About: blatcho

Whether you’re snoozing in a campground or schlepping up to an alpine valley, these are the best pads we’ve found for resting your weary bones.

Whether you’re up against pet hair or you want to splurge on a high-end laser-guided robot vacuum, we have the perfect pick for you.

These hearing aids are tiny and nearly invisible, but they aren’t terribly effective.

Washington Post: TikTok users with stigmatized interests or marginalized identities express anxiety over its potential ban, as rebuilding their communities elsewhere may be hard  —  President Biden signed legislation Wednesday that could ban TikTok, leaving users in the United States who have spent years building …

Julie Zauzmer Weil / Washington Post: The US IRS says it spent $10.5M to develop and $2.4M to run its free tax filing website, used by 140K+ taxpayers in 12 states, and claims high user satisfaction  —  In its first year, more than 140,000 households in 12 states did their taxes with Direct File

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: EyeEm, the bankrupt photo sharing network acquired by Freepik last year, will license users’ photos to train AI if the images are not deleted within 30 days  —  EyeEm, the Berlin-based photo-sharing community that exited last year to Spanish company Freepik after going bankrupt, is now licensing its users’ photos to […]

New music from Maggie Rogers, Tyla, Brittany Howard, and SchoolBoy Q showcase distinct artistic evolutions.

Plus: Leaked details tell us more about the new Google Pixel 8A, Freitag’s environmentally conscious bag is entirely recyclable, and it’s time to unpack a whole bunch of tech acronyms.

Climate change is increasing the number of days people are exposed to hazardous pollution, affecting already disadvantaged communities the most.

William Brown / Firstyear’s blog-a-log: Google and Apple use passkeys to capture users by locking credentials into their platforms and have made the UX of passkeys worse than that of password managers  —  At around 11pm last night my partner went to change our lounge room lights with our home light control system.

Jonathan Ford / Financial Times: A review of Dana Mattioli’s The Everything War, which covers Lina Khan’s antitrust battle against Amazon and makes a case that no company should be so powerful  —  Dana Mattioli’s important book looks the winner-takes-all dynamic that built a competition-squashing behemoth

Tom Dotan / Wall Street Journal: Investors cheer Microsoft and Alphabet’s huge AI spending plans as shares of both firms rallied but not Meta’s, which saw its worst trading day in 18 months  —  Meta had its worst trading day in 18 months after warning of years of AI investment; shares of Microsoft and Alphabet […]

More like Robot Rock, am I right? (Sorry.) These are some of the best dust busters around, and they’re cheaper than usual.

In an investigative report into crashes and deaths associated with Tesla Autopilot, federal regulators concluded that the system lacked standard protections.

From Mr. and Mrs. Smith to Fallout, these are our picks for what you should be watching on the streamer.

Mathieu Dion / Bloomberg: IBM plans to expand its semiconductor packaging and testing plant in Bromont, Quebec, with more than CA$1B in investments over the next five years  —  – The chips-packaging facility has about 1,000 employees  — ‘What you really need is a full supply chain onshore’: Thomas

Leah Nylen / Bloomberg: Filing: FTC says Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, and other Amazon execs used Signal’s disappearing messages to conceal evidence in FTC’s antitrust case against Amazon  —  – Agency accuses retail giant of failing to preserve documents  — Top executives communicated via Signal disappearing chats

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple has renewed discussions with OpenAI about using its technology to power some features in iOS 18; talks with Google on using Gemini remain ongoing  —  – The iPhone maker has also been holding discussions with Google  — Negotiations center on powering AI chatbot in iOS 18 update

MIT faculty members Roger Levy, Tracy Slatyer, and Martin Wainwright are among 188 scientists, artists, and scholars awarded 2024 fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Working across 52 disciplines, the fellows were selected from almost 3,000 applicants for “prior career achievement and exceptional promise.” Each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent […]

World-renowned cellist Carlos Prieto ’59 returned to campus for an event to perform and to discuss his new memoir, “Mi Vida Musical.” At the April 9 event in the Samberg Conference Center, Prieto spoke about his formative years at MIT and his subsequent career as a professional cellist. The talk was followed by performances of J.S. […]

Five strategies for interviewers.

Data from 1 million nonprofit workers show that men have an easier pathway to leadership — and suggests how to level the playing field.

For less than you’d spend on dinner out for two, you can snag this pair of excellent noise-canceling earbuds.

Nine Inch Nails, Pulp Fiction, “Regulate.” The last year before culture began to migrate online was not like any other.

All of them and none of them, really. Let us explain.

Sean O’Kane / TechCrunch: The NHTSA closes a 2021 investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot and opens a new one to evaluate whether a December 2023 Autopilot recall fix is effective enough  —  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed a long-standing investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system …

Clothilde Goujard / Politico: The EU Commission says Shein will have to comply with DSA rules for content handling, starting August 2024, as the retailer has more than 45M users in the EU  —  Europe tightens scrutiny of China-based tech companies.  —  BRUSSELS — Chinese fashion app Shein will face stringent rules …

Dustin Volz / Wall Street Journal: Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Jensen Huang, and others join a panel to advise US DHS on deploying AI safely within America’s critical infrastructure  —  Panel will advise Department of Homeland Security on deploying artificial intelligence safely within America’s critical infrastructure

Political campaigns are deploying AI-generated deepfake versions of politicians to reach hundreds of millions of eligible voters in India’s 2024 election – the world’s largest ever

Nintendo’s top-of-the-line handheld gaming console hardly ever goes on sale, making this small discount super appealing.

The FCC voted 3-2 to restore net neutrality rules that had disappeared during the Trump administration.

From Poor Things to Dune: Part One, here’s everything you need to watch on Hulu right now.

Katie Robertson / New York Times: Former Twilio CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson buys The Onion from G/O Media, via his new company Global Tetrahedron; Lawson had long wanted to buy the site  —  The satirical news website was bought by a new firm in Chicago that took inspiration for its name, Global Tetrahedron, from […]

CoinDesk: Consensys sues the US SEC over what it calls the “unlawful seizure of authority” over ethereum, after receiving a Wells notice for its MetaMask wallet product  —  By offering their MetaMask wallet software, the SEC says Consensys is acting as an unregistered securities broker.

Chris Miller / Financial Times: The CHIPS Act has been surprisingly successful so far, giving the US greater scope to meet critical infrastructure needs in the event of a crisis in East Asia  —  More than halfway through its incentives spending, the US will have far greater scope to manage shocks

AI companies are trying to impose safety measures on their chatbots, while researchers are finding ways around them all the time. Where will this end, asks Alex Wilkins

MIT graduate student Riyam Al Msari and alumna Francisca Vasconcelos ’20 are among the 30 recipients of this year’s Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. In addition, two Soros winners will begin PhD studies at MIT in the fall: Zijian (William) Niu in computational and systems biology and Russel Ly in economics. The […]

Two ambitions drive Eric Tuyizere: advancing his technological skills and following his passion for entrepreneurship. In July 2023, when he discovered that MIT’s Emerging Talent program was launching the fifth cohort of its Certificate in Computer and Data Science, he applied right away. Seven months in, he says he has found even more than he […]

On April 9, a trailer with the words “Born by Fire” emblazoned on the back pulled down MIT’s North Corridor (a.k.a. the Outfinite). Students, clad in orange construction vests, maneuvered their futuristic creation out of the trailer, eliciting a surge of curious bystanders. The aerodynamic shell is covered by 5 square meters of solar panels. […]

Aspiring PMs must be cautious about what advice they take as gospel.

If you’re managing technology for your team or organization, this special series is for you.

By leaning into transparency, eschewing rebate schemes, and cutting out middlemen, this nonprofit is able to significantly lower the market price of insulin.

This week, we probe each other’s knowledge of common acronyms from the early internet, the mobile era, and the AI boom. So fire up your LLM, send an RCS, and tell your BBS pals the game is afoot.

President Joe Biden may have signed the TikTok ban bill into law, but his campaign is still active on the Chinese-owned app.

WIRED found thousands of ads running on Meta’s social platforms promoting sexually explicit “AI girlfriend” apps. Some human sex workers say the platform unfairly polices their own posts more harshly.

Andy Chalk / PC Gamer: Garry’s Mod is removing “all Nintendo related stuff” from its Steam Workshop, covering “20 years of uploads”, after receiving a takedown request from Nintendo  —  Fans aren’t happy, as you can imagine.  —  Following a takedown request issued by Nintendo …

Financial Times: Interviews with 24+ current and ex-ByteDance staff: the Beijing-based company has increasingly taken a grip over TikTok’s operations, leading to a culture clash  —  Insiders say ByteDance exerting increasing influence over platform despite US pressure over ownership

Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review: A look at AI video startup Synthesia, whose avatars are more human-like and expressive than predecessors, raising concerns over the consequences of realistic AI  —  I’m stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity?  —  This makes it sound like I’m dying, but […]

India currently has a fairly small chip-manufacturing industry, but prime minister Narendra Modi wants the country to become a dominant player in the sector in just a few years

Eight MIT faculty members are among the 250 leaders from academia, the arts, industry, public policy, and research elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced April 24. One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, the academy is also a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to academy […]