About: blatcho

Patrick Coffee / Wall Street Journal: Celebrities, including aging star athletes, are signing deals to put AI duplicates of themselves into ad campaigns, helping brands de-age them, among other uses  —  Using AI-generated duplicates, brands also benefit, using stars in ways they never could before

Tim Copeland / The Block: How kids are using hacked Discord servers or Twitter accounts and “NFT drainers” for phishing attacks to steal millions of dollars’ worth of NFTs and tokens  —  – NFT drainers like Inferno and Venom are commonly used to carry out phishing attacks involving compromised Discord servers and Twitter accounts.

Jon / The Nexus Of Privacy: Amid ongoing Reddit protests, decentralized link aggregation and discussion forum projects Lemmy and KBin grow to a total of 70K+ MAUs and nearly 600 instances  —  Draft!  Work in Progress!  Feedback welcome! … Contents:  — Eight days later …  – Experiment to find what approaches …

By combining a solar fuel cell that converts carbon dioxide into fuel with a plastic recycling system, researchers can create sustainable fuels and useful chemicals

What do they need on a daily basis to be happy and working at their best?

A leader must learn how to reframe a career setback and move forward.

Two questions entrepreneurs need to answer before launching a new venture.

Plugging my dryer into a bonnet attachment makes wash days so much easier, on my spirit and my arms.

Indian cities, afflicted by rising temperatures and poor air quality, are becoming hot spots of ozone pollution, which has proven a difficult problem to fix.

Yes, they’re fun, fast, and convenient. But motorized vehicles are not for children.

Tim Hakki / Decrypt: Twitter suspends Explain This Bob, a GPT-4 bot tied to the BOB Token, after Elon Musk called the account a “scam”; Musk replied “I love Bob” in April 2023  —  The move marks an abrupt about-face for Musk, who had previously engaged with the bot’s content on Twitter.

Rebecca Tan / Washington Post: Sources: Meta plans tighter content rules in Vietnam, its seventh largest market, after government requests and keeps a list of officials not to be criticized  —  HANOI — When Facebook took off in Vietnam about a decade ago, it was like a “revolution,” said two of the company’s early employees […]

Nikou Asgari / Financial Times: Sources: internal teams at Singapore-based Crypto.com trade tokens for profit on the exchange and elsewhere, a little known fact since its 2016 launch  —  Singapore group has desk to profit from market moves  —  Crypto.com, the exchange endorsed by Hollywood actor Matt Damon …

Spending freezes and job cuts don’t have to sink your prospects.

When going abroad, the right plugs are essential to keeping your gadgets charged. These are our favorites.

Whether you’re snoozing in a campground or schlepping up to an alpine valley, we’ve tested the perfect pads for you to rest your legs.

With the ability to sear well and provide enough control for effective two-zone heating, Weber’s Spirit E-330 propane grill makes a great backyard upgrade.

Washington Post: Hands-on with an Adobe Photoshop beta’s Generative Fill AI feature, which lets users add objects to, remove content from, and expand images using text prompts  —  A new ‘generative fill’ AI capability can create joyful Photoshop edits — and frightening deepfakes

Lisa Bannon / Wall Street Journal: A look at US hospitals using sometimes flawed AI-based diagnosis tools, as some clinicians say they feel pressure from administrations to defer to the algorithm  —  Artificial intelligence raises difficult questions about who makes the call in a health crisis: the human or the machine?

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Investors of Bengaluru-based Mojocare say they found “financial irregularities” at the health care startup, which has raised ~$23M from Sequoia India and others  —  Mojocare investors have found “financial irregularities” at the Indian health and wellness startup and are moving …

From a sound machine to a smart sensor, here’s what made life easier during my infant’s first year (and a few things I could’ve lived without).

The AI era promises a flood of disinformation, deepfakes, and hallucinated “facts.” Psychologists are only beginning to grapple with the implications.

Make sure the world at large can see how talented you are.

Stanford CRFM: An assessment finds it is currently feasible for major foundation model providers to comply with the draft EU AI Act and doing so would improve transparency  —  Stanford researchers evaluate foundation model providers like OpenAI and Google for their compliance with proposed EU law on AI.

Takahiro Shibuya / Nikkei Asia: Sources: Huawei is negotiating with ~30 small to midsize Japanese firms over licensing fees for use of patented tech, an unusual move for a major manufacturer  —  Chinese telecom giant turns to patent fees to offset sales decline  —  China’s Huawei to trying to forge a path forward amid U.S. […]

New York Times: Taliban officials keep getting their WhatsApp accounts banned, causing disruptions at the nascent government, which relies on the platform for communication  —  The Taliban administration is stuck in a cat-and-mouse game with WhatsApp, which is off-limits to the nascent government because of U.S. sanctions.

These accessories might not cure your anxiety or insomnia, but they can feel like a hug when you really need one.

Think of it as a budget version of Boston Dynamics’ Spot for beginner hackers. It ain’t cute, but you can teach it new tricks.

Your phone’s portrait mode is no match for these portable, powerful point-and-shoot cams.

Camomile Shumba / CoinDesk: Report: a group of central banks developed 33 API functionalities to test 30+ CBDC online, offline, and in-store use cases, via QR codes, phones, and more  —  An API layer could facilitate a wide range of central bank digital currency payment scenarios, a Bank for International Settlements and Bank of England […]

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget: Similarweb: Reddit had ~52M visitors on Tuesday, June 13, down from 57M the day before blackouts began; average session was 7.2 minutes, lowest in three years  —  The protest appears to have had a small but noticeable effect on the platform.  —  When more than 8,000 subreddits went dark …

Wes Davis / The Verge: Google makes third-party “smart chips” in Docs available to all Workspace and personal Google accounts, letting users pull and view data from third-party apps  —  You can now embed third-party app “smart chips” into your Google Doc after the company announced yesterday that the feature …

These WIRED-tested slim slates let you take the world’s library anywhere.

San Francisco is at the forefront of a movement to recycle wastewater from buildings, homes, and neighborhoods and use it for toilets and landscaping.

A landmark right to repair law in Massachusetts is great for car owners. The US government argues it’s also great for hackers.

Lavender Au / Wired: A profile of Jack Ma, the Chinese tech icon who disappeared from public view for three months after regulators questioned him over a November 2020 speech  —  The iconic Alibaba founder disappeared from view after criticizing China’s government.  He returned to the country in March—as a teacher, not a businessman.

Brad Stone / Bloomberg: How a seminal 2017 paper by Google researchers laid the groundwork for the AI hype cycle, resulting in a Silicon Valley frenzy not seen since the dot-com boom  —  In late May, 300 entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, journalists and assorted self-described thought leaders crammed into Shack15 …

Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk: Binance, Binance.US, and the SEC agree to ensure only Binance.US staff can access customer funds; the proposed agreement needs sign-off from a federal judge  —  The proposed agreement still needs judicial sign-off.  —  Binance, Binance.US and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) …

The ransomware gang Clop exploited a vulnerability in a file transfer service. The flaw is now patched, but the damage is still coming into focus.

From Disclosure to The Boys in the Band, here are our picks for the best streaming titles to feast your eyes on.

From She-Ra and the Princesses of Power to Black Mirror, these are our picks for the best streaming titles to binge this week.

Niket Nishant / Reuters: Crypto payments startup Wyre says it is winding down and that investors with assets on the company’s platform can withdraw them through July 14  —  Cryptocurrency infrastructure provider Wyre is winding down, feeling the pinch of dwindling interest in a market that was once hailed as the next frontier of finance.

Kellen Browning / New York Times: Félix Lengyel, aka xQc, a Twitch streamer with 12M followers, signs a ~$100M deal with Kick, a streaming service backed by Australian gaming and gambling sites  —  The deal signed by Félix Lengyel, known as xQc, matches traditional athletes’ contracts, and is another sign …

David Ingram / NBC News: Steve Huffman praises Elon Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter and says he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter as an example for Reddit to follow  —  Steve Huffman said in an interview that Elon Musk’s cost-cutting at Twitter was inspiring and that the two have chatted “a handful of […]

If language models such as ChatGPT are trained using the outputs of other AIs, they will become heavily biased, overly simple and disconnected from reality, researchers warn

Using the latest imaging technology, conservators have turned back time on Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, revealing the masterpiece’s hidden secrets

How will advances in computing transform human society? MIT students contemplated this impending question as part of the Envisioning the Future of Computing Prize — an essay contest in which they were challenged to imagine ways that computing technologies could improve our lives, as well as the pitfalls and dangers associated with them. Offered for […]

In 2021, Crystan McLymore was a nuclear surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy, in charge of more than 30 mechanics maintaining the systems and safety of a nuclear reactor aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier. Two years later, she is excelling in a completely different world, if possibly in service to those […]

The predictive power of machine learning is a game changer.

Teams often end up duplicating (or triplicating) investments in solving common problems.