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The two companies will join forces to build large-scale AI systems for Azure. The end goal? Developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), another term for autonomous computers that can see the world and solve tasks the same way humans do – basically, what we always wanted ‘AI’ to be. As part of the deal, OpenAI – which has previously leveraged its technology to annihilate gamers, predict language, and generate coherent blocks of text from a single phrase – will also exclusively run its computing efforts in Microsoft’s cloud....

But now, nearly five years later, the company has hit that goal — as it announced earlier this week. To celebrate, Surface head honcho Panos Panay shared a video that teases a cleaner look for the OS, adopting more of the Fluent-UI touches the company has slowly been rolling out. A post shared by Panos Panay (@panospanay) on Mar 19, 2020 at 12:47pm PDT Though the video is low resolution, we catch a few glimpses at aesthetic changes....

Some say it’s a war between generation Z (born 1997-2012) and minimal millennials (born 1981-1996), symptomatic of bigger differences. Others say it’s a pandemic response, where our domestic prisons became cuddly cocoons, stimulating our senses, connecting us with other people and places. But what really lays behind the choice to clutter or cull? Why do some people revel in collections of novelty eggcups? Or have so many framed pictures you can barely see the (ferociously busy) wallpaper?...

The Cooper Bikes Company was founded in 2009 aiming to build innovative bikes for the urban environment. And they look a treat! These ebikes don’t resemble the somewhat space-age futuristic chunky offerings that some other companies are rolling out. With a nod to the company’s retro roots, the ebikes come with slim frames featuring a complete ebike drive system in the rear wheel hub. This makes them almost indistinguishable from a conventional bike....

Let’s get to it. Facebook’s “cryptocurrency” Libra is facing yet more challenges as Mastercard, Visa, eBay, payment system provider Stripe, and South American partner Mercado Pago have pulled out of the troubled project, The Financial Times reports. The news comes just one week after PayPal left the project. Messaging platform Telegram may be putting the brakes on the launch of its TON blockchain token, according to a note sent to investors seen by Bloomberg....

Former Mt. Gox traders Joseph Jones and Peter Steinmetz allege McCaleb was “fraudulent” and “negligent” in his representation of the exchange, partly leading to the loss of their Bitcoin when it was hacked in the notorious hacking incident from 2014, CoinDesk reports. The complaint, submitted on May 19, claims Mt Gox was already suffering from safety issues in January 2011. Two security breaches, the document says, resulted in the loss of “thousands of a Mt....

The method is designed to shrink the gap between a robot’s “mind” and movements by creating customized chips that serve its specific computing needs. The system’s inventors believe it could enhance a variety of robotics applications — including frontline medical care of COVID-19 patients. “It would be fantastic if we could have robots that could help reduce risk for patients and hospital workers,” said Dr Sabrina Neuman, an MIT CSAIL graduate who designed the method....

The eruption, centered on a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster (roughly 390 million light-years from Earth) produced energetic jets, ripping a mammoth hole, 15 times larger than the Milky Way Galaxy, in the cloud of plasma surrounding the galactic cluster. “We’ve seen outbursts in the centers of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive. And we don’t know why it’s so big. But it happened very slowly — like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years,” Melanie Johnston-Hollitt of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) stated....

To boost the adoption of electric and low emission vehicles, the government announced yesterday its Clean Car Discount package, which offers significant subsidies to prospective EV owners. Specifically, New Zealanders buying an imported new EV will receive a rebate of $6,166, and those buying an imported second-hand EV will get a rebate of $2,466. The subsidy will be lower for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). New PHEV buyers will be eligible for $4,110, and used hybrids will qualify for $1,644....

For the first time, astronomers are able to view a massive Jupiter-like world orbiting far from its parent star. The planet is visible orbiting at a distance beyond the debris field surrounding the stellar furnace. Such a world would resemble the hypothesized Planet X, thought by some astronomers to orbit beyond Neptune in our own solar system. The planetary disk in the HD 106906 system is similar, in some ways, to the Kuiper Belt in our own system....

Publications from Financial Times to The Independent, and Axios crowed that BYD sold 641,000 vehicles during the first half of 2022. That’s quite a few thousand more than Tesla’s 564,000. But they failed to include some crucial analysis that is easily understood if you take five minutes to read BYD’s financials. The 641,000 vehicles included not only pure-electric but also plug-in hybrid vehicles. By comparison, Tesla is all-electric, baby. It’s a pretty bad error when it comes to accurate reporting....

I don’t blame you if you feel left out of the conversation. However, this piece is not a long-form explainer to explain every character arc in this story. But it’s a collection of well-written articles that can educate you about the issue in a better way. Before we begin the GameStop saga, however, it’s important to learn one concept that’s central to the whole story: shorting. Shorting A vague definition of shorting is betting against a company in the share market....

As of June 2019, 50.3 percent of Google searches received zero clicks. By contrast, searches with organic clicks to non-Google websites now make up only 45 percent of all traffic. That is according to data from marketing analytics firm Jumpshot based on 40 million browser-based searches on desktop and mobile in the US. The data was crunched by Rand Fishkin, founder of audience intelligence search engine SparkToro. Credit: Rand Fishkin / SparkToro Even worse, it seems this trend towards zero-click searches has seen steady growth since 2016....

For one, e-bikes are typically big and heavy; many city dwellers already forgo regular bikes because they take up too much space in a small apartment or they don’t want to walk them up a flight of stairs. For another, you’ll be even more paranoid about locking them up. You’ll need at least two heavy-duty locks to protect your pricey purchase. That’s where a folding bike like the $1,999 Oyama CX E8D Series II comes in....

But there’s a new player in town: Cytrox. This lesser-known company was found enabling surveillance, in a joint investigation by Canada-based Citizen Lab, and Meta In this story, we’ll break down the company’s origins and tell you about its spyware. What is Cytrox? Cytrox started as a North Macedonian startup, but documents reviewed by Citizen Lab suggest it has a presence in Israel and Hungary. Its description on Crunchbase says it provides “governments with an operational cyber solution” — quite vague....

The quantum slalom One of the biggest challenges facing STEM researchers today is the difficulty of building a fault-tolerant, stable quantum computer. In essence, modern physicists are darting back and forth between trying to scale quantum computers to functional sizes and attempting to squelch all the noisy errors as the systems grow. When it comes to qubits, the quantum equivalent of computer bits, bigger is usually better. But it’s also much noisier....

The proposals are part of the controversial Online Safety Bill, which is currently working its way through parliament. Ministers say the legislation would make Britain “the safest place in the world to be online,” but campaigners fear it will erode free speech and privacy. Their prime concern involves the threat to end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messenger apps. Under the mooted measures, telecoms regulators could force platforms to scan through private messages for illegal content....

The “Invite to Group via Link” feature allows groups to be indexed by Google and they are generally available across the internet. With some wildcard search terms you can easily find some… interesting… groups. pic.twitter.com/hbDlyN6g3q — Jordan Wildon (@JordanWildon) February 21, 2020 That makes it surprisingly easy to find some, umm, interesting groups with a simple Google search. There’s probably a public group for just about any topic you can think of, from animal rescue to the church of satan....

This comes hot on the heels of an update that allowed Apple users to stream videos to AirPlay devices too. — Tom Conrad (@tconrad) May 26, 2020 Quibi is a “mobile-first” video streaming service. It creates shows and movies designed to be watched on your phone — meaning they’re designed for a small horizontal or vertical stream. While this is a novel (but not entirely new) idea, one of the things that separates Quibi’s app from competitors is the amount of funding and investment it’s received....

The partnership makes some sense. While Fitbit continues to be popular in the fitness market, it’s struggled to make a mark with the ‘smart’ portion of its smartwatches. Google, meanwhile, has been partnering with third-party companies making Android Wear watches forever, but their sales pale in comparison to the Apple Watch. Google has begun taking hardware into its own hands in the last few years, introducing phones, laptops, speakers, and more....