NASA's SpaceX Crew-9 has returned to Earth safely after a stay of more than nine months aboard the International Space Station. The crew remained in space longer than expected due to issues with Boeing's Starliner capsule, which was originally scheduled to bring them home sooner.

While the mission has been politically fraught, the astronauts said in a rare space-to-earth interview last month that they were neither stranded nor abandoned. "That's been the rhetoric. That's been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck -- and I get it. We both get it," [NASA astronaut Butch] Wilmore said. "But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don't feel abandoned, we don't feel stuck, we don't feel stranded." Wilmore added a request: "If you'll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative. Let's change it to 'prepared and committed.' That's what we prefer..." CNN has more details on the arrival: Williams and Wilmore, alongside NASA's Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov of Russia's Roscosmos space agency, safely splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida at 5:57 p.m. ET. The crew's highly anticipated return came after the crew climbed aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and departed the International Space Station at 1:05 a.m. ET. Williams, Wilmore, Hague and Gorbunov spent Tuesday morning and afternoon in orbit in the roughly 13-foot-wide (4-meter-wide), gumdrop-shaped SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Gradually descending, the capsule carried the astronauts from the space station, which orbits about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, toward the thick inner layer of our planet's atmosphere.

Around 5 p.m. ET, the Crew Dragon capsule began firing its engines to begin the final phase of the journey: reentry. This leg of the journey is considered the most dangerous of any flight home from space. The jarring physics of hitting the atmosphere while traveling more than 22 times the speed of sound routinely heats the exterior of returning spacecraft to more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,926 degrees Celsius) and can trigger a communication blackout. After plunging toward home, the Crew Dragon spacecraft deployed two sets of parachutes in quick succession to further slow its descent. The capsule decelerated from orbital speeds of more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,359 kilometers per hour) to less than 20 miles per hour (32 kilometers per hour) as the vehicle hit the ocean.

After the vehicle hit the ocean, a SpaceX rescue ship waiting nearby worked to haul the spacecraft out of the water. Williams and Wilmore and their crewmates will soon exit Dragon and take their first breaths of earthly air in nine months. Medical teams will evaluate the crew's health, as is routine after astronauts return from space, before deciding next steps. Ultimately, the NASA crew members will return to their home base at Johnson Space Center in Houston. You can watch a recording of the re-entry and splashdown here.

The rumors were right: Google parent Alphabet has agreed to buy cyber security start-up Wiz for $32 billion, the biggest acquisition in the search group's history. From the report: Alphabet held talks over a $23 billion acquisition of Wiz last year, although the negotiations collapsed after some of the cyber security company's directors and investors became worried about antitrust hurdles.

The deal, which will rank as the biggest deal of the year so far, was announced on Tuesday morning. It will probably still face scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission under President Donald Trump, whose new chair Andrew Ferguson has maintained guidelines giving the agency the ability to block large deals used by his predecessor Lina Khan.

"Cuba's power grid collapsed Friday night," reports CNN, "triggering a nationwide power outage and plunging its more than 10 million people into darkness." Video filmed by CNN in the capital Havana showed streets and buildings shrouded in total darkness, as people used electric torches to navigate the streets. By Saturday morning, the Cuban government officials said that "microsystems" — pockets of electricity — had been restored in some cities. However, it remains unclear when the island's power system would be fully online again and most people remained in the dark...

It marks the latest in a series of failures on the Caribbean island struggling with creaking infrastructure, natural disasters and economic turmoil... For nearly a week in October, most of Cuba suffered near-total blackouts, the worst energy outages in decades. While Cubans are used to frequent power outages, to have another nationwide backcourt — the fourth in six months — was unsettling for many people who need electricity to cook and refrigerate food that otherwise spoils quickly in the tropical heat.
"Many residents posted on online sites looking for propane, charcoal, and fuel for generators..."

After raising rates last June for customers on some of its older plans, T-Mobile is pushing up costs again -- but it's not entirely clear how many people are affected. From a report: According to a memo obtained by CNET and sent to T-Mobile employees early this morning, some people will see a $5 per-line increase beginning with their April or May bills.

The memo by Jon Freier, president of T-Mobile's consumer group, states that customers affected by the price hike should be notified by the end of today, March 13. Only those who receive a notice will see the rate increase.

Freier cites the "rising costs over the past several years" as the impetus behind the price push. Other carriers are facing the same headwinds, such as Verizon last December and this January, and AT&T last January and June.

August, 2023: Thousands of Crypto Scammers are Enslaved by Human-Trafficking Gangsters, Says Bloomberg Reporter. ("They'd lure young people from across Southeast Asia...with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling.")

February, 2025: A coordinated response begins by Thai, Chinese and Myanmar authorities, which includes cutting power, internet, and fuel supplies to the scam centers.

Today: The Associated Press reports that thousands of the people liberated from locked compounds in Myanmar now "have found themselves trapped once again, this time in overcrowded facilities with no medical care, limited food and no idea when they'll be sent home." Thousands of sick, exhausted and terrified young men and women, from countries all over the world squat in rows, packed shoulder to shoulder, surgical masks covering their mouths and eyes. Their nightmare was supposed to be over... The armed groups who are holding the survivors, as well as Thai officials across the border, say they are awaiting action from the detainees' home governments. It's one of the largest potential rescues of forced laborers in modern history, but advocates say the first major effort to crack down on the cyber scam industry has turned into a growing humanitarian crisis...

An unconfirmed list provided by authorities in Myanmar says they're holding citizens from 29 countries including Philippines, Kenya and the Czech Republic. Authorities in Thailand say they cannot allow foreigners to cross the border from Myanmar unless they can be sent home immediately, leaving many to wait for help from embassies that has been long in coming. China sent a chartered flight Thursday to the tiny Mae Sot airport to pick up a group of its citizens, but few other governments have matched that. There are roughly 130 Ethiopians waiting in a Thai military base, stuck for want of a $600 plane ticket. Dozens of Indonesians were bused out one morning last week, pushing suitcases and carrying plastic bags with their meager possessions as they headed to Bangkok for a flight home... The recent abrupt halt to U.S. foreign aid funding has made it even harder to get help to released scam center workers...

It's not clear how much of an effect these releases will have on the criminal groups that run the scam centers. February marked the third time the Thais have cut internet or electricity to towns across the river. Each time, the compounds have managed to work around the cuts. Large compounds have access to diesel-powered generators, as well as access to internet provider Starlink, experts working with law enforcement say.
The article also points out that "The people released are just a small fraction of what could be 300,000 people working in similar scam operations across the region, according to an estimate from the United States Institute of Peace. Human rights groups and analysts add that the networks that run these illegal scams will continue to operate unless much broader action is taken against them..."

"The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes estimates that between $18 billion and $37 billion was lost in Asia alone in 2023, with minimal government action against the criminal industry's spread."

As Christie's auction house planned the first-ever auction dedicated to AI-generated art works, over 5,600 people signed an online letter urging them to cancel it. "Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license," the letter complained.

"These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them. Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies' mass theft of human artists' work." CNET reports that the signers "range from illustrators to authors to art therapists to cinematographers, from countries all across the globe."

Christie's ignored them all and held the auction anyways. So what happened when it was over on Wednesday morning? More than 30 lots attracted hundreds of bids and brought in $728,784, Christie's reports. And there's a generational twist: The auction house says 37% of registrants were completely new to Christie's, and 48% of bidders were millennials or members of Gen Z... The highest price in the sale was $277,200 for a work by Refik Anadol titled Machine Hallucinations — ISS Dreams — A. It used a data set of more than 1.2 million images taken from the International Space Station and satellites.
ARTnews reports that the auction actually brought in more than Christie's had expected: The sale, which made up of 34 lots, had an 82 percent sell through rate... While some digital artists, including Beeple, championed the sale, others decried it as emblematic of the ongoing struggle between human artistry and machine-driven innovation. The results, however, suggest that AI art — controversial as it may be — is carving a firm place in the market.

Earth's core "burns with an estimated forty-four trillion watts of power," the New Yorker reminds us — enough to "satisfy the entire world's energy needs" with a power source that's carbon-free, ubiquitous — and unlimited. (Besides running 24 hours a day, one of geothermal energy's key advantages is "it can be used for both electricity and heating, which collectively account for around 38% of global climate emissions...")

And one drilling expert tells them there's been an "exponential spin-up of activity in geothermal" energy projects over the last two years. (Ironically it was the fracking boom also brought an "explosion of new drilling practices — such as horizontal drilling and magnetic sensing — that inspired a geothermal resurgence.") In 2005 one research team calculated that just 2% of the heat just four miles underground in America "could meet the entire country's energy needs — two thousand times over," according to the article.

So their new article checks in on the progress of geothermal energy projects around the world, including a Utah company using a diamond-bit drill to dig nearly a mile into the earth to install a 150-ton steel tube surrounded by special heat-resistant cement — all to create "a massive straw" for transporting hot water (and steam). The biggest problem is drilling miles through hot rock, safely. If scientists can do that, however, next-generation geothermal power could supply clean energy for eons... At 6:15 P.M. on May 3rd, cement had started flowing into the hole. Four hours later, part of the cement folded in on itself. The next morning, the cement supply ran out; the men had miscalculated how much they needed. This brought the three-hundred-million-dollar operation to a maddening halt... The cement truck from Bakersfield arrived around 8:30 P.M. By ten-thirty, the men were pouring cement again, gluing the enormous metal straw in place. Next, the team scanned the borehole with gamma rays...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The chief executive of streaming giant Netflix on Thursday announced a $1 billion investment to produce some 20 films and TV series in Mexico annually over the next four years. Speaking at President Claudia Sheinbaum's morning press conference in Mexico City, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos said he looked forward to entering more partnerships with producers in the Latin American nation. Sheinbaum said the investments in the film industry should produce many jobs beyond immediate production needs, such as hospitality for actors and crew members, fashion designers and also spur tourism. "It's an industry that gives a lot of mileage to the economy," Sheinbaum said. "It's not only important for Mexico to be seen in the world, but also because of the economic development and jobs generated by a production."

"Reddit Answers" uses generative AI to answer questions using what past Reddittors have posted. Announced in December, Reddit now plans to integrate it into their search results, reports TechCrunch, with Reddit's CEO saying the idea has "incredible monetization potential."

And yet Reddit's stock fell 14% this week. CNBC's headline? "Reddit shares plunge after Google algorithm change contributes to miss in user numbers." A Google search algorithm change caused some "volatility" with user growth in the fourth quarter, but the company's search-related traffic has since recovered in the first quarter, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in a letter to shareholders. "What happened wasn't unusual — referrals from search fluctuate from time to time, and they primarily affect logged-out users," Huffman wrote. "Our teams have navigated numerous algorithm updates and did an excellent job adapting to these latest changes effectively...." Reddit has said it is working to convince logged-out users to create accounts as logged-in users, which are more lucrative for its business.
As Yahoo Finance once pointed out, Reddit knew this day would come, acknowledging in its IPO filing that "changes in internet search engine algorithms and dynamics could have a negative impact on traffic for our website and, ultimately, our business." And in the last three months of 2024 Reddit's daily active users dropped, Yahoo Finance reported this week. But logged-in users increased by 400,000 — while logged-out users dropped by 600,000 (their first drop in almost two years).

Marketwatch notes that analyst Josh Beck sees this as a buying opportunity for Reddit's stock: Beck pointed to comments from Reddit's management regarding a sharp recovery in daily active unique users. That was likely driven by Google benefiting from deeper Reddit crawling, by the platform uncollapsing comments in search results and by a potential benefit from spam-reduction algorithm updates, according to the analyst. "While the report did not clear our anticipated bar, we walk away encouraged by international upside," he wrote.

Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin is cutting about 10% of its workforce, a significant pullback aimed at slashing costs and refocusing resources after years of development work. From a report: The rocket and engine maker laid out the personnel shakeup during an all-hands employee meeting with Chief Executive Officer Dave Limp Thursday morning, confirming a workforce reduction first reported by Bloomberg. In a memo sent to employees, Limp said the company's growth led to "more bureaucracy and less focus" than needed after a hiring spree over the past few years.

After years of expansion bankrolled by Bezos, who started Amazon and is the world's third-richest person, Blue Origin is looking to trim manager ranks as it works to clear some $10 billion worth of launch contracts. With a staff of more than 10,000, the layoffs stand to impact over 1,000 roles.

They publish 77 newspapers in 26 U.S. states, according to Wikipedia. But this week a "cybersecurity event" at the newspapers' parent company "disrupted systems and networks," according to an article at one of their news sites which quotes an email sent to employees by the publishing company's CEO. "We have notified law enforcement of the situation."

And the company "has not released print or e-editions in most markets this week," according to the Augusta Free Press, "originally telling subscribers the outage was due to a server issue," The CEO said the company is also working to identify "additional steps we can take to help prevent something like this from happening again." The computer server appears to have compromised [last] Monday morning. No timeline has been announced for when news operations will return to normal publication schedules. According to a report in The News Virginian and published on the websites of the affected papers nationwide, the company is now producing, printing and delivering back issues, indicating at least some progress on printing and layout front...

Unfortunately, the cybersecurity attack on its server wasn't the only bad news for Lee Enterprises this week... In addition to the estimated $16.7 million the enterprise reported it lost in the last quarter, it has also gutted the staff of its newspapers as it appears to shift its focus toward more successful digital operations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In the most comprehensive study of its kind, scientists have found that generally, the world feels brighter when you wake up. People start the day in the best frame of mind in the morning, but end in the worst, at about midnight, the findings suggest, with the day of the week and the season also playing a part. Mental health also tends to be more varied at weekends but steadier during the week, according to the study led by University College London. "Generally, things do seem better in the morning," the researchers concluded. Their findings were published in the journal BMJ Mental Health. [...]

The results showed that happiness, life satisfaction, and worthwhile ratings were all higher on Mondays and Fridays than on Sundays, while happiness was also higher on Tuesdays. There was no evidence that loneliness differed across days of the week. There was clear evidence of a seasonal influence on mood. Compared with winter, people tended to have lower levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms and loneliness, and higher levels of happiness, life satisfaction and feeling that life was worthwhile in the three other seasons. Mental health was best in the summer across all outcomes. But the season didn't affect the associations observed across the day, however. Scientists suggest that the findings may be due to physiological changes linked to the body's circadian rhythm. Cortisol, a hormone that influences mood and motivation, peaks after waking and declines by bedtime, which may contribute to better mental health earlier in the day.

Factors like sleep cycles, weather, and when participants chose to respond to the survey could have influenced the findings. There's also the differences between weekdays and weekends, which have their own variations in daily routines.

In 2022, writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe the gradual deterioration of a service or product. The term's prevalence has increased to the point that it was the National Dictionary of Australia's word of the year last year. The editors at Ars Technica, having "covered a lot of things that have been enshittified," decided to highlight some of the worst examples the've come across. Here's a summary of each thing mentioned in their report: Smart TVs: Evolved into data-collecting billboards, prioritizing advertising and user tracking over user experience and privacy. Features like convenient input buttons are sacrificed for pushing ads and webOS apps. "This is all likely to get worse as TV companies target software, tracking, and ad sales as ways to monetize customers after their TV purchases -- even at the cost of customer convenience and privacy," writes Scharon Harding. "When budget brands like Roku are selling TV sets at a loss, you know something's up."

Google's Voice Assistant (e.g., Nest Hubs): Functionality has degraded over time, with previously working features becoming unreliable. Users report frequent misunderstandings and unresponsiveness. "I'm fine just saying it now: Google Assistant is worse now than it was soon after it started," writes Kevin Purdy. "Even if Google is turning its entire supertanker toward AI now, it's not clear why 'Start my morning routine,' 'Turn on the garage lights,' and 'Set an alarm for 8 pm' had to suffer."

Portable Document Format (PDF): While initially useful for cross-platform document sharing and preserving formatting, PDFs have become bloated and problematic. Copying text, especially from academic journals, is often garbled or impossible. "Apple, which had given the PDF a reprieve, has now killed its main selling point," writes John Timmer. "Because Apple has added OCR to the MacOS image display system, I can get more reliable results by screenshotting the PDF and then copying the text out of that. This is the true mark of its enshittification: I now wish the journals would just give me a giant PNG."

Televised Sports (specifically cycling and Formula 1): Streaming services have consolidated, leading to significantly increased costs for viewers. Previously affordable and comprehensive options have been replaced by expensive bundles across multiple platforms. "Formula 1 racing has largely gone behind paywalls, and viewership is down significantly over the last 15 years," writes Eric Berger. "Major US sports such as professional and college football had largely been exempt, but even that is now changing, with NFL games being shown on Peacock, Amazon Prime, and Netflix. None of this helps viewers. It enshittifies the experience for us in the name of corporate greed."

Google Search: AI overviews often bury relevant search results under lengthy, sometimes inaccurate AI-generated content. This makes finding specific information, especially primary source documents, more difficult. "Google, like many big tech companies, expects AI to revolutionize search and is seemingly intent on ignoring any criticism of that idea," writes Ashley Belanger.

Email AI Tools (e.g., Gemini in Gmail): Intrusive and difficult to disable, these tools offer questionable value due to their potential for factual inaccuracies. Users report being unable to fully opt-out. "Gmail won't take no for an answer," writes Dan Goodin. "It keeps asking me if I want to use Google's Gemini AI tool to summarize emails or draft responses. As the disclaimer at the bottom of the Gemini tool indicates, I can't count on the output being factual, so no, I definitely don't want it."

Windows: While many complaints about Windows 11 originated with Windows 10, the newer version continues the trend of unwanted features, forced updates, and telemetry data collection. Bugs and performance issues also plague the operating system. "... it sure is easy to resent Windows 11 these days, between the well-documented annoyances, the constant drumbeat of AI stuff (some of it gated to pricey new PCs), and a batch of weird bugs that mostly seem to be related to the under-the-hood overhauls in October's Windows 11 24H2 update," writes Andrew Cunningham. "That list includes broken updates for some users, inoperable scanners, and a few unplayable games. With every release, the list of things you need to do to get rid of and turn off the most annoying stuff gets a little longer."

Web Discourse: The rapid spread of memes, trends, and corporate jargon on social media has led to a homogenization of online communication, making it difficult to distinguish original content and creating a sense of constant noise. "[T]he enshittifcation of social media, particularly due to its speed and virality, has led to millions vying for their moment in the sun, and all I see is a constant glare that makes everything look indistinguishable," writes Jacob May. "No wonder some companies think AI is the future."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Down an easy-to-miss turnoff on the A48 just outside Chepstow on the Welsh border, the gentle rumble of trucks, cranes and people at work mixes with birdsong in what is an otherwise peaceful rural setting. It is a crisp and sunny winter morning when I visit and, at first glance, the site appears to be little more than prefab containers and a car park. Yet, behind the scenes a group of men and women with expertise in diving, marine biology, technology, finance, construction and manufacturing are building something extraordinary. They have come together with a single mission statement: to make humans aquatic. Their project is called Deep (not The Deep) and the site was chosen after a global search for the perfect location to build and test underwater accommodation, which the project founders say will enable them to establish a "permanent human presence" under the sea from 2027.

So far, so crazy sounding. Yet Deep is funded by a single anonymous private investor with deep pockets who wants to put hundreds of millions of pounds (if not more) into a project that will "increase understanding of the ocean and its critical role for humanity," according to a Deep spokesperson. Its leadership team remains tight-lipped not only about the amount (they will only say it is substantially more than the 100 million pounds being invested into the Deep campus near Chepstow), but also about the investor's identity. Whoever is behind it, the size of the investment means that an ambitious-sounding idea appears to be swiftly becoming a reality.

[...] Mike Shackleford, Deep's chief operating officer, explains the thought process behind the project. "Back in the 1950s and 60s, there was a space race and an ocean race going on, and space won out. Space is tough to get to, but once you're up there, it's a relatively benign environment." The ocean is the opposite: it's fairly easy to get to the bottom, but once you're down there, "basically, everything wants to kill you," he jokes. "Yet, just about every oceanographer I've met says, 'You'd be shocked at how little we know about the ocean,'" Shackleford tells me. "So somebody has got to take those first steps to try to build some of the technology that will allow us to go down and study the ocean in situ." The idea of Deep's sentinels is that, initially, people will be able to stay inside for up to 28 days at a time -- though the hope is that this could one day be extended to months ... and beyond. "The goal is to live in the ocean, for ever. To have permanent human settlements in all oceans across the world," says Shackleford.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Robocallers posing as employees of the Federal Communications Commission made the mistake of trying to scam real employees of the FCC, the FCC announced yesterday. "On the night of February 6, 2024, and continuing into the morning of February 7, 2024, over a dozen FCC staff and some of their family members reported receiving calls on their personal and work telephone numbers," the FCC said. The calls used an artificial voice that said, "Hello [first name of recipient] you are receiving an automated call from the Federal Communications Commission notifying you the Fraud Prevention Team would like to speak with you. If you are available to speak now please press one. If you prefer to schedule a call back please press two."

You may not be surprised to learn that the FCC does not have any "Fraud Prevention Team" like the one mentioned in the robocalls, and especially not one that demands Google gift cards in lieu of jail time. "The FCC's Enforcement Bureau believes the purpose of the calls was to threaten, intimidate, and defraud," the agency said. "One recipient of an imposter call reported that they were ultimately connected to someone who 'demand[ed] that [they] pay the FCC $1,000 in Google gift cards to avoid jail time for [their] crimes against the state.'" The FCC said it does not "publish or otherwise share staff personal phone numbers" and that it "remains unclear how these individuals were targeted." Obviously, robocallers posing as FCC employees probably wouldn't intentionally place scam calls to real FCC employees. But FCC employees are just as likely to get robocalls as anyone else. This set of schemers apparently only made about 1,800 calls before their calling accounts were terminated.

The FCC described the scheme yesterday when it announced a proposed fine of $4,492,500 against Telnyx, the voice service provider accused of carrying the robocalls. The FCC alleges that Telnyx violated "Know Your Customer (KYC)" rules by providing access to calling services without verifying the customers' identities. When contacted by Ars today, Telnyx denied the FCC's allegations and said it will contest the proposed fine.

On January 24th Brooklyn blogger Jeffrey Emanuel made the case for shorting NVIDIA, remembers MarketWatch, "due to a number of shifting tides in the AI world, including the emergence of a China-based company called DeepSeek."

He published his 12,000-word post "on his personal blog and then shared it with the Value Investors Club website and across Reddit, X and other platforms." The next day he saw 35 people read his post. "But then the post started to go viral..." Well-known venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya shared Emanuel's post on Nvidia's short case with his 1.8 million X followers. Successful early stage investor Naval Ravikant shared the post with his 2.6 million followers... Morgan Brown, a vice president of product and growth at Dropbox, pointed to it in a thread that was viewed over 13 million times. Emanuel's own X post got nearly half a million views. He also quickly gained about 13,000 followers on the platform, going from about 2,000 to more than 15,000 followers...

[Emanuel] pointed to the fact that so many people in San Jose were reading his blog post. He theorized that many of them were Nvidia employees with thousands — or even millions — of dollars worth of Nvidia stock tied up in employee stock options. With that much money in a single asset, Emanuel speculated that many were already debating whether to hold the stock or sell it to lock in profits. He believes his blog post helped convince some of them to sell. "A lot of the sell pressure you saw on Monday morning wasn't necessarily what you might think. I believe a fair amount of that was from shares that had never been active because they had been sitting in workplace.schwab.com accounts..."
Emanuel stresses he's "the most bullish on AI," with MarketWatch emphasizing that "while the points Emanuel laid out in his blog post might be bearish for Nvidia, he still thinks they paint a positive future for AI." Nevertheless, Monday NVIDIA's market capitalization dropped $600 billion, which MarketWatch calls "the largest single-day market-cap drop to date for any company." What countless Wall Street firms and investment analysts had seemingly missed was being pointed out by some guy in his apartment.... Matt Levine, the prominent Bloomberg News financial columnist, noted the online chatter that claimed Emanuel's post "was an important catalyst" for the stock-market selloff and said it was a "candidate for the most impactful short research report ever." Emanuel spent the rest of the week booked solid as hedge funds paid him $1,000 per hour to speak on the phone and give his take on Nvidia and AI...

Emanuel wrote that the industry may be running low on quality data to train that AI — that is, a potential "data wall" is looming that could slow down AI scaling and reduce some of that need for training resources... Some of these companies, like Alphabet, have also been investing in building out their own semiconductor chips. For a while, Nvidia's hardware has been the best for training AI, but that might not be the case forever as more companies, such as Cerebras, build better hardware. And other GPU makers like AMD are updating their drivers software to be more competitive with Nvidia... Add all these things together — unsustainable spending and data-center building, less training data to work with, better competing hardware and more efficient AI — and you get a future where it's harder to imagine Nvidia's customers spending as much as they currently are on Nvidia hardware... "If you know that a company will only earn supersized returns for a couple years, you don't apply a multiple. You certainly don't put a 30-times multiple," Emanuel told MarketWatch.
The article notes that DeepSeek "is open-source and has been publishing technical papers out in the open for the past few months... The $5.6 million training-cost statistic that many investors cited for sparking the DeepSeek market panic was actually revealed in the V3 technical paper published on Dec. 26."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: The same morning that JetBlue Airways announced that it was the first airline partnering with Venmo to begin accepting payments for booking flights, an account on the popular payment platform was already raking in money. A Venmo user named Owen Miller paid the JetBlue Checkpoint Store for a drink on Wednesday morning, which is a typical transaction between a traveler and airline, except for the fact that JetBlue doesn't operate that account. "At this time, JetBlue does not accept Venmo payment for inflight purchases such as food and beverages," a representative for the airline told SFGATE in an email. "Unfortunately, we have seen accounts falsely representing themselves as JetBlue to deceive and defraud customers." To stay safe from scammers when booking JetBlue flights with Venmo, the airline recommends customers only use verified JetBlue channels, such as their official website or app, and follow their secure payment process using the provided QR code. JetBlue said it plans to fold Venmo payments into its mobile app later this year.

At Galaxy Unpacked today in San Jose, California, Samsung unveiled the new Galaxy S25 series of flagship smartphones loaded with AI capabilities and LLMs. "Currently, the Galaxy S25 range is comprised of the Galaxy S25 ($800), Galaxy S25+ ($1,000), and Galaxy S25 Ultra ($1,300)," reports Wired. "The phones are available for preorder today and will officially go on sale February 7." Since the hardware is relatively unchanged from last year's Galaxy S24 series, here's what Wired has to say about the new AI smarts: The Galaxy S25 is a tale of two AIs: Gemini and Bixby. Yes, while Google's Gemini AI assistant sits at the forefront -- it can finally be triggered through a long press of the power button-- Samsung is bringing its original Bixby voice assistant out from the shadows. Bixby has been enhanced with large language models but is still designed to handle phone functions, like changing device settings. Gemini is meant to be used for general web queries and more complex actions. You can even have two hot words, one for each assistant. I foresee all of this being confusing [...].

The highlight AI feature debuting on the Galaxy S25 series is "cross-app experiences." These are tasks you can ask Gemini to perform, even if the task requires multiple apps. For example, you can ask for the schedule of this season's Arsenal matches and then add it to your calendar; Gemini will then search and add every Arsenal FC game in the season to your schedule. Or you can ask it to find pet-friendly vegan restaurants nearby and text the list to a friend. It even works with images too -- snap a pic of your fridge and ask Gemini to find you a recipe based on the available ingredients. These cross-app experiences work with Google apps, Samsung's Galaxy apps, and select third-party apps, like WhatsApp and Spotify.

All these AI features have culminated in a new app: Now Brief. Samsung calls this proactive assistance (remember Google's Now on Tap?) where a morning brief arrives with the weather, upcoming calendar events, stock details, news articles, and suggestions to trigger routines. There's also an evening brief with a summary of the day's events with photos. Since the feature can plug into email, it'll send reminders about expiring coupons and upcoming travel tickets. Samsung claims it can even suggest changing an 8:45 am alarm even earlier if it sees a 9 am meeting on the schedule. On the lock screen, a "Now Bar" widget persists at the bottom, much like Apple's Live Activities. It'll offer quick access to the Now Brief app, but it will also show updates for favorite sports teams, along with glanceable directions from Google Maps.

The rest of the AI features are playing a bit of catch-up to Apple and Google's Pixel phones. There's Drawing Assist, a generative AI tool to craft new images in different art styles based on sketches or text prompts. AI Select works with the S Pen stylus on the S25 Ultra and understands what is selected -- for example, if a video is selected, it will suggest turning it into a GIF. Audio Eraser is an editing tool to cut out background noise in videos post-capture, canceling out the sound of a crowd's chatter or an ambulance's siren. Finally, Samsung's Generative Edit feature, which lets you erase unwanted objects in images, now works locally on the device and is much more accurate and faster. A full list of specs can be found here. You can watch a recording of the event on YouTube.

Donald and Melania Trump have launched a pair of meme coins just before President Trump was sworn into office. The coins are already worth billions of dollars, raising "serious ethical questions and conflicts of interest," said Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota. CNN reports: Melania Trump launched her cryptocurrency $MELANIA in a social media post Sunday, sending her husband's cryptocurrency $TRUMP, announced two days earlier, plummeting. "The Official Melania Meme is live! You can buy $MELANIA now. https://melaniameme.com," the future first lady wrote on X Sunday. Meme coins are a type of highly volatile cryptocurrency inspired by popular internet or cultural trends. They carry no intrinsic value but can soar, or plummet, in price. "My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE!" Trump wrote on X Friday. "It's time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW. Go to http://gettrumpmemes.com -- Have Fun!" Both coins are trading on the Solana blockchain. [...]

$TRUMP is the first cryptocurrency endorsed by the incoming president, who once trashed bitcoin as "based on thin air." [...] While executive branch employees must follow conflict of interest criminal statutes that prevent them from participating in matters that impact their own financial interests, the law does not apply to the president or the vice president. [...] The Trump coin's market capitalization, which is based on the 200 million coins circulating, is capped at $13 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. The meme coin's website said there will be 1 billion Trump coins over the next three years. Both $MELANIA and $TRUMP's websites contain disclaimers saying the coins are "intended to function as a support for, and engagement with" the values of their respective brands and "are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type."

The website says the meme coin is not politically affiliated. But 80% of the coin's supply is held by Trump Organization-affiliate CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight LLC, which are both subject to a three-year unlocking schedule -- so they cannot sell all of their holdings at once. Trump coin's fully diluted value (which reflects the eventual total supply of Trump coins) stood at around $54 billion as of Monday morning, according to CoinMarketCap. At that value, the 80% linked to Trump is worth a staggering $43 billion, at least on paper. The $TRUMP coin's website says it is "the only official Trump meme. Now, you can get your piece of history. This Trump Meme celebrates a leader who doesn't back down, no matter the odds," the website reads. "Trump owning 80% and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it," Nick Tomaino, a former Coinbase executive, said in a post on X. "Trump should be airdropping to the people rather than enriching himself or his team on this."

CNN reports: TikTok appears to be coming back online just hours after President-elect Donald Trump pledged Sunday that he would sign an executive order Monday that aims to restore the banned app. Around 12 hours after first shutting itself down, U.S. users began to have access to TikTok on a web browser and in the app, although the page still showed a warning about the shutdown.
The brief outage was "the first time in history the U.S. government has outlawed a widely popular social media network," reports NPR. Apple and Google removed TikTok from their app stores. (And Apple also removed Lemon8).

The incoming president announced his pending executive order "in a post on his Truth Social account," reports the Associated Press, "as millions of TikTok users in the U.S. awoke to discover they could no longer access the TikTok app or platform."

But two Republican Senators said Sunday that the incoming president doesn't have the power to pause the TikTok ban. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Peter Ricketts of Nebraska posted on X.com that "Now that the law has taken effect, there's no legal basis for any kind of 'extension' of its effective date. For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale... severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China. Only then will Americans be protected from the grave threat posted to their privacy and security by a communist-controlled TikTok."

The Associated Press reports that the incoming president offered this rationale for the reprieve in his Truth Social post. "Americans deserve to see our exciting Inauguration on Monday, as well as other events and conversations." The law gives the sitting president authority to grant a 90-day extension if a viable sale is underway. Although investors made a few offers, ByteDance previously said it would not sell. In his post on Sunday, Trump said he "would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture," but it was not immediately clear if he was referring to the government or an American company...

"A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S.," a pop-up message informed users who opened the TikTok app and tried to scroll through videos on Saturday night. "Unfortunately that means you can't use TikTok for now." The service interruption TikTok instituted hours earlier caught most users by surprise. Experts had said the law as written did not require TikTok to take down its platform, only for app stores to remove it. Current users had been expected to continue to have access to videos until the app stopped working due to a lack of updates... "We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned," read the pop-up message...

Apple said the apps would remain on the devices of people who already had them installed, but in-app purchases and new subscriptions no longer were possible and that operating updates to iPhones and iPads might affect the apps' performance.

In the nine months since Congress passed the sale-or-ban law, no clear buyers emerged, and ByteDance publicly insisted it would not sell TikTok. But Trump said he hoped his administration could facilitate a deal to "save" the app. TikTok CEO Shou Chew is expected to attend Trump's inauguration with a prime seating location. Chew posted a video late Saturday thanking Trump for his commitment to work with the company to keep the app available in the U.S. and taking a "strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship...."

On Saturday, artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI submitted a proposal to ByteDance to create a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok's U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter...
The article adds that TikTok "does not operate in China, where ByteDance instead offers Douyin, the Chinese sibling of TikTok that follows Beijing's strict censorship rules."

Sunday morning Republican House speaker Mike Johnson offered his understanding of Trump's planned executive order, according to Politico. Speaking on Meet the Press, Johnson said "the way we read that is that he's going to try to force along a true divestiture, changing of hands, the ownership.

"It's not the platform that members of Congress are concerned about. It's the Chinese Communist Party and their manipulation of the algorithms."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker for sharing the news.