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Techmeme
August 8, 2023, 4:50 PM
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Top News

The Guardian:
The UK Electoral Commission reports a hack by “hostile actors” starting in August 2021 and discovered in October 2022; the full scope isn't “conclusively” known  —  Names and addresses of 40 million registered voters were accessible as far back as 2021 after cyber-attack
Ian King / Bloomberg:
Nvidia unveils the GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip, a combination GPU and CPU relying on high-bandwidth memory 3, or HBM3e, expected to enter production in Q2 2024  —  - Company is upgrading lineup that fueled $1 trillion valuation  — New chip could make it harder for rivals like AMD to catch up
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Nvidia announces AI Workbench, which lets users create, test, and customize LLMs from Hugging Face and others on local workstations before using cloud resources  —  Timed to coincide with SIGGRAPH, the annual AI academic conference, Nvidia this morning announced a new platform designed to let users create …
Samuel Axon / Ars Technica:
Dutch engineer Bram Moolenaar, who in 1991 released and then maintained the very popular Vim open-source code editor, died on August 3 at 62  —  The open source software legend left us on August 3 at age 62.  —  Computing as we know it today was built in no small part by individuals …
Jane Friedman:
An author finds “garbage books”, most likely AI-generated, uploaded to Amazon under her name and added to Goodreads; both services have since removed the titles  —  Update: Hours after this post was published, my Goodreads profile was cleaned of the offending titles.
Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch:
Prosecraft, which compiled 27K+ books to compare their language's “vividness”, shuts down after a writer backlash over the site's potential generative AI uses
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Given the countless times Elon Musk has walked back announcements, the business media must rethink its coverage of X, Musk, and the fight with Mark Zuckerberg  —  After a weekend of whoppers about X and fighting Mark Zuckerberg, the press should take a more skeptical approach
Bloomberg:
TSMC plans to build a €10B plant in Germany's Dresden, owning 70% of the fab while Infineon, NXP, and Bosch each hold 10% stakes, set to open by the end of 2027  —  - Taiwanese giant will own 70% of fab in eastern city of Dresden  — Facility to supply auto, industrial sectors starting in 2027
Hugh Son / CNBC:
The SEC fines 11 Wall Street firms $289M total for poor recordkeeping by using apps including Signal, WhatsApp, and iMessage; CFTC fines four banks $260M total  —  - U.S. regulators on Tuesday announced a combined $549 million in penalties against Wall Street firms that failed to maintain electronic records of employee communications.
Nikkei Asia:
Source: Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, and Intel plan to invest in Arm as soon as its Nasdaq IPO in September 2023; SoftBank owns 75% of Arm and Vision Fund owns 25%  —  SoftBank chip design unit to debut on Nasdaq, market cap seen topping $60bn  —  SoftBank Group plans to list shares in its chip deign unit …
Steven Levy / Wired:
Q&A with Grimes on her “c” persona, letting people use her voice in their music, AI, social media, Elon Musk, NFTs, a stronger sense of ethics in tech, and more  —  Claire Boucher is open sourcing her musical persona to let people create their own version of Grimes with AI.
Wall Street Journal:
EchoStar co-founder Charlie Ergen strikes a deal to merge Dish and EchoStar, a move aimed at getting the funds for a wireless network to rival AT&T and Verizon  —  Deal aims to give Dish the financial flexibility it needs to compete in the next generation of wireless
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Google debuts Project IDX, an AI-enabled browser-based dev environment using the open-source Visual Studio Code and that integrates Google's PaLM 2-based Codey  —  Google today announced the launch of Project IDX, its foray into offering an AI-enabled browser-based development environment …
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
WhatsApp introduces screen sharing during video calls, rolling out gradually on Android, iOS, and Windows, and support for Landscape mode on video calls  —  WhatsApp today introduced screen sharing as its latest feature to enhance the video calling experience on its platform …
Paul Sawers / TechCrunch:
Spotify expands its AI-powered DJ beta, available in the app's Music feed, to ~50 markets, six months after debuting the English-only feature in North America  —  Spotify is expanding its AI-powered “DJ” to dozens of markets globally, six months after debuting the feature in North America.
Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
Researchers tested 14 LLMs for political bias and found OpenAI's GPT-4 was the most left-wing libertarian and Meta's LLaMA was the most right-wing authoritarian  —  New research explains you'll get more right- or left-wing answers, depending on which AI model you ask.  —  Should companies have social responsibilities?

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UiPath:
UiPath Unveils 10 Innovations that Will Shape the Agentic Future  —  Orchestration engine, API workflows and agentic testing among key features of new UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation, launched at UiPath DevCon 2025
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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:50 PM ET, August 8, 2023.

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From Mediagazer

Todd Spangler / Variety:
Memo: Business Insider is cutting staff by 21% to “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control” and “exiting the majority of our Commerce business”

Pew Research Center:
Share of news influencers on Bluesky has doubled after the 2024 US election to 43%, but X remains popular, with 82% of news influencers maintaining an account

Nikita Mazurov / The Intercept:
PBS station WNET removed at least three educational TV episodes that discuss transgender identity and drag expression, following a DOGE subcommittee hearing

More News

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge:
Matter's biggest problem is that companies can't agree on how to support Thread, a protocol Matter picked, especially for border routers joining mesh networks

Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:
Sources including current and former Stability AI employees describe a chaotic startup led by an inexperienced CEO often unable to deliver on his lofty promises
Richard Lawler / The Verge:
A US judge denies Google's request for a summary judgment in a $5B lawsuit over tracking users' activities in Incognito mode, pushing the case closer to a trial
Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:
Sources: in the fall of 2020, the NSA discovered that Chinese hackers had access to Japanese defense networks; the problem persisted until at least fall 2021
Hayden Field / CNBC:
Zoom updates its terms to let the company train its AI models using some customer data, but doesn't plan to use audio, video, or chat content without consent
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