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After Kasparov’s loss, the experts didn’t miss a beat. They said Chess was too easy and postulated that machines would never beat us at Go. Champion Lee Sedol’s loss against DeepMind’s AlphaGo proved them wrong there. Then the experts said AI would never beat us at games where strategy could be overcome by human creativity, such as poker. Then AI beat us at poker. And at StarCraft. Now it’s going for even more complex games such as Magic: The Gathering....

At the end of last year, Ant Group (which owns the payment platform AliPay) failed to go public on the stock market. Chinese regulators cited a lack of compliance with new fintech regulations, which were abruptly introduced a week after founder Jack Ma publicly criticized the existing regulatory regime. Since then, the calculated reining-in of China’s largest tech firms by the government continues unabated, culminating in several high-profile cases over the past month....

As our world is shaken in the most dramatic way imaginable, it is time for our global startup community to get closer, support, and learn from each other. Some of us remember the crash of 1987 and the dot-com bubble burst of 2000, in addition to the 2007 financial crisis. Not only is its human impact horrible, but the current economic crisis is more sudden and can easily end up being worse....

According to a lawsuit filed in New York over the weekend, Bitfinex and Tether “engaged in unfair, deceptive, untrue or misleading acts” by failing to disclose that Tether was not backed 1:1 to by the US dollar. Other defendants named in the suit include Digfinex (the majority owner of Bitfinex and Tether)and its current executives, payment processor Crypto Capital, and Bitfinex’s former chief strategy officer Phil Potter, who reportedly left the company in January last year....

“You should…commence the conversation by saying ‘Hulloa!’” suggested the first phone book, New Haven, Connecticut’s The Telephone Directory. “When you are done talking, say ‘That is all!’, and the person spoken to should say ‘O.K.’” And so language changed, at least to start conversations. As NPR summarized from Ammon Shea’s book The First Telephone Book, Thomas Edison favored starting phone calls with “Hello” while the more widely credited father of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, preferred “Ahoy....

For some, COVID-19 is synonymous with loneliness and relationship stress. Many people end up choosing between intimacy and security. Singles looking for partners resign to celibacy, while couples experience tensions related to forced isolation. But creativity loves adversity. In the face of a global pandemic, we are finding new, innovative and safe ways to (re)connect intimately and sexually through technology. As researchers studying erobotics, a field intersecting sexuality and technology, we are interested in how human-machine erotic interactions can contribute to well-being — even in times of worldwide health crisis....

The developer has come up with a solution for streamers worried about getting in trouble because of copyrighted tunes. The game, which is slated to drop on December 10, will arrive with an option to disable certain songs from playing in an attempt to avoid copyright strikes while streaming, Polygon reports. “We know that for content creators, licensed music can sometimes be problematic,” CD Project Red UK head of communication Hollie Bennet said in a video presentation....

While making songs sounds like a simple task when we listen to them, but it seems incredibly hard when you pick up an instrument. This is probably the perfect time for you to pick up the instrument that’s been lying somewhere in your house for ages. So, today’s list of tools includes stuff that’ll help you learn some music, and make life more fun during this lockdown. Fender, one of the leading manufacturers of guitars in the world, is offering three months of free lessons on its Fender Play platform (app and website)....

In a Sunday interview with Axios on HBO, Bosworth was grilled about misinformation on social media. The Facebook veteran mounted a stern defense of his company. According to Bosworth, it’s not platforms that are responsible for misinformation — it’s their users: Bosworth does have a point: people are awful and stupid. We’re drawn to divisive content, susceptible to bullshit, and prone to confirmation biases. Yet Bosworth overlooks how algorithms influence these tendencies....

Cloud storage is like New York real estate. When you stumble across a great deal, you’ve gotta jump on it, then figure out everything you’re going to do with it. Thanks to Black Friday, some of those already standout deals are getting an even more impressive bump, allowing shoppers to carve out huge cloud storage spaces it could take years to fill at super-low one time pricing. Case in point, Degoo Premium is offering up a cavernous 10TB of space in the cloud as part of its 10TB Lifetime Backup Plan, now on sale for just $59....

Developers previously had access to a Linux kernel and a terminal app with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), but the emphasis was on command-line tools. They could even run GUI apps in Windows 10 with some workarounds, but this is the first time they’re getting native support for the feature. Behold: This lets developers test and build Linux GUI apps without leaving the Windows environment, giving them access to GPU acceleration and better performance than you’d get with a virtual machine....

But what exactly is open-source intelligence? And how is it helping efforts to understand what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine? Broadly speaking, open-source intelligence describes the knowledge or insight emerging from focused collection, monitoring, and analysis of publicly accessible information, now mostly online, using specialized methods and tools. At first sight, open-source intelligence seems to be a contradiction in terms. Intelligence is usually associated with secrets and spies, not the insights of online investigators, many of them amateur, who share their findings with anyone who is interested....

If you put an ad in your local newspaper or on television, you understand enough about newspaper circulation and TV ratings to get a general idea of how many people your ad will reach. But when you buy an ad through Google Ads or on a platform like LinkedIn or YouTube, what should you expect? And are you getting the most out of your ad buy in those arenas? The Complete Digital Advertising Super Bundle ($78....

Disney+ today rolled out a feature called GroupWatch, designed to let users watch their shows and movies together without having to use third-party software. So if you’ve been dying to have that Disney watch party with your friends, but want to keep a responsible social distance, now you can finally do that. GroupWatch allows up to seven users to watch at once, provided they all have Disney+ subscriptions. Users can control pausing, rewinding, or fast-forwarding for the rest of the party — it reminds me a bit of the defunct Rabbit platform, actually....

In early May, Meta released Open Pretrained Transformer (OPT-175B), a large language model (LLM) that can perform various tasks. Large language models have become one of the hottest areas of research in artificial intelligence in the past few years. OPT-175B is the latest entrant in the LLM arms race triggered by OpenAI’s GPT-3, a deep neural network with 175 billion parameters. GPT-3 showed that LLMs can perform many tasks without undergoing extra training and only seeing a few examples (zero- or few-shot learning)....

There’s a reason why Adobe Photoshop is still the undisputed king of the image editing universe. It’s held the belt for the last quarter century and shows virtually no sign of stopping anytime soon. So if that’s the case, who does Adobe even bother to include sister image managing software Adobe Lightroom in their uber-successful Creative Cloud? Well, they include it because Adobe Lightroom is a lot more powerful than meets the eye, as the training in the Comprehensive Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop Bundle ($39....

Twitter says it suspended the account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” referencing the attack on the Capitol by a group of pro-Trump thugs that resulted in five deaths. — Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 8, 2021 The company adds that although its “public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly,” these people “are not above our rules entirely and cannot use Twitter to incite violence, among other things....

But what’s driving the investment boom? Why are ebikes so hot right now? What makes a company a good investment, and how does the market differ from Europe vs the US? I sat down with Clement Pointillart, Executive Director of growth-equity fund Verlinvest, and Bailey Morrow, Director of consumer and frontier tech at Silicon Valley Bank, to find out what’s really happening in the world of ebike investment behind the headlines....

Do it yourself electronics tinkerers are living in a heyday of opportunities. Between the ultra customization options of Arduino boards and components, the utility of the micro-computing power of the Raspberry Pi and the WiFi/Bluetooth capabilities that ESP32 microcontrollers offer, possible projects really are only limited by the scope of the imagination. Of course, for every hobbyist crafting autonomous robots and home security devices and DIY media servers, there are a dozen who have no idea this mini-tech revolution is even happening....

ERC-20 tokens are designed and used solely on the Ethereum platform and can be shared, exchanged for other tokens, or transferred to a cryptocurrency wallet. The new tokens include two eToro stablecoins: eToro EuroX (EURX) and eToro US DollarX (USDX). They also feature three crypto assets: Maker (MKR), Basic Attention Token (BAT), and OmiseGO (OMG). “Adding 120 ERC-20 tokens to the eToro wallet is further evidence of our belief that one day all investable assets will be tokenized,” said Doro Rosenblum, managing director of eToroX....