Month: February 2022

Crypto enthusiasts and government officials are not natural allies, at least outside Miami. And yet Colorado governor Jared Polis received a warm welcome when he appeared onstage at last week’s ETHDenver conference to present his vision for making Colorado the “first digital state.” That’s because he came bearing good news for the crypto faithful. Polis,
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When the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 project was announced in 2015, it promised a brave new energy future for Europe. Criss-crossing under the Baltic Sea from western Siberia to make land in Germany, it assured Germany—and the tight-knit European energy market, through which natural gas supplies cross borders with ease—guaranteed supply. Nord Stream 2
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Last November, the tech giant Yandex unveiled Chervonenkis, Russia’s most powerful supercomputer and the 19th most powerful commercial computer on the planet. Chervonenkis, which Yandex uses to train artificial intelligence algorithms for applications like web search and translation, was built by linking together more than 1,500 chips from the US company Nvidia. Earlier this week,
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“It’s startling and disturbing,” says Ashique KhudaBukhsh, an assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology who researched the problem with collaborators Krithika Ramesh and Sumeet Kumar at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. Automated captions are not available on YouTube Kids, the version of the service aimed at children. But many families use the
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Jose Fernando Rico Mercado, 34, who co-owns three childcare facilities in Mexico, has always run side gigs, including designing notebooks sold on demand on Amazon. During the pandemic, his monthly earnings fell from $17,000 at their peak to almost zero. He joined Fiverr and set up a team of illustrators fulfilling orders for new NFT
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Emily Christensen knows this sounds a little West Coast, but when she enters the old houses her company has been hired to take apart, she senses an energy. “It’s intense,” she says. “These houses have seen decades of human drama.” Christensen and her partner, David Greenhill, started their firm, Good Wood, in 2016. Portland, Oregon,
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Last year, Shirin Nilizadeh got a call from a friend who had been worn down looking for a job. Her friend had sent her résumé to infinite job portals, only for it to seemingly disappear into a black hole. “She was going around asking everyone, ‘What’s the trick?’” Nilizadeh remembers. Nilizadeth didn’t have job advice,
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Lately I have been trying to get through the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s big report, the one that came out late last year, called “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.” It’s a challenge because (a) I must, um, learn as I go, and (b) the PDF is nearly 4,000 pages of aggregated,
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Sports fans who tuned in to watch the Beijing Winter Olympics on YouTube are instead being served propaganda videos. An analysis of YouTube search results by WIRED found that people who typed “Beijing,” “Beijing 2022,” “Olympics,” or “Olympics 2022” were shown pro-China and anti-China propaganda videos in the top results. Five of the most prominent
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Joy Nazzari, the founder of British proptech startup Showhere, is desperately trying to hire 16 people—a combination of senior-level developers, project managers, and designers. But her pool of candidates is running dry. “It’s never been harder or more expensive to hire new people,” she says. “Yet you also have to defend who you already have,
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What is a real ape? On OpenSea, the internet’s most popular NFT marketplace, answering that question incorrectly can be costly. Last year, Bored Apes—cartoon primates linked to unique cryptocurrency tokens—skyrocketed in popularity. Now the cheapest cost $309,000, and OpenSea is crawling with imitations and rip-offs. Two projects featuring flipped versions of original Bored Apes, called
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On February 3, the group started accepting ether donations on crypto crowdfunding platform Juicebox, eventually raising some $52 million. In exchange for their contributions, all donors received cryptocurrency $JUSTICE tokens, which give holders a voice in how AssangeDAO’s resources are used. That element, Taaki says, makes the DAO mechanism more effective at raising funds than
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Takuma Miyazono began driving virtual race cars at age 4, when his father brought home the highly realistic motorsport game Gran Turismo 4. Sixteen years later, in 2020, Miyazono became the Gran Turismo world champion, winning an unprecedented “triple crown” of esports motor racing events. But he had never faced a Gran Turismo driver quite
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The collapse of the biggest chip deal in history will complicate the future for its intended target. The mega-deal would have seen Nvidia, the world’s largest chip company by market capitalization, acquire Arm, a UK company that licenses chip designs that are increasingly vital across the tech industry. The deal’s collapse is a blow to
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The Internal Revenue Service is dropping a controversial facial recognition system that requires people to upload video selfies when creating new IRS online accounts. “The IRS announced it will transition away from using a third-party service for facial recognition to help authenticate people creating new online accounts,” the agency said on Monday. “The transition will
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Since January 6, 2021, meanwhile, the app’s position among the Trump movement has continued to consolidate. Channels owned by far-right figures are mushrooming: Trump lawyer turned election conspiracy theorist Lin Wood is nearing a million subscribers; former 8chan administrator Ron Watkins has almost half a million. Among the Trump-backed elected politicians who have opened thriving
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The current wave of artificial intelligence can be traced back to 2012, and an academic contest that measured how well algorithms could recognize objects in photographs. That year, researchers found that feeding thousands of images into an algorithm inspired loosely by the way neurons in a brain respond to input produced a huge leap in
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