Author Archives: admin

As Quantum Computing Threats Loom, Microsoft Updates Its Core Crypto Library

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft has updated a key cryptographic library with two new encryption algorithms designed to withstand attacks from quantum computers. The updates were made last week to SymCrypt, a core cryptographic code library for handing cryptographic functions in Windows and Linux. The library, started in 2006, provides… Read More »

Voyager 1 Team Accomplishes Tricky Thruster Swap

fjo3 shares a report from NASA: Engineers working on NASA’s Voyager 1 probe have successfully mitigated an issue with the spacecraft’s thrusters, which keep the distant explorer pointed at Earth so that it can receive commands, send engineering data, and provide the unique science data it is gathering. After 47 years, a fuel tube inside… Read More »

OpenAI Fundraising Set To Vault Startup’s Valuation To $150 Billion

OpenAI is in talks to raise $6.5 billion from investors at a valuation of $150 billion, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the situation. From the report: The new valuation, a figure that doesn’t include the money being raised, is significantly higher than the $86 billion valuation from the company’s tender offer earlier this… Read More »

‘An AI Bot Named James Has My Old Local News Job’

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired, written by Guthrie Scrimgeour: It always seemed difficult for the newspaper where I used to work, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, to hire reporters. If someone left, it could take months before we hired a replacement, if we ever did. So, last… Read More »

Mistral Releases Pixtral 12B, Its First-Ever Multimodal AI Model

Mistral AI has launched Pixtral 12B, its first multimodal model with language and vision processing capabilities, positioning it to compete with AI leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic. You can download its source code from Hugging Face, GitHub, or via a torrent link. VentureBeat reports: While the official details of the new model, including the data… Read More »

Bluesky Lets You Post Videos Now

Bluesky, the decentralized social networking startup, has introduced support for videos up to 60 seconds long in its latest update, version 1.91. The Verge reports: The videos will autoplay by default, but Bluesky says you can turn this feature off in the settings menu. You can also add subtitles to your videos, as well as… Read More »

Mark Zuckerberg Says He’s Done Apologizing

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The home of the Golden State Warriors was packed on Tuesday evening this week, but it wasn’t to watch Steph Curry. Thousands of fans gathered at the Chase Center in downtown San Francisco to watch one of Silicon Valley’s biggest ballers, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, sit down… Read More »

Human Drivers Keep Rear-Ending Waymos

Waymo’s driverless cars have a much lower crash rate than human drivers, with fewer than one injury-causing crash per million miles driven, compared to an estimated 64 crashes by human drivers over the same distance. As Ars Technica’s Timothy B. Lee notes, a significant portion of Waymo’s most severe crashes involved human drivers rear-ending the… Read More »