Category: Uncategorized

Jan Schwartz / Reuters: Source: Volkswagen plans to fire most of the management team at Cariad next week, after the software unit missed its development goals and exceeded its budget  —  Carmaker Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) is set to dismiss all but one of the executive board members at its software division Cariad next week …

These are our favorite gender-inclusive vibrators, wand massagers, and sleeves to give you and your partner(s) a helping hand.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Apple says emerging markets like India, where the iPhone has a small market share, are ready to take off, which could add “a lot of switchers” to its ecosystem  —  Apple is turning its attention to emerging markets at a time when growth is slowing at home.

Wall Street Journal: Research papers and staff interviews detail the workarounds Chinese companies like Huawei, Baidu, and Alibaba use to develop AI systems without the latest chips  —  Research in China on workarounds, such as using software to leverage less powerful chips, is accelerating

As the Elon Musk era of Twitter continues to throw up bugs and controversies, some people are looking at alternatives. The invite-only Bluesky is the latest challenger, but does it have staying power?

A decades-old conjecture about the best way to minimize the surface area of a three-bubble cluster seemed unprovable—until a breakthrough result.

How many ports do you need? What does 4K UHD even mean? Here’s everything you need to know.

A  few simple tools can help filter out most Twitter Blue users (but still see the ones you like).

Patrick Kulp / Emerging Tech Brew: Q&A with Marissa Mayer on her startup Sunshine that makes an AI-based contacts organizer, what she could have done differently at Yahoo, AI’s future, and more  —  The former Yahoo chief says she wishes she had acquired Hulu instead of Tumblr.  —  After a decades-long career …

Jessica Lyons Hardcastle / The Register: The organizers of DEF CON AI Village, set to run from August 10 to 13 this year, say they will host “thousands” of people to find bugs and biases in LLMs  —  Can’t wait to see how these AI models hold up against a weekend of red-teaming by infosec’s […]

Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk: Pepecoin, a meme coin launched in April, has a $1B+ market cap despite concerns about concentrated ownership; Arkham: a trader turned $263 into $3.8M in profits  —  A pseudonymous crypto trader bought trillions of the meme coin three weeks ago on UniSwap for $263, and still holds about $9 million …

An excellent student in math, science, and computing, Michael McDonald was nonetheless lukewarm about pursuing a career in any of those areas. It wasn’t until he actively engaged in the process of discovery related to astronomy research that he fell in love professionally. “I think I might have become a programmer in an alternate universe, […]

Plus: Apple and Google plan to stop AirTag stalking, Meta violated the FTC’s privacy order, and how to tell if your car is tracking you.

Finally, a robot vacuum has something I never knew I wanted: an air freshener!

Taylor Hatmaker / TechCrunch: Scammers appear to be hacking verified Meta accounts to impersonate the company and run Facebook ads asking users to download shady tools likely with malware  —  Sketchy Facebook pages impersonating businesses are nothing new, but a flurry of recent scams is particularly brazen.

Tom Phillips / Eurogamer.net: The International Olympic Committee adds Fortnite to its Olympic Esports Series competition, which will also feature Just Dance and Gran Turismo  —  Five years after the IOC criticised shooters.  —  News by Tom Phillips Editor-in-chief  —  Fortnite has been named as a late addition …

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: An in-depth look at the regulatory risks for OpenAI under GDPR, including questions around future data scraping and handling “right to be forgotten” requests  —  The European Union’s fight with ChatGPT is a glance into what’s to come for AI services.

Queen Elizabeth II was a blank canvas onto which scores of memes were projected. Charles III is nothing of the sort.

When was the last time you cleaned your floors? If you’re checking out these deals, it’s probably been too long.

Fisheries managers are recognizing the ecological importance of the maligned marine suckers and are stepping up efforts to help their populations recover.

Lora Kelley / New York Times: A profile of Roger Lee, who runs Layoffs.fyi that has catalogued ~450,000 tech job cuts and Comprehensive.io that tracks compensation in tech job postings  —  Roger Lee has cataloged hundreds of thousands of tech job cuts on his site Layoffs.fyi.  He still believes the industry will “100 percent” bounce […]

Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch: Q&A with Vint Cerf, chief internet evangelist at Google and recipient of IEEE’s Medal of Honor, on how Google has changed since 2005, the hazards of LLMs, more  —  “That’s always an exciting place to be — a place where nobody’s ever been before.”  —  Vint Cerf has been a near-constant […]

Cristina Criddle / Financial Times: A journalist recounts discovering that ByteDance surveilled her in 2022 after reporting on TikTok’s staff troubles in London and wonders why she was targeted  —  The FT’s Cristina Criddle on discovering she’d been surveilled by the controversial social media company

By reading a rat’s intentions from its brain patterns, an AI can help the rodent move objects in a virtual environment

Want to stream the royal ceremony wherever you are? Here’s where you can tune in on Saturday.

Chance Miller / 9to5Mac: Brydge, an iPad, Mac, and Surface accessory maker, is shutting down; sources: Brydge has neither paid its staff salaries nor fulfilled orders since January 2023  —  Brydge, a once thriving startup making popular keyboard accessories for iPad, Mac, and Microsoft Surface products, is ceasing operations.

Filipe Espósito / 9to5Mac: In an email to users, Twitter acknowledges a bug that showed some Circle tweets to users outside of the Circle in April 2023 and says the issue has been fixed  —  Back in April, several Twitter users were affected by a bug that showed private Twitter Circle tweets to random users […]

Theo Wayt / The Information: Amazon is working on AI tools to generate photos and videos for merchants’ ad campaigns on its platform, as the company seeks to build a broader ad business  —  Amazon is building a team to work on artificial intelligence tools that will generate photos and videos for merchants to use […]

A VR accessory called JumpMod can make users feel like they are jumping higher or landing harder, just by moving a weight on their back

The long-accepted practice of search engines scraping content from websites is being re-examined now that the data is being used to build valuable artificial intelligence tools

After more than two decades as part of Amazon’s core leadership team, Jeff Wilke helped transform the way people buy almost everything. His next act is no less ambitious: proving that America can make just about anything. In March 2021, Wilke stepped down from his post as CEO of Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer business — encompassing […]

A thoughtful message can make the difference between a lost customer and a loyal one.

In the early 1980s, Richard Samuels PhD ’80 was an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, specializing in Japanese politics and public policy. With the rapid emergence of Japan as a global economic powerhouse, Samuels, now the director of the Center for International Studies (CIS) and Ford International Professor of Political Science, had […]

The UK-based AI company has mastered games. Next challenge: science.

A survey of 79 firms found that inclusion and adaptability are closely linked.

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

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

Recycling was already a mess. Now a study finds that one facility may emit 3 million pounds of microplastics a year.

Warning labels on AI-generated media give viewers little context. Artists and human rights advocates have forged a more effective—and creative—path.

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.

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 …

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 […]

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

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

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 […]

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 …

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