About: blatcho

This $300 phone performs better than its predecessor, but the competition is stiff.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: Ant Group’s transformation into a fully regulated company has been on hold for over a year as China reshuffles its regulatory system  —  Powerful new regulator will have to approve the fintech giant’s application to become a financial-holding company

Eric Berger / Ars Technica: Airbus, Eutelsat, SES, Thales, and other European satellite companies plan to bid for the IRIS² satellite constellation, hoping to rival SpaceX’s Starlink  —  The bid includes large players such as Airbus Defence and Space, Eutelsat, and SES.  —  A consortium of nearly every major …

Adam Morgan McCarthy / The Block: Dune: Ethereum’s median average transaction fee jumped to ~87 gwei on May 2, the highest level since May 2022, mostly due to memecoin trading exploding again  —  – Average transaction fees on the Ethereum network reached highs last seen in May 2022 this week.

A test to see whether ChatGPT has memorised the contents of copyrighted material suggests it was trained on passages from Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and many other novels

Plenty of students are interested in entrepreneurship at MIT. But there aren’t a lot of opportunities to work at startups because of their small size and limited resources. That can make startups feel like a black box to students unsure if they would like the environment. Since 2016, the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship […]

There’s a long list of reasons why MIT’s sailing pavilion is unique. For one, it’s home to the oldest collegiate sailing program in the world. It’s also completely free and open to the MIT community — a rarity among sailing programs, made possible by alumni donations. There are also not many sailing facilities in the […]

From Star Wars classics to Marvel flicks, here’s what you need to watch on the streaming platform.

Joseph Menn / Washington Post: A judge sentences ex-Uber CSO Joe Sullivan to three years of probation; he was convicted in October 2022 for not disclosing a 2016 data breach to regulators  —  The first corporate executive convicted of a crime related to a data breach by outsiders is sentenced to probation and fined

Yifan Yu / Nikkei Asia: Apple’s Q2 revenue rose 15.3% YoY in Asia-Pacific, business in India grew by “very strong double digits”, but sales fell 2.9% in Greater China and 7.1% in Japan  —  iPhone maker logs double-digit growth in India, says market at ‘tipping point’  —  Asia-Pacific, outside of Japan …

Ina Fried / Axios: Tim Cook says Apple views AI as “huge” but there are “a number of issues that need to be sorted”, and doesn’t expand on how it plans to use AI in its products  —  Tim Cook said Thursday that AI is “huge” but cautioned that there are “a number of issues […]

A series of centipede-inspired robots with different numbers of legs show that the more legs a robot has, the better it is at moving across unpredictable ground

A tiny microphone designed to replicate the way sound is processed in the inner ear could be used in hearing aids

A conversation with HBS professor Karim Lakhani on the challenges facing senior leaders.

Sponsor content from Deloitte.

Too often, scaling up comes at the cost of customer satisfaction — but it doesn’t have to.

No matter the genre or location, these gadgets will upgrade your experience.

This week, we discuss the still-in-beta social platform the internet elite are buzzing—and skeeting—about.

The technique may finally be emerging as a way to preserve species at risk of extinction.

Alf Wilkinson / Financial Times: A Finder.com experiment using ChatGPT to pick 38 stocks finds the portfolio rose 4.9% compared to an average 0.8% loss for 10 popular funds over eight weeks  —  Theoretical fund of 38 stocks do better than 10 most popular funds on Interactive Investor, finds finder.com  —  Latest news on ETFs

Ilya Banares / Bloomberg: Shopify reports Q1 revenue up 25% YoY to $1.5B, above $1.43B analyst estimates, GMV up 15% to $49.6B, and plans to cut 20% of its staff; SHOP jumps 14%+  —  Shopify Inc. cut jobs for the second time in less than a year and agreed to sell the majority of its […]

Annie Palmer / CNBC: Shopify offloads its logistics unit to supply chain tech company Flexport, a reversal after years of building the operation and acquiring Deliverr for $2.1B  —  – Shopify is selling its logistics unit to supply chain technology company Flexport.  — The Canadian e-commerce company …

Sound can’t normally travel from beneath water’s surface to the air above due to a mismatch in densities, but a new material changes that

Researchers often use simulations when designing new algorithms, since testing ideas in the real world can be both costly and risky. But since it’s impossible to capture every detail of a complex system in a simulation, they typically collect a small amount of real data that they replay while simulating the components they want to […]

Allergy season has arrived. We’ve gathered discounts on our favorite models to help clear the air at home.

Google’s new dedicated domain lets you join the growing sites dedicated to puns, pets, and mowing the lawn.

From Redfall to Valheim, Microsoft’s subscription service includes plenty of captivating titles.

Lina M. Khan / New York Times: FTC’s Lina Khan calls for regulating AI, saying the tech could fuel market dominance and collusion by large firms, increase fraud and discrimination, and more  —  It’s both exciting and unsettling to have a realistic conversation with a computer.  Thanks to the rapid advance …

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Striking Hollywood writers have two main AI worries: their work being used as training data and being tasked with just fixing AI-generated “sloppy first drafts”  —  WGA writers don’t want to train AI or clean up AI-generated “sloppy first drafts.”

Luc Cohen / Reuters: A jury convicts former OpenSea product manager Nathaniel Chastain of insider trading, making $50K+ by buying and selling NFTs he featured on OpenSea’s homepage  —  A former product manager at OpenSea, the world’s largest marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), was convicted on Wednesday …

Mutations of a gene called Foxp2 have been linked to a type of speech disorder called apraxia that makes it difficult to produce sequences of sound. A new study from MIT and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University sheds light on how this gene controls the ability to produce speech. In a study of mice, […]

An 80,000 word PhD thesis would take many hours to present. MIT Research Slam competitors get three minutes. The finalists of the 2023 MIT Research Slam competition met head-to-head on April 19 at a live, in-person showcase event. Four PhD candidates and five postdoc finalists competed for the judges’ and audience’s vote. The contestants put […]

As a star runs out of fuel, it will billow out to a million times its original size, engulfing any matter — and planets — in its wake. Scientists have observed hints of stars just before, and shortly after, the act of consuming entire planets, but they have never caught one in the act until […]

The pros and cons of relying on machine intelligence to de-risk human behavior.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the ethical and research challenges in creating artificial general intelligence.

It may sound simple, but getting back to business basics can bring enormous value in these moments.

The company is adding new tools as bad actors use ChatGPT-themed lures and mask their infrastructure in an attempt to trick victims and elude defenders.

The tech industry’s transition to passkeys gets its first massive boost with the launch of the alternative login scheme for Google’s billions of users.

Two long-awaited fungus killers are about to roll out. But if one is widely deployed first, it might breed resistance and make the other useless.

Sarah Jeong / The Verge: Bluesky, which has ~55,000 users, feels absolutely wild, highlighted by the CEO pleading to stop “skeets” and increasingly weird struggles over norms and vibes  —  Early last week, barely anyone had heard of Bluesky.  On Wednesday, it was just one of many alternatives vying …

Parmy Olson / Bloomberg: Geoffrey Hinton should have spoken up years ago when others like Timnit Gebru were criticizing Google over LLMs; hopefully Hinton spurs others to speak up now  —  It is hard not to be worried when the so-called godfather of artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton, says he is leaving Google and regrets his […]

Financial Times: A guide to how quantum computing, qubits, and “quantum algorithms” work, the biggest challenges, government involvement, and potential for hacking, or “Q-day”  —  The next generation of quantum computers will open a new world of possibilities, but also pose enormous risks to our online security

MIT and Harvard University are teaming up on a new online education initiative: Axim Collaborative, a venture designed to make learning more accessible, effective, and relevant so that learners can reach their full potential. Axim Collaborative is a nonprofit funded with the $700 million the two institutions received for the sale of edX, the online […]

The government says it’ll fact-check the internet. Kunal Kamra is challenging the IT amendments in court.

Stock up on carpet cleaners, pet cameras, and beds for your four-legged friends.

A Google Drive left public on the American College of Pediatricians’ website exposed detailed financial records, sensitive member details, and more.

Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch: The EU’s Digital Markets Act becomes applicable today, after entering into force in November 2022; enforcement on gatekeepers is not expected until spring 2024  —  GAFAM giants will have marked their calendars today as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the European Union’s plan to curb …

Peter Kafka / Vox: Q&A with Nick Denton, Jonah Peretti, and also Ben Smith, whose book Traffic details the rise and fall of BuzzFeed and Gawker, on digital media and its reckoning  —  A conversation with two media pioneers — plus Ben Smith, whose new book chronicles their rise and fall.

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Roku introduces new ad products, including use of contextual AI for automatically running ads next to relevant moments in shows and movies on The Roku Channel  —  In Roku’s recent quarter, the company posted better-than-expected revenue of $741 million, but worried investors with its warning …

Since the term “soft robotics” was adopted in 2008, engineers in the field have been building diverse representations of flexible machines useful in exploration, locomotion, rehabilitation, and even space. One source of inspiration: the way animals move in the wild. A team of MIT researchers has taken this a step further, developing SoftZoo, a bio-inspired […]