Category: Uncategorized

A set of Soyuz spacecraft coolant leaks hints that Roscosmos is struggling as the space agency loses international partnerships and funding.

Open source intelligence researchers are verifying and debunking opaque claims about who ruptured the gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea.

ABC News: An interview with Sam Altman on OpenAI’s GPT-4, how “people should be happy” that OpenAI is a “little bit scared of” its tools, misinformation, rivals, and more  —  “This will be the greatest technology humanity has yet developed,” he said.  —  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks with ABC News, Mar. 15, 2023.

Bryce Elder / Financial Times: OpenAI’s GPT-4 failed a CFA Institute exam, the finance world’s self-styled toughest test, scoring eight out of 24, despite the answers being available online  —  Artificial intelligence versus arbitrary irrelevance  —  It’s an algorithmic mystery box that inspires fear, awe and derision in equal measure.

Words have always played a central role in Barry Duncan’s life. He’s worked in bookstores for more than 40 years, reads often, and has tried his hand at writing novels, children’s books, song lyrics, and plays. But it wasn’t until he stumbled onto the book “An Almanac of Words at Play” that Duncan realized words […]

We like HDR-pimped pics, but this latest camera controversy outlines how computational photography could set us down a dicey path.

Headphone jacks might be endangered, but they’re not gone. Here are our favorite smartphones that still let you plug and play.

Faiz Siddiqui / Washington Post: Amid mounting safety concerns about Tesla’s FSD, ex-staffers blame Elon Musk’s erratic leadership, cost-cutting measures like removing radar, and more  —  Tesla’s campaign to deliver a fully autonomous vehicle has suffered amid mounting safety concerns — and the boss’s Twitter distraction

Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg: Sources: Netflix’s ad-supported tier reached about 1M MAUs in the US after its second month, and the company has hit its forecasted deliveries to advertisers  —  Good afternoon from Los Angeles.  It’s good to be home and I hope your March Madness bracket is doing better than mine.

Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch: UChicago researchers launch a free app to help artists prevent AI models from stealing their “artistic IP”, by adding imperceptible “perturbations” to their art  —  Generative art’s style mimicry, interrupted  —  The asymmetry in time and effort it takes human artists …

Don’t drink and tweet.

Type Ia supernovas are astronomers’ best tools for measuring cosmic distances. In a first, researchers recreated one on a supercomputer to learn how they form.

Instant photography has never been more fun with this antidote to the Instagram era.

Anna Tong / Reuters: Replika and Character.AI, who offer AI companions, are no longer allowing adult content, angering some users who have become deeply involved with their chatbots  —  After temporarily closing his leathermaking business during the pandemic, Travis Butterworth found himself lonely and bored at home.

Abner Li / 9to5Google: Researchers detail a recently fixed aCropalypse vulnerability in Google Pixel’s Markup tool that lets some screenshots be retroactively unredacted or uncropped  —  Besides the Samsung Exynos modem issue, Android 13 QPR2 with the March 2023 security update fixes a vulnerability with the Pixel’s Markup screenshot tool.

Cameron Kaiser / Ars Technica: A look back at PLATO, an educational computer system released in 1960 that some consider a precursor to graphics, touchscreens, messaging apps, games, and more  —  Forums, instant messaging, and multiplayer video games all started here.  —  Bright graphics, a touchscreen, a speech synthesizer …

Help the whole family catch more z’s with soothing background noise.

Its digital chassis is an internet-connected platform for the whole car, and the tech giant has General Motors, Jeep, Mercedes, and many more on board.

Tom Warren / The Verge: An interview with Microsoft CVP of Design and Research Jon Friedman about the company’s vision for Microsoft 365 Copilot, Bing AI lessons, AI ethics, and more  —  Copilot is more than just a chatbot.  Microsoft is slowly building an AI assistant that it has dreamed about for years.

Inside Higher Ed: A group of librarians argue the Internet Archive is a library, saying that the four major publishers’ lawsuit threatens the development of digital collections  —  A lawsuit against the Internet Archive threatens the most significant specialized library to emerge in decades, say a group of current and former university librarians.

Plus: A SpaceX supplier ransom, critical vulnerabilities in dozens of Android phones, and more.

Wall Street Journal: Some US TikTok creators contemplate what to do if the app that created their business opportunities is banned, like moving to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts  —  The platform created business opportunities for some users.  Now, they’re planning for what might come next

Maria Bustillos / The Nation: A look at four publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive, which hinges on defining the legal ownership of ebooks, ahead of oral arguments on March 20  —  Or that they haven’t already started to pollute Google searches.  And if publishers win their lawsuit against the Internet Archive …

When SVB collapsed, entrepreneurs who feared losing everything spent nerve-wracking days crafting backup plans, seeking new funds, and pleading with politicians.

The crisis exposed Big VC’s flaws. It’s time to rethink venture capital’s power—and reimagine investment in innovation.

Botanists and community stewards are using patches of native flora as blueprints to revive tropical dry evergreen ecosystems from near-extinction.

Financial Times: Some investors are concerned SVB’s collapse and its rescue by the US government, after Silicon Valley investors’ lobbying, could lead to tougher tech regulation  —  Late last Saturday night, Jason Calacanis, a prominent internet entrepreneur and investor, hit the caps button on his keyboard …

Charlotte Alter / TIME: Sources: effective altruism leaders were warned of Sam Bankman-Fried’s issues in 2018 and 2019, but they dismissed claims and threatened those raising concerns  —  Leaders of the Effective Altruism movement were repeatedly warned beginning in 2018 that Sam Bankman-Fried was unethical …

Methods to generate the random numbers we need for secure communications are all flawed in some way, but quantum computers that exist today could produce random numbers that can’t be faked

The next phase of tech capitalism will demand more, not less, of your humanity.

From You to Wednesday, these are our picks for the best streaming titles to binge this week.

Connie Loizos / TechCrunch: After SVB froze its deposits, HR software startup Rippling raised a $500M Series E at an $11.25B valuation, same as Series D, taking its total funding to $1.2B  —  As a serial entrepreneur who has famously endured some ups and downs, Parker Conrad has nearly seen it all.  Or so he […]

Financial Times: How tech from Synthesia, an AI startup backed by Kleiner Perkins and GV, is being used to make deepfake news videos promoted by Venezuela’s government  —  UK tech company developed software used in fake news videos promoted by authoritarian government  —  As Venezuela prepared for carnival season …

Rock your inner jock with a pair of sturdy, sweatproof, and tangle-proof headphones. Here are our favorites.

Hailey Fuchs / Politico: Source: TikTok is paying dozens of creators to visit DC next week and lobby lawmakers against a forced sale, ahead of CEO Shou Zi Chew’s testimony on March 23  —  The influential social media app TikTok is flooding the nation’s capital with influencers next week as part of an 11th hour […]

In work that could lead to important new physics with potentially heady applications in computer science and more, MIT scientists have shown that two previously separate fields in condensed matter physics can be combined to yield new, exotic phenomena. The work is theoretical, but the researchers are excited about collaborating with experimentalists to realize the […]

MIT Professor Marin Soljačić and four additional MIT alumni — Vanderlei Salvador Bagnato PhD ’87, Turan Erdogan ’87, Harold Metcalf ’62, and Andrew Weiner ’79, SM ’81, ScD ’84 — are among 17 recipients of the 2023 Optica Awards. Optica, formerly known as OSA, announced the awards, which celebrate those in the optics and photonics field […]

Silicon Valley Bank illustrates why payroll shouldn’t be stored in an institution vulnerable to bank runs.

MIT’s commitment to undergraduate financial aid will remain strong for the 2023-24 academic year, increasing to an estimated budget of $164.1 million. The increase will offset a 3.75 percent rise in tuition and changes in housing, dining, and other estimated costs. The estimated average MIT scholarship for students receiving financial aid next year is $61,247. […]

Sector specialization comes with steep risks — and high upside.

Your strategy should be driven by relationship-building — not shiny new tech.

Pro-Russia groups are gaming Facebook’s review process, and moderators are stuck in the middle.

Alexander Martin / The Record: Q&A with two of Meta’s leading security experts about its Online Operations Kill Chain, a framework for responding to threat activity like influence operations  —  Next year will feature some of the most geopolitically significant elections of our times.

Wall Street Journal: A shortage of skilled workers is impeding Micron’s goal of a chip manufacturing campus in Syracuse, NY, where it plans to invest $100B and hire 9K employees  —  Micron plans to hire 9,000 employees at a new suburban Syracuse campus amid shortage of skilled workers

The US is proposing bold action to clean thousands of PFAS “forever chemicals” out of drinking water. It’s long overdue.

In the face of safety risks, experts have tightened the reins on heritable genome editing—but haven’t ruled out using it someday.

Wired: How the vague and varied US legal definitions of “cybercrime” causes issues, as the UN negotiates an international cybersecurity treaty with similar broad terms  —  From US state laws to the international stage, definitions of “cybercrime” remain vague, broad, and increasingly entrenched in our legal systems.

In 2018, MIT convened its Task Force on the Work of the Future, which concluded in a 2020 report that while new technologies were not necessarily going to massively wipe out employment, smart practices and policies would be necessary to let automation complement good jobs. Today a successor group is continuing the task force’s effort: […]

Even though Flavio Emilio Vila Skrzypek left his native country of Peru to study at MIT, you can tell immediately that his homeland is close to his heart. Vila, who is pursuing a master’s in city planning, has made it his mission to improve land-use policy back home. “Property policies in Peru should learn from […]

We analyzed an algorithm that evaluates people claiming welfare benefits and found shocking discrimination.