As programmatic advertising spend continues to surge, reaching a projected $180 billion by 2025 in the U.S. alone, the industry faces mounting challenges around efficiency and scale.
Between 2020 to 2023, the number of bidstream requests between DSPs and SSPs has increased by 2.3 times, far outpacing actual inventory growth. This surge, driven by the proliferation of SSPs, ad tech intermediaries and increased header bidding adoption, has created a complex supply chain rife with inefficiencies, impacting everyone from brands and agencies to DSPs and SSPs.
These inefficiencies manifest in wasted ad spend due to duplicate bid requests, reduced campaign performance from suboptimal inventory matching, strained technical infrastructure and increased operational costs and difficulty achieving campaign goals due to inconsistent access to desired audiences. Meanwhile, DSPs and SSPs face growing processing overhead as they manage an ever-increasing volume of bid requests, some of which never result in delivered impressions.
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Ideal for small and medium sized jobs, from smartphone repairs to PC builds.
Many years ago, I built my first PC inside a repurposed Gateway chassis with just a regular old screwdriver and a grounding bracelet. I’ll spare you the ugly details, but let’s just say I wish I had tools specially made for the job. If you want to avoid pain in your own projects, you should consider picking up Hoto’s 48-in-1 Electric Precision Screwdriver set. It has everything you need to pry open gadgets for fine adjustments, yet costs just $69.99 ($40 off) on sale at Amazon and Walmart. That price matches the record low from Black Friday.
The cordless electric screwdriver is a bit skinnier but longer than some of the other Hoto variants we’ve recommended, which is what you want in tighter quarters. It offers two torque speeds, allowing you to dial it up for stubborn screws or down for softly reassembling fragile items.
Among the included magnetic screwdriver bits are half a dozen options with 45mm shafts for extra reach. You’ll get 20 more 28mm bits to cover a range of common screw heads. The package also contains a variety of spudgers, picks, priers, and tweezers, along with a suction cup, a magnetic pad that doubles as a ruler, and things to help you stay grounded to protect yourself and your electronics. Everything is neatly secured in the included storage case, which also has a dedicated magnetizer and demagnetizer, plus an external USB-C port to charge the screwdriver while it’s docked.
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Samsung just announced a blistering fast PCIe Gen 5 SSD, but if you’re buying an SSD purely for gaming, you can get by just fine and save money with the last-gen Samsung 990 EVO Plus. The 1TB model is down to $74.99 ($35 off) at Amazon, or you can step up to 2TB for $129.99 ($55 off) — both are new record lows. The M.2 NVMe drives are primarily limited to PCIe Gen 4 speeds, with read/write values of 7.2GBps and 6.3GBps, respectively. That’s still very fast for heavy file transfers and more than enough for SSD-optimized PC games to play their best. You can also install one inside a PlayStation 5 for expanded storage.
Prime members can get Ugreen’s MagFlow 2-in-1 charging stand for $23.99 ($36 off) at Amazon, which is an all-time low price. It has a magnetic holder for your MagSafe iPhone, but note: it doesn’t have Qi2’s 15W charging speed. That might be fine if you’re just using it as a bedside stand for overnight charging, however. The stand features a ball join that lets you adjust the viewing angle. There’s also a Qi pad in the base to charge your wireless earbuds. Be aware that the package doesn’t include the required 20W wall adapter.
The JBL Authentics 200 is available at a new all-time low of $199.95 ($150 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. The smart speaker sounds really good for its small stature, but surprisingly, it doesn’t have a battery to make it truly portable like the bigger and more powerfulAuthentics 300 does, which is also on sale for a record low $299.95 ($150 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. Both take on a retro-inspired appearance, but include modern smarts with both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant built in, plus diverse connectivity options including Wi-Fi (supporting AirPlay, Chromecast, and the like), Bluetooth, and aux. Read our hands-on impressions.
OpenAI’s former CTO Mira Murati has officially launched Thinking Machines Lab, an AI research company focused on making AI systems “more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable.” The startup came out of stealth last week and is already drawing serious […]
In its latest teaser, Nothing is showing off the design and camera of its standard Nothing Phone (3a) while more leaks detail an upcoming software feature.
Apple has been under investigation by authorities in France for nearly two years over App Tracking Transparency, a privacy feature that lets iPhone users decide whether their activity can be tracked by advertisers or not. You’ve likely seen many of the ‘Ask App Not to Track’ pop-ups. Now, per a new Reuters report, the case is about to wrap up and looks set to end unfavorably for Apple.
Sony is permanently reducing the price of the PlayStation VR2. Starting in March, the headset will cost $400, €450 and £400 — down from $550, €600 and £530, respectively. Included in the price cut is the Horizon Call of the Mountain bundle, which, like the standard package, will cost $400, €450 or £400 depending on your region. While it’s been possible to buy the PS VR2 for less than $400 during recent sales, the new pricing should give retailers the flexibility to discount the device even more aggressively down the road.
It’s hard to say what this means for the future of the PS VR2. Arguably, it was too expensive at launch, and at $400, it still costs more than the Meta Quest 3S, a standalone headset that doesn’t require a PlayStation 5 or PC to power it. Sony recently added support for low-latency hand tracking, but overall the company doesn’t appear keen on investing more time and money into the platform. Major first-party studios haven’t made many games for the PS VR2, and those that have, including the creators of Call of the Mountain, have seen layoffs in recent months.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/sony-cuts-the-price-of-ps-vr2-to-400-154138227.html?src=rss
For several years now, we've been following a tantalizing story indicating that the high heat of the ash cloud generated when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD was sufficiently hot to turn one of the victim's brains into glass. It remains a matter of debate in the archeological community, but a fresh analysis of the physical properties of the glass-like material found in the remains lends more evidence to the hypothesis, as detailed in a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.
As previously reported, the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius released thermal energy roughly equivalent to 100,000 times the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, spewing molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in particular. The vast majority of the victims died of asphyxiation, choking to death on the thick clouds of noxious gas and ash.
But a 2001 study in Nature, co-authored by Petrone, estimated a temperature of 500° Celsius (932° Fahrenheit) for the pyroclastic surge that destroyed Pompeii, sufficient to kill inhabitants in fractions of a second. Back in 2018, we reported on Petrone's conclusion that inhabitants of Herculaneum may have suffered a similar fate. There was fracturing in the bones and "cracking and explosion" of the skullcaps, consistent with forensic cases where skulls burst from extreme heat.
Ram's 1500 Ramcharger goes on sale later this year, and the company is taking a slightly different approach to its electrified truck than rivals Ford and General Motors, which both now offer battery electric pickups. The Ramcharger will be a range-extended EV, albeit one with more lithium-ion on board than most BEVs have.
Honestly, pickup trucks are a poor candidate for electrification, at least while we're still firmly in early adopter territory. The instant and impressive torque from an electric motor is great, but the shape of a cab and bed is inherently draggy in a way that few other vehicles are, a problem exacerbated by whopping great frontal areas.
But the pickup truck is also the most popular kind of vehicle in the US, and the industry has tried very hard to convince itself and everyone else that pickup buyers could seamlessly adopt electric powertrains en masse. That way, everyone in America could drive an EV, climate change would go away, and no one would have to consider changing their lifestyle or taking a bus to work.
In a bid to take on YouTube, TikTok is revamping its desktop platform with the addition of several new features. The company announced on Thursday that its web-based experience features a new modular layout, refreshed For You feed, a new Explore tab, immersive full-screen LIVE gaming streaming, and a floating player. The social network’s new […]
For two decades, TechCrunch has provided a front row view to the future of technology, shaping conversations that matter and spotlighting the next big things before they break — both on the page and in person at our world-renowned events. This year, as we celebrate our 20th anniversary, we’re launching our most ambitious events calendar […]
Innovation isn't just about speed--it's about direction. As U.S. chief innovation officer at Deloitte, Deb Golden is redefining how businesses approach transformation, from embracing AI responsibly to dismantling outdated systems that hold them back. In this episode of The Speed of Culture podcast, she shares why speed without strategy leads to chaos, how businesses can...
Fox News' two top-performing programs shared the spoils on Tuesday. The Five won the total viewer battle, while Jesse Watters Primetime finished first in the Adults 25-54 demo. Over at MSNBC, the 7 p.m. slot vacated by Joy Reid was temporarily rebranded as MSNBC Prime. The first episode was anchored by Michael Steele and was...
WPP disappointed the market with weaker-than-expected earnings results for Q4 and 2024. For the former, revenue less pass-through costs declined 2.3%, while the latter declined 1% on a like-for-like basis. The outlook for 2025 is flat to minus 2%, sending the ad giant's shares tumbling in early morning trading on Thursday. WPP's results stand in...
Mummy Pig is announcing a pregnancy, and Kylie Kelce is the perfect host to Peppa her with questions. Today, Kelce's Not Gonna Lie (NGL) podcast and her team at Wave Sports & Entertainment joined with Hasbro to announce that Mummy Pig, Peppa Pig's mom from the British animated franchise, is pregnant. "Baby No. 3 is...
Yesterday, we posted a story where we asked if Tegna was setting up a weather forecasting hub based on a job posting we saw. Tegna quickly responded to our question by saying it was a backup role for big weather events, but also sent along a full statement, which I didn't post in full. I...
The DJI Dock 3 is small enough to fit a couple into the back of a pickup truck. | Image: DJI
DJI has announced the third iteration of its drone-in-a-box solution designed for autonomous missions like safely inspecting power lines and emergency response. As with previous versions, the DJI Dock 3 is small enough to be transported in the back of a pickup truck, but it’s the first that allows DJI’s new Matrice 4D and Matrice 4TD drones to be launched from a moving vehicle using an optional gimbal mount accessory.
Although the company hasn’t revealed how much that special mount for mobile launches will cost, the new DJI Dock 3 will be available in two bundles priced for enterprise customers with sizable budgets. It can be purchased with the DJI Matrice 4D drone for $21,059, or with the Matrice 4TD for $23,409. Those prices don’t include installation, deployment services, or optional hardware upgrades and software features.
The new dock carries forward several features from previous versions like a built-in weather station, antennas, surveillance cameras, and an internal backup battery. It still needs access to power and the internet, but can be upgraded with a cellular 4G dongle for remote deployment.
The DJI Dock 3 has an improved IP56 rating for dust and water-resistance and its operational temperature range has been expanded to as hot as 50 degrees Celsius, or as cold as -30 degrees Celsius — although DJI says preheating will be needed when temperatures are that cold.
It can communicate with drones on missions as far as 10 kilometers away, but that range can be extended to up to 25 kilometers for fixed deployments (such as on a highrise building) through the use of relays mounted at elevated locations. But that’s assuming your local jurisdiction allows drones to be operated autonomously or at those distances. In the US, the FAA requires drone operators to obtain a Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) waiver for remote operation at extended distances.
The Dock 3 is designed to work with new IP55-rated water and dust-resistant versions of the DJI Matrice 4 Series of drones that launched earlier this year. The Matrice 4D and 4TD both feature ant-ice propeller blades, 47 minute flight times, and a combination of wide-angle, medium tele, and telephoto cameras. The Matrice 4TD has expanded night time capabilities with the addition of an infrared thermal camera and a near-infrared auxiliary light for added illumination.
Amazon is making its foray into quantum computing with the launch of a new chip designed to make quantum error correction more efficient. In an announcement on Thursday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said the chip, called Ocelot, can “reduce the costs of implementing quantum error correction by up to 90%, compared to current approaches.”
Quantum computing errors are one of the biggest challenges in the industry. Unlike traditional computers, quantum computing replaces binary 1s and 0s with qubits, a unit that can exist in multiple states at the same time. As noted by Amazon, qubits are “sensitive to the smallest changes, or ‘noise’ in their environment,” such as vibrations, heat, and electromagnetic interference, making it “extremely challenging to build quantum computers that can perform reliable, error-free calculations of any significant complexity.”
Instead of adding more qubits to correct these errors, Amazon built error correction into its Ocelot chip with what it calls “cat qubits” (named after the Schrödinger’s cat experiment). These qubits are supposed to reduce the amount of energy and resources used for quantum error correction as they “intrinsically suppress” certain kinds of errors.
“We didn’t take an existing architecture and then try to incorporate error correction afterwards,” Oskar Painter, Amazon Web Services’ director of quantum hardware, said in the press release. “We selected our qubit and architecture with quantum error correction as the top requirement.”
The approach differs from what Google and Microsoft are doing to reduce errors in quantum computing. In December, Google announced its Willow quantum computing chip, which can perform a computing challenge in less than five minutes. The company’s researchers also found that introducing more qubits into the system can help reduce errors. Meanwhile, Microsoft recently announced its Majorana 1 quantum computing processor, which it claims can “scale to a million qubits on a single chip” while reducing errors.
Amazon says its Ocelot chip is still a prototype, but the chip’s more efficient architecture could potentially allow for smaller quantum computers that use less resources.
Content warning: this article contains graphic descriptions of violence against people and animals.
An “error” in Instagram Reels caused its algorithm to show some users video after video of horrific violence, animal abuse, murders, dead bodies, and other gore, Meta told 404 Media. The company said “we apologize for the mistake.”
Sometime in the last few days, this error caused people’s Reels algorithms to suddenly change. A 404 Media reader who has a biking-related Instagram account reached out to me and said that his feed, which is “typically dogs and bikes,” had become videos of people getting killed: “I had never seen someone being eaten by a shark, followed by someone getting killed by a car crash, followed by someone getting shot,” he told 404 Media.
To test this, the person let me login to his Instagram account, and I scrolled Reels for about 15 minutes. There were a couple videos about dogs and a couple videos about bikes, but the vast majority of videos were hidden behind a “sensitive content” warning. I will describe videos I saw when I clicked through the warnings, many of which had thousands of likes and hundreds of comments:
An elephant repeatedly stepping on and flattening a man
A man attacking a pig with a wrench
A close-up video of someone who had just been shot in the head
A woman crying while laying on top of a loved one who had just been shot to death
A man on a motorcycle stopping next to a pedestrian and shooting them in the head with a pistol
A pile of dead bodies in what looked to be a war-type situation
A small plane crash in front of a crowd of people
A group of people beating a crocodile to death
A few videos by an account called “PeopleDeadDaily”
A man being lit on fire
A man shooting a cashier at point blank range
Most, but not all, of these videos were behind a “sensitive content” warning label, which won’t play the video unless you click a button that says “see reel”. In this person’s feed, I also saw video after video of people getting jumped, attacked, into fistfights, and being hit by cars, which were not behind sensitive content warning labels. A close-up video of a person falling out of a tower of terror-style amusement park ride, and patrons screaming, was also not behind a warning label.
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When this user reached out to me and told me he was seeing almost exclusively gore videos on his Reels algorithm, I wondered if it would be worth writing a story at all, because all of us at 404 Media regularly see incredibly disturbing content on Instagram. Was this any different than a normal day on Instagram, or had he just ended up on the “death algorithm” as Sam and Emanuel both called it and have both ended up on? Even the person who initially told me about this had this thought: “I’ve been telling people about this and hearing, ‘Oh it’s cuz u liked something, maybe someone u followed changed their profile,’” he said. “I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone. I feel like nobody I’ve talked to today understands how disturbing what is being pushed is.”
Then I looked at the comments of many of these videos and it became clear that the issue was widespread. Here are comments I saw on the gore videos:
“What happened today? My feed is full of shoot, killing, thriller clips, fighting, killing human/animals, murder, and torture. Feed got f**cked”
“Today’s algorithm showed me around 70 murders, 100+ accidents, and around 115 violence videos, is anyone on Instagram noticing it?”
“Bro today’s feed is not for beginners”
“Por que me sale Gore en mi ap de racismo?” (Why am I getting gore on my racism app?)
“Yo wtf is ig becoming”
“What is Instagram on today?”
“Algorithm is insane today”
“Why the fuck I have so many like this today???”
“This isn’t a normal day, some DARKWEB shit going on here.”
“I feel like I lost some humanity today when I exposed myself to seeing so many of those types of videos, Gore, deaths and what broke me the most was animal cruelty,” one post read. “Excuse me if I sound a bit exaggerated but death, pain and human suffering is something that makes me sick, I always imagine ‘What would happen if I or my family were there?’ i can't sleep when my mind replays those videos.”
In an email, a Meta spokesperson told 404 Media “We have fixed an error that caused some users to see content in their Instagram Reels feed that should not have been recommended. We apologize for the mistake.” They said that the problem does not have anything to do with Meta’s recent announcement that it would loosen some content moderation rules.
To prove that this was actually happening, I sent Meta six links to graphic reels. These included two videos of people getting shot in the face, a video of a dead body with no context or obvious news value, a person getting lit on fire, the account called “PeopleDeadDaily,” and the tower of terror video. None of these videos have been deleted.
One of the many problems preventing people from actually holding Meta to account for any of this is that everyone’s feed is so incredibly personalized. Like I said, because we report on the darker corners of the internet, my Instagram feed is full of horrific things on a daily basis, which is probably not everyone’s experience.
When we talk about things like “content moderation,” the vast majority of the job is deleting videos of terrorism, murder, horrific violence, and things like this, not censoring specific viewpoints, which is part of why the job itself is so traumatizing. Meta has signaled that it intends to do less content moderation overall. And so the future of Instagram, for us all, may be one where you login to see what your friends are up to and instead have videos of people getting murdered shoved algorithmically into your feed.
Four years after its launch, Meta is reportedly considering spinning off Instagram Reels into its own standalone app, according to a report from The Information. The report, citing an anonymous source, said Instagram head Adam Mosseri discussed the project, code-named […]
