Pocket Tactics:
Follow these steps to cancel your LinkedIn Premium membership:
– Visit linkedin.com on your device or desktop – Log into your LinkedIn account– Click the ‘profile’ option at the top left of the app/page– Select ‘premium features’– Click ‘premium account and features’– Go ahead select the ‘manage subscription’ option– Now, head to the ‘manage premium account’ page, select ‘cancel subscription’– Follow the instructions from here and your LinkedIn Premium subscription will be canceledLink
Matt Birchler, at Birchtree:
I’m not going to tell you Samsung never follow Apple's lead, but I think we’re in silly territory when we’re suggesting Samsung is copying Apple by releasing a thinner phone before Apple does the same thing. A thinner phone…something Samsung never would have thought of themselves. 😛Link
This one is easy: Samsung produces components for Apple; therefore they have prior knowledge of the form factor. Moreover, Samsung has a much faster go to market process than Apple, which allows them to have a good several months time to market.
Apple CEO Tim Cook will personally donate $1 million to President-elect Trump’s inaugural committee, sources with knowledge of the donation tell AxiosLink
Inauguration donation from Cook, same as the one from Zuckerberg
9to5Mac:
The Chinese government forced Apple to remove VPN apps from the App Store there way back in 2017, and the company is now having to do the same in India.Link
Blocking VPN apps is close to simply asking people not to use VPN.
Anybody who signs up for a VPN receives full set up information on how to have that iOS VPN set without the need of a UI.
TechDirt:
In other words, Musk reserves the right to unilaterally decide which blocks and mutes are “legitimate” and which are not, based on criteria known only to him. This arbitrary and opaque process is a far cry from a principled commitment to free speech.Link
It has always been like this, and always will be.
404 Media:
Almost two years ago, Louisiana passed a law that started a wave that’s since spread across the entire U.S. south, and has changed the way people there can access adult content. As of today, Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina join the list of 17 states that can’t access some of the most popular porn sites on the internet, because of regressive laws that claim to protect children but restrict adults’ use of the internet, instead.
MegaLag detailed explanation on how was this possible.
The short story is PayPal owns this browser extension, Honey, that promises it discounts everything you intend to buy, while it actually strips down the influencers' affiliate commissions.
If you never saw a PR suicide-by-greed, PayPal has just committed one.
Sky News:
Three air fryers, made by the Chinese brands Xiaomi, Tencent and Aigostar, wanted to record audio on their owner's phone for no specified reason, according to the Which? study. Meanwhile, smart TVs made by Hisense and Samsung which were tested by Which? asked for people's postcodes during set-up. Samsung's TV app also asked for permission to be able to see all the other apps on the user's phone.All of the products in the research required privacy consent to work properly and wanted to know users' precise locations.
The Platformer:
Earlier this year, a group of accounts had begun asking the company’s chatbot, Claude, to generate text for search engine optimization — the art of getting a website to rank more highly in Google. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a publisher trying to generate keywords to describe their site to Google. But these accounts, which worded their prompts carefully in an apparent effort to escape detection by Anthropic’s normal filters, appeared to be part of a coordinated effort.
Wall Street Journal:
Before the dinner, Zuckerberg did a private demonstration for Trump of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, which he gifted to the president-elect, the people familiar with the discussions said.Zuckerberg’s team told the inaugural fund before the dinner that Meta planned to donate, one of the people said.Link
Two things: one, all US politics and policies will go first through Trump’s own pockets, and two, I dislike people who bend the knee preemptively.
Ars Technica, on TikTok at risk of being banned in the US:
"Estimates show that small businesses on TikTok would lose more than $1 billion in revenue [in US] and creators would suffer almost $300 million in lost earnings in just one month unless the TikTok Ban is halted," TikTok's spokesperson said. In the same period, TikTok would lose about 29 percent of advertising revenue, the court filing said, after losing a third or more of users.
Financial Times, on Russian-backed campaign in Romania (paywalled):
The Russian-backed influence campaign that prompted Romania to scrap its presidential election result echoes operations carried out in Moldova and other countries this year, according to Romanian intelligence reports and Moldovan officials.The short story is that presidential elections in Romania were annulled when the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) informed the National Security Council (CSAT) that Calin Georgescu’s (one of the most obscure candidates) campaign was sponsored and managed by the Russian government.
The Atlantic, about the new reasoning OpenAI Pro o1
Even if you accept the claim that o1 understands, instead of mimicking, the logic that underlies its responses, the program might actually be further from general intelligence than ChatGPT. o1’s improvements are constrained to specific subjects where you can confirm whether a solution is true—like checking a proof against mathematical laws or testing computer code for bugs. There’s no objective rubric for beautiful poetry, persuasive rhetoric, or emotional empathy with which to train the model.
The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote next week on an annual defense bill that includes just over $3 billion to help U.S. telecom companies remove equipment made by Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE from American wireless networks.Link
I may be missing something here: US is spending $3 bn to remove Chinese hardware, but they protect TikTok for the sake of liberty of speech?
I fancy liberty of speech too, but not when it comes from an uncontrollable channel that is owned by non-US entities.
This is an automated, AI managed, human washing machine, that gets you cleaned in 15 minutes. It also assesses your stress level and directs water jets to your tensioned muscles.
The machine's designer was Manatsu Ueda, a 90-year-old resident of Toyonaka, Osaka PrefectureAnd:
The human washing machine of the future doesn't just wash the body. Sensors scanning the person's back measure their levels of stress and fatigue, and in response, the device outputs imagery in pace with their state of body and mind to create a relaxing space for them.
I stumbled upon Quiche Browser by chance, while looking for Bluesky devs lists. Quiche Browser is a web browser for iOS, highly customizable, sleek, buttery, and swift.
It has already gotten a place on my first screen, competing with Safari and Arc. Its pricing model is one of the softest I have seen in the market: free forever, pay only for cosmetics, if you want them; on top of that, there is donation area that has common sense.
Dot is an AI companion (a real companion, not a solar CASIO) that resembles Pi (a short lived personal companion, whose founder, Mustafa Suleyman, moved to Microsoft and left Pi in struggle).
Dot is made by The New Computer, a five persons company, of which some worked for Apple and Kenosha.
That may not be relevant for a new business, but it is obvious they brought their DNA with them.
So here came this day, but it took a hit in the head first for FBI to realize end-to-end encrypted messaging apps are the only solution to protect from eavesdropping.
John Gruber, at Daring Fireball:
It seems kind of new for the FBI to call encryption “our friend”, but now that I think about it, their beef over the years has primarily been about gaining access to locked devices, not eavesdropping on communication protocols.
The Browser Company, makers of ARC browser, are making another AI-based browser. This time better and smarter, it is called DIA and it is fully AI-based.
Take a look: https://vimeo.com/1035951032
(I cannot link to X, it is against my religion…)
OpenAI is discussing plans to introduce advertising to its artificial intelligence products, as the ChatGPT maker seeks new revenue sources as it restructures as a for-profit company.Sarah Friar, chief financial officer at OpenAI, told the Financial Times in an interview that the $150bn AI start-up was weighing up an ads model, adding that it planned to be “thoughtful about when and where we implement them [ads]”.Link
It is hard to think a $150Bn company needs ads to make a profit.
The Biden administration said Tuesday that it would award up to $7.86 billion in direct funding to Intel, with the U.S. chip giant set to receive at least $1 billion of that money before the end of the year.The money is a reduction from Intel’s preliminary award of $8.5 billion, which President Biden announced during a visit to the company’s Arizona plant in March. The Commerce Department said it had reduced Intel’s grant because the chip maker, the biggest recipient of money under the CHIPS Act, also received a $3 billion contract to make semiconductors domestically for the military.
As the left flees and X loses broader relevance, it becomes a more overtly right-wing site. But the right needs liberals on X. If the platform becomes akin to “alt-tech platforms” such as Gab or Truth Social, this shift would be good for people on the right who want their politics to be affirmed. It may not be as good for persuading people to join their political movement.Link
I am certain common sense is not a monopoly, especially not a monopoly of a party.
I’m 80 years old, and I’m looking forward to many more years of creating new and interesting things with AI.Link
From 60s music, to marriage advice, to hypothetical matchup between Romans and Vikings. It is captivating and mind opening how people are enriching their lives with AI.
An "experimental art installation" dubbed "Deus in Machina" by the St. Peter's Church in Lucerne has seen a confessional booth outfitted with a vertically aligned monitor, a bunch of computer equipment and a big blue button for adventurous penitents willing to ask questions to AI Jesus (or is that JAIsus?) in one of 100 languages he's programmed to speak and respond in.Link
I hate these guys came up with this name before me.