Why does “bouba” sound round and “kiki” sound spiky? This intuition that ties certain sounds to shapes is oddly reliable all over the world, and for at least a century, scientists have considered it a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words Read more…
The U.S. State Department is reportedly developing a site called freedom.gov that would let users in Europe and elsewhere access content restricted under local laws, including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda. Washington views the move as a way to counter censorship. One source said officials had discussed including a Read more…
Amazon’s cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools [non-paywalled source], leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant’s push to roll out these coding assistants. Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its Read more…
Workplace grievances that once fit in a single email are now ballooning into 30-page documents stuffed with irrelevant historical detail, made-up legal precedents, and citations to laws from the wrong country — and UK employment lawyers say generative AI is the likely culprit. Anna Bond, legal director at Lewis Silkin, Read more…
A bare-bones Chinese app called “Are You Dead?” — whose entire premise is that solo-living users tap daily to confirm they’re still alive, triggering an alert to an emergency contact after two missed check-ins — has rocketed to the top of China’s app store charts and gone viral globally without Read more…
Europe’s failure to produce a Tesla or a Waymo stems not from insufficient research spending or high taxes — problems California shares in abundance — but from labor laws that make it devastatingly expensive for companies to unwind failed bets. According to estimates, corporate restructuring costs the equivalent of 31 Read more…
The IRS’s IT division has reportedly lost 40% of its staff and nearly 80% of its tech leadership amid a federal “efficiency” overhaul, the agency’s CIO revealed yesterday. Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization during a panel at the Association of Government Accountants yesterday, describing it as Read more…