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After rumors of a deal with Alphabet died down, the Cambridge-based marketing tech firm is making acquisitions on its own.

More than 300,000 Ram Heavy Duty pickup trucks are being because a faulty part could cause certain braking and tracking systems to fail.

Vikas Enti started Reframe Systems in 2022 to accelerate housing production using robots and software to build energy-efficient homes for lowers cost than traditional developers.

The new Avesta Housing program is meant to help moderate-income families that are 'often overlooked' afford their first home.

"Okay, we're doing this," begins a new announcement at The Verge: Today we're launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content. It'll cost $7 / month or $50 / year — and for a limited time, if you sign up for the annual plan, we'll send you an absolutely stunning print edition of our CONTENT GOBLINS series, with very fun new photography and design... A surprising number of you have asked us to launch something like this, and we're happy to deliver. If you don't want to pay, rest assured that big chunks of The Verge will remain free — we're thinking about subscriptions a lot differently than everyone else... If you're a Verge reader, you know we've been covering massive, fundamental changes to how the internet works for years now. Most major social media platforms are openly hostile to links, huge changes to search have led to the death of small websites, and everything is covered in a layer of AI slop and weird scams. The algorithmic media ecosystem is now openly hostile to the kind of rigorous, independent journalism we want to do. A few years ago, we decided the only real way to survive all this was to stand apart and bet on our own website so that we could remain independent of these platforms and their algorithms. We didn't want to write stories to chase Google Search trends or because we thought they'd do well on social media. And we definitely didn't want to compromise our famously strict ethics policy to accept brand endorsement deals from the companies we cover, which almost all of our competitors in the creator economy are forced to do in order to run sustainable businesses... [W]e intend to keep making this thing together for a long, long time. So many of you like The Verge that we've actually gotten a shocking number of notes from people asking how they can pay to support our work. It's no secret that lots of great websites and publications have gone under over the past few years as the open web falls apart, and it's clear that directly supporting the creators you love is a big part of how everyone gets to stay working on the modern internet. At the same time, we didn't want to simply paywall the entire site — it's a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free. The print premium for subscribers is described as a "beautiful / deranged print product" that's drawn from a series of articles "about what Google had done to the web, capped off by a feature about search engine optimization titled 'The People Who Ruined the Internet.'" But it ships with a satirical cover that instead proclaims it as "The Verge Guide to Search Engine Optimization". A tongue-in-check announcement explains: [A] year has passed, and we've had a change of heart. Maybe search engine optimization is actually a good thing. Maybe appeasing the search algorithm is not only a sustainable strategy for building a loyal audience, but also a strategic way to plan and produce content. What are journalists, if not content creators? Anyway, SEO community, consider this our apology. And what better way to say "our bad, your industry is not a cesspool of AI slop but a brilliant vision of what a useful internet could look like" than collecting all the things we've learned in one handy print magazine? Which is why I'm proud to introduce The Verge Guide to Search Engine Optimization: All the Tips, Tricks, Hints, Schemes, and Techniques for Promoting High-Quality Content! Whoops — slip off the cover and the real title appears: "CONTENT GOBLINS" (written in green slime). Again, it's "an anthology of stories about 'content' and the people who 'make' it." In very Verge fashion, we are meeting the moment where the internet has been overrun by AI garbage by publishing a beautifully designed, limited edition print product. (Also, the last time we printed a magazine, it won a very prestigious design award.) Content Goblins collects some of our best stories over the past couple years, capturing the cynical push for the world's great art and journalism to be reduced into units that can be packaged, distributed, and consumed on the internet. Consider Content Goblins as our resistance to that movement. With terrific new art and photography, we're making the case that great reporting is vital and enduring — and worth paying for. This gorgeous, grotesque magazine can be yours if you commit to an annual subscription to The Verge — while supplies last.

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Casual restaurants have seen more pronounced difficulties because they depend on customers with lower incomes and have to compete with fast food chains employing the same tactics.

Wednesday OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced "12 Days of OpenAI," promising that "Each weekday, we will have a livestream with a launch or demo..." And sure enough, today he announced the launch of two things: - "o1, the smartest model in the world. Smarter, faster, and more features (e.g. multimodality) than o1-preview. Live in ChatGPT now, coming to API soon." - "ChatGPT Pro. $200/month. Unlimited usage and even-smarter mode for using o1. More benefits to come!" Altman added this update later: For extra clarity: o1 is available in our plus tier, for $20/month. With the new pro tier ($200/month), it can think even harder for the hardest problems. Most users will be very happy with o1 in the plus tier! VentureBeat points out that subscribers "also gain access to GPT-4o, known for its advanced natural language generation capabilities, and the Advanced Voice feature for speech-based interactions." And even for non-subscribers, ChatGPT can now also analyze images, points out VentureBeat, "a hugely helpful feature upgrade as it enables users to upload photos and have the AI chatbot respond to them, giving them detailed plans on how to build a birdhouse entirely from a single candid photo of one, for one fun example." In another, potentially more serious and impressive example, it is now capable of helping design data centers from sketches... o1 represents a significant evolution in reasoning model capabilities, including better handling of complex tasks, image-based reasoning, and enhanced accuracy. Enterprise and Education users will gain access to the model next week... OpenAI's updates also include safety enhancements, with the o1-preview scoring 84 on a rigorous safety test, compared to 22 for its predecessor... To encourage the use of AI in societal-benefit fields, OpenAI has announced the ChatGPT Pro Grant Program. The initiative will initially award 10 grants to leading medical researchers, providing free access to ChatGPT Pro tools. In a video Altman displays graphs showing o1 dramatically outperforms gpt4o on math questions, on competition coding at CodeForces, and on PhD-level science questions.

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The cryptocurrency officially rose six figures Wednesday night, just hours after the president-elect said he intends to nominate cryptocurrency advocate Paul Atkins to be the next chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Today a group of German scientists presented data suggesting Earth is absorbing more sunlight than in the past, reports Ars Technica, "largely due to reduced cloud cover." We can measure both the amount of energy the Earth receives from the Sun and how much energy it radiates back into space.... The new paper finds that the energy imbalance set a new high in 2023, with a record amount of energy being absorbed by the ocean/atmosphere system. This wasn't accompanied by a drop in infrared emissions from the Earth, suggesting it wasn't due to greenhouse gases, which trap heat by absorbing this radiation. Instead, it seems to be due to decreased reflection of incoming sunlight by the Earth.... Using two different data sets, the teams identify the areas most effected by this, and they're not at the poles, indicating loss of snow and ice are unlikely to be the cause. Instead, the key contributor appears to be the loss of low-level clouds [particularly over the Atlantic ocean]... The drop in low-level clouds had been averaging about 1.3 percent per decade. 2023 saw a slightly larger drop occur in just one year.... So, what could be causing the clouds to go away? The researchers list three potential factors. One is simply the variability of the climate system, meaning 2023 might have just been an extremely unusual year, and things will revert to trends in the ensuing years. The second is the impact of aerosols, which both we and natural processes emit in copious quantities. These can help seed clouds, so a reduction of aerosols (driven by things like pollution control measures) could potentially account for this effect. The most concerning potential explanation, however, is that there may be a feedback relationship between rising temperatures and low-level clouds. Meaning that, as the Earth warms, the clouds become sparse, enhancing the warming further. That would be bad news for our future climate, because it suggests that the lower range of warming estimates would have to be adjusted upward to account for it. If the decline in reflectivity wasn't just caused by normal variability, the researchers warn, "the 2023 extra heat may be here to stay..."

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With vast amounts of data do draw on, AI should be able to come up with good gift ideas, but does it?

Wednesday Cuba's energy grid collapsed, "leaving millions without power," CNN reported, calling it "the latest in a series of failures on an island struggling from creaking infrastructure, natural disasters and economic turmoil." Today Reuters reports: Cuba said it had reconnected its national electrical grid on Thursday, though generation remained well below demand one day after a plant failure knocked out power to millions across the island... Around half of Cuba's power generation facilities are offline for maintenance or broken down. All are decades old and producing well under capacity. As a result, a majority of Cuba's residents suffer hours-long, rolling blackouts on a daily basis even when the grid is functional. Cuba's electrical grid has been on the brink of collapse for years, as fuel shortages, a string of natural disasters and an economic crisis have left the island's government unable to maintain the system's decrepit infrastructure. Dwindling oil imports from Venezuela, Russia and Mexico tipped the system into full crisis this year, leading to several nationwide blackouts that have sparked unrest and increasing anger among the population. The blackouts, together with food, medicine and water shortages, have vastly complicated life on the island and driven a record-breaking exodus of its residents since 2020. Authorities informed Cuba's citizens that scheduled power outages will now resume, reports ABC News. "Cuban authorities said they will continue their current practice of implementing daily, five-hour power outages by block or zone as they have been doing for the past few months."

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It is part of a plan to prioritize other services hospital officials see as more crucial to meeting the needs of the public.

"The Rust Foundation is dedicated to ensuring a healthy Rust ecosystem," according to a new announcement today, " which depends on a growing pool of well-trained developers to thrive." The latest SlashData Developer Nation survey found Rust to be the fastest-growing programming language, doubling its users over the past two years. As Rust's adoption continues to accelerate, the demand for a multifaceted ecosystem of quality training will too. Their blog post highlights three examples of the Rust community "creating new pathways for learning Rust" and "addressing the critical need for Rust training in academic settings..." Rust-Edu operates as a non-profit through Portland State University, with funding from Futurewei. Their mission is to "spread Rust use and development through academic curricula and communities throughout the world, making Rust the language of choice for 'systems programming' in its broadest sense through shared efforts of faculty, students and the Rust community." They focus on three main areas: curriculum development, educational tools, and language improvements... teach-rs, pronounced "teachers," is a modular and reusable university course designed for in-person teaching in Rust. Its mission is to introduce Rust in higher education and ensure that more students enter the job market with considerable Rust experience. The teach-rs project provides ready-to-use Rust teaching materials, including slide decks and exercises that can be adapted to various teaching contexts... As an open source permissively licensed project, teach-rs enables educators to share and improve resources, making introducing Rust instruction into their programs more accessible. Many institutions now use teach-rs in their courses, including the Slovak University of Technology, RustIEC (a collaboration between Vrije Universiteit Brussel and KU Leuven), and the University Politehnica of Bucharest. At the time of this writing, teach-rs has nearly 3000 stars on GitHub... Under the guidance of The Rust Foundation's Global Rust Coordinator and Rust Nation UK's organizer Ernest Kissiedu, Mordecai Etukudo (Mart) has developed a guide to help educational institutions adopt Rust in their systems. This resource walks organizations through the entire implementation process, from initial assessment to community engagement.

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Maine MILL's long-awaited project is underway with plans to open in 2026.

A tsunami warning was issued — and then cancelled about an hour later — for 400 miles of California coastline after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast near California's northern border with Oregon. "About 5 million people were under the warning while it was in effect," reports a San Francisco news site. Phones had sounded with an emergency tone in affected areas, with a warning that "You are in danger. Get away from coastal waters. Move to high ground or inland now." Warning sirens sounded in some areas, and as a precaution San Francisco paused service for its BART trains travelling under the San Francisco Bay. But while tsunami waves were originally predicted to hit San Francisco at 12:10 p.m. — they didn't. New information prompted the cancellation of the tsunami warning. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the news.

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OpenAI just unveiled a new subscription tier called ChatGPT Pro. Users can pay $200 a month for almost unlimited access to ChatGPT’s tools, and an exclusive new AI model.

The state Board of Environmental Protection adopted the rules Thursday despite opponents saying the regulations are unclear and the costs will be passed on to consumers.

The Solana JavaScript SDK "was temporarily compromised yesterday in a supply chain attack," reports BleepingComputer, "with the library backdoored with malicious code to steal cryptocurrency private keys and drain wallets." Solana offers an SDK called "@solana/web3.js" used by decentralized applications (dApps) to connect and interact with the Solana blockchain. Supply chain security firm Socket reports that Solana's Web3.js library was hijacked to push out two malicious versions to steal private and secret cryptography keys to secure wallets and sign transactions... Solana confirmed the breach, stating that one of their publish-access accounts was compromised, allowing the attackers to publish two malicious versions of the library... Solana is warning developers who suspect they were compromised to immediately upgrade to the latest v1.95.8 release and to rotate any keys, including multisigs, program authorities, and server keypairs... Once the threat actors gain access to these keys, they can load them into their own wallets and remotely drain all stored cryptocurrency and NFTs... Socket says the attack has been traced to the FnvLGtucz4E1ppJHRTev6Qv4X7g8Pw6WPStHCcbAKbfx Solana address, which currently contains 674.86 Solana and varying amounts of the Irish Pepe , Star Atlas, Jupiter, USD Coin, Santa Hat, Pepe on Fire, Bonk, catwifhat, and Genopets Ki tokens. Solscan shows that the estimated value of the stolen cryptocurrency is $184,000 at the time of this writing. For anyone whose wallets were compromised in this supply chain attack, you should immediately transfer any remaining funds to a new wallet and discontinue the use of the old one as the private keys are now compromised. Ars Technica adds that "In social media posts, one person claimed to have lost $20,000 in the hack." The compromised library "receives more than ~350,000 weekly downloads on npm," Socket posted. (Although Solana's statement says the compromised versions "were caught within hours and have since been unpublished."

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The shop, which specializes in laminated pastries and sourdough bread, is located at 868 Roosevelt Trail.

11 years ago his hard drive ended up in a U.K. landfill — with 8,000 bitcoin. It's now worth $800 million... and James Howell wants it back. The Guardian reports that his "bid to become extremely rich reached a judge on Tuesday with a team of lawyers arguing that it was still possible to launch a hunt for his missing hard drive containing the bitcoin." They claimed that rather than searching for a "needle in a haystack", the position of the bitcoin hoard had been narrowed down to a small area and there was a "finely tuned" plan to retrieve it... [Howells] has been asking Newport city council for help in getting the hard drive back, and even said he would share the money with the authority, to no avail... James Goudie KC, representing the council, said Howells had no legal claim to the hard drive. He said: "Anything that goes into the landfill goes into the council's ownership." Goudie said Howells' offer to share some of the bitcoin with Newport council amounted to a bribe. He said: "He is trying to buy something the council is not in a position to sell...." Before the hearing, a spokesperson for Newport council said: "The council has told Mr Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area. "Responding to Mr Howells' baseless claims are costing the council and Newport taxpayers time and money which could be better spent on delivering services." Howells was 28 when he lost the hard drive, and has said he may as well keep trying to recover it — because he'll always know that it's out there. Howells' legal teams are "working pro bono," the article notes, "on the basis that they get a share of the bitcoin profits if successful..." And TechSpot points out that "There's also the question of whether the data on the drive would still be accessible after more than a decade of sitting under a pile of rotting garbage. "Howells has a team of data recovery engineers who are also working pro bono..." Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the news.

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