Category: Uncategorized

Rosie Perper / CoinDesk: Sotheby’s launches a curated, peer-to-peer secondary NFT marketplace on its Metaverse platform, fully on-chain via the Ethereum and Polygon networks  —  Sotheby’s Metaverse will now offer a curated, peer-to-peer marketplace via the Ethereum and Polygon networks.

Joe Schneider / Bloomberg: A US federal judge declared a mistrial in Masimo’s suit against Apple over Apple Watch stolen trade secrets claims after jurors were unable to reach a consensus  —  Apple Inc. and Masimo Corp. failed to persuade a jury to reach a unanimous verdict in a trial where the medical-devices company claimed […]

Forget crypto, VR, AI. When it comes to empowering humans, new technology has nothing on the well-tempered clavier.

A machine that moulds scrap aluminium into automotive parts could help speed up production of electric vehicles while cutting down the industry’s dependence on aluminium mining and extraction

Emma Roth / The Verge: Mastodon announces a new onboarding experience that makes mastodon.social the default server choice, instead of requiring users pick from thousands of instances  —  Mastodon is making it easier for newcomers to create an account on the platform.  On Monday, the decentralized network announced …

Big ideas took the stage on Monday morning, ahead of the inauguration of MIT’s 18th president, Sally Kornbluth. As final preparations were underway on Killian Court for the afternoon’s ceremonies, members of the MIT community gathered to welcome Kornbluth with an academic symposium exploring the theme “Where Big Ideas Come From — and Why They […]

Sally Kornbluth made a resounding call today for the entire MIT community to join together and address the “global crises” of the current era, including climate change, in her inaugural address as the Institute’s 18th president. “I hope to inspire you to join us in something important and new,” Kornbluth said in remarks delivered to […]

On a recent evening at MIT, over a hundred people gathered at Boynton Hall for a conversation with Amgen Professor of Biology Emerita Nancy Hopkins and journalist Kate Zernike. The topic of discussion was Zernike’s book, “The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science,” which made its official debut at the end […]

Takeaways from a survey of more than 800 customer service reps.

Don’t let overcommunication tank productivity.

A recent analysis of more than 500 employees across 12 organizations found that actual strategic alignment was two to three times lower than perceived alignment.

The EV maker said it will expunge rare earths from its vehicles’ motors, suggesting Tesla engineers will have to get creative.

Davey Alba / Bloomberg: NewsGuard finds 49 websites populated by generative AI posing as news outlets with generic names like News Live 79; some feature falsehoods and programmatic ads  —  The news-rating group NewsGuard has found dozens of news websites generated by AI chatbots proliferating online …

The sheer volume of horrendous recipes on TikTok has led to the emergence of a whole new brand of influencer.

AI tools? A porn filter, but for Top Secret documents? Just classifying less stuff? US lawmakers are full of ideas but lack a silver bullet.

Meghan Bobrowsky / Wall Street Journal: Earnings from Meta, Amazon, Google, and Intel were better than expected, sparking hope that the post-pandemic hangover is fading, but sales growth still lags  —  Shares rise on better-than-expected results, but growth lags behind what Microsoft, Amazon and Google did in past

Cade Metz / New York Times: An interview with AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, who recently left Google after over a decade to speak about AI’s risks, on regrets, quitting the company, and more  —  For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT.  Now he worries it will […]

How much speed do you need? And what’s a MU-MIMO? We decipher the jargon and explain what to look for.

Naomi Nix / Washington Post: Sources describe how Meta managers built up “kingdoms” as headcount doubled, and how layoffs led to falling morale and lower confidence in Zuckerberg  —  Roiled by waves of layoffs and a costly investment in the metaverse, many insiders say the Facebook founder has lost his vision — and the trust […]

Jordan Novet / CNBC: An interview with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian about the unit finally turning a profit in Q1 2023, in part by making its data center operations more efficient  —  – Google said this week that its cloud unit finally turned profitable in the first quarter.  — Since ex-Oracle exec Thomas …

Financial Times: Carmakers and IP experts raise concerns over the rising dominance of Chinese companies like Huawei when it comes to 4G, 5G, and Wi-Fi standard essential patents  —  Led by Huawei, Chinese groups are filing patents around the tech that enables products to access the internet

It is thought that quantum computers will eventually be able to crack the encryption methods we use today, but exactly when this will happen is an open question. Now, one cryptographer has started a betting pool

Now there is a way to use ink to write words or patterns in liquid, much as you might write on a solid surface, and the letters could conceivably last a very long time

MIT’s campus spilled over with good cheer yesterday during a community-wide celebration marking the upcoming inauguration of MIT President Sally Kornbluth on Monday. In a day of activities that truly had something for everyone, MIT community members and their families enjoyed an array of student performances, amusement park rides, exhibits hosted by MIT’s departments and […]

Whether you want a beast of a machine with dedicated graphics or a light, easy-to-upgrade PC, we have the perfect rig for you.

Richard Feynman’s path integral is a powerful prediction machine and a philosophy. Physicists still struggle to figure out how to use it, and what it means.

Reed Albergotti / Semafor: An interview with Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn on investing $100M+ in 100+ AI startups and why he thinks he failed to steer AI development toward human safety  —  Jaan Tallinn used the fortune he made selling Skype in 2009 to invest in AI companies like Anthropic and DeepMind …

Firefox gets a needed tune-up, SolarWinds squashes two high-severity bugs, Oracle patches 433 vulnerabilities, and more updates you should make now.

Avram Piltch / Tom’s Hardware: The creator of the GPT4Free GitHub project, which allows free access to GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, says OpenAI is demanding he take the repo down or face a lawsuit  —  GPT4Free uses other sites’ connections to OpenAI.  —  Anyone can use ChatGPT for free, but if you want to use GPT4 […]

Reuters: A Brazilian federal judge lifts Telegram’s ban in the country for refusing to hand over neo-Nazi data, saying a complete ban of the service “is not reasonable”  —  Brazil’s second instance appeals court lifted on Saturday the suspension of the encrypted messaging app Telegram …

Make your life easier. With Apple’s app, you can trigger a series of automated tasks with a single tap or Siri voice command.

Plus: Amazon kills off its fitness wearables while Apple shores up its products’ health-tracking capabilities.

From the stylish Evercade to the old-school Sega Genesis Mini, these machines will have you bleeping, blooping, and blasting back to the good old days.

BBC: Wikimedia won’t comply with the Online Safety Bill’s age checks of its UK readers or contributors, citing the foundation’s “commitment to collect minimal data”  —  Wikipedia will not comply with any age checks required under the Online Safety Bill, its foundation says.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Microsoft’s Canva-like web app Designer, which leverages user-created content and OpenAI’s text-to-image DALL-E 2 to ideate designs, launches in public preview  —  Microsoft Designer, Microsoft’s AI-powered design tool, today launched in public preview with an expanded set of features.

Ooni’s first electric pizza oven is a fast and convenient (but tiny) pizza revelation.

Maybe you don’t want your phone number, email, home address, and other details out there for all the web to see. Here’s how to make them vanish.

Increasingly severe heat waves will imperil the country’s development goals, slow economic growth, and heighten health risks, new research shows.

Vivian Wang / New York Times: A look at livestream shopping in China, where an estimated $500B in goods were sold on apps like Douyin in 2022, an 8x jump since 2019, amid regulatory scrutiny  —  Star sellers can amass huge followings and eye-popping fortunes, through a format that mixes consumerism and entertainment.

Washington Post: Jack Dorsey criticized Elon Musk’s leadership of Twitter on Bluesky and refused to take responsibility for the acquisition, claiming “it all went south”  —  The former CEO issued his strongest criticism yet of Musk’s takeover of the social media site

Joanna Stern / Wall Street Journal: A WSJ columnist used Synthesia, ElevenLabs, and ChatGPT to create an AI clone that could trick her bank’s voice biometric system, make a TikTok, and more  —  Our columnist replaced herself with AI voice and video to see how humanlike the tech can be.  The results were eerie.

President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea visited MIT on Friday, participating in a roundtable discussion with Institute leaders and faculty about biomedical research and discussing the fundamentals of technology-driven innovation clusters.  South Korea, Yoon noted in his remarks, has highly regarded educational institutions, hospitals, and research facilities, along with robust legal and business systems. […]

TechCrunch: Docs and sources: OpenAI closed a $10.3B+ funding round at a $27B-$29B valuation; investors include Microsoft, Tiger Global, Sequoia, a16z, and Founders Fund  —  OpenAI, the startup behind the widely used conversational AI model ChatGPT, has closed new funding, TechCrunch has learned.

Kim Zetter / Wired: Sources: the US DOJ discovered the SolarWinds breach in late May 2020, months before its public disclosure in December 2020, but was unaware of its significance  —  In May 2020, the US Department of Justice stumbled upon Russian hackers in its network, but did not realize the significance of what it […]

Forbes: Filing and sources: drone delivery startup Zipline is raising a $330M Series F at a ~$4.2B valuation, up from its $2.7B valuation for its Series E in June 2021  —  The funding, revealed in a filing, shows that the logistics company priced a $330 million Series F funding round in April.

AI search engines like Microsoft’s Bing Chat often fail to provide citations to back up statements, or cite information incorrectly – and this is more likely when answers sound more convincing

Four strategies based on in-depth studies of 12 large European firms.

J-PAL North America, a regional office of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), has announced six new partnerships with government agencies and leading nonprofits through the State and Local Evaluation Incubator and the Housing Stability Evaluation Incubator, launched in August 2022. These collaborators span the contiguous United States and represent a wide range of […]

SVB was a cautionary tale.

Can Northvolt make greener batteries for a better world and a bigger profit?