Month: July 2023

Trump’s Inevitability Problem – The Atlantic

Trump’s Inevitability Problem – The Atlantic

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. There’s Donald Trump, and there’s everyone else. At the moment, the former president of the United States appears unbeatable in the 2024 Republican primary race. But perhaps inevitable is a trickier word than it seems. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: It’s Iowa Time What happens when you say the unsayable? Former Congressman (and current GOP presidential contender) Will Hurd found out the hard way Friday night. “Donald Trump is not running for president to make America great again,” Hurd told the Republican masses inside the Iowa Events Center. “Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison.” The boos rained down, and, rest assured, they were mighty. Hurd was one of 13 candidates who had trekked to Des Moines for the Iowa GOP’s cattle-call event known as the Lincoln Dinner. Prospective voters and donors gathered …

Idaho woman convicted of killing her two children sentenced to life in prison | Idaho

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Lori Vallow Daybell, an Idaho mother convicted of murdering her two youngest children and a romantic rival, was sentenced to life in prison without parole Monday. Vallow Daybell was found guilty in May of killing her children, Joshua “JJ” Vallow, seven, and Tylee Ryan, 16, as well as conspiring to kill Tammy Daybell, her fifth husband’s previous wife. Vallow Daybell will serve three life sentences one after the other, the judge said. Her husband, Chad Daybell, is awaiting trial on the same murder charges. Vallow Daybell also faces two other cases in Arizona – one on a charge of conspiring with her brother to kill her fourth husband, Charles Vallow, and one of conspiring to kill her niece’s ex-husband. The case made international headlines after the nationwide search undertaken for the children as well as the bizarre details that emerged, including Vallow Daybell’s claims that her son and daughter were zombies and that she was a goddess sent to usher in the Biblical apocalypse. At the Fremont county courthouse in St Anthony, Idaho, judge Steven …

Google Assistant reportedly pivoting to generative AI

Google Assistant reportedly pivoting to generative AI

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When Google had its unpleasant realization that it had been complacently spinning its wheels on a form of fake AI for a decade, chances are it started re-aligning itself that day. And it sounds like Assistant itself is now getting a generative facelift, according to an internal email reported by Axios. The email says that the Assistant team leads “see a huge opportunity to explore what a supercharged Assistant, powered by the latest LLM [large language model] technology, would look like,” and describe some organizational changes to achieve that. Of course, you don’t make sweeping changes to a successful division just because you want to see what something looks like. It feels more like they have already seen what it looks like as other companies have demonstrated it publicly, and they are in a hurry to catch up. At any rate the change in “vision” will unfold over the months to come. Although there are numerous examples of LLMs powering chatbots and assistants, the technology has yet to be proven to be a practical evolution …

Max Q: Solving artificial gravity with gravityLab

Max Q: Solving artificial gravity with gravityLab

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Hello and welcome back to Max Q! In this issue: Solving artificial gravity with gravityLab News from Atomos Space and more But first… The Aerospace Corporation and TechCrunch are joining forces to host a pitch competition to find the strongest startups using AI/Machine Learning to work with satellite data streams. Finalists will get the rare opportunity to pitch in front of our judges on the Space Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 and exhibit their AI/ML startup at Disrupt 2023 this September. Apply today! Living without gravity spells disaster for the human body. Even a few weeks in microgravity can lead to issues with circulation and vision; over the longer term, the complications compound even further. The heart begins to degenerate and atrophy. Bones turn thin and brittle. But what about Martian gravity, which is around 0.38 that of Earth? Or somewhere in-between — 0.16 G on the moon, or 0.91 on Venus? How do these gravity levels affect the body, plants and other organisms, even manufacturing processes? We have astonishingly few answers to these questions. gravityLab …

Dismay as Rishi Sunak vows to ‘max out’ UK fossil fuel reserves | Fossil fuels

Published by Sam

Rishi Sunak has pledged to “max out” the UK’s oil and gas reserves as he unveiled a new round of intensive North Sea drilling, which experts warned could be catastrophic for the climate. Unveiling a plan to authorise more than 100 new North Sea licences on a visit to north-east Scotland, the prime minister also indicated he would approve the UK’s largest untapped reserves in the Rosebank field, which hold 500m barrels of oil. Speaking to reporters on a visit to a Shell gas terminal north of Aberdeen, Sunak insisted the plan was compatible with net zero commitments given the anticipated part-reliance on fossil fuels for years to come, saying it was more carbon-intensive to ship oil and gas from other countries. But experts said this ignored the fact that much of the UK’s imported gas comes by pipeline and tends to be produced more cleanly than its British equivalent. Environmental groups said Sunak’s plan would “send a wrecking ball” through climate commitments. Tory and Labour MPs said Sunak’s “economically illiterate” announcement was “driving a …

The Ugly Honesty of Elon Musk’s Twitter Rebrand

The Ugly Honesty of Elon Musk’s Twitter Rebrand

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I woke up Sunday to find I had begun using the social network formerly known as Twitter. The app had updated to show the new name chosen by its owner: X. Now, underneath the friendly and familiar blue icon with a white bird, that letter alone was displayed—X—as if my iPhone was affirming that Elon Musk’s Twitter had become an error. Soon after, the bird icon disappeared, too, in favor of a white-on-black ????. The change has rolled out slowly. First the website rebranded, and then, by the end of last week, Musk had dismantled the Twitter signage on the company’s San Francisco headquarters and erected a huge, glowing X on its rooftop. (It has since been taken down.) Reprising the creeper thinking that inspired Musk to name Tesla’s models the “S,” “3,” “X,” and “Y,” such that they would combine to spell S3XY, Twitter also reportedly gave several conference rooms new, X-oriented names, including “eXposure” and, once again, “s3Xy.” As my colleague Charlie Warzel explained last week, Musk has been trying to make X …

Memphis police say Jewish school shooting averted after officers shot gunman | Memphis

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Police in Memphis said they had likely prevented a mass shooting after they shot a man who earlier was reported to have opened fire at a Jewish day school in the Tennessee city. In a statement and news conference, local police said they had responded to a report of a white man with a handgun shooting outside the Margolin Hebrew Academy and trying to gain entry to the building. The main failed to enter the school as he was unable to get past the double security doors. “Thankfully, that school had a great safety procedure and process in place and avoided anyone being harmed or injured at that scene,” said Dan Crow, the assistant police chief. The assailant then fled the scene in a maroon pick up truck before police arrived. However, the truck was then located nearby after an alert was put out. After police stopped the vehicle the driver then got out armed with his gun, causing one police officer to open fire, injuring him. The suspect was then taken to hospital. “I …

Dynatrace acquires cloud-native debugging platform Rookout

Dynatrace acquires cloud-native debugging platform Rookout

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Observability and security platform Dynatrace today announced that it plans to acquire Rookout, a Tel Aviv-based observability startup that focuses on helping developers troubleshoot and debug their code in production. Publicly traded Dynatrace already offers a comprehensive suite of observability tools, but the addition of Rookout will allow it to expand these services with code-level observability into production environments. Dynatrace expects the transaction to close before September 30. The two companies did not disclose the acquisition price, but Rookout previously raised a total of $28 million, including a $16 million Series B round it announced a year ago. The company’s investors include the likes of Fort Ross Ventures, TLV Partners, Emerge, Cisco Investment, LIAN Group, Mighty Capital and Binder & Partners. Rookout CEO Shahar Fogel and CTO Liran Haimovitch. Unsurprisingly, Dynatrace says it plans to embed Rookout into its existing platform and notes that this will also help it improve collaboration between development, IT and security teams, which will then be able to use a single platform for their observability needs. “Our mission is to …

Top US adviser to attend Saudi talks in bid to attract support for Ukraine plan | US foreign policy

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Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, is expected to attend a meeting in Saudi Arabia this weekend at which Ukraine and its allies will try to persuade countries from the global south to back Kyiv’s proposals for ending the war. According to officials involved in planning for the meeting, it is primarily aimed at drawing neutral countries such as Brazil and India off the fence in their approach to the Russian invasion. The meeting has been called by Ukraine, and it is hoped the Saudi venue might attract Chinese participation, but there is so far no confirmation Beijing will send any representatives. According to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the planned talks, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine have invited 30 countries, including Indonesia, Egypt, Mexico, Chile and Zambia. The meeting of top security officials is expected to take place in Jeddah, and if Sullivan, the US national security adviser, attends in person, it will be his second trip to the Red Sea port city in 10 days. On Thursday, he held talks with …

How to succeed in today’s grocery delivery market

How to succeed in today’s grocery delivery market

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Misfits Market CEO Abhi Ramesh thinks we’re in a ‘normalization period’ The instant grocery delivery market has been on a roller coaster ride over the past few years, and recently the ride has been down. For example, Dunzo, a hyperlocal delivery startup in India, reportedly postponed employee salaries for a month and plans additional layoffs, with a strategy on “streamlining our cash flow so we can build a more sustainable business for the future,” it wrote to employees in an email. Then over in Europe, Getir, the delivery giant there, said it was pulling out of Spain, Italy and Portugal as it was finalizing a new round of investment. That announcement came a month after Getir exited France. Not everything is doom-and-gloom in this market, though. Misfits Market acquired Imperfect Foods at the end of 2022, and JOKR raised additional funding earlier this year. Meanwhile, Misfits Market is finishing up the integration of the two companies. Granted, Misfits Market had its own brush with layoffs earlier this year, but founder and CEO Abhi Ramesh told …