SATURDAY, 20 APRIL 2024, 10:18
If the South African government does not want to repeat the mistakes of the past, it must urgently end the current crisis by shifting decisively towards a renewable energy economy based on South Africa’s extraordinary wind and solar resources.
The once-every-four-years event cut in half the so-called mining reward, which is the amount of Bitcoin released from the network to compensate companies known as miners for validating transactions.
Tether, the issuer of the world’s most used stablecoin, has teamed up with TON Foundation to allow customers to send crypto payments using the popular Telegram encrypted instant messaging service.
The recall provides a first glimpse of how many Cybertrucks have been sold since chief executive officer Elon Musk handed over the first pickups to customers in November.
Online spending is growing rapidly in South Africa. However, many still prefer visiting shopping malls.
Earlier this week, Netflix found itself embroiled in an AI scandal when Futurism spotted AI-generated images used in the Netflix documentary What Jennifer Did.. The movie’s credits do not mention any uses of AI, causing critics to call out the filmmakers for “potentially embellishing a movie that’s supposed to be based on real-life events,” reports Ars Technica. An executive producer of the...
Ben Schoon reports via 9to5Google: Google’s Arif Dikici confirmed on LinkedIn this week that Android is now using VideoLAN’s (the makers of VLC) “dav1d” software decoder to allow AV1 to work on more devices. This is now available on all devices running Android 12 or higher via a software update. Mishaal Rahman points out that this started to roll out with the March 2024 Google Play system...
BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: Mozilla has announced Firefox Nightly for ARM64. This release will cater to the growing demand for support on ARM64 platforms, commonly referred to as AArch64. Feedback from the community has led Mozilla to expand the availability of Firefox Nightly. Users can now access the browser as both .tar archives and .deb packages, depending on their...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Dutch privacy watchdog AP on Friday said it was recommending that government organizations should stop using Facebook as long as it is unclear what happens with personal data of users of the government’s Facebook pages. “People that visit a government’s page need to be able to trust that their personal and sensitive data is in safe hands,”...
Ashley Capoot reports via CNBC: Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of 23andMe, is considering a proposal to take the genetic testing company private after its stock price tumbled more than 95% from its 2021 highs. A late Wednesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said Wojcicki is working with advisors and plans to speak with possible financing sources and partners. She “wishes to maintain...
Curls and waves are beautiful. But when you want to smooth them out, these hot tools—irons, brushes, and combs—work wonders.
Women Who Code (WWC), a U.S.-based organization of 360,000 people supporting women who work in the tech sector, is shutting down due to a lack of funding. “It is with profound sadness that, today, on April 18, 2024, we are announcing the difficult decision to close Women Who Code, following a vote by the Board of Directors to dissolve the organization,” the organization said in a blog post....
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: In October 2003, Mark Zuckerberg created his first viral site: not Facebook, but FaceMash. Then a college freshman, he hacked into Harvard’s online dorm directories, gathered a massive collection of students’ headshots, and used them to create a website on which Harvard students could rate classmates by their attractiveness, literally and...
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Biden administration is designating two “forever chemicals,” man-made compounds that are linked to serious health risks, as hazardous substances under the Superfund law, shifting responsibility for their cleanup to polluters from taxpayers. The new rule announced on Friday empowers the government to force the many companies that manufacture or use...
Linus Torvalds, discussing the AI hype, in a conversation with Dirk Hohndel, Verizon’s Head of the Open Source Program Office: Torvalds snarked, “It’s hilarious to watch. Maybe I’ll be replaced by an AI model!” As for Hohndel, he thinks most AI today is “autocorrect on steroids.” Torvalds summed up his attitude as, “Let’s wait 10 years and see where it actually goes before we make all these...
Microsoft Research Asia earlier this week unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track. ArsTechnica: In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don’t require video feeds — or allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them...
Manish Lachwani, who founded the software start-up HeadSpin, is the latest tech entrepreneur to face time in prison in recent years.
From Spaceman to Suzume, here are our picks for the best streaming titles to feast your eyes on.
From 3 Body Problem to Ripley, these are our picks for the best streaming titles to binge this week.
An anonymous reader shares a report: TCS, Infosys, and Wipro, India’s top three IT outsourcing firms, have collectively seen their workforce shrink for the first time in at least 20 years. The trio reported a combined reduction of more than 63,750 employees in the financial year ending March 31, 2024.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Gear team spends countless hours in front of displays while writing for you. So we reviewed those too (including a few portable screens).