About: blatcho

Even with no actual Yakuza in it, the latest installment in the franchise is excellent, and a credit to its historic setting.

Simon Willison / Simon Willison’s Weblog: A developer runs Meta’s 13B LLaMA model, considered to be competitive with GPT-3, on his laptop, showing local language models are feasible on consumer hardware  —  The open release of the Stable Diffusion image generation model back in August 2022 was a key moment.

CNBC: New York shuts down Signature Bank as US regulators cite a “systemic risk exception” like for SVB, announcing all of Signature’s depositors will be “made whole”  —  U.S. regulators said Sunday it shut down New York-based Signature Bank, a second financial institution …

U.S. Department of the Treasury: The US Treasury, Federal Reserve, and the FDIC: all Silicon Valley Bank depositors will be “fully” protected, and their money will be available on March 13  —  WASHINGTON, DC — The following statement was released by Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen …

A computer game being developed by Amazon, called Alexa Arena, is designed to harvest information on how humans interact with robots so the firm can train the machines on how best to go about their duties in offices and homes

In 2022, two teams made photons act as if time were simultaneously flowing in both directions, which could point to a way to boost quantum devices.

If the AI bot is going to stick around, you may as well get the most out of it.

Ben Cohen / Wall Street Journal: A look at Bring a Trailer, a classic car blog from 2007 that became a marketplace, facilitated $1.37B in 2022 sales, and held its 100,000th auction on March 7  —  Bring a Trailer is where obsessives buy, sell and geek out over classic cars.  The company pops open its […]

Om Malik / On my Om: More than a bailout, SVB needs a white knight, someone who can come in and take over the bank that has been at the heart of the US innovation economy  —  After three decades of being part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem — as a reporter, writer, entrepreneur, and […]

Financial Times: Sources: Tim Cook is pressing ahead with the MR headset debut this year, overruling designers’ objections, and Apple expects to sell ~1M units in the first year  —  New launch will be first steered entirely by CEO and under direction of operations team  —  When Tim Cook unveils Apple’s new …

Plus: A data breach exposes Washington, Ring camera footage has a new problem, and the George Santos scandal slips into the world of cybercrime.

Plus: Uber makes it easier to get picked up at the airport, Google adds new bio-authentication features to Android, and a herd of goats gets gone.

Whether you want to stream it live on Sunday or catch highlights afterward, here’s how to watch the 95th Academy Awards.

Rob Wile / NBC News: In an email to sellers, Etsy warns that the SVB collapse is causing delays in processing payments; one seller says it would be “catastrophic” for his business  —  Etsy is warning sellers that the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday is causing delays in processing payments …

Marie Woolf / Globe and Mail: Meta says it plans to block Canadians’ ability to view or share news content on Facebook and Instagram if the country’s proposed Online News Act becomes law  —  Tech giant Meta has decided to block Canadians’ ability to view or share news content on Facebook and Instagram …

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch: An interview with Gowalla co-founder and CEO Josh Williams as he re-launches his location-based social networking app at SXSW, 14 years after its debut  —  One of the original location-based social apps is relaunching at SXSW – 14 years after its debut  —  Gowalla co-founder and CEO Josh Williams …

A nationwide shortage of power grid transformers is causing delays across the US for everything from infrastructure for electric vehicles to new homes

Enoch Yiu / South China Morning Post: A look at the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing’s new IPO rules, which will allow pre-revenue “big tech” firms with a valuation of $1.9B or more to raise capital  —  This is part one of a two-part series looking at upcoming changes at Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing […]

CNBC: European telcos ramp up pressure on EU regulators to consider a framework where Google, Netflix, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft help cover network costs  —  – Telecom groups are ramping up pressure on EU regulators to consider a framework where the companies that send traffic over their networks …

Giovanni Colantonio / Digital Trends: A look at Sumplete, a game ChatGPT claimed it “invented” after being prompted to create Sudoku-like puzzles and is identical to at least one other mobile game  —  ChatGPT can add another job to its résumé: game developer.  With just a few simple prompts from a user …

A robot that dissolves into a puddle after exposing itself to heat and UV light could one day be used to securely gather intelligence and then destroy itself before it falls into the wrong hands

From The Land of Steady Habits to Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, here are our picks for the best streaming titles to feast your eyes on.

From Lost in Space to Wednesday, these are our picks for the best streaming titles to binge this week.

Celebrate everyone’s favorite red-capped plumber with a discount on a special Nintendo Switch and classic games.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: Meta plans multiple rounds of layoffs over the coming months that in total would be roughly the same magnitude as its ~13% cut in November 2022  —  New layoffs at Meta Platforms would follow cuts of around 11,000 employees started last year  —  Facebook-parent Meta Platforms Inc …

TechCrunch: How startup founders are reacting to Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, as some worry about frozen funds, operating expenses, and paying employees full salaries  —  Engineers at Polymath Robotics were working late Wednesday night on multiple projects when co-founder and CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher noticed chatter …

Matt Levine / Bloomberg: As the “Bank of Startups”, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed from its exposure to interest-rate risk, a lack of diversity among depositors, and VC herd mentality  —  Programming note: Money Stuff was supposed to be off today, but: bank run!  —  SVB

A robot that is controlled by Google’s PaLM-E artificial intelligence language model can process images and text, respond to queries and even grab a bag of food for you from the kitchen

An artificial intelligence in the game Justice Online will let players customise characters to look like anything they want, including celebrities or dog people, just by typing in instructions – and the tech could make it to other games too

In 1994, as Professor Peter Shor PhD ’85 tells it, internal seminars at AT&T Bell Labs were lively affairs. The audience of physicists was an active and inquisitive bunch, often pelting speakers with questions throughout their talks. Shor, who worked at Bell Labs at the time, remembers several occasions when a speaker couldn’t get past […]

Almost every large corporation is committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 but lacks a roadmap to get there, says John Sterman, professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, co-director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and leader of its Climate Pathways Project. Sterman and colleagues offer a suite of well-honed […]

In a lab on the fourth floor of MIT’s Building 56, a group of Massachusetts high school students gathered around a device that measures conductivity. Vincent Nguyen, 15, from Saugus, thought of the times the material on their sample electrode flaked off the moment they took it out of the oven. Or how the electrode […]

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Businesses must use their power and influence to push for the systemic changes required to meet climate targets.

Customer expectations are outpacing technological innovation. Here’s how to close the gap.

The technology behind OpenAI’s viral chatbot is set to become widely replicated, unleashing a tidal wave of bots.

Relativity Space’s attempt to reach orbit heralds the increasing use of 3D printing in the space sector.

Celebrate everyone’s favorite red-capped plumber with a discount on a special Nintendo Switch and classic games.

Arjun Kharpal / CNBC: Bitcoin falls ~8% to ~$19,900, a near two-month low, and ether falls 8%+ to ~$1,400, after a selloff of US stocks, rising interest rates, and troubles at SVB  —  – Bitcoin fell below $20,000 on Friday hitting a near-two month low after a stock market sell-off in the U.S.

Filipe Espósito / 9to5Mac: Kuo: Apple plans to unveil a redesigned HomePod with a built-in 7-inch display in H1 2024, enabling tighter integration with Apple’s other hardware products  —  Apple this year introduced a new HomePod that looks exactly like the original model announced in 2017 and discontinued in 2021.

Lingling Wei / Wall Street Journal: A look at China’s “golden shares”, initially meant to reduce Beijing’s role in the economy and now used to quietly control the country’s biggest tech companies  —  The state takes company stakes that are often small but give it a board seat and power to ensure that corporate behavior […]

Matthew Kearney was drawn to MIT by the culture of its cross-country team. Growing up in Austin, Texas, he loved spending time outdoors and playing soccer, but by high school running had become his primary sport. While looking at colleges, he wanted to find a place with both strong academics and a strong team community. […]

The Office of the Vice Chancellor and the Registrar’s Office have announced this year’s Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellows: professor of brain and cognitive sciences John Gabrieli, associate professor of literature Marah Gubar, professor of biology Adam C. Martin, and associate professor of architecture Lawrence “Larry” Sass. For more than 30 years, the MacVicar Faculty Fellows […]

The world’s most popular music streamer is putting more focus on video and previews. But it’s not clear that’s what listeners want.

Representative Darin LaHood’s claim that he was the subject of “backdoor” searches comes at a dicey moment for the bureau.

The head of the messaging app says a new law will undermine privacy. The government says it’s about protecting children.

Bloomberg: Researchers call for transparency on AI tools’ carbon footprint; training GPT-3 took an estimated 1.287 GWh of electricity, or what ~120 US homes use in a year  —  Artificial intelligence has become the tech industry’s shiny new toy, with expectations it’ll revolutionize trillion-dollar industries from retail to medicine.

Reuters: Oracle reports Q3 revenue up 18% YoY to $12.39B, vs. $12.42B est., cloud services and license support revenue up 17% YoY to $8.9B, and net income down 18% YoY  —  Oracle Corp (ORCL.N) missed quarterly revenue estimates on Thursday, as businesses slowed down IT spending against the backdrop of a sobering economic outlook.

CoinDesk: New York’s AG sues KuCoin, alleging the Seychelles-based crypto exchange offers tokens, such as ETH, that meet the definition of a security, without registering  —  A press release said the lawsuit was part of ongoing “efforts to crack down on unregistered cryptocurrency platforms.”

At first glance, aerospace engineering and brain and cognitive sciences may seem like an unlikely match for a double-major. But for Elissa Gibson ’22, the common thread connecting the two inherently different disciplines is clear: the human factor, by way of aviation. A lifelong love of airplanes helped Gibson discover the MIT Introduction to Technology, […]