'People say I come across as incredibly boring!' How to find love on the dating apps - whatever the obstacles Sick of swiping and messaging but never meeting anyone you like and who likes you back? Here's what worked for some lucky couples U sing dating apps to find love is commonplace these days - and yet, for many singles, it has become a double-edged sword. The perks of having a never-ending supply of potential matches at your fingertips are obvious - but the appeal of connecting and meeting with strangers is time-limited. It can be especially frustrating to feel as if you're stuck at the swiping stage. In 2023, US jeweller Shane Company found that the average American will spend about eight months using dating apps - swiping on around 3,960 profiles - before finding a partner.

In her 2012 book, Addiction by Design, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll lays out the different technological mechanisms casinos employ to keep people gambling. From the architecture of buildings and placement of ATMs to the design of casino carpets--all of it exemplifies strategic calculation. As a blurb for a gambling trade show once put it, the various elements making up the modern gambling experience are "symphonies of individual technologies" that come together to "create a single experience," calibrated in a way to keep people playing, to maximize "time on device." "There's something very similar about the mechanisms that are built into dating apps, especially with swiping," she says. "Swiping left and right--it's almost like a horizontal slot machine. You really don't know what you're going to get."

If one of your New Year's Resolutions was to get back on the dating scene, today is the day to finally bite the bullet. January 5 is'Dating Sunday' - the first Sunday in January, which is annually recognised as the busiest day for dating apps. On this day, apps including Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble see substantial increases in activity, with users more actively seeking and initiating conversations. 'As we move into the first days of the new year, many people find themselves reflecting on the past year and visioning for the year ahead,' said Moe Ari Brown, Hinge's Love and Connection expert. 'The new year marks a shift from one chapter to the next and offers us the opportunity for a reboot.

Samantha posted her story on TikTok and shared the scenario on a private Facebook group; many women responded--including her date's wife. Ultimately, as a result of this conversation, Samantha decided to report his profile to Hinge. The next day, the company contacted her to let her know it would be deleting his profile. Mandy and Samantha were pleased with Bumble's and Hinge's swift action to take down the profiles of the men they had matched with--but the experience was indelible. Neither of them plans to use dating apps again.

In the hour before the Chaotic Singles x Tinder dating event kicked off at the Moxy South Beach in Miami, the sky opened and the downpour began. The patrons of the nearby restaurant where I'd been dining were caught in the deluge, the rain soaking them as though they'd just swum in directly from Biscayne Bay. This perhaps had a cleansing effect--some sort of spiritual clean slate upon which to begin the night's mingling endeavor. But on a more literal level, it meant that the hotel's gorgeous rooftop would no longer be the venue for the night's icebreakers and hopeful attempts at romance. Instead, the event would be held in the lobby, alongside guests of the hotel.

To operate at a building scale, service robots must perform very long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks by navigating to different rooms, accessing different floors, and interacting with a wide and unseen range of everyday objects. We refer to these tasks as Building-wide Mobile Manipulation. To tackle these inherently long-horizon tasks, we introduce BUMBLE, a unified Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based framework integrating open-world RGBD perception, a wide spectrum of gross-to-fine motor skills, and dual-layered memory. Our extensive evaluation (90+ hours) indicates that BUMBLE outperforms multiple baselines in long-horizon building-wide tasks that require sequencing up to 12 ground truth skills spanning 15 minutes per trial. BUMBLE achieves 47.1% success rate averaged over 70 trials in different buildings, tasks, and scene layouts from different starting rooms and floors. Our user study demonstrates 22% higher satisfaction with our method than state-of-the-art mobile manipulation methods. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of using increasingly-capable foundation models to push performance further. For more information, see https://robin-lab.cs.utexas.edu/BUMBLE/

The rise of dating apps in the last decade has changed the way people forge relationships, with Pew research conducted in 2022 finding that 53% of US adults under 30 had used online dating. But dating apps have caused dissatisfaction and despair among many users, as Pew found 46% of all users (and 51% of women) had a negative experience of online dating. Some dating companies have faced business struggles recently, with shares in Bumble crashing by 30% last month after a bad earnings report and Match Group this year announcing an 8% slump in paying Tinder users and cuts to 6% of its global workforce. The Guardian asked people to share why they had chosen to ditch dating apps and forge connections in other ways. I've been single for about 12 years, and was on the apps since they arrived.

TechCrunch reported that a group of researchers from the university KU Leuven in Belgium identified six popular dating apps that malicious users can use to pinpoint the near-exact location of other users. Dating apps including Hinge, Happn, Bumble, Grindr, Badoo and Hily all exhibited some form of "trilateration" that could expose users' approximate locations, which prompted some of the apps to take action and tighten their security, according to the published paper. The term "trilateration" refers to a three-point measurement used in GPS to determine the relative distance to a target. The six named apps fell into one of three categories of trilateration" including "exact distance trilateration" in which a target is accurate to "at least a 111m by 111m square (at the equator)," "round distance trilateration" or "oracle trilateration" in which distance filters are used to approximate a rounded area much like a Venn diagram. Grindr is "susceptible to exact distance trilateration" while Happn falls under "rounded distance trilateration."

Bumble, the company that distinguished itself from apps like Tinder by creating a "feminist dating app," hasn't done too many favors for that brand recently. Yes, there was the ad campaign that appeared to shame women who choose celibacy--which the company wisely retracted this week. There was also the tentative announcement that Bumble may roll back its defining "women make the first move" ethos. Then there were the strange remarks last week from Bumble founder and #girlboss icon Whitney Wolfe Herd, who informed the audience at Bloomberg's Tech Summit of "a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with another dating concierge." Naturally, these "concierges" would make use of artificial intelligence software, which users could train by "shar[ing] your insecurities" and thus help to "train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself," Wolfe Herd claimed.

In the 2023 blockbuster, Robots, Shailene Woodley and Jack Whitehall star as singletons who send robot'doubles' of themselves out on dates. While this might sound far-fetched, it could soon become a reality. Speaking at the Bloomberg Tech Summit, Herd, 34, claimed that daters could soon use an'AI dating concierge' to go out on hundreds of dates for them. 'If you want to get really out there, there is a world where your [AI] dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierge,' she said. In the 2023 blockbuster, Robots, Shailene Woodley and Jack Whitehall star as singletons who send robot'doubles' of themselves out on dates.