“Buy Now Pay Later” apps give millions of users the chance to instantly purchase what they want, then pay off the item in installments. But as the services extend from small-ticket items to luxury goods, exercise equipment, and even rent and utilities, consumer protection advocates worry they may lead people into buying more than they
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After months of haggling, the House of Representatives on Friday evening passed a major federal infrastructure bill that promises to inject $1.2 trillion over the next five years into supporting trains, planes, automobiles, utility networks, and energy systems. The legislation has been pared down from its original and more ambitious form, when it was worth
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No one likes email. It’s a broken piece of the modern world that we’ve yet to ditch despite also now having to listen for the pings of Slack and Teams. But a pair of researchers have uncovered one simple technique for reducing inbox dread: return email to its asynchronous roots. Most of us believe we
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Half a century ago, the battery of the future was built out of sodium. The reason has to do with why the seas are salty. Sodium is a light element that ionizes easily, giving up one of its electrons. In a battery, those ions shuttle back and forth between two oppositely charged plates, generating a
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The company, which runs several channels full of children’s content, just sold for $3 billion. Disney, look out. In the last month alone, videos from Cocomelon, Little Baby Bum, and Blippi have been viewed more than 2.37 billion times. These three YouTube channels—which are among the biggest on the platform—have, collectively, racked up 157 billion
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Burro makes carts that help growers of trees and vineyards with harvests. Meanwhile, the maker of Vespa scooters wants to carry your groceries. When Amazon introduced its home robot Astro earlier this year, it first showcased the robot following behind a person. It’s a simple idea that has captured people’s imaginations with depictions in science
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As more and more people switch to working from home, some are left counting the cost. Millions of people are seemingly ready and willing to take a pay cut to continue working remotely. Sixty-one percent of American workers; four in 10 Londoners; more than a quarter of office workers in the UK. Breathless media reports
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SenseTime and Megvii both include facial recognition technology among their offerings and do a lot of business with government agencies.  Last November, the Chinese government ordered Ant Group, a business spun out of Alibaba that operates the ubiquitous Alipay mobile payments platform and other financial services, to cancel its hotly anticipated IPO at the last
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The Meta dream envisages whole companies operating in a virtual world. Many made the switch years ago—with mixed results. Facebook’s metaverse, or Meta’s metaverse, isn’t just being touted as a better version of the internet—it’s being hailed as a better version of reality. We will, apparently, “socialize, learn, collaborate, and play” in an interconnected 3D
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Used electric vehicle batteries could be the Achilles’ heel of the transportation revolution—or the gold mine that makes it real. This summer, Dirk Spiers, a tall, rumpled Dutchman-turned-Oklahoman, got a heads-up from General Motors about more problems with the Chevrolet Bolt. Over the previous year, the car model that had once been celebrated as GM’s
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It’s time for companies to listen to candidates, understand the skills they actually need, and use technology when it helps. Pity your HR team. Covid has sparked a wave of resignations, would-be replacements are demanding to work from home with better benefits, and recruitment processes are looking pretty broken. Broken how? Research suggests a third
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The National Security Commission on AI included members from Oracle, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Some of its recommendations are already federal law. Oracle, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are archenemies in the competitive cloud computing market. But in late 2018, top executives from the four companies, including future Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, teamed up on an
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Mark Zuckerberg would like you to call his troubled company something else now. From Wall Street to Main Street to Capitol Hill, everyone is mad at Facebook. The company has been under fire since a trove of leaked internal documents shed light on its struggles to prevent real-world harm, from political unrest to teen suicides.
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Researchers trained an algorithm to answer questions about human values. Some of the responses are troubling. Artificial intelligence has made it possible for machines to do all sorts of useful new things. But they still don’t know right from wrong. A new program called Delphi, developed by researchers at the University of Washington and the
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The president’s long-awaited nominees are strong proponents of narrowing the digital divide and restoring net neutrality rules. President Biden finally made his picks for the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday, ending a baffling delay that forced Democrats to operate in a 2–2 deadlock with Republicans instead of the 3–2 majority that the president’s party typically
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The “badge posts” of the company’s former researchers offer the parting thoughts of the disillusioned. “Hi, all,” reads a note on Facebook’s internal Workplace system that was posted on December 9, 2020. “Friday is going to be my last day at Facebook. It makes me sad to leave. I don’t think I’ll ever have a
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Human reviewers and AI filters struggle to police the flood of content—or understand the nuances in different Arabic dialects. Facebook launched support for Arabic in 2009 and scored a hit. Soon after, the service won plaudits for helping the mass protests known as the Arab Spring. By last year, Arabic was the third most common
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Internal research documents provide a blueprint for solving the company’s biggest problems. In December 2019, as Facebook was bracing for the looming chaos of the 2020 election, a post appeared on its internal discussion site. “We are responsible for viral content,” the title declared. The author walked through the ways in which Facebook’s algorithmic design
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A WIRED series dives into thousands of internal documents, showing a company rife with issues that it largely failed to address. On October 5, a former member of Facebook’s civic misinformation team named Frances Haugen testified before Congress. In her nearly two years at Facebook, Haugen said, she had consistently seen the company prioritize growth
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Plus: The infamous 2016 Macbook Pro, Gödel’s ontological proof, and a mascot’s moment of weakness. Hi, folks. So Facebook is changing its name? Sorry, Mark, Plaintext is taken. And apparently, so is “TRUTH Social.” The Plain View This week Apple introduced a set of new MacBook Pro laptops. During the prerecorded launch event, Apple’s engineers
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Making your News Feed chronological is an enlightening look at what’s really happening on the platform. Facebook is broken, says whistleblower Frances Haugen, who worked on the company’s civic integrity team. In testimony before Congress and in the media, Haugen has argued that the social giant’s algorithms contribute to maladies that range from teen mental
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Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, digital artist Beeple, scholar Timnit Gebru, actor John Cho, and more will discuss some of the biggest challenges facing humanity. Our world is facing some of the most critical challenges of all time. While the past decade ushered in dramatic technological acceleration, the last 18 months have kicked off a tectonic
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Many people eligible for Covid-era rent assistance have trouble navigating a “tangled web” of agencies because they don’t have reliable internet access. A national moratorium on evictions expired in late August, after the US Supreme Court blocked a Biden administration bid to extend it. Many feared a drastic upswing in evictions, but instead filings rose
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