Category: Uncategorized

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

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 …

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 […]

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 …

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

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

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.

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

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) …

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 …

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

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

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.

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 […]

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 …

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.

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 […]

The predictive power of machine learning is a game changer.

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 […]

No matter how old you are, someone will argue you’re the wrong age.

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

Here’s everything you need to know about switching from Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T to the search giant’s cell phone service.

This compact clamshell is a classy introduction to folding smartphones for folks without deep pockets.

Anne VanderMey / Bloomberg: Reddit says 80% of its top subreddits are currently open; Reddark estimates that 5K+ subreddits are limiting access, down from almost 9K on June 12  —  Reddit Inc. said that most of the company’s communities were operating as normal — four days after a protest that shut down thousands …

Dana Priest / Washington Post: Hanan Elatr, the widow of Jamal Khashoggi, sues the NSO Group in Virginia, claiming Saudi Arabia used the Israeli company’s Pegasus tool to track them both  —  In the lawsuit, Hanan Elatr says Saudi Arabia used NSO’s Pegasus spyware to track her and her husband’s whereabouts before he was murdered

Director Tim Story’s new movie turns a timeworn trope into a staggeringly modern slasher.

Financial Times: Sources: OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe have met News Corp, the NYT, and others to discuss copyright issues over LLMs and a possible subscription fee  —  Google and OpenAI are discussing agreements to pay publishers over using content to train generative AI models

Everything you never wanted to know about the future of talking about the future.

Jay Peters / The Verge: CEO Steve Huffman says Reddit’s API was “never designed to support third-party apps” and now takes issue with apps that are building a business on top of Reddit  —  Thousands of Reddit communities are still dark in protest of the API changes that are forcing some third-party developers to shut […]

Netflix’s dystopian hit asks what happens when people become too content about … content.

From Succession to SmartLess, Max is a streaming paradise of “it’s not TV” television.

Sylvia Varnham O’Regan / The Information: Sources: Meta is working on ways to make the next version of LLaMA available for commercial use; the model is currently only licensed for research use  —  Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his deputies want other companies to freely use and profit from new artificial intelligence software Meta […]

Teo Armus / Washington Post: Amazon officially opens Metropolitan Park in Arlington, Virginia, the first phase of its HQ2, where it has projected to bring 25,000 workers by 2030  —  After a national bidding war that prompted cities to offer billions in tax dollars and years of planning and construction that promised …

Particles produced by cosmic rays hitting Earth’s atmosphere, called muons, have been proposed as an alternative to GPS navigation that would work underground – and now it has been tested for real

From self-driving cars to humanoid robots, the world of robotics is a long way from talk of artificial intelligence causing human extinction. It’s a breath of fresh air, says Alex Wilkins

MIT’s School of Engineering and global health care company Novo Nordisk has announced the launch of a multi-year program to support postdoctoral fellows conducting research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and data science with life sciences. The MIT-Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellows Program will welcome its first cohort of up to 10 postdocs […]

It was an uncharacteristically sunny morning as Marcela Angel MCP ’18, flanked by a drone pilot from the Boston engineering firm AirWorks and a data collection team from the Colombian regional environmental agency Corpoamazonia, climbed a hill in the Andes Mountains of southwest Colombia. The area’s usual mountain cloud cover — one of the major […]

The rapid advance of artificial intelligence has generated a lot of buzz, with some predicting it will lead to an idyllic utopia and others warning it will bring the end of humanity. But speculation about where AI technology is going, while important, can also drown out important conversations about how we should be handling the […]

Companies have more options than ever. Here’s where to start.

Research finds that consumers treat refunds as money they’ve already spent.

How one integrated, community-based care program lets vulnerable seniors continue to live at home for as long as possible.

Psilocybin is on the cusp of becoming legally available in Oregon—but not as a medical treatment.

This week, we sift through the details revealed in the leaked Cybertruck report, and talk about what happens next for Tesla.

Here’s how the video game in the new season’s best sketch happened on the backend.

Tom Warren / The Verge: Microsoft begins selling replacement Surface components via the Microsoft Store, including displays, batteries, and SSDs, for “out-of-warranty, self repair”  —  Microsoft is starting to sell replacement components for its Surface devices.  The software giant now supplies replacement parts …

Reuters: Sources: Alphabet cautions staff not to enter confidential info into chatbots, including Bard, or directly use AI-generated code, following Amazon and others  —  Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) is cautioning employees about how they use chatbots, including its own Bard, at the same time as it markets …

Bloomberg: A look at Nvidia’s long-planned transformation to an AI powerhouse, driven by CEO Jensen Huang; in 2022, data center operators collectively spent $15B on orders  —  The first time Jensen Huang tried ChatGPT, he asked it to write a poem about his company.  Huang, who’d made a bet …

MIT engineers have synthesized a superabsorbent material that can soak up a record amount of moisture from the air, even in desert-like conditions. As the material absorbs water vapor, it can swell to make room for more moisture. Even in very dry conditions, with 30 percent relative humidity, the material can pull vapor from the […]