About: blatcho

Jeanny Yu / Bloomberg: Pinduoduo’s net income has more than tripled in Q2 2022 and its shares have soared 43% over the past month, as it emerges as a big winner amid China’s lockdowns  —  As Chinese consumers curb their spending in a pandemic-stricken economy, one discount e-commerce firm is emerging as a clear stock-market […]

Matthew S. Burriesci / Meta: Meta unveils Pseudonymized Facebook Identifiers, which combine timestamps and Facebook Identifiers, to deter unauthorized data scraping  —  Takeaways  — We changed how we use Facebook Identifiers (FBIDs) after we observed that unauthorized scraping often involves guessing content IDs or using purchased FBIDs.

Cecilia D’Anastasio / Bloomberg: CEO Dave Baszucki says Roblox sees 2M+ daily active users in Russia, while competitors like EA, Nintendo, and Ubisoft have slowed or ceased sales in the country  —  Roblox Corp.’s popularity in Russia is increasing even as almost every other publicly traded gaming company has retreated from the country after its […]

Vibrating pads placed on people’s arms can make the illusion of weight in virtual reality more convincing by tricking the brain to disregard some input from our senses

A pair of tweezers that mimic the shape of a New Caledonian crow’s beak outperforms traditional tweezers

In her new book theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder argues some of her colleagues may have gotten too excited about wild ideas like the multiverse.

Plus: Reminiscing on Steve Jobs, a question for his loved ones, and a meltdown on the West Coast.

From books to the Museum of Modern Art, gaming is getting new kinds of recognition.

Taryn Plumb / VentureBeat: Isovalent, the creator of open-source networking and security solution for cloud environments Cilium, has raised a $40M Series B led by Thomvest Ventures  —  There’s no question that Kubernetes has become the new enterprise standard when it comes to building and operating modern applications.

Andrew Orr / AppleInsider: Apple’s iOS 16 webpage now lists iCloud Shared Photo library as “coming later this year”; the feature was also removed from the latest iOS 16 betas  —  Apple announced iCloud Shared Photo Library as part of iOS 16, but it appears that the feature won’t arrive in the iOS 16 release […]

Kenrick Cai / Forbes: Sources: Stability AI, the startup behind Stable Diffusion, is in talks to raise $100M; Coatue proposed a $500M valuation and Lightspeed offered a $1B valuation  —  With the image generator Stable Diffusion, you can conjure within seconds a potrait of Beyoncé as if painted by Vincent van Gogh …

A series of experiments found that people prefer technology they think was invented before they were born. The effect seems to hold if the technology isn’t really as old as people think it is

Tweezers have remained largely unchanged for more than 4000 years, but now a more dexterous version has been created by mimicking an even older design – the beak of a crow

Last spring, MIT Professor Emma Teng and Lead Wellness Instructor Sarah Johnson worked together to teach a joint class: 21G.015 (Introduction to Buddhism, Mindfulness, and Meditation), developed as a companion to PE.0534 (Fitness and Meditation), taught by Johnson. In the “mens et manus” tradition of MIT, the class gave students an opportunity to study and […]

Many of America’s allies have little faith that huddling under America’s nuclear umbrella will keep them safe. “The conventional wisdom has been that the threat of nuclear retaliation by the U.S. is enough to defend our junior non-nuclear allies,” says Jung Jae Kwon, a political science doctoral student at MIT. “But this threat is not […]

Many leaders’ coping mechanisms can seriously backfire.

Here’s how to leverage it.

Identify how you feel about the decision — and how you want to feel when it’s made.

This Wi-Fi 6E router is a speedy and stable dream for gamers—but only if you can stomach or skip the subscriptions.

Turns out there’s a neurological reason you can’t stop clicking on YouTube closet purges.

The influential astronomer led the hunt for extraterrestrial signals and helped make the field of astrobiology what it is today.

Jamie Crawley / CoinDesk: FTX Ventures buys 30% of Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital for an undisclosed amount; SkyBridge will use some of the funds to buy $40M in cryptocurrencies  —  SkyBridge will invest some of the funds into crypto assets for its balance sheet.  —  FTX Ventures, the investment arm …

Wall Street Journal: Robinhood launches Investor Index, updated monthly, to track the performance of the 100 most popular stocks in its app, weighting users’ “conviction” in them  —  Robinhood Markets is launching an index to track the favorite stocks of its millions of predominantly young, social-media-savvy customers.

TechCrunch: India says its central bank will prepare a whitelist of legal loan apps and the IT ministry plans to ensure that only approved apps are hosted on app stores  —  India plans to mandate which loan apps are allowed on app stores in the country, the latest in a series of recent steps …

Escape, a thoughtful book by Marie Le Conte, recalls a time when people tended to organise themselves into small communities around blogs and other online hangouts. Should we go back?

Typically, it would take two graduate students to do the research that Setayesh Radkani is doing. Driven by an insatiable curiosity about the human mind, she is working on two PhD thesis projects in two different cognitive neuroscience labs at MIT. For one, she is studying punishment as a social tool to influence others. For […]

The once dominant ecigarette company faces more legal challenges and FDA scrutiny after a probe into whether it deceptively marketed to children and teens.

The UK’s tech-savvy head of state was queen of a thousand memes.

Users harassed people for a decade. Then they messed with the wrong woman.

Ben Brody / Protocol: The White House unveils its principles to enhance tech platform accountability and competition, including Section 230 reforms and robust data protections  —  The White House on Thursday praised “bipartisan interest in Congress in passing legislation to protect privacy” …

Brody Ford / Bloomberg: DocuSign reports Q2 revenue up 22% YoY to $622.2M, vs. $602.7M est., and a full-year billings forecast of $2.55B to $2.57B, vs. $2.53B est.; stock jumps 18%+  —  DocuSign Inc. rallied 17% after reporting quarterly sales that topped analysts’ estimates and raising its billings forecast …

The Economic Times: A survey of ~4,000 Indian gig workers on Swiggy, Zomato, Uber, Amazon, and others: 42% say their income is flat, 47% have no insurance, and 51% can’t save money  —  Gig workers in India are young, financially stressed, and largely uninsured, according to a new report.

Some students have jobs or internships over the summer. But members of MIT Spokes rode their bicycles 3,800 miles across the country to teach STEM classes at learning festivals, centers for adjudicated youth, summer schools, libraries, summer camps, and after-school programs.  Spokes members Robert Henning ’20, Mariela Perez-Cabarcas ’22, Simone Lassar ’22, Maxwell Yun ’22, […]

Through a $1 million gift from Daniel Gilbert ’91 and his wife, Judy, the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program gained a permanent source of funding with the establishment of the MIT Sandbox Endowment Fund. The new fund allows MIT Sandbox to expand its entrepreneurship education offerings to MIT undergraduate and graduate students, bringing to life […]

The internet had a collective feel-good moment with the introduction of DALL-E, an artificial intelligence-based image generator inspired by artist Salvador Dali and the lovable robot WALL-E that uses natural language to produce whatever mysterious and beautiful image your heart desires. Seeing typed-out inputs like “smiling gopher holding an ice cream cone” instantly spring to […]

Sponsor content from KPMG.

A guide to what it should do — and who should be on it.

The pandemic exposed major weaknesses and undermined public faith in the system.

Enough with the urban vs. rural binary. Bringing agriculture into cities can have huge benefits beyond healthy food.

Microsoft’s news algorithm leaves a lot to be desired. Here’s how to turn it off and reclaim that space.

This week, we round up all the biggest announcements from Apple’s iPhone (and Watch) launch event.

Ryan Weeks / The Block: Mysten Labs, which is developing the Sui blockchain, raised a $300M Series B led by FTX at a $2B+ valuation; all five founders worked at Meta’s crypto unit  —  – Mysten’s Series B round values the company at over $2 billion, giving investors equity and token warrants.

Bloomberg: Apple’s state-backed Chinese data center partner, Guizhou Cloud Big Data, says lockdowns have paralyzed the city of Guiyang, stopping workers from seeing family  —  China’s latest Covid lockdown has virtually paralyzed a city of 6 million that houses much of the country’s electronic information …

Reuters: Russia’s trade minister Denis Manturov says Russians will be able to buy the iPhone 14 despite US sanctions thanks to the country’s parallel import scheme  —  Russians will have the chance to buy the new Apple iPhone 14 despite the U.S. tech company having left the country thanks …

In recent years, researchers who study autism have made an effort to include more women and girls in their studies. However, despite these efforts, most studies of autism consistently enroll small numbers of female subjects or exclude them altogether, according to a new study from MIT. The researchers found that a screening test commonly used […]

Saddled by still-mediocre battery life, the Apple Watch Ultra isn’t a true competitor to the reigning king of premium wearables. But it’s getting much closer.

Wednesday’s iPhone launch event saw the release of four new iPhone models, plus an Apple Watch built to take a beating.

With iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, Apple is introducing passkeys—a more convenient and secure alternative to passwords.

TechCrunch: Despite the recent downturn in the cryptocurrency market, Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 batch has 30 crypto startups, up from 25 in its Winter 2022 batch  —  Crypto and web3 stands out in the Summer 2022 batch  —  Crypto founders have heard the saying a thousand times in the past few months …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Hebbia, a startup founded by Stanford AI researchers that’s developing AI-powered search tools, has raised a $30M Series A led by Index Ventures  —  Hebbia, a startup developing AI-infused search tools, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Index Ventures with participation from Radical […]