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On this day, 44 years ago, Microsoft launched its first hardware product, the Z80 SoftCard, a vital accessory for the Apple II computer, enabling it to run the once-popular CP/M OS and software like WordStar, significantly boosting Microsoft's revenues until its discontinuation in 1986 due to declining CP/M interest.
In today's Techpresso:
🤷♀️ Discord April Fool's video surpasses 1B YouTube views in one day
🛒 Amazon removes cashierless system from its grocery stores
🙃 Facebook let Netflix peek into user DMs, court docs claim
🚗 Tesla sales fall amid increased competition
💰 Intel says past mistakes contributed to its foundry business losing $7 billion last year
🎁 + 7 other news you might like
🔮 + 8 handpicked research papers and tools
🤷♀️ Discord April Fool's video surpasses 1B YouTube views in one dayLINK
An April Fool’s Day video by Discord humorously advertising "Loot boxes" unexpectedly surpassed a billion views on YouTube in less than a day.
Speculations arise that Discord may have unintentionally enabled a "viewbotting" mechanism, inflating the video's view count significantly.
Despite its rapid view count increase, Discord's video does not come close to the most viewed video on YouTube, "Baby Shark," which has over 14 billion views.
🛒 Amazon removes cashierless system from its grocery storesLINK
Amazon is discontinuing its "Just Walk Out" checkout-free technology in its Amazon Fresh grocery stores, opting instead for Dash Carts and self-checkout counters.
"Just Walk Out" technology, introduced back in 2016, has faced challenges such as delayed receipt times for customers and the need for human reviewers to ensure accurate checkouts.
Despite phasing out "Just Walk Out" in most locations, Amazon will maintain the technology in select Amazon Fresh stores in the UK and some Amazon Go stores, as well as at various ballparks.
🙃 Facebook let Netflix peek into user DMs, court docs claimLINK
Meta allegedly allowed Netflix to access Facebook users' direct messages for nearly a decade, forming part of a major anti-trust lawsuit accusing them of anti-competitive activities and privacy rule breaches. The lawsuit claims Netflix and Facebook had a 'special relationship' that included ad purchases, data sharing agreements, and access to private APIs, leading to enhanced ad targeting capabilities for Facebook. Despite Meta's denial of sharing private messages with Netflix, the company has faced previous penalties for unauthorized user information sharing, including a $284 million fine by Ireland for a data leak affecting over half a billion users.
🚗 Tesla sales fall amid increased competitionLINK
Tesla's vehicle deliveries in the first quarter fell 20 percent from the previous quarter and more than 8 percent year-over-year, totaling 387,000 vehicles, which was below Wall Street's expectation of 443,000.
The company's share price dropped by 4.9% following the report of decreased deliveries, amid challenges such as soft demand for electric vehicles, high interest rates, and lawsuits against its Autopilot technology.
Tesla underwent a recall of nearly 2 million vehicles over concerns related to its Autopilot software and faces a wrongful-death lawsuit, contributing to the scrutiny and challenges it is currently dealing with.
💰 Intel says past mistakes contributed to its foundry business losing $7 billion last yearLINK
Intel's foundry business experienced a $7 billion operating loss in 2023, worsening from its $5.2 billion loss the previous year, with revenue also declining 31% from $27.49 billion to $18.9 billion.
CEO Pat Gelsinger attributes the losses to previous mistakes, including initially forgoing ASML's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines, and states Intel won't achieve operating break-even until around 2027.
Intel aims to reduce outsourcing from 30% to 20% and has secured a $15 billion deal with Microsoft for custom chips, alongside being the largest beneficiary of the CHIPS Act, receiving $8.5 billion in direct funding and additional financial supports.
Other news you might like
Anthropic researchers wear down AI ethics with repeated questions.LINK
Perplexity bets on brand-sponsored questions to fund its AI search ambitions.LINK
Opera is now the first leading browser with built-in local LLMs.LINK
Spotify’s price is reportedly going up again.LINK
Stability AI launches enhanced audio generation model, Stable Audio 2.0.LINK
Microsoft reportedly reduced its Teams workforce to put more people on Copilot.LINK
Waymo self-driving cars are delivering Uber Eats orders for first time.LINK
Latest research and tools
Euler's RGB Animator: a tool that crudely simulates the three-body problem using Euler's method, translating the polar coordinates of the bodies over time into RGB values for visualization, with a warning on potential abrupt color transitions.LINK
PyTorch Library for Running LLM on Intel CPU and GPU: a PyTorch library that enables running large language models on Intel CPUs and GPUs with features like low latency, INT2 support for large models, a Text-Generation-WebUI, and Self-Speculative Decoding for faster inference speeds, along with support for various LLM fine-tuning methods.LINK
ReALM: Reference Resolution as Language Modeling: the paper introduces a method that views reference resolution as a language modeling task to improve understanding and generation of text by machines.LINK
Choose your weapon: Survival strategies for depressed AI academics: the paper discusses the challenges that university-based AI researchers face in keeping up with corporate AI powerhouses due to the increasing computational resources required for state-of-the-art AI research.LINK
GitHub: a platform where developers can collaborate on projects, track issues, and engage with the community, ensuring that concerns like the safety of using "__SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED" can be openly discussed and addressed.LINK
Portr: an open-source ngrok alternative that uses SSH remote port forwarding to securely expose local HTTP and TCP connections to the public internet, primarily designed for small teams.LINK
The Solution of the Zodiac Killer's 340-Character Cipher: the paper details how a team deciphered the infamous Zodiac Killer's 340-character cipher, revealing a message that did not identify the killer.LINK
Octopus v2: on-device language model enhances super agent capabilities for improved performance.LINK
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