MONDAY, 01 SEPTEMBER 2025, 19:28
Amtrak’s new 160 mph tilting Acela trains have debuted on the Northeast Corridor, offering smoother rides, upgraded interiors, faster Wi-Fi, and 27% more seating capacity. However, “they don’t complete the journey any faster than the old trains,” reports The Independent. From the report: Acela runs from Washington, DC’s Union Station to Boston via Philadelphia, New York Penn Station, New Haven,...
Today, Microsoft unveiled two in-house AI models: MAI-Voice-1, a high-speed speech-generation system now live in Copilot, and MAI-1-Preview, its first end-to-end foundation model trained on 15,000 H100 GPUs. Neowin reports: MAI-Voice-1 is a speech generation model and is already available in Copilot Daily and Podcasts. To preview the full capabilities of this voice model, Microsoft has created...
Microsoft is testing new Xbox Game Pass features with Insiders, letting Core and Standard subscribers stream cloud-enabled titles they own or access via subscription across more devices, including supported TVs and browsers. These tiers will also gain access to select PC game versions for the first time. From a Xbox blog post: We’re always exploring more ways to make your Xbox experience...
Stellantis has put its fully developed Level 3 driver-assistance system on hold due to high costs, technical hurdles, and weak consumer demand. Reuters reports: As recently as February, Stellantis said its in-house system, which is part of the AutoDrive program, was ready for deployment and a key pillar of its strategy. The company said the system, which enables drivers to have their hands off...
FFmpeg 8.0 brings GPU-accelerated video encoding via Vulkan — and can now subtitle your videos automatically using integrated speech recognition. From a report: At the start of the week, the FFmpeg project released its eighth major version. It’s codenamed “Huffman” after the Huffman code algorithm, which was invented in 1952, making it one of the oldest lossless compression algorithms. […] The...
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant is officially coming to TVs, starting with Samsung’s 2025 lineup of TVs and smart monitors. With the integration, you can call upon Copilot and ask for movie suggestions, spoiler-free episode recaps, and other general questions. On TV, Copilot takes on a “friendly, animated presence” that resembles the opalescent Copilot...
Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) are pressing ahead with a Microsoft Office 365 rollout despite Microsoft refusing to disclose where sensitive law enforcement data will be processed. Freedom of Information documents reveal that Microsoft cannot guarantee data sovereignty, may process data in “hostile” jurisdictions, retains encryption key control, and blocks vetting of...
Imgur users have flooded the image-hosting site’s front page with pictures of John Oliver giving the middle finger to parent company MediaLab AI. The revolt follows staff layoffs that eliminated human moderators and the breakdown of core site functions including video playback for non-logged-in users and failed image uploads. A former employee confirmed MediaLab AI laid off Imgur’s moderation...
President Donald Trump stopped allowing small shipments to enter the country without paying tariffs. Now, things are getting pricier and shipping costs are going up.
Hundreds of staff gathered outside the CDC headquarters in Atlanta on Thursday to support the public health leaders who resigned, or were fired by the Trump administration, in recent days. Three of the four senior leaders who resigned yesterday, Debra Houry, Demetre Daskalakis and Daniel Jernigan, spoke at the demonstration
CDC in crisis: who are the top officials resigning or being forced...
Share your adventures with the world and save some cash on the GoPro Hero 13 Black.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that the Department of Commerce will begin publishing GDP statistics on the blockchain, touting it as part of President Trump’s push to make America a “crypto government.” CoinTelegraph reports: Lutnick made the announcement during a White House cabinet meeting on Tuesday, describing the effort as a move to expand blockchain-based data...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Credit reporting giant TransUnion has disclosed a data breach affecting more than 4.4 million customers’ personal information. In a filing with Maine’s attorney general’s office on Thursday, TransUnion attributed the July 28 breach to unauthorized access of a third-party application storing customers’ personal data for its U.S. consumer...
Highest 2 Lowest, Echo Valley, and Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical are just a few of the movies you should be watching on Apple TV+ this month.
Anthropic will start training its AI models on user data, including new chat transcripts and coding sessions, unless users choose to opt out. The Verge: It’s also extending its data retention policy to five years — again, for users that don’t choose to opt out. All users will have to make a decision by September 28th. For users that click “Accept” now, Anthropic will immediately begin training...
Ethereum Shows Impressive Stability Above the $4,600 Threshold Ethereum (ETH) continues to demonstrate resilience, holding above the $4,600 mark even as the market experiences high volatility. Its ability to stay strong at this critical level signals investor confidence in Ethereum’s long-term potential as the backbone of decentralized finance (DeFi), smart contracts, and NFTs. Institutional...
MAGAX Delivers Utility and AI to Memes For years, meme coins like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu thrived on hype and community, but they lacked deeper utility. MAGAX is changing that narrative. By introducing the Meme-to-Earn model, it allows creators and sharers of viral content to be rewarded directly through blockchain. Its AI-powered Loomint engine verifies […]
Every breath people take in their homes or car probably contains significant amounts of microplastics small enough to burrow deep into lungs, new peer-reviewed research finds, bringing into focus a little understood route of exposure and health threat. The Guardian: The study, published in the journal Plos One, estimates humans can inhale as much as 68,000 tiny plastic particles daily. Previous...
Solana Breaks Past $200 After 9% Rally Solana (SOL) posted a powerful 9% rally over the past 24 hours, reclaiming the $200 level and reigniting bullish sentiment across the crypto market. The move sent its market capitalization past $107 billion, placing it firmly among the strongest-performing large-cap altcoins this week. Trading activity exploded, with futures […]
On today’s episode of Uncanny Valley, our hosts talk to features editor Jason Kehe about everything from screen time limits and the return to flip phones to the romanticization of the early internet.
Solo entrepreneurs now launch 35% of all startups, double the rate from a decade ago, yet venture capital funding patterns remain virtually unchanged, according to an analysis by venture capitalist Sajith Pai. Carta’s equity management data reveals that while solo-founded companies grew from 17% of 2,600 startups in 2015 to 35% of 3,800 startups in 2024, their share of VC funding barely moved...