Month: April 2023

Circumvent Facial Recognition with Yarn

Knitwear can protect you from a winter chill, but what if it could keep you safe from the prying eyes of Big Brother as well? [Ottilia Westerlund] decided to put her knitting skills to the test for this anti-surveillance sweater. [Westerlund] explains that “yarn is a programable material” containing FOR loops and other similar programming

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Large language models are the new cloud battleground

Two months ago, Amazon didn’t make a single mention of AI on its earnings call (Google and Microsoft mentioned AI dozens of times each). This past week, by contrast, the company’s cloud division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), could talk about little else. As announced by Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of database, analytics, and machine learning at

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Contract docs reveal the Georgia National Guard plans to use location-based phone surveillance to target ads using geofences around 67 local public high schools (Sam Biddle/The Intercept)

Sam Biddle / The Intercept: Contract docs reveal the Georgia National Guard plans to use location-based phone surveillance to target ads using geofences around 67 local public high schools  —  The Georgia Army National Guard plans to combine two deeply controversial practices — military recruiting at schools …

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Using STEP and STL Files in FreeCAD

If you’ve tried FreeCAD, you know that it has a daunting number of workbenches and options. [MangoJelly] has a large number of video tutorials on FreeCAD, and the latest one, below, covers working with STEP and STL with the tool. If you’ve ever wondered why designers like to work with STEP files and not STL,

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Q&A with Microsoft’s CVP of ads on keeping Bing Chat results from becoming too promotional, AI-powered search threatening publishers’ ad revenue, and more (Patience Haggin/Wall Street Journal)

Patience Haggin / Wall Street Journal: Q&A with Microsoft’s CVP of ads on keeping Bing Chat results from becoming too promotional, AI-powered search threatening publishers’ ad revenue, and more  —  Kya Sainsbury-Carter, who recently was named to head the company’s ad business, offers an inside look at Microsoft’s game plan

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Hackaday Links: April 16, 2023

The dystopian future you’ve been expecting is here now, at least if you live in New York City, which unveiled a trio of technology solutions to the city’s crime woes this week. Surprisingly, the least terrifying one is “DigiDog,” which seems to be more or less an off-the-shelf Spot robot from Boston Dynamics. DigiDog’s job

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A US House Committee publishes a draft stablecoin bill proposing a moratorium on stablecoins backed by other cryptocurrencies, requesting a CBDC study, and more (Nikhilesh De/CoinDesk)

Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk: A US House Committee publishes a draft stablecoin bill proposing a moratorium on stablecoins backed by other cryptocurrencies, requesting a CBDC study, and more  —  The stablecoin bill is the first major piece of crypto legislation in 2023.  —  The U.S. House Financial Services Committee published …

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Netflix’s second ever livestream hit technical issues, leading to a 75+ minute delay and the company taping the Love is Blind reunion episode for later viewing (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch)

Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch: Netflix’s second ever livestream hit technical issues, leading to a 75+ minute delay and the company taping the Love is Blind reunion episode for later viewing  —  Netflix had some serious issues with the livestream of its “Love is Blind” reunion episode.  We always knew the livestream would be messy …

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