Welcome to episode 50 of Pixelated, a podcast by 9to5Google. This week, we talk about the lack of One UI 7 and Gemini Live’s Astra camera/screen sharing already going free.
The Instagram app has its own built-in camera, so users can take photos and videos for Stories without needing another app. While users can save this content to their photo library, some people have noticed that the Save button on the Instagram camera has now disappeared – but luckily there’s already a fix available.
This fall Apple will launch four new iPhones, including the ultra-thin iPhone 17 Air. But with the iPhone 17 Pro Max, the company is leaning hard in the opposite direction, and thus fulfilling the wish of many users over the years for the most battery life possible.
Bluesky may soon get a new blue checkmark verification system, according to changes to the app’s public GitHub repository spotted Friday by reverse engineer alice.mosphere.at. The blue checks may have a similar look to the system pioneered by Twitter, now X, but Bluesky’s version seems like it will work quite differently. Bluesky’s blue check system […]
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Enough with my typical small talk. Let’s jump into the news right away this week. And there’s plenty of it, including Lyft’s entry into Europe, AV startup […]
The government-run website covid.gov used to host information about COVID-19 vaccines, testing, and treatment. Now, under President Trump’s purview, the page redirects to a White House website espousing the unproven theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory. The theory, which has been opposed by many virologists, was espoused in a report by House Republicans […]
This week's flight of the New Shepard spacecraft, NS-31, and its all-female crew has stirred up a mess of coverage, from tabloids to high-brow journalism outlets. And why not? Six women, led by superstar Katy Perry, were flying into space!
By contrast, Ars Technica has been largely silent. Why? Because yet another suborbital flight on New Shepard matters little in the long arc of spaceflight history. Beyond that, I did not want to be too negative about someone else's happiness, especially since it was privately funded. Live and let live, and all of that.
However, if I'm being frank, this flight and its breathless promotion made me uncomfortable. Let me explain. Perhaps the most important change in spaceflight over the last two decades has been the rise of commercial spaceflight, which is bringing down the cost of access to space and marks an essential step to humanity becoming a spacefaring species. This rising tide has been spurred in large part by billionaires, particularly Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and, to a lesser extent, Richard Branson.
When it comes to actually storing the numerical weights that power a large language model's underlying neural network, most modern AI models rely on the precision of 16- or 32-bit floating point numbers. But that level of precision can come at the cost of large memory footprints (in the hundreds of gigabytes for the largest models) and significant processing resources needed for the complex matrix multiplication used when responding to prompts.
Now, researchers at Microsoft's General Artificial Intelligence group have released a new neural network model that works with just three distinct weight values: -1, 0, or 1. Building on top of previous work Microsoft Research published in 2023, the new model's "ternary" architecture reduces overall complexity and "substantial advantages in computational efficiency," the researchers write, allowing it to run effectively on a simple desktop CPU. And despite the massive reduction in weight precision, the researchers claim that the model "can achieve performance comparable to leading open-weight, full-precision models of similar size across a wide range of tasks."
Watching your weights
The idea of simplifying model weights isn't a completely new one in AI research. For years, researchers have been experimenting with quantization techniques that squeeze their neural network weights into smaller memory envelopes. In recent years, the most extreme quantization efforts have focused on so-called "BitNets" that represent each weight in a single bit (representing +1 or -1).
Some ChatGPT users have noticed a strange phenomenon recently: Occasionally, the chatbot refers to them by name as it reasons through problems. That wasn’t the default behavior previously, and several users claim ChatGPT is mentioning their names despite never having been told what to call them. Reviews are mixed. One user, software developer and AI […]
Following the reveal of specs and “Razr Ultra” branding yesterday, another new leak shows the new Motorola Razr flagship again, this time with dust resistance and with an underwhelming software support schedule.
A federal judge in Nevada has ruled that it’s unconstitutional to obtain swaths of cellular records through “tower dumps” — but will still let police get away with using it as evidence, as reported earlier by 404 Mediaand Court Watch.
With tower dumps, authorities can dig through the cell records that pinged off a particular tower during a specific time. Though police may be looking for just one record, these dumps often expose the data of thousands of people, making it a major privacy concern. In a 2010 case involving the High Country Bandits, for example, officers caught the two bank robbers by looking through a tower dump containing more than 150,000 phone numbers.
In the ruling, Judge Miranda Du said that searching through these records violates the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. However, Du denies a motion to suppress using these records as evidence because the court seems to be the first “within the Ninth Circuit to reach this conclusion and the good faith exception applies.”
As noted in the filing, the tower dump exposed the data of 1,686 users, but the records helped authorities build their case against Nevada man Cory Spurlock, who faces charges related to a murder-for-hire conspiracy and conspiracy to distribute marijuana. In February, a federal judge in Mississippi similarly deemed tower dumps unconstitutional, preventing FBI officials from pulling information from cell towers spanning nine locations and four carriers, as reported by Court Watch. The Department of Justice has since appealed the decision.
The Trump administration and DOGE tried to cut more than 1,400 employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. An employee union and other groups are fighting to keep the regulator intact.
Popular NAS-maker Synology has confirmed and slightly clarified a policy that appeared on its German website earlier this week: Its "Plus" tier of devices, starting with the 2025 series, will require Synology-branded hard drives for full compatibility, at least at first.
"Synology-branded drives will be needed for use in the newly announced Plus series, with plans to update the Product Compatibility List as additional drives can be thoroughly vetted in Synology systems," a Synology representative told Ars by email. "Extensive internal testing has shown that drives that follow a rigorous validation process when paired with Synology systems are at less risk of drive failure and ongoing compatibility issues."
Without a Synology-branded or approved drive in a device that requires it, NAS devices could fail to create storage pools and lose volume-wide deduplication and lifespan analysis, Synology's German press release stated. Similar drive restrictions are already in place for XS Plus and rack-mounted Synology models, though work-arounds exist.
This week, Kia announced its affordable EV4 electric sedan will launch in the US early next year. While the US won’t get a hatchback edition of the EV4 that was mentioned when it was revealed in February, there will be two battery configurations: a 58.3kWh battery with a Kia-estimated range of 235 miles, and a larger 81.4kWh battery with a Kia-estimated range of 330 miles. No EPA range estimates are currently available.
The EV4 will get Tesla’s NACS charging port and can charge up from 10 to 80 percent in 31 minutes at a DC fast charging station. It also has vehicle-to-load capability that provides AC power for devices like computers. And on the inside, the EV4 features 30 inches worth of side-by-side screens that run Kia’s latest “connected car Navigation Cockpit (ccNC) software with apps like YouTube.
The automaker’s “first all-electric global sedan” will be built in Korea, and while Kia has not confirmed an official price, MotorTrend reports it could be about $37,000 before any incentives. That price would undercut Tesla’s most affordable and popular Model 3 electric sedan, which costs $42,490 before the Federal $7,500 tax incentive. However, by the time this sedan is ready to ship, President Trump’s tariffs on cars built outside the country may have a significant impact.
We’ve already gotten a new mid-range release from Nothing this year, but what many have been waiting for is a new flagship release in the Nothing Phone (3), and now we’ve got a better idea of its release date.
