Here is the daily technology #threadcast for 4/1/24. The goal is to make this a technology "reddit".
Drop all question, comments, and articles relating to #technology and the future. The goal is make it a technology center.
Here is the daily technology #threadcast for 4/1/24. The goal is to make this a technology "reddit".
Drop all question, comments, and articles relating to #technology and the future. The goal is make it a technology center.
One quarter of travel operators yet to implement AI
Article via Travolution
AI chipmaker Cerebras announces CFIUS clearance, a key step toward IPO
The government decision helps clear the path for an initial public offering from one of Nvidia's challengers in artificial intelligence chips.
Artificial intelligence chip developer Cerebras said Monday that it has obtained clearance from a U.S. committee to sell shares to Group 42, a Microsoft-backed AI company based in the United Arab Emirates.
That clearance came from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, and it's a key step for Cerebras in its effort to go public. Cerebras competes with Nvidia, whose graphics processing units are the industry's choice for training and running AI models, but most of its revenue comes from a customer called Group 42.
Cerebras filed to go public in September but has not provided details on timing or size for the initial public offering. The regulatory overhang was tied to the company's relationship with Group 42, which was the source of 87% of Cerebras' revenue in the first half of 2024, made the IPO look uncertain.
"We thank @POTUS for making America the best place in the world to invest in cutting-edge #AI technology," Andrew Feldman, Cerebras' co-founder and CEO, wrote in a Monday LinkedIn post. "We thank G42's leadership and the UAE's leadership for their ongoing partnership and commitment to supporting U.S headquartered AI companies."
Lawmakers have previously worried about Group 42's connections to China. Last year Mike Gallagher, then a Republican member of Congress from Wisconsin, said in a statement that he was "glad to see G42 reduce its investment exposure to Chinese companies." Microsoft later announced a $1.5 billion investment in Group 42.
Trump's tariffs could mean big business for supply chain software startup LightSource
LightSource, a supply chain software startup, has raised $33 million in a funding round led by Bain Capital and Lightspeed.
With President Donald Trump set to impose sweeping tariffs on a wide swath of U.S. trading partners this week, corporate America is awash in uncertainty.
LightSource, a San Francisco startup whose software helps companies manage their procurement process, costs and vendor relationships, didn't know what the president's tariffs plan would look like before raising its first funding round. But the timing didn't hurt.
LightSource has just closed a $33 million financing, led by Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from J2 Ventures.
"Tariffs and trade winds are shifting so fast, it's enough to make your head spin," said Ajay Agrawal, a partner at Bain and now a board member at LightSource. "For a company with hundreds or thousands of different parts and suppliers — even just understanding what the impact will be on their whole enterprise is unbelievable."
President Trump's plans to slap "reciprocal tariffs" on all countries with duties on U.S. goods is set to be announced on Wednesday. Concerns surrounding the impact of those moves pushed the Nasdaq down more than 10% in the first quarter, the index's biggest drop for any period since 2022.
Trump has already said he would impose 25% tariffs on "all cars that are not made in the United States." Autos is a market that co-founder and CEO Spencer Penn knows well.
Amazon resumes drone deliveries after two-month pause
Amazon has resumed making drone deliveries in Texas and Arizona after it halted the program earlier this year.
Amazon has restarted drone deliveries in two states after a months-long pause, the company confirmed.
In January, Amazon halted Prime Air deliveries in College Station, Texas, and Tolleson, Arizona, the two U.S. markets where it's testing the service, as the company rolled out a software update to its drone fleet.
Amazon discovered an abnormality with the drone's altitude sensor, caused by dust in the air, that could have caused its system to produce an inaccurate reading of its position relative to the ground, the company said. Amazon "never experienced an actual safety issue," but said it opted to suspend deliveries while it corrected the issue.
The company brought drone deliveries back online last week after it completed the software update and received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, Amazon spokesperson Av Zammit said in a statement.
"Safety underscores everything we do at Prime Air, which is why we paused our operations to conduct a software update on the MK30 drone," Zammit said. "The updates are now complete and were approved by the FAA, allowing us to resume deliveries."
An FAA spokesperson didn't immediately provide a comment.
TikTok creators, partners remain optimistic ahead of app’s second ban deadline
As TikTok nears another ban deadline, creators and firms say they believe the Chinese-owned app will remain in the U.S. They are, however, hedging their bets.
For the second time this year, TikTok is staring at a deadline that could determine its fate in the U.S. and that of numerous creators and brands that have built businesses on the Chinese-owned social app.
The sense of urgency that led some creators to post wistful goodbye videos in January has shifted to a more cautiously optimistic outlook, with creators and firms saying they believe TikTok will remain in the U.S. They are, however, hedging their bets.
"I'm trying to be optimistic and hope that they keep it, but as a creator, I have to be prepared either way," said Gianna Christine, a creator with 2.7 million TikTok followers.
TikTok could be effectively banned in the U.S. on April 5 because of a national security law originally signed by former President Joe Biden that requires its Chinese parent ByteDance to divest the app's American operations. ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to sell TikTok, but Trump signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to not enforce the law, granting the Chinese company 75 more days to divest the U.S. portion of its business.
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"I really don't see TikTok getting banned," said Olivia Plotnick, the founder of the Wai Social marketing and consultancy agency. "Trump really is going to want to show how amazing he is, and make a deal happen."
TikTok and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Whatever is in store for TikTok, the company is acting like business as usual.
Current and former TikTok workers said they have received no communication from management about its future in the U.S. Brands and creators said they have received no updates from the company either.
Just waiting for TikTok and the white house.
!summarize #rossgerber #tesla #stocks
!summarize #wisconsin #lepen #france #election
The first TikTok ban deadline didn't significantly alter the social media postings from creators and brands, according to data provided to CNBC by Later, a social media and influencer marketing firm.
Social media users increased their posts on Threads and YouTube by 10% and 6%, respectively, the week of the TikTok ban in January compared to the week prior, according to Later. Still, the general posting habits of brands and creators during the week after the January deadline compared to the week preceding it were nearly identical, a spokesperson for Later said.
Throughout March, creators and brands steadily reduced the number of scheduled TikTok posts they plan to publish during the weeks leading up to the April deadline while increasing their scheduled Instagram posts, Later data showed. The March data suggests creators and brands are "reallocating content to Instagram as a safer or more stable alternative," the Later spokesperson said.
For a brief moment, the Chinese social media app RedNote rose to the top of Apple's app store during the week leading to the January deadline. Known as Xiaohongshu in China, that app has similar short-video features as TikTok, but it has a user base comprised mostly of women from more affluent Chinese cities that embraced the sudden influx of American users, Plotnick of Wai Social said.
"Trump likes this sort of leverage that the law provides him," Chilson said. "He's obviously using quite aggressively — not quite in the text of the law — his latitude to make deals to continue to string this along."
Amazon has set a goal to deliver 500 million packages by drone per year by the end of the decade. The company last year notched a critical regulatory milestone that could enable it to accelerate deliveries. It's eyed international expansion to the U.K., and recently welcomed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in a visit to a Prime Air facility.
The company also introduced a new version of its delivery drone, called the MK30, which is designed to be quieter than previous models and can fly in light rain.
Customers in College Station, a quiet suburban town that's about 100 miles northwest of Houston, had previously complained about the drones' noise levels. After rolling out the MK30, the company is also taking steps to relocate its drone hub farther away from residents' homes later this year.
Amazon said the crashes were unrelated to its decision to halt drone operations. The company has said these kinds of incidents, which have also occurred with other models in previous years, are part of the testing process, as it pushes drone systems "up to the limits and beyond."
LightSource was started in 2021 by Penn and CTO Idan Mintz, while the two were working in different parts of Alphabet. Penn was at robotaxi unit Waymo, and Mintz was in the Google X "moonshot factory."
Prior to Waymo, Penn worked at Tesla when the electric vehicle maker was starting to mass produce its popular Model 3 sedans. He said that finance, sourcing and engineering professionals have to work together to find, or sometimes custom order, high-quality parts. They also have to maintain their best supplier relationships while evaluating new potential vendors and negotiating fair prices.
Often these teams rely on "hundreds of disparate processes and information that's stuck in thousands of emails, spreadsheets and randomly formatted invoices and contracts," Penn said.
The new company would eventually invest in research and development in the U.S. and potentially become an alternative to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the report said. Taiwan Semiconductor announced a $100 billion investment in the U.S. earlier this month to bolster chip manufacturing. The deal brought the company's total investment in the U.S. to $165 billion.
Taiwan has become a hub for global chip manufacturing, building chips for some of the largest companies such Nvidia and Apple. Taiwan Semiconductor is by far the leading worldwide supplier.
Both GlobalFoundries and United Microelectronics have reportedly discussed the merger and informed government officials from both countries. United Microelectronic had previously looked into buying or building production plants in the U.S. but ditched the possibility due to costs, Nikkei reported.
"After careful consideration, I have directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in this case as we carry out President Trump's agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again," Bondi said.
Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate, faces separate federal and state murder charges for the killing, which rattled the business community while galvanizing health insurance critics.
The federal charges include murder through use of a firearm, which carries the possibility of the death penalty. The state charges carry a maximum punishment of life in prison. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to a state indictment and has not entered a plea to the federal charges.
Prosecutors have said the two cases will proceed on parallel tracks, with the state case expected to go to trial first. It wasn't immediately clear if Bondi's announcement will change the order.
After his arrest, Mangione was whisked by plane and helicopter back to New York and walked slowly up a Manhattan pier in a highly choreographed spectacle by a throng of officers with assault rifles and a contingent that included New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Trump, who oversaw an unprecedented run of executions at the end of his first term, signed an executive order on his first day back in office on Jan. 20 that compels the Justice Department to seek the death penalty in federal cases where applicable.
Mangione's case is the first time Bondi has ordered prosecutors to pursue the death penalty since she took office in February and immediately lifted a moratorium that that had been imposed under former President Joe Biden's administration. The Trump administration has signaled it will aggressively push for death sentences for certain crimes, accusing the Biden administration of going easy on violent criminals.
Trump's administration carried out 13 federal executions during his first term, more than under any president in modern history.
Biden campaigned on a pledge to work toward abolishing federal capital punishment but took no major steps to that end. But in his final days in office, the Democrat president commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on death row, converting their punishments to life in prison.
A fourth U.S. Army soldier, who together with three others went missing in Lithuania last week when their vehicle sank in a peat bog, was found dead, U.S. and Lithuanian officials said on Tuesday.
Леру я несколько раз видел, потому что бывал на ее передачах, - говорит Вячеслав. - Если не говорить о самих передачах, то о Лере у меня сложилось хорошее впечатление. Она приятный человек. Что касается Азизы, то она одна из тех людей, которые бывали у нас в гостях неоднократно. Азиза сама любит рассказывать, что даже готовила у нас как-то раз, когда мы ещё жили на Сухаревской, плов. Азиза принимала участие и в наших концертах. Я с ней знаком достаточно хорошо. Она хорошая певица, хороший музыкант, профессиональный.
Я считаю, что никто ни с кем не ссорился, - продолжает Вячеслав. – Быть может, это просто такой сценарий для того, чтобы немножечко повысить, так сказать, градус напряжения. А на самом деле…
"This is kind of crazy that that could be possible. That's horrific. And that's, again, that's bad for the cause."
Rogan mentioned a report that a "gay barber" allegedly was rounded up with Tren de Aragua members and thrown into an El Salvadoran prison.
"One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, 'I'm not a gang member. I'm gay. I'm a barber,' " he read from a Time magazine report from the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.
"The cause is, Let's get the gang members out. Everybody agrees. But let's not [let] innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs.
"And then, like, how long before that guy can get out? Can we figure out how to get them out? Is there any plan in place to alert the authorities that they've made a horrible mistake and correct it?"
Первыми на нейтральный статус от FIG в марте 2024-го решились четыре российских спортсмена, выступающие в прыжках на батуте – дисциплине, которая тоже входит в юрисдикцию Международной федерации гимнастики. Из белорусских гимнастов к тому моменту его получили уже 32 человека. В декабре желание соревноваться на международной арене, пусть даже в качестве нейтральных спортсменов, начало набирать обороты: как рассказывал первый вице-президент Федерации гимнастики России Василий Титов, заявки на получение статуса подали около 100 человек.
В начале марта 2025 года FIG выдала нейтральный статус 12 российским спортивным гимнастам. Ими оказались олимпийская чемпионка Ангелина Мельникова, Мария Агафонова, Алёна Глотова, Анна Калмыкова, Злата Осокина, Людмила Рощина, Ксения Зеляева, Григорий Климентьев, Кирилл Прокопьев, а также Даниел Маринов, Илья Заика и Владислав Поляшов. С последними тремя произошла странная история: 31 марта стало известно, что их имена пропали из перечня нейтральных атлетов. Впрочем, спустя некоторое время Маринова, Заику и Поляшова вернули в этот список.
Причём в то время, пока Даниел, Илья и Владислав отсутствовали в списке, они оставались в предварительном составе участников этапа Кубка мира в катарской Дохе, который пройдет с 16 по 19 апреля. Как объяснила в интервью «Матч ТВ» старший тренер сборной России по спортивной гимнастике Валентина Родионенко, их исчезновение было связано с технической ошибкой.
"This case is not about abortion. This case is about general healthcare," Katherine Farris, the chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, told The Independent.
"If Medicaid enrollees can't enforce the rights that the Medicaid statute creates, then those rights, you know, they're not real rights," Elizabeth Taylor, the executive director of the National Health Law Program who wrote a brief to support Planned Parenthood, told Axios.
"It is essential to the effective working of the Medicaid program ... that when they aren't getting what they're legally entitled to, they can go into court and enforce those rights," she added.
Booker's speech so far has covered several topics, including cutbacks to Social Security, research funding, immigration, national security, and more, taking often-lengthy questions and statements from Democrat senators throughout the night without yielding the floor.
Such questions and comments are allowed under Senate rules, but Booker must remain standing to hold the floor. During the night, he took questions from Sens. Andy Kim, D-N.Y., and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and early Tuesday took comments and statements from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.
In 2016, Murphy took the Senate floor for a 15-hour filibuster to demand gun-control legislation after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.
Виктория, как вы считаете, действительно ли это была техническая ошибка, и с чем ещё это может быть связано?
Надеюсь, что это была техническая ошибка, и ребята будут выступать на соревнованиях, и их допустят. Единственное, что я могу – это пожелать им, чтобы это была всего лишь техническая ошибка.
Каким образом гимнаст может себя защитить в таких обстоятельствах?
Уже никак. Просто тренируются дальше, не обращают внимания. А потом всё объясняется, рассказывается. Мы и так сейчас в тяжёлом положении, я думаю, ребята уже ко всему готовы.
Cotton said the legislation "will remove the red tape that places an undue financial burden on would-be gun owners," according to Breitbart.
The National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation endorsed the legislation.
"This $200 punitive tax has only ever served as a financial barrier for law-abiding Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights," John Commerford, executive director of National Rifle Association-Institute for Legislative Action, said in a statement, according to Breitbart.
https://inleo.io/threads/view/carephree/re-leothreads-34gervkay
Runway says its latest AI video model can actually generate consistent scenes and people
AI startup Runway says its latest AI video model can generate consistent scenes and people across multiple shots, according to an announcement. AI-generated videos can struggle with maintaining consistent storytelling, but Runway claims on X that the new model, Gen-4, should allow users more “continuity and control” while telling stories.
#technology #runway #ai
Currently rolling out to paid and enterprise users, the new Gen-4 video synthesis model allows users to generate characters and objects across shots using a single reference image. Users must then describe the composition they want, and the model will then generate consistent outputs from multiple angles.
As an example, the startup released a video of a woman maintaining her appearance in different shots and contexts across a variety of lighting conditions.
The release comes less than a year after Runway announced its Gen-3 Alpha video generator. That model extended the length of videos users could produce, but also sparked controversy as reportedly had been trained on thousands of scraped YouTube videos and pirated films.