Category: Uncategorized

If you must have a giant computer screen, you could do worse than this one.

A device made of cylinders tethered to the ocean floor could lessen the ferocity of waves, preventing them from eroding the shore

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: ~270 US Apple Stores held staff meetings on unionization risks in the past two weeks, using a unionized store in Towson, Maryland as a cautionary tale  —  Apple is continuing its push to keep retail stores from unionizing.  Also: A deep look inside efforts to diversify the company’s product …

Nathan Lambert / Democratizing Automation: An ML scientist writes about the extreme strain of working in an AI industry collectively shaken up by ChatGPT, as he oscillates between motivation and burnout  —  Fear, FOMO, and the scientific exodus driven by ChatGPT  —  Every single person I know working in AI these days …

After rising from the dead, the theater subscription service is back with a convoluted new business model. Here’s how it works and how to sign up.

Aric Toler / bellingcat: The leaked Pentagon Ukraine documents seem to have first appeared on Discord, followed by 4chan, before appearing on Telegram, Twitter, and major media outlets  —  In recent days, the US Justice Department and Pentagon have begun investigating an apparent online leak of sensitive documents, including some that were marked “Top Secret”.

Kit Chellel / Bloomberg: How the gambling industry has kept up with decades of computer-assisted tech developed to beat roulette, like wearable devices, timers, and predictive software  —  One spring evening, two men and a woman walked into the Ritz Club casino, an upmarket establishment in London’s West End.

Plus: Kobo’s new E Ink tablet is made for doodling, Google moves podcasts into YouTube Music, and Peloton connects to Android watches.

Plus: 119 arrested during a sting on the Genesis dark-web market, the IRS aims to buy an online mass surveillance tool, and more.

We’ve tested dozens of ways to watch stuff on 4K or HD TVs. These are our favorites.

Reuters: Baidu sues “relevant” app developers and Apple over fake apps for its Ernie bot on the App Store; Ernie, launched in March 2023, doesn’t have an official app  —  Chinese search giant touts product as answer to U.S.-developed ChatGPT chatbot  —  Baidu lodged lawsuits …

Thomas Germain / Gizmodo: An interview with Victor Wong, Google’s senior director of product management for Privacy Sandbox, about replacing third-party cookies, Apple’s ATT, and more  —  To replace the cookie in Chrome and Android, Google has an offering for the world called “Privacy Sandbox.”  Here’s an exclusive peek into how it will work.

Aidan McLaughlin / Mediaite: Twitter replaces the week-old “US state-affiliated media” label on NPR’s account with a new label describing the nonprofit media company as “Government Funded”  —  Twitter removed the “state-affiliated media” label it had affixed on NPR’s account this week …

The story behind the fight over this game’s rights is as complex as the game itself.

In California, the bodies of four furry swimmers tested positive for a strain of toxoplasmosis first seen in mountain lions.

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Experts say when ChatGPT confabulates, it is reaching for information that is absent from its training data and filling in blanks with plausible-sounding words  —  A look inside the hallucinating artificial minds of the famous text prediction bots.  —  Over the past few months …

Joel Khalili / Wired: A look at the increasing complexity of the operating environment for crypto companies in the US, as a regulatory turf war between the SEC and the CFTC escalates  —  US agencies are sparring over who gets to oversee the crypto industry, and companies are stuck in the middle.

Easter weekend brings discounts on some of our favorite Amazon devices, plus Google Pixel phones.

Financial Times: Customs data: London-based Mykines shipped ~$1.2B of chips, servers, and other electronics into Russia, at least $982M of which are subject to export controls  —  Company registered to terraced house in London sent goods including semiconductors, according to customs data

The Hindu: Twitter seemingly removed a journalist’s tweet about India’s Home Minister globally, not just in the country, an apparent first, in response to a “legal demand”  —  The move is an apparent first, as Twitter generally takes down posts in response to government demands only in the country whose government demanded censorship

Naomi Nix / Washington Post: Sources: Meta is giving some VR developers compensation packages of $600K to $1M, significantly more than most gaming companies, despite a push to rein in costs  —  Programmers’ high pay is just a sliver of the company’s multibillion-dollar metaverse investment

Luscafilm has announced three new Star Wars movies. There’s a crucial title missing.

Weird hands have become a well-known way to identify an image generated by artificial intelligence, but that could be set to change

Matt Taibbi / Racket News: Matt Taibbi plans to use Substack Notes instead of Twitter after learning Twitter is blocking Substack links because the company is upset about Substack Notes  —  On staying at Substack, and leaving Twitter, I guess  —  Earlier this afternoon, I learned Substack links were being blocked on Twitter.

Sometime in 2019, MIT PhD student Ajay Brahmakshatriya formulated a simple, though still quite challenging, goal. He wanted to make it possible for people who had expertise in a particular domain — such as climate modeling, bioinformatics, or architecture — to write their own programming languages, so-called domain-specific languages (or DSLs), even if they had […]

Nelson Yuan-sheng Kiang, an internationally recognized scientist known for his influential research into speech and hearing, as well as his dedication to enhancing academic exchange between Chinese and American scientists, died March 19 at his home in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston. He was 93. Kiang was a principal research scientist in the Research […]

And how to address them before your competitors seize the opportunity.

In the coming decades, renewable energy sources such as solar and wind will increasingly dominate the conventional power grid. Because those sources only generate electricity when it’s sunny or windy, ensuring a reliable grid — one that can deliver power 24/7 — requires some means of storing electricity when supplies are abundant and delivering it […]

Three ways to disrupt this insidious, global bias.

Sponsor content from GEP.

Scientists are hesitant to blame climate change, but varying weather conditions are causing new and troubling tornado patterns.

Unravel the tangled world of cords and find the ones you need to charge your gadgets and transfer data.

Aria Alamalhodaei / TechCrunch: Colorado-based True Anomaly, which develops software and “autonomous orbital pursuit vehicles” to collect space data, raised $30M including a $17M Series A  —  As tensions between the United States and China continue to escalate, a new startup has emerged from stealth …

CoinDesk: The US Treasury warns that DeFi services not compliant with AML and terrorist financing rules pose “the most significant current illicit finance risk”  —  The department’s first analysis of illicit finance risks associated with DeFi recommends the U.S. look at enhancements to its existing anti-money laundering regime.

Elon Musk’s highly publicized decision distracts from his recent move to reduce transparency on the platform.

Tim Keary / VentureBeat: Bitdefender survey of 400+ IT/security professionals: 42% were told to cover up data breaches that should have been reported, 29.9% admit covering up breaches  —  In a world where cybercrime is becoming more difficult to prevent, many security leaders are putting pressure on IT professionals to bury the truth.

In Greg Fournier’s line of work — studying living systems that developed billions of years ago — outstanding questions far outnumber established answers. “Often, we have very little information to go on. We can suggest how each piece of evidence we have may be more consistent with different scenarios,” says Fournier, an associate professor of […]

Put a discounted fitness tracker on your wrist, hop on an electric bicycle, and experience spring bliss.

These are our favorite classic flicks, Marvel movies, and Star Wars sagas on the streaming platform.

Abner Li / 9to5Google: YouTube adds a Podcasts tab to channel pages globally on its website and mobile apps, showing playlists that creators have marked as podcasts  —  While we’re still waiting for podcasts to widely roll out (in the US) to YouTube Music, YouTube has added a “Podcasts” tab to channel pages.

Mitchell Clark / The Verge: Substack writers are getting a pop-up saying Twitter “unexpectedly restricted access to embedding tweets”, a day after Substack unveiled its Twitter-like Notes  —  Writers trying to embed tweets in their Substack stories are in for a rude surprise: after pasting a link to the site …

Video memes made with algorithms are suddenly everywhere. Their sudden proliferation may herald an imminent explosion in the technology’s capability.

Lance Whitney / ZDNet: Microsoft adds three Bing features to its SwiftKey keyboard beta for Android: web search results, a tone option in which AI rewrites text, and the AI chatbot  —  Android users who want to tap into some AI as they type on their phones can now do so with help from Microsoft.

Benjamin Mangrum, assistant professor of literature at MIT, has been awarded the 2023 Levitan Prize in the Humanities. This award, presented each year by a faculty committee, empowers a member of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) faculty with funding to enable research in their field. With an award of $30,000, […]

Research has shown that standout customer experiences are fueled by cross-functional collaboration.

It can help you work around obstacles, find opportunities across silos, and more.

Advice from a time-management coach on navigating four key phases of the process.

Without an information sharing and analysis center, the country’s food and agriculture sector is uniquely vulnerable to hackers.

This week, we learn how automakers adopted the subscription model where drivers pay to unlock features, and why the used car market will embrace it too.

BMW and others have been criticized for charging monthly fees for features in new cars like heated seats. Now the tactic is coming to used cars.