Seeing people who aren’t developers create apps through vibe coding lately has reminded me of something from two years ago that bodes well for the future of Siri. Vibe coding is the term assigned to the process of building apps using AI by describing the app that you want to exist.
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Pushed by trackmobile railcar movers, the Atlas V rocket rolled to the launch pad last week with a full load of 27 satellites for Amazon's Kuiper internet megaconstellation.
Credit:
United Launch Alliance
Last week, the first operational satellites for Amazon's Project Kuiper broadband network were minutes from launch at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
These spacecraft, buttoned up on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, are the first of more than 3,200 mass-produced satellites Amazon plans to launch over the rest of the decade to deploy the first direct US competitor to SpaceX's Starlink internet network.
However, as is often the case on Florida's Space Coast, bad weather prevented the satellites from launching April 9. No big deal, right? Anyone who pays close attention to the launch industry knows delays are part of the business. A broken component on the rocket, a summertime thunderstorm, or high winds can thwart a launch attempt. Launch companies know this, and the answer is usually to try again the next day.
© SpaceX
Google is aware of an issue today with Cast (previously “Chromecast built-in”) not working “on certain VIZIO TV models from 2016-2020.”
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A subtle change in Android 16 Beta 4 adds Dynamic Color to the always-on display (AOD) clocks.
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The wholesale American cannibalism of one of its own crucial appendages—the world-famous university system—has begun in earnest. The campaign is predictably Trumpian, built on a flagrantly pretextual basis and executed with the sort of vicious but chaotic idiocy that has always been a hallmark of the authoritarian mind.
At a moment when the administration is systematically waging war on diversity initiatives of every kind, it has simultaneously discovered that it is really concerned about both "viewpoint diversity" and "antisemitism" on college campuses—and it is using the two issues as a club to beat on the US university system until it either dies or conforms to MAGA ideology.
Reaching this conclusion does not require reading any tea leaves or consulting any oracles; one need only listen to people like Vice President JD Vance, who in 2021 gave a speech called "The Universities are the Enemy" to signal that, like every authoritarian revolutionary, he intended to go after the educated.
© Getty Images
AI is transforming how traders analyze the stock market—scanning massive volumes of data to uncover patterns, trends, and opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed. But for these models to deliver real value, they must be trained on clean, high-frequency data. […]
The post Top 5 Data Resources for Training AI Models for Stock Market Analysis first appeared on Tech Startups.
On Monday, a developer using the popular AI-powered code editor Cursor noticed something strange: Switching between machines instantly logged them out, breaking a common workflow for programmers who use multiple devices. When the user contacted Cursor support, an agent named "Sam" told them it was expected behavior under a new policy. But no such policy existed, and Sam was a bot. The AI model made the policy up, sparking a wave of complaints and cancellation threats documented on Hacker News and Reddit.
This marks the latest instance of AI confabulations (also called "hallucinations") causing potential business damage. Confabulations are a type of "creative gap-filling" response where AI models invent plausible-sounding but false information. Instead of admitting uncertainty, AI models often prioritize creating plausible, confident responses, even when that means manufacturing information from scratch.
For companies deploying these systems in customer-facing roles without human oversight, the consequences can be immediate and costly: frustrated customers, damaged trust, and, in Cursor's case, potentially canceled subscriptions.
© Juj Winn via Getty Images
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is sending out mass layoff notices that appear to be in defiance of a court order blocking further layoffs following DOGE-induced cuts.
“I regret to inform you that you are affected by a reduction in force (RIF) action,” says a notice reviewed by The Verge that was sent by CFPB Acting Director Russell Vought to an agency employee. “This RIF action is necessary to restructure the Bureau’s operation to better reflect the agency’s priorities and mission.” Access to CFPB systems will be cut off after Friday, and employees will be placed on administrative leave until their official end date, the notice says.
Fox Business reports that around 1,500 workers will receive RIF notices across core functions, based on an unnamed source. On Thursday night, CFPB Chief Legal Officer Mark Paoletta sent a notice of the agency’s supervision and enforcement priorities that said the CFPB would “shift resources away from enforcement and supervision that can be done by the States” and rescinded previous enforcement and supervision priority documents, The Wall Street Journal reported.
In March, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration not to “terminate any CFPB employee, except for cause related to the individual employee’s performance or conduct; and defendants shall not issue any notice of reduction-in-force to any CFPB employee.” An appeals court order this month partially stayed that portion of the injunction, but only to the extent it would keep the CFPB from issuing a RIF that the agency determined “after a particularized assessment, to be unnecessary to the performance of defendants’ statutory duties.”
The union that brought the original complaint to stop the agency from being gutted filed a motion late Thursday asking the court to require the government to explain how the mass terminations don’t violate its preliminary injunction. “The plaintiffs have been told that entire offices, including statutorily mandated ones, have or soon will be either eliminated or reduced to a single person,” the filing says. “It is unfathomable that cutting the Bureau’s staff by 90 percent in just 24 hours, with no notice to people to prepare for that elimination, would not ‘interfere with the performance’ of its statutory duties, to say nothing of the implausibility of the defendants having made a ‘particularized assessment’ of each employee’s role in the three-and-a-half business days since the court of appeals imposed that requirement.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee who helped establish the agency, called the agency’s “dismantling” of the agency “yet another assault on consumers and our democracy by this lawless Administration, and we will fight back with everything we’ve got.”
Updated March 17th: Added filing from CFPB worker union and statement from Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Google just dropped a new AI model into the mix: Gemini 2.5 Flash, and it’s already turning heads. This preview release is aimed at developers and businesses looking for something smart, fast, and budget-friendly. Google is calling it a “workhorse […]
The post Google launches Gemini 2.5 Flash, a multimodal AI model built for speed, scale, and affordability first appeared on Tech Startups.
A curious change in Android 16 Beta 4 sees Google darken artwork in the media player on Pixel devices.
more…WhatsApp this week released a major update that adds a new way to create and manage sticker packs without having to leave the app. Read on as we detail exactly what’s new for WhatsApp users.
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Kevin Hall, a prominent nutrition expert who led influential studies on ultra-processed foods, has resigned from his long-held position at the National Institutes of Health, alleging censorship of his research by top aides of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In a post on LinkedIn, Hall claimed that he "experienced censorship in the reporting of our research because of agency concerns that it did not appear to fully support preconceived narratives of my agency’s leadership about ultra-processed food addiction."
In comments to CBS News, Hall said the censorship was over a study he and his colleagues recently published in the journal Cell Metabolism, which showed that ultra-processed foods did not produce the same large dopamine responses in the brain that are seen with use of addictive drugs. The finding suggests that the mechanism leading people to overconsume ultra-processed foods may be more complex than the studied mechanisms in addiction. This appears to slightly conflict with the beliefs of Kennedy Jr., who has claimed that food companies use additives to make ultra-processed foods addictive.
© Getty | Kevin Dietsch
The Meta monopoly trial has raised a question that Meta hopes the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can't effectively answer: How important is it to use social media to connect with friends and family today?
Connecting with friends was, of course, Facebook's primary use case as it became the rare social network to hit 1 billion users—not by being acquired by a Big Tech company but based on the strength of its clean interface and the network effects that kept users locked in simply because all the important people in their life chose to be there.
According to the FTC, Meta took advantage of Facebook's early popularity, and it has since bought out rivals and otherwise cornered the market on personal social networks. Only Snapchat and MeWe (a privacy-focused Facebook alternative) are competitors to Meta platforms, the FTC argues, and social networks like TikTok or YouTube aren't interchangeable, because those aren't destinations focused on connecting friends and family.
© Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg
