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VHS Robot Swaps Tapes, as Seen in Hackers

Tape robots are typically used in places that store vast amounts of data – think film studios and government archives. If you’ve seen the 1995 cult movie Hackers, you might remember a scene where the main character hacks into a TV station and reprograms their tape ‘bot to load a series he wanted to watch.

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A California judge rules that the RR/BAYC NFTs, which featured primates in similar poses to the BAYC under the pretense of satire, violated Yuga Labs’ copyright (Sam Reynolds/CoinDesk)

Sam Reynolds / CoinDesk: A California judge rules that the RR/BAYC NFTs, which featured primates in similar poses to the BAYC under the pretense of satire, violated Yuga Labs’ copyright  —  Use of BAYC trademarks by Ripps’ RR/BAYC was intended to confuse consumers, a U.S. judge in California has ruled

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AI’s mythology as a technology for creating intelligent beings instills fear; “data dignity” and seeing AI as a social collaboration could address worries (Jaron Lanier/New Yorker)

Jaron Lanier / New Yorker: AI’s mythology as a technology for creating intelligent beings instills fear; “data dignity” and seeing AI as a social collaboration could address worries  —  There are ways of controlling the new technology—but first we have to stop mythologizing it.

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The Shuttle Engine Needed 3D Printing, But…

If we asked you to design a circuit to blink a flashing turn signal, you would probably reach for a cheap micro or a 555. But old cars used bimetallic strips in a thermomechanical design. Why? Because, initially, 555s and microcontrollers weren’t available. [Breaking Taps] has the story of NASA engineers who needed some special

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A look at GeoComply, which says it checks 10B online sports bets per year on 400M+ devices to verify if the bets are happening in a US state where they’re legal (Katherine Sayre/Wall Street Journal)

Katherine Sayre / Wall Street Journal: A look at GeoComply, which says it checks 10B online sports bets per year on 400M+ devices to verify if the bets are happening in a US state where they’re legal  —  Even before online wagering on sports was legal in the U.S., Anna Sainsbury and David Briggs predicted

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Tiny Three-Tube Receiver Completes Spy Radio Suite

In our surface-mount age, it’s easy to be jaded about miniaturization. We pretty much expect every circuit to be dimensionally optimized, something that’s easy to do when SMDs that rival grains of sand are available. But dial the calendar back half a century or so and miniaturization was a much more challenging proposition. Challenging, perhaps,

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Some critics of Twitter Blue, such as @dril, Kara Swisher, and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, say they have been given unwanted Blue checkmarks (Mike Pearl/Mashable)

Mike Pearl / Mashable: Some critics of Twitter Blue, such as @dril, Kara Swisher, and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, say they have been given unwanted Blue checkmarks  —  If you can’t beat ’em verify ’em. … The latest speed bump in the rollout of Twitter’s revamped verification policy under new owner Elon Musk is here:

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A Delicious Advancement in Battery Tech

Electronics have been sent to some pretty extreme environments, but inside a living host is a particularly tricky set of conditions, especially if you don’t want to damage the organism ingesting the equipment. One step in that direction could be an edible battery cell. (via Electrek) Developed by scientists at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia,

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Cloud infrastructure company Volumez, which develops controller orchestration software, raised a $20M Series A led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Meir Orbach / CTech: Cloud infrastructure company Volumez, which develops controller orchestration software, raised a $20M Series A led by Koch Disruptive Technologies  —  Volumez’s controller-less architecture composes direct Linux data paths between media and applications, helping companies convert knowledge into intelligence quickly and at scale

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Twitter Blue checkmarks were restored on Saturday for some of the platform’s biggest names, including those who had not criticized the verification system (Victor Swezey/The Daily Beast)

Victor Swezey / The Daily Beast: Twitter Blue checkmarks were restored on Saturday for some of the platform’s biggest names, including those who had not criticized the verification system  —  Across Twitter on Saturday, some of the platform’s biggest names expressed surprise when their fickle checkmarks suddenly reappeared.

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