The acting head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told lawmakers that it has bought and used spyware made by Paragon Solutions in drug trafficking cases, according to a letter seen by TechCrunch. ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons wrote in the letter to three congresspeople that he approved the agency’s criminal investigative unit Homeland Security … Read more
As generative AI matures from a novelty into a workplace staple, a new friction point has emerged: the "shadow AI" or "Bring Your Own AI (BYOAI)" crisis. Much like the unsanctioned use of personal devices in years past, developers and knowledge workers are increasingly deploying autonomous agents on personal infrastructure to manage their professional workflows. … Read more
Two pieces of good gaming news today. First: Dinosaur Polo Club has shadow dropped a brand new game today. Second, it’s available for free on both PC and Mac from Itch.io. The project is called Read the F*cking Manual, or RTFM, and it is a co-op game based on working in tech support. Dinosaur Polo … Read more
To build the autonomous machines of the future, sometimes your model needs a model. Companies developing self-driving cars, robots manipulating the physical environment, or autonomous construction equipment collect thousands, if not millions, of hours of video data for evaluation and training. Organizing and cataloging that video is now a job for humans, who have to … Read more
For three decades, the web has existed in a state of architectural denial. It is a platform originally conceived to share static physics papers, yet it is now tasked with rendering the most complex, interactive, and generative interfaces humanity has ever conceived. At the heart of this tension lies a single, invisible, and prohibitively expensive … Read more
The air felt different at this year’s SXSW, the annual March festival where tech meets pop culture in Austin. I was reminded of the 2019 SXSW when people packed downtown, and snake lines formed out of local ventures. Attendees said it was like that again this year, though my friend, who lives in the area and … Read more
A new trailer has given us our best look yet at the upcoming The Ghost in the Shell anime. While it might not tell us all that much about the direction the show will go in plot-wise, it sure is aesthetically pleasing, with a throwback art style that looks a lot more like the original … Read more
Processing 200,000 tokens through a large language model is expensive and slow: the longer the context, the faster the costs spiral. Researchers at Tsinghua University and Z.ai have built a technique called IndexCache that cuts up to 75% of the redundant computation in sparse attention models, delivering up to 1.82x faster time-to-first-token and 1.48x faster … Read more
Almost four years after launching a security feature called Lockdown Mode, Apple says it has yet to see a case where someone’s device was hacked with these additional security protections switched on. “We are not aware of any successful mercenary spyware attacks against a Lockdown Mode-enabled Apple device,” Apple spokesperson Sarah O’Rourke told TechCrunch on … Read more
Google is adding a pair of new features to Gemini aimed at making it easier to switch to the AI chatbot. Personal history and past context are big components to how a chatbot provides customized answers to each user. Gemini now supports importing history from other AI platforms. Both free and paid consumer accounts can … Read more
