About: blatcho

This backpacking tent isn’t too heavy and uses a new ecofriendly, sag-resistant rain fly.

Jennifer Elias / CNBC: At an all-hands last week, Sundar Pichai defended Google Cloud’s new desk-sharing policy; an exec says ~35% of staff are in the office at least four days a week  —  – Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed employee criticism of the cloud unit’s new desk-sharing policy at an all-hands meeting last week.

Platformer: Source: Twitter broke on Monday after the only site reliability engineer assigned to the project for migrating to a paid API made a “bad configuration change”  —  The high cost of cutting expenses  —  Twitter’s website is breaking in novel new ways — and while the company managed …

David McCabe / New York Times: Sources: The White House has given feedback on a draft bipartisan bill and is considering asking Congress for more legal powers to police apps like TikTok  —  In a strategy shift, the Biden administration is increasingly pointing to Congress to give it more legal power to deal with TikTok […]

The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) leads energy education at MIT, developing and implementing a robust educational toolkit for MIT graduate and undergraduate students, online learners around the world, and high school students who want to contribute to the energy transition. As MITEI’s director of education, Antje Danielson manages a team devoted to training the next […]

One student confesses that motors have always freaked them out. Amy Huynh, a first-year student in the MIT Technology and Policy Program, says “I just didn’t respond to the way electrical engineering and coding is usually taught.” Huynh and her fellow students found a different way to master coding and circuits during the Independent Activities […]

The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) announced Wednesday that MIT professor Daniel Hastings has been elected president-elect of the organization. Hastings, the associate dean of engineering for diversity, equity, and inclusion; head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics; and the Cecil and Ida Green Education Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, will be […]

Sponsor content from DELOITTE GLOBAL TAX.

Practice regulating your emotions by being aware of your facial expressions and body language.

A new study shows that including information about age, gender, and race can produce fairer outcomes.

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Q&A with Atari CEO Wade Rosen on the company’s 50th anniversary, making use of its traditional IP, plans to focus on retro gaming hardware, licensing, and more  —  Wade Rosen wants Atari to come back as one of the most valuable gaming brands.  After all, there aren’t many 50-year-old game companies.

Kaya Yurieff / The Information: Sources: around 20 leaders at Clubhouse have left over the past year, including hires from Meta, Google, and others; Clubhouse continues to add “top talent”  —  Roughly 20 leaders have departed Clubhouse over the past year or so, including many of the notable hires …

Keith Zhai / Wall Street Journal: Sources: China plans to create an agency to manage the country’s data stores, shifting from multiple ministries, seeking to streamline its regulatory structure  —  Beijing’s plan to streamline regulatory structure would bring all data-related issues under a single agency

Peter Eckersley did groundbreaking work to encrypt the web. After his sudden death, a new organization he founded is carrying out his vision to steer artificial intelligence toward “human flourishing.”

From record cleaners to slip mats, these extras are for budding enthusiasts and die-hard collectors alike.

Look Ma, no wires! These stick vacs are the best battery-operated dust suckers.

Pranshu Verma / Washington Post: Scammers are using voice-cloning AI to impersonate family members in distress, sometimes spoofing specific numbers to further the ruse, and victims fall for it  —  Scammers are using artificial intelligence to sound more like family members in distress.  People are falling for it and losing thousands of dollars.

Charlie Warzel / The Atlantic: An interview with Ask Jeeves’ co-creator Garrett Gruener, who says his original idea was similar to the chatbots Microsoft and Google are trying to build today  —  Garrett Gruener, the co-creator of Ask Jeeves, couldn’t beat Google, but he’s feeling just fine about the dawn of the chatbot era.

Wall Street Journal: Sources and docs: Binance and Binance.US have been more intertwined than disclosed, sharing staff, finances, and an affiliated entity to buy and sell crypto  —  The exchange was intertwined with an American firm portrayed as independent.  Now, regulators are circling.

Microsoft has used ChatGPT to create code for robotic arms and quadcopter drones from simple text commands given by humans, but experts warn that putting AI in control of such devices is a risky path

When people pay for sexual media, they’re seeking more than an anonymous image. AI cannot replicate the underlying desires that drive sex work.

Bert Hubert / Bert Hubert’s writings: An analysis of the EU Cyber Resilience Act, which covers every connected device and almost all software, causing open-source developers to worry about its scope  —  The EU’s new Cyber Resilience Act is admirable in its goal.  And the EU is not alone in thinking something needs to be […]

Alex Kantrowitz / Big Technology: Meta, Twitter, and Snapchat’s subscription fees and features are aimed at professional creators filling social feeds because regular users post too infrequently  —  Monthly fees for Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat are not for ordinary users.  They’re for the professionals who’ve taken over the feeds.

Nelson Wang / CoinDesk: A presentation in FTX’s Chapter 11 case shows the exchange has identified assets of ~$2.2B in FTX.com wallets and a ~$9.3B net borrowing by Alameda Research  —  So far, $2.2 billion in assets have been identified in the wallets of accounts associated with FTX.com, of which only $694 million are in […]

Data centres often waste the heat generated by servers, but UK firm Heata intends to bring servers into people’s homes where the waste energy can be used to heat up people’s hot water for showers

Proprietary chargers suck. With wireless charging, Garmin’s Vivomove Trend is moving in the right direction.

You’re tired. They’re tired. Here’s how to get your tiny person to close their eyes.

Plus: The US Marshals disclose a “major” cybersecurity incident, T-Mobile has gotten pwned so much, and more.

Alberto Nardelli / Bloomberg: Source: Russia is circumventing sanctions by importing advanced chips through countries such as Turkey and the UAE; shipments from China to Russia have surged  —  Russia looks to be successfully working around European Union and Group of Seven sanctions to secure crucial semiconductors …

Alex Cranz / The Verge: Meta is good at making VR hardware but is ignoring its core gamer audience, as it’s not clear the company realizes that games are driving its VR business  —  Meta seems very committed to making hardware to usher in a whole new world and racing away from the games that […]

Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer: Bing Chat appears to have a hidden Celebrity mode, in which the chatbot answers questions while impersonating Biden, Trump, Tom Cruise, and other famous people  —  A secret Bing Chat ‘Celebrity’ mode allows users to instruct the AI to impersonate celebrities, answering questions and talking like the person it imitates.

Robot grippers made from soft plastics will melt in the heat, but a wooden alternative can do the job just fine

An artificial intelligence has learned to master an Atari skiing game in days of playing time rather than the decades it took a specialist DeepMind AI, simply by reading the instructions written for humans before it started

Demetri Sevastopulo / Financial Times: The US imposes new rules requiring that CHIPS Act beneficiaries agree not to expand manufacturing capacity in “countries of concern”, like China, for 10 years  —  Commerce department imposes new rules on beneficiaries of $39bn programme  —  Chipmakers must agree not to expand capacity …

Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review: Q&A with OpenAI’s Sandhini Agarwal, Liam Fedus, Jan Leike, and co-founder John Schulman on training ChatGPT, dealing with virality, fixing problems, and more  —  Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.  —  When OpenAI launched ChatGPT …

Financial Times: Some UK officials and SoftBank staff blame onerous FCA rules, complexity and cost, inflexibility, and political chaos for Arm’s decision to shun London listing  —  Onerous rules said to have influenced rejection of UK float for chip designer in favour of New York

Arlington, Virginia, won a US-wide contest to host Amazon’s second headquarters. More than half of the giant project is now indefinitely delayed.

On the precipice of his biggest year yet—with starring roles in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Creed III—Majors is finally at peace.

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

CoinDesk: Silvergate says it’s discontinuing the Silvergate Exchange Network, an instant settlement service that its clients could use to move money to crypto exchanges  —  The bank said it would delay its annual filing earlier this week.  —  Silvergate Bank announced Friday it was suspending its …

Bloomberg: Sources: Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI seeks to raise money at around a $4B valuation after raising a $101M seed at a ~$1B valuation in October 2022  —  With artificial intelligence booming, one key player in the fast-growing space is talking to investors about raising more money …

Paul Alcorn / Tom’s Hardware: Intel moves to a two-year cadence for data center GPU releases, canceling the Rialto Bridge series and delaying its next release, Falcon Shores, to 2025  —  Intel takes its GPU ambitions down a notch.  —  Image 1 of 2  —  Intel’s VP and GM of the super compute group announced […]

Waving your arms to control your actions in virtual reality can lead to you accidentally punching things in the real world, but now software can help you control your virtual limbs by wiggling your fingers

An artificial intelligence has designed new versions of trastuzumab, an antibody treatment against breast cancer, in just a few days – existing methods take weeks or months

As a social media user, you can be eager to share content. You can also try to judge whether it is true or not. But for many people it is difficult to prioritize both these things at once. That’s the conclusion of a new experiment led by MIT scholars, which finds that even considering whether […]

The second QSEC Annual Research Conference (QuARC) brought together MIT student and postdoctoral researchers, staff, faculty, and industry partners for a two-day exploration of the leading edge in quantum information science and engineering. Held on Jan. 23 and 24 at the Omni Mount Washington Resort in New Hampshire, QuARC featured keynote addresses from prominent thinkers […]

The MIT Press has announced the first recipients of the Grant Program for Diverse Voices. Launched in 2021 to expand funding for authors whose experience and knowledge of diverse communities informs books that meet the highest standards of peer-reviewed scholarship, the initiative provides support for the research and writing of new works.  “The MIT Press […]

Five considerations for mental-health-care providers, insurers, and employers.

How employers do — or don’t — step up can have a major impact on employees and their families.

We often fall back on old habits when facing tough problems. But that’s when we need new approaches the most.