Spend enough time in San Francisco, peering into the cyberpunk future, and you may find that weird things start seeming normal. Fleets of self-driving cars? Yawn. A start-up trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth? Sure, why not. Summoning a godlike artificial intelligence that could wipe out humanity? Ho-hum. You may even find yourself, as I…
With its horse-trodden roads, endless fields of almond blossoms and cowboy heritage, the 20,000 person town of Oakdale, Calif., fits the American West of imagination. And for decades, its media diet was classically all-American, too. Nightly news broadcasts played on living room televisions. Copies of local newspapers lined doorsteps on Sunday mornings. The town even…
Members of a South Texas community that has served as the hub of Elon Musk’s rocket launch company, SpaceX, voted on Saturday to formally establish a new city called Starbase, fulfilling one of Mr. Musk’s long-held dreams. All but six of the 218 people who voted supported incorporating the city of Starbase, according to Cameron…
Last month, an A.I. bot that handles tech support for Cursor, an up-and-coming tool for computer programmers, alerted several customers about a change in company policy. It said they were no longer allowed to use Cursor on more than just one computer. In angry posts to internet message boards, the customers complained. Some canceled their…
And yet, perhaps after simply being confronted with the possibility of Jessie’s demise, I’ve developed a new fondness for her. Jessie doesn’t pretend to be the ideal woman; she has less in common with the imperfectly perfect Alexa than she does the deep, resonant and pompously put-on voice of authority that Laurie Anderson cultivated in…
At first, residents of the upscale cul-de-sac in West Lake Hills, Texas, did not know who had moved into the 6,900-square-foot, six-bedroom mansion next door. Then construction workers arrived to erect a 16-foot chain-link fence around the $6 million property, which is one of four homes on the leafy street. They also installed an outward-facing…
OpenAI said on Monday that it was restructuring as a public benefit corporation, allowing the nonprofit that controls OpenAI to retain its grip on the company. The decision is a victory for OpenAI’s critics, including one of its founders, Elon Musk, who complained that the company was too focused on profits and had abandoned its…
Earth Sciences Minister Kiren Rijiju is reportedly upset with the French IT company Atos. Reason is said to be delay in the delivery of two supercomputers by the French company to Indian weather forecasting institutes. According to a report in news agency PTI, the Earth Sciences Ministry had ordered two supercomputers worth $100 million from…
Bobby Kotick, the former head of Activision Blizzard, is reportedly considering buying TikTok, as the app could be banned in the United States. The Wall Street Journal reports that Kotick has talked to ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, about buying the app, which could cost hundreds of billions of dollars.This comes as US lawmakers…
Apple‘s Find My app has cost the city of Denver, US $3.76 million in compensation and damages. In 2022, the city’s police wrongly raided and ransacked an elderly woman’s home looking for a stolen truck and guns. According to a report by CNN, Denver police were seeking to recover a stolen truck loaded with guns,…
