Techmeme
October 24, 2023, 11:40 AM

Top News

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
A look at Nightshade and Glaze, tools made by researchers at UChicago that help artists “poison” their work to confuse or break AI models that later train on it  —  A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it's scraped …
David Pierce / The Verge:
Automattic plans to acquire Texts, a $15 per month messaging app that works with WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal, iMessage, and more, for $50M  —  Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and a number of other popular web properties, just made a different kind …
Marissa Newman / Bloomberg:
Google disables live traffic conditions in Israel and the Gaza Strip for its Maps and Waze apps, a source says at the request of the Israel Defense Forces  —  - Israeli army asked tech giant to limit real-time information  — Google took similar action in Ukraine during war with Russia
Benedict Evans:
A Twitter user since 2007 reflects on leaving due to Elon Musk swapping stasis at the company for chaos, his constant bullshitting, and spreading toxic content  —  Twitter always used to look a lot like Craigslist.  It stumbled into something that a lot of people found very useful …
Reuters:
Sources: Nvidia has begun designing ARM CPUs for Windows PCs, and AMD also plans to build ARM chips; source: Nvidia and AMD could start selling them in 2025  —  Nvidia (NVDA.O) dominates the market for artificial intelligence computing chips.  Now it is coming after Intel's longtime stronghold of personal computers.
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Sources: many people inside Apple do not believe its own AI/ML team can deliver on generative AI, and worry that the company will only use its own team's output  —  Speaking of Mark Gurman, he has an interesting bit about Apple's AI efforts in his latest Power On column:
Kenza Bryan / Financial Times:
EU environmental groups criticize Apple branding its new Apple Watches as “carbon neutral” and using credits to cancel out the 7kg to 12kg of emissions per unit  —  iPhone maker flags credentials of its latest Watch products as EU seeks to clamp down on ‘greenwashing’
Ashley Carman / Bloomberg:
Spotify Q3: revenue up 11% YoY to €3.4B, MAUs up 26% to 574M, subscribers up 16% YoY to 226M, and €32M operating income, vs. a €44.6M loss est.; SPOT jumps 9%+  —  Spotify Technology SA rose the most since January after the music-streaming giant reported third-quarter results …
David Pierce / The Verge:
A look at POSSE, a decade-old idea that a user should Publish (on your) Own Site and Syndicate Elsewhere, and the challenges of building a system based on that  —  The platform era is ending.  Rather than build new Twitters and Facebooks, we can create a stuff-posting system that works better for everybody.
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
Xreal, formerly Nreal, announces the $399 Xreal Air 2 and $449 Air 2 Pro, AR glasses with brighter Micro OLED displays, available in five countries in November  —  Xreal is opening preorders for its latest generation of augmented reality glasses, the Xreal Air 2 and Air 2 Pro …
Suzanne Smalley / The Record:
Q&A with FTC Commissioner and digital privacy expert Alvaro Bedoya on the agency's plan to hire child psychologists to understand social media's impact on kids  —  I saw and I heard stories from parents about the mental health issues that their children were experiencing and how both the parents and …
Matt Marshall / VentureBeat:
A paper from Geoffrey Hinton and other experts warns of AI systems' worrying capabilities and says 33% of companies' AI R&D budgets should go to managing risks  —  Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, two of the so-called AI godfathers, have joined with 22 other leading AI academics …
Financial Times:
Analysts: Chinese AI startup SenseTime's pivot from government surveillance work to data centers now seems doomed by new US export controls on powerful AI chips  —  Hong Kong-based AI company SenseTime faces ‘end of the road’ for data centre ambitions  —  SenseTime, once the darling …
Tyler Cowen / Marginal Revolution:
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Hands-on with DALL-E 3: suggests more detailed prompts, restrictive, denies art requests in the style of living artists, and shows how quickly AI is improving  —  To understand how quickly AI is improving, forget ChatGPT — use an image generator  —  Earlier this month …
More: Synced, Mashable, and CNET
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
After Unciphered developed a crack for an old IronKey USB drive to recover 7,002 BTC, the owner declines their help because he agreed to work with other experts  —  Stefan Thomas lost the password to an encrypted USB drive holding 7,002 bitcoins.  One team of hackers believes they can unlock it—if they can get Thomas to let them.

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