanish) to join us in providing outstanding customer support to our rapidly growing client base. We're looking for compassionate and persuasive individuals who have an exceptional way of connecting with people. That skillful way you are able to connect with customers and turn things around is what we are looking for to reduce client churn, as well as gather client insights about our products, services, and customer satisfaction. This is a temporary position, estimated to last though the end of May 2025, with the potential of full time employment based on performance and business needs. You would be hired on by eSalon's staffing partner, Apple One. While the role is fully remote, it is preferred you are based in the LA area for occasional training and company events. You must have availability to work a consistent schedule, Monday through Friday, 8AM-5PM PST. The hourly rate is $18 with the option of occasional overtime.Provide customer service via phone, email, and chat.Use consultative sales skills to assess client goals, educate them on the benefits of eSalon, propose a customized eSalon solution, and save clients from discontinuing service.Maintain a satisfactory level of productivity and customer satisfaction. Meet and exceed individual goals.Retain clients in accordance with company requirements and customer needs.Document client interactions accurately.Communicate ongoing retention activity and progress.Reply to clients and reviews through Social Media.Project professionalism and work cooperatively with other departments and seek further advice and guidance when necessary. RequirementsExcellent written and oral communication with native level fluency in English and Spanish.1+ years customer service or call center experience (preferably with an emphasis on retention sales).Experience selling in a solution or service environment with top notch phone presentation skills.Active experience utilizing CRM systems to document daily calls, meetings, and activity is required.Must be organized, self-motivated, driven, and have an appetite to succeed.Consistent track record of retaining a high percentage of clients.Excellent writing skills.Stable work history.Must have a stable internet speed of at least 50MB.Highly motivated & energetic.Experience with Zendesk a plus.Flexible and able to thrive in fast paced, high growth environment.Must be available Monday - Friday, 8AM-5PM PST.Must be based in the United States.Must be authorized to work in the US for any employer.Benefits$18 / Hour Fully Remote position with equipment provided Complementary eSalon products Related Jobs See more Customer Support jobs

TikTok's days in the US may soon be over. The app is set to be banned on Sunday, unless a US buyer or the Supreme Court intervenes.In the meantime, there's another app owned by TikTok's parent company ByteDance that's making waves. Lemon8 is currently the most downloaded lifestyle app in Apple's App Store and has over 10 million downloads in the Google Play store."Lemon8 is a lifestyle community focused app powered by TikTok, where you can discover and share authentic content on a variety of topics such as beauty, fashion, travel, food, and more," the app's description reads in both stores.Here's what you need to know about Lemon8.Note: I reached out to ByteDance for this story, and the company did not respond for comment.What is Lemon8? Lemon8 posts can contain text to help label objects in the post. Screenshot by Zach McAuliffe/CNETLemon8 is a video- and photo-sharing platform that eschews the vertical-scrolling format of TikTok in favor of a Pinterest board-style format. But what Lemon8 and TikTok do have in common is both have Following and For You tabs to show you posts from creators you follow and posts the app thinks you will like.Lemon8's content is split into six topic tabs, plus a seventh tab called All. The other tabs are Fashion, Beauty, Food, Wellness, Travel and Home. These tabs can be found across the top of your screen, and tapping into these tabs shows you recommended and suggested posts.Posts can be swipeable photo collections like in Instagram, or TikTok-style videos. Some creators add text to their photos to label clothing or a product. Some will also include the price of the item in the text.How is Lemon8 different from TikTok and other apps?Lemon8 is different from other apps in terms of what is posted and how it's presented.Lemon8 has a lot of influencer ads and product recommendations. It's difficult to tell what is and isn't sponsored content, and this appears to be the norm across the app. TikTok also has sponsored content, but usually these are marked as such in the bottom-left corner. Memes don't seem to be catching on in Lemon8. Screenshot by Zach McAuliffe/CNETThere aren't a lot of memes or jokes on Lemon8 compared to other apps, either. You can find memes on Lemon8, but various hashtags associated with "memes," like "funnymemes" and "catmemes," have fewer than 1 million views (as opposed to hundreds of millions on Instagram). This could be because Lemon8 is still catching on in the US, but my suspicion is Lemon8 isn't meant for memes. It's meant to be more of a guidebook to help you achieve a certain lifestyle or aesthetic.There's also a lot of writing in Lemon8. For example, post captions might include instructions for a recipe or a deeper breakdown of an outfit. TikTok captions can have useful information, but those captions are more about connecting posts to hashtags to get more views and don't necessarily add new information to the TikTok post. Lemon8 uses captions in a similar way to Instagram posts, but Lemon8 captions have one key difference from Instagram: templates. Lemon8 templates can help you quickly make, or give you an idea of what to include in, captions. Screenshot by Zach McAuliffe/CNETLemon8 lets you use templates for your posts to help you quickly format and to give you an idea of what to caption your post. There are caption templates for fashion, shopping finds, beauty, food and travel.Lemon8 reminds me of a mashup between the magazines Martha Stewart Living, Muscle & Fitness and Travel + Leisure. You can find some useful tips in Lemon8 to help you achieve a desired aesthetic or find some vacation inspiration, but it's not clear what is and isn't an ad.What are people saying about Lemon8?People's reaction to Lemon8 is seemingly positive so far. One TikTok creator posted a video calling Lemon8 "Pinterest, but interactive." Another said Lemon8 is a combination of Pinterest, Instagram and TikTok.However, this positivity could be artificially inflated. ZDNet reports that many TikTok posts about Lemon8 have described the app with similar language, making some believe ByteDance paid these creators.And some Lemon8 creators' claims make this theory sound more viable. One Lemon8 creator told Insider that ByteDance paid them to post on the app. Two other Lemon8 creators showed Insider emails that outlined the app's payment structure.Should you download Lemon8?Lemon8 is free so even if you're a little curious you can download and try the app. Just know the app's posts resemble instructional guides more than memes to share, and many posts feel like advertisements.See at App StoreSee at Google PlayWho owns Lemon8?ByteDance, the Chinese tech company that owns TikTok, also owns Lemon8. According to ZDNet, ByteDance is positioning Lemon8 to be an Instagram rival as more users stop using, or abandon, Meta's app.According to the Wall Street Journal, a leaked internal memo from Meta showed that Instagram engagement was declining. ByteDance executives could be hoping to capitalize on this by giving Instagram users an alternative app in the form of Lemon8. And while Lemon8 was released globally in 2020, the app's recent growth might show ByteDance's gamble is paying off.What's Lemon8's privacy policy? Lemon8's travel tab can give you inspiration for your next getaway. Screenshot by Zach McAuliffe/CNETMost of Lemon8's privacy policy seems standard for social media apps. It states Lemon8 collects personal and location information to provide you with a better app experience. Some collected information includes your IP address and browsing history. But part of the app's privacy policy might raise eyebrows."The personal information we collect from you may be stored on a server located outside of the country where you live," the policy reads. The company has servers around the world, according to the policy, so your information could be stored in any of them.This is different from how Lemon8's sister app TikTok stores some user's data. The company stores US-based user data in Oracle servers. TikTok CEO Shou Chew said ByteDance employees in China can access this data, but with "robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval" overseen by a US-based security team.For more on social media, check out how you can use social media for good and how social media apps like Bereal and Mastodon might be the next big thing.