About: blatcho

Sponsor content from Google.

From Hypnospace Outlaw to Chicory: A Colorful Tale, Microsoft’s subscription service includes a bounty of fun games for console and PC.

Forget about patchy internet connections and dead spots with one of these WIRED-tested mesh systems.

What are you playing next? From Humanity to Riders Republic, Sony’s subscription service has so many great options for your PS5.

Dan Primack / Axios: a16z to open a crypto-focused London office and is leading a $44M investment in UK-based Gensyn, which offers a decentralized compute network for training AI  —  America’s largest investor in crypto startups believes that the industry’s future may be across the pond, and is opening …

Tom Warren / The Verge: Microsoft will bring select games on PC Game Pass to Nvidia’s GeForce Now in the coming months, letting subs stream games with RTX 4080 levels of performance  —  Microsoft is planning to bring PC Game Pass titles to Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service.  Sarah Bond, head of Xbox creator experience […]

Sarah Kessler / New York Times: Researchers of tech change and employment disagree on how many jobs AI will affect; one tricky factor is primarily tasks, not occupations, are being automated  —  The tally of how many jobs will be “affected by” world-changing technology is different depending on who you ask.

A vegetable-growing trial has pitted expert human gardeners against an AI-powered robot – both produced comparable crops, but the robot used about 40 per cent less water

We grilled, smoked, baked, cleaned, and repeated to find the best option for every home.

By imbuing enormous vectors with semantic meaning, we can get machines to reason more abstractly—and efficiently—than before.

Give your favorite guy a treat that’ll make his whole year with these boozy, outdoorsy, techy ideas.

Kirsten Grieshaber / Associated Press: A University of Vienna philosopher used ChatGPT to create a 40-minute church service, including the sermon, prayers, and music, led by four AI-generated avatars  —  The artificial intelligence chatbot asked the believers in the fully packed St. Paul’s church in the Bavarian town of Fuerth to rise from the pews […]

Natasha Singer / New York Times: While US schools debate what to teach students about AI’s promise and potential peril, universities, tech companies, and nonprofits offer ready-made curriculums  —  While schools debate what to teach students about powerful new A.I. tools, tech giants, universities and nonprofits are intervening with free lessons.

Washington Post: Verizon report: median amount lost from business email compromise is $50K in recent years and median ransomware damage doubled to $26K over the last two years  —  A smorgasbord of data in Verizon’s annual breach report  —  When a vulnerability in the ubiquitous open-source tool log4j …

Experiments often yield unexpected results. In research and in life, MIT Associate Professor Cem Tasan has learned to embrace that uncertainty. “Very often we start with an idea or a hypothesis, and to test that idea we design experiments, and when we run the experiments, we see something totally different,” says Tasan, the newly tenured […]

We tried blow-dryers, brushes, and a machine that sucks up your locks like a vacuum. These are our top tools to dry your ‘do.

The perfect kitchen companion, these versatile blenders can whip up breakfast, dinner party dips, and everything in between.

Plus: Amazon Prime might roll out an ad-based tier, AI-powered ads land on LinkedIn, and there’s even more talk about face computers.

Platformer: Sources: Twitter is refusing to pay its Google Cloud bills as its contract ends on June 30, and is now planning to move off the platform altogether  —  Musk won’t pay his Google Cloud bill — and the company’s trust and safety systems are hanging in the balance

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: In a test, researchers find that 90%+ of 1,008 jokes generated by GPT-3.5 were not new but rather the same 25 jokes likely learned during the model’s training  —  When tested, “Over 90% of 1,008 generated jokes were the same 25 jokes.”  —  On Wednesday, two German researchers …

Bloomberg: As major US banks abandon crypto companies during an expanding crackdown, a look at the emergence of smaller regional US lenders and Swiss, Asian, and UK firms  —  Two months after the collapse of Silvergate Capital Corp. and Signature Bank, a new banking landscape for crypto companies …

Do you struggle to nod off or stay asleep through the night? These WIRED-tested tools can help.

Scientists are uncovering previously unknown species preserved in museum and botanical garden collections, only to find that they no longer exist in the wild.

Make the most of your future weekends with these discounted gadgets.

Bloomberg: A comparison between US data and 5,100 Stable Diffusion-generated images related to job title and crime finds the tool amplifies gender and racial stereotypes  —  Heather Hiles, chair of Black Girls Code  —  At Canva, whose visual communication platform has 125 million active users …

Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica: A look at Realtek’s lawsuit accusing MediaTek of paying a company a “bounty” to file meritless US patent lawsuits to drive Realtek out of the TV chip market  —  Lawsuit: Patent trolls created “harmful illusion” of unstable TV-chip market.  —  [Update, 8:10 pm ET …

Wall Street Journal: An interview with Gary Gensler after the SEC’s Binance and Coinbase lawsuits, which have existential stakes for the companies and could define Gensler’s legacy  —  Agency chair focuses enforcement power on exchanges after earlier failures to subdue industry  —  WASHINGTON—Gary Gensler had seen enough.

An analysis of over 800 hours of footage from busy pedestrian areas in Japan found that pairs of people that share stronger social bonds are less likely to physically bump into other people walking

From The Trial of the Chicago 7 to The Boys in the Band, here are our picks for the best streaming titles to feast your eyes on.

From Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story to Black Knight, these are our picks for the best streaming titles to binge this week.

Deals to let GM and Ford EV owners use Tesla charging points show the EV maker turning its giant Supercharger network into a competitive advantage.

Emma Roth / The Verge: Microsoft adds voice mode to Bing Chat on desktop, letting users ask questions using their voice in English, Japanese, French, German, and Mandarin  —  Microsoft is bringing Bing’s voice mode to Edge on desktop.  With this latest update, you can now ask Bing’s chatbot questions using your voice …

Karissa Bell / Engadget: In an AMA about Reddit’s API changes, the company’s CEO said Reddit can’t “subsidize commercial entities”, criticized the Apollo developer’s behavior, and more  —  “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive,” he said.  —  Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has finally spoken publicly …

Rosie Perper / CoinDesk: Kraken launches Kraken NFT, a marketplace with 250+ NFT collections across the Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon blockchains, after a beta started in November 2022  —  Now out of its public beta test, the platform has expanded to include over 250 NFT collections.

Robotic dogs do better than humans at identifying nests of invasive fire ants. The robots could be useful in helping eradicate an invasive species that packs a venomous sting

A new MIT Bootcamp brought 48 experienced and emerging innovators from six continents to campus as they learned how to scale their ventures. The Venture Advancement Program, which ended on May 12, was organized by MIT Open Learning and delivered a mix of lectures, workshops, and mentoring sessions from leading MIT academics and startup veterans. […]

Three Spanish MIT postdocs, Luis Antonio Benítez, Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, and Fernando Romero López, were chosen by the Department of Physics as the first cohort of Mauricio and Carlota Botton Foundation Fellows. This year’s recipients are provided with a one-year stipend and a research fund to pursue their research interests; they will visit the Botton Foundation […]

The MIT biology community recently welcomed eight postdocs — Catalyst Fellows — to campus as part of the inaugural Catalyst Symposium.  Catalysts speed up reactions, and the symposium aims to accelerate progress in inclusive diversity — not just at MIT, but at top research institutions across the country, according to Professor Amy Keating, head of the Department […]

Sponsor content from Zoho.

Start by understanding what the technology can do, then explore how it can be used to solve problems.

Reframe your company’s past in a way that creates advantages for the present.

It thrusts, it vibrates, and it does it all in a ton of positions. But it has a price tag to match.

The company’s quest to unseat Garmin continues with a new fullscreen cycling mode and other navigation features.

When it opened at Universal Studios Hollywood in 1996, it was the single most expensive thrill ride of all time. A look back at whether it was all worth it.

Natasha Singer / New York Times: The Khan Lab School trials Khanmigo, an AI chatbot developed by Khan Academy to simulate one-on-one tutoring, one of the first such experiments in the US  —  Proponents see the tools as a way to automatically customize academic support.  They could also make children test subjects for A.I. experiments.

Jon Porter / The Verge: Spotify is testing a new feature called Your Offline Mix, which will automatically save a mix of users’ recently played songs for offline listening  —  / The playlist is described in the app as ‘a mix of recently played songs for when the vibe is high but your connection is […]

Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security: Barracuda asked its Email Security Gateway customers on June 6 to replace infected appliances immediately, after patching a zero-day vulnerability on May 20  —  It’s not often that a zero-day vulnerability causes a network security vendor to urge customers to physically remove and decommission …

When MIT’s mini cheetah perfectly executed a backflip on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” the audience screamed and applauded wildly. If this machine — which also pranced around the stage like a show dog and stretched in several different directions — could perform such a difficult maneuver, one that is impossible for most humans, […]

Water surging from the broken Ukrainian dam is killing animals, destroying habitats, and unleashing pollution. The effects may be irreversible.

The Clearing  and The Bear are just two of the shows you won’t want to miss on this streaming service.