Techmeme
August 23, 2023, 11:00 AM

Top News

Tom Warren / The Verge:
Sony announces the PlayStation Portal, an 8-inch handheld console that will stream PS5 games over Wi-Fi in 1080p at 60fps, available later in 2023 for $200  —  Sony is officially launching its portable PlayStation later this year, the PlayStation Portal remote player.
Bo Moore / IGN:
Hands-on with Sony PlayStation Portal: a slightly weird design but lighter than the Switch, expansive and vibrant 60Hz LCD screen, no Bluetooth, and needs a PS5  —  PlayStation Portal-ble  —  Sony has a storied, if a bit neglected, history with handheld gaming.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
IBM unveils watsonx Code Assistant for IBM Z, which uses a code-generating AI model to translate COBOL code into Java, set for general availability in Q4 2023  —  COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages in use, dating back to around 1959.
Ryan Weeks / The Block:
The FBI details North Korea's TraderTraitor-affiliated actors, responsible for Alphapo, CoinsPaid, and Atomic Wallet hacks, and warns over cashing out $40M+ BTC  —  - The warning, issued today, comes after a series of high profile crypto heists carried out by North Korea-affiliated Lazarus Group in recent years.
Elizabeth Napolitano / CoinDesk:
A US judge sentences ex-OpenSea product head Nate Chastain to three months in prison for making ~$50K via insider trades, in the first NFT insider trading case  —  Chastain was found guilty on charges of buying and selling NFTs from collections he knew would later be featured on his former company's home page.
Wall Street Journal:
Investigation: despite scaling back in Russia in 2022, Binance continues to handle substantial ruble trading, helping clients evade sanctions via intermediaries  —  Binance is helping Russians move money abroad, potentially adding to its sprawling legal problems in the U.S. The cryptocurrency giant …
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
An analysis of Google's policy dilemma as YouTube and UMG explore AI licensing, Google scrapes the web to train its AI, and lawsuits could upend copyright law  —  Google has made clear it is going to use the open web to inform and create anything it wants, and nothing can get in its way.
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
AirPods Max can malfunction or suddenly stop working because of users' sweat or condensation inside of earcups, an issue Apple has not publicly acknowledged  —  Apple's $550 flagship headphones have a problem: They can malfunction, or suddenly stop working entirely, because of users' sweat …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
OpenAI adds fine-tuning to GPT-3.5 Turbo, letting developers customize models with their own data to make them perform better for their use cases for a fee  —  OpenAI customers can now bring custom data to the lightweight version of GPT-3.5, GPT-3.5 Turbo — making it easier to improve …
Bloomberg:
SIA: Huawei is building secret chip fabrication facilities across China that would let the company skirt US sanctions and is receiving ~$30B in state funding  —  - Tech giant is reportedly getting $30 billion in state support  — Biden administration monitoring and ready to take action
Yueqi Yang / Bloomberg:
Binance.US partners with MoonPay to let users use debit or credit cards and Apple Pay or Google Pay to buy Tether, which can then be used to buy other tokens  —  - Payment partnership allows users to convert dollars to Tether  — Exchange has been unable to process users' dollars directly
Laura Noonan / Financial Times:
Bank for International Settlements: crypto has amplified rather than reduced financial risks in less developed economies, offering only an “illusory” appeal  —  Currency's appeal as a low-cost solution for countries with high inflation is ‘illusory’, says BIS
Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal:
A decade after data analytics promised to revolutionize US agriculture, many farmers are still waiting for the tech to pay off and are swamped by a data deluge  —  Uptake of agtech tools has been tepid, and even many farmers who do use them struggle with the software and a flood of data from their farms
Elad Gil / Elad Blog:
LLMs, Transformers, and diffusion models represent an entirely new era for AI and discontinuity from the past capabilities of the CNN/RNN/GAN world  —  Rather then view LLMs, Transformers, and diffusion models as part of a continuum with past “AI”, it is worth thinking of this as an entirely new era and discontinuity from the past
Makena Kelly / The Verge:
Meta says it remains committed to rolling out default E2EE for Messenger, which has opt-in E2EE, by the end of 2023, and shortly afterwards for Instagram DMs  —  Meta plans to roll out default end-to-end encryption for its Messenger product by the end of this year, the company confirmed in a blog post Tuesday.
Sarah Frier / Bloomberg:
LinkedIn is benefiting from recent social media upheavals with a jump in sharing, leveraging its position as a place where old-school self-promotion still works  —  The professional network is benefiting from upheavals elsewhere in the social media landscape.  —  The biggest social media platforms all have their niches.
Kevin Jiang / Toronto Star:
Experts warn that Meta, and possibly Google, blocking trusted news outlets in Canada will worsen misinformation as the world nears a “precipice” of AI content  —  As it becomes increasingly difficult to trust what we read online, experts say it's critical to learn how to tell real media from fake — here's how.
Scharon Harding / Ars Technica:
3D printer maker Bambu Lab blames a cloud outage for an issue that caused some of its customers' devices to start printing without their consent  —  Bambu Lab says it will help with repairs, replacement parts.  —  Imagine waking in the middle of the night to the sound of your 3D printer, printing away.

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Earlier Picks

Joseph Cox / 404 Media:
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Dave James / PC Gamer:
Tom Warren / The Verge: