Arts

Marqeta, an Oakland-based card issuing platform, raised $150 million in new funding at a $4.3 billion valuation. Coatue Management led, and was joined by Vitruvian Partners. Existing backers include Visa, Goldman Sachs, 83North, Granite Ventures, and Iconiq Capital. http://axios.link/C4cR Pie Insurance, a Washington, D.C.-based workers comp insurer, raised $100 million in new equity funding. Gallatin Point Capital was joined by return backers Greycroft, SVB Capital, Aspect Ventures, Elefund, and Sirius International Insurance Group. www.pieinsurance.com SmartRent, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based provider of smart home automation solutions, raised $60 million in Series C funding. Spark Capital led, and was joined by Fifth Wall, Energy Impact Partners, the Amazon Alexa Fund, Bain Capital Venture...

Read More
Arts

Policymakers and advocates are pushing for new limits on political advertisers' ability to narrowly target voters with tailored messaging on major tech platforms, Axios' Margaret Harding McGill and Kyle Daly report. Why it matters: Critics say the targeted political ads are a key means of spreading misinformation on topics like the presidential election and the pandemic. Driving the news: Ranking Digital Rights, a research program affiliated with the New America think tank, is calling on Facebook and other online platforms to limit targeted advertising in the lead-up to the November election in a report released Wednesday. Democratic lawmakers are also pressuring tech companies with new bills to curb political ad targeting online.The big picture: Advocates of limiting the targeted ads

Read More
Arts

Privately owned orbital human spaceflights are here. A new era of commercialized space travel begins.

SpaceXs Crew Dragon Demo-2 is off to a roaring start. After a delayed launch earlier in the week, the spacecraft lifted off at 3:22 pm ET on Saturday. It left the planet, and entered Earths orbit where it will later dock with the International Space Station (ISS), beginning a new era of commercial space tourism and exploration all with the help of mercurial billionaire Elon Musk. If all goes as planned, the Crew Dragon capsule, which rides on the top of SpaceXs Falcon 9 rocket, will make a 19-hour trip to the ISS. The capsule is designed to fly mostly autonomously, but astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will take the controls while in Earths orbit to test out its manual capabilities. Docking with the ISS, however, is supposed to be completely autonomous, which is a new feature o...

Read More
Arts

artificial intelligence A lot of resources will be needed to create an Artificial General Intelligence. There are many efforts to make various narrow super-intelligence. Narrow Superintelligence are AI-related software systems that are beyond humans in some area of activity. Google makes a … Microsoft has a new Artificial Intelligence Supercomputer that has 38 petaflops. This makes it the fifth most powerful computer in the world. * This is about being able to do a hundred exciting things in natural language processing at once … MemVerge, the inventor of Memory Machine software, today introduced whats next for in-memory computing: Big Memory Computing. This new category is sparking a revolution in data center architecture where all applications will run in memory. Until now, in-memory...

Read More
Arts

There is a large gap between the current crop of task-specific narrow AI tools and Artificial General Intellig

There is a large gap between the current crop of task-specific narrow AI tools and Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) envisioned by futurists and SF authors. Ben Goertzel has been working towards AGI. There is also OpenAI and other companies and projects to develop AGI. There would need to be a baby AGI that would be trained and improved over years.Ben has talked about five years to get to idiot savant level partial AGI.He has talked about ten years to get to human-level AGI.He teaching the human-level AGI to be able to program and reprogram itself and to make its own hardware. I would note that huge companies and the entire multi-trillion information technology industry is focused on increasing programmer productivity and iterating on the improvement of the hardware. This pathway...

Read More
Arts

carbon nanotubes Power consumption of a home refrigerator can be cut by 29% while improving cooling capacity. Researchers replaced widely-used, but environmentally unfriendly, R134a refrigerant with the more energy-efficient R600a. They dosed R600a with multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) nanoparticles. A more energy-efficient … Carbonics has demonstrated a wafer-scalable approach for producing an array of aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) FETs with performance exceeding 100 GHz and linearity of 10dB. This indicates we could finally be close to a tipping point where nanotubes become a … Carbon Nanotube Thin Film Patch Antennas Viable for 5G, Drones, Sensors and IOT The Clean Energy Research Foundation has discovered a method of manufacturing the worlds strongest and toughest materials....

Read More
Arts

The pageant queen from Wilwaukee on winning the Season 12 crown and America’s hearts

By Christopher Rudolph Look over there, its a winner! On the Season 12 premiere of RuPauls Drag Race Jaida Essence Hall stomped into the workroom, making her presence known with her line: Hey bitches, shes here! Throughout the competition Jaida was not only the essence of beauty on and off the runway, she was also a consistently strong queen eventually taking her to the top three and over the finish line. The Milwaukee-based pageant queen not only served effortless eleganza with her larger-than-life fashion, but she was also a comedic powerhouse. She was always able to squeeze a few laughs, whether as a bad apple in the Worlds Worst sketch or as Rhonda Shimes in Gays Anatomy. Her candid Look over there line from the Choices 2020 political debate became an instant meme. Jaida was also a ...

Read More
Arts

Du 27 mai au 2 juin 2020, vivez le Black Friday français avec une avalanche de remises exceptionnelles.

Les French Days, cest reparti pour une édition 2020 qui se veut plus généreuse que les précédentes. Hormis les six grandes enseignes initiatrices du projet Cdiscount, Fnac Darty, Boulanger, Rue du Commerce, La Redoute et Showroomprivé - dautres acteurs ont décidé de proposer leurs offres promotionnelles, à linstar dAmazon extrêmement présent cette année. Comme son équivalent américain, le Black Friday, lévénement est loccasion de mettre à jour vos équipements tech ou électroménager. Vous procurer le meilleur smartphone, le meilleur ordinateur portable, le meilleur téléviseur 4K ou encore le meilleur aspirateur robot est désormais à portée de budget. Et ce pour quelques jours seulement, plus précisément du 27 mai au 2 juin. Sur cette page, nous sélectionnerons chaque jour ce que nous cons...

Read More
Arts

La mise à jour 20H1 de Microsoft est publiée dans les délais prévus.

Après près d'un an et demi de tests bêta, la nouvelle mise à jour majeure de Windows 10 est enfin disponible en téléchargement. Cette actualisation, également connue sous le nom de Windows 10 version 2004, apporte une foule de nouvelles fonctionnalités remarquables au sein du système d'exploitation de Microsoft. Parmi celles-ci figurent un tout nouvel explorateur de fichiers, une barre de recherche améliorée, la prise en charge de connexions sans mot de passe et une nouvelle interface Cortana, l'assistant numérique se retrouvant transformé en une application distincte tout en offrant davantage d'interactions conversationnelles. Parmi les autres ajouts, citons une option de téléchargement dans le cloud pour faciliter la réinitialisation de Windows 10 à sa configuration dusine, ainsi que de...

Read More