What's better than funny animal videos? Funny animal videos with funny voice overs! And they have everything from a cat stuck in the tub, a raccoon stuck under some furniture and a cute baby giraffe. Oh, and by the way, the scamming hound dog one? - Absolutely true story. Trust me on that.
Open thread below...
Fringe Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy claimed he was an expert on gender while attacking the trans community as just crying for relief from their "mental illness."
Unprompted, Ramaswamy immediately weighed on the homophobic right-wing attacks on the LGBTQ community.
Host Chuck Todd asked how he intends to "unite the country when you're essentially denigrating the views of half of the country?"
"I don't think I'm denigrating the views of half the country. I mean, let's take the touchiest of those subjects right now on the trans issue," he said.
Why is Vivek discussing the trans community? That wasn't the question.
"I think that when a kid says that I'm born into the wrong body, that my gender doesn't match my biological sex, more often than not, that is a case of a mental health disorder," Ramaswamy said. "That doesn't mean you disrespect that person. It means they're crying out for help."
Calling everyone in the trans community mentally ill and crying out for help is not disrespectful at all? Seriously?
Later in the interview Todd asked him how he knows with certainly that gender is a binary issue.
"You're calling it that, but how do you know it's that? Are you confident that you know that gender is as binary as you're describing it? Are you confident that it isn't a spectrum?" Todd asked.
"I am," Vivek responded.
"Do you know this as a scientist?"
"Well, there's two X chromosomes if you're a woman, an X and a Y. That means you're a man."
“Fuck war,” reads the icing on one of Bakery XOXO's phallic-shaped anti-war cakes, while another had the colours of the Ukrainian flag, with the message "the sun will rise again."
Source: Moscow Times
A Moscow baker has been fined for “discrediting” the Russian military’s actions in Ukraine with anti-war cakes, independent media reported Friday.
Anastasia Chernysheva started posting photos of her confectionary creations decorated with anti-war slogans on her bakery's Instagram in April 2022, two months into Russia’s invasion.
“F*ck war,” reads the icing on one of Bakery XOXO's phallic-shaped anti-war cakes. Another cake is decorated in the blue-and-yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag.
Police detained Chernysheva on Thursday afternoon, the police monitoring website OVD-Info reported, citing her lawyer Yulia Yevdokimova.
She was released that evening after being charged with “discrediting” the military, a crime introduced last year as Russia effectively muzzled public opposition to the war with draconian wartime censorship laws.
On Friday, Moscow's Izmailovsky District Court found her guilty and ordered her to pay a fine of 35,000 rubles ($440), OVD-Info said.
from Latest articles from Crooks and Liars
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Nothing perverse about indoctrinating pre-schoolers like this at all. Nope.
Source: Meduza
In Yeysk, a town in Russia’s Krasnodar region, local children participated in a “kindergarten military parade.” According to Yeysk’s regional governor, Roman Bublik, the event was called “We are the great-grandchildren of the great victors.”
The independent outlet 7x7 reported that the parade occurred at a local stadium, where parents watched from the stands. According to Bublik’s Telegram channel, preparation for the parade took one month, as the children learned to march and the parents sewed the children’s uniforms. Each kindergarten chose specific types of troops to represent in the parade.
“Our children’s parade took place for the first time this year. We are very pleased and proud that this glorious tradition has begun in Yeysk. I’m confident that we’ll hold this parade annually,” reported Bublik.
"Great-grandchildren of the great victors” I suppose is more uplifting than rapists, murderers of women and children, and stealers of washing machines.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco and — if you don’t already know — it’s the startup world’s big tent. It draws founders, investors, CEOs, tech professionals, scientists, policy makers, researchers and entrepreneurs. It’s where you’ll find inspiration, gain knowledge, forge new relationships and discover tools to help you build your business.
Shameless, but helpful, plug: Buy your pass now for significant savings. Prices increase on May 12 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Who doesn’t like to save money?
We’re fortunate to partner with some of the startup world’s leading companies to help make magic at Disrupt. We say fortunate because they’re passionate, thoroughly engaged and hands-on. They consistently deliver highly relevant content, educational expertise, resources and connection to the event. Their participation elevates, engages and supports early-stage founders.
Our partners also come to Disrupt to connect and explore opportunities with other companies within the startup ecosystem. They form alliances, forge partnerships, and look for potential investments, and sometimes they become a startup’s new client. Be sure to make time to meet, greet and network with our partners.
Here’s an early look at just some of our partners who will be on hand to help you move your early-stage startup to the next level. We’ll announce many more in the coming weeks.
Don’t miss out on the invaluable startup insights that Dealmaker, Helm.ai, Mayfield and Visa will bring to the stage during breakout sessions. Connect with other attendees in small group roundtable sessions with LatinX Startup Alliance, Mayfield and Otter.ai.
You’ll find plenty to discover on the exhibition floor, too, with Builder.ai, DuploCloud, Hedera, InvestHK, Platform.sh, Remote Technology Services, Yatta and others showing off their latest technologies, discussing how you can engage more with their companies and offering everyone’s favorite: swag! Plus, for the second year running, JetBlue Technology Ventures will be front and center connecting with female founders at the Women of Tech(Crunch) reception.
Oh, and if that bounty isn’t enough to whet your startup appetite, check this out. Visa will hold the finals of the Visa Everywhere Initiative 2023 global competition at TechCrunch Disrupt. Stop by to meet and greet the finalists at the TechCrunch Disrupt Pavillion on the exhibition floor.
And finally, you won’t have to worry about dead device batteries while you’re at Disrupt — just plug into one of the charging stations courtesy of Brex, and you’ll be good to go.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco, and our partners will help make it the best one yet. Don’t forget, prices go up on May 12 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Buy your pass now and save.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
Meet Visa, Mayfield, DuploCloud and more at Disrupt by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch
Daily Show comedian Roy Wood gave Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his fellow Repubicans attacking CRT, along with corrupt bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas the treatment they deserved at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner.
WOOD: The only thing Ron DeSantis has done that I got to give him credit for. This boy got people riled up over stuff they can't understand. Don't nobody -- they don't know what Critical Race Theory is, get these people riled up about something that they can't even define like crypto or NFTs. Ask any Republican that's anti-CRT. Ask any Republican trying to explain CRT. They sound like a Democrat trying to explain the charges against Trump.
It's bad everywhere. Who's got to stop it? We got to stop it. We got the files. We got files. We'll be right back. I'm Rachel Maddow. I have files. Rachel Maddow get them files on you, that's a rap. I think Republicans, you all would be surprised man, if you all would just be real about what CRT is. You can be surprised some black folks might meet you halfway. But you got to tell the truth. You can't lie to black people call it what it is.
from Latest articles from Crooks and Liars
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The Wall Street Journal went under the hood of the lab-grown meat industry, also known as cultivated or cell-cultured meat, and the struggles within.
The Journal particularly homed in on what’s going on at UPSIDE Foods, which received a blessing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration related to its process for making cultivated chicken, essentially saying it was safe to eat and making it the first company to receive this approval. Eat Just, which has been selling its product in Singapore, the first nation to approve the sale of cultivated meat, followed, getting its “thumbs-up” from the FDA in March.
WSJ’s story pays particular attention to UPSIDE Foods’ success at making small batches of its chicken product, as well as its lack of being able to produce large amounts of product at a low cost, or at even price parity with traditional meat — and to be fair, most cultivated meat companies struggle with this too.
“Initially our chicken will be sold at a price premium,” UPSIDE founder and CEO Uma Valeti told TechCrunch in November. “As we scale, we expect to eventually reach price parity with conventionally produced meat. Our goal is to ultimately be more affordable than conventionally produced meat.”
Companies in this sector make meat from animal cells that are fed growth factors. The production and pricing challenges presented in the WSJ story, however, are not new. “Is cell-culture meat ready for prime time?” wasn’t just a clever TechCrunch+ headline, but a legitimate question posed in early 2022 that still really hasn’t been answered.
Most cultivated meat stories in our archives include at least a sentence about how hard it is for companies to produce mass quantities and to create foods by this method so that the finished product is under $10 a pound.
The cultivated meat industry’s known struggles will take time to sort out, and maybe that’s OK by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
There are oodles of advantages to having a diverse workforce, but, as inBeta founder James Nash points out, you can’t simply take your homogenous workforce, add diversity, stir and hope for the best.
Often, something subtle gets in the way of diversity at startups: Companies depend on employee referrals in the beginning, but if a startup’s makeup is already not diverse, referrals aren’t going to change that.
That’s for startups. In the world of venture capital, things are more pronounced: A warm introduction is the only way to get in front of investors at many VC funds. That’s great for people who are already hooked into the startup ecosystem, but you don’t have to look for very long to realize that this is not a very diverse group of people.
“We’d love to hear from you. The best way to reach us is through someone we mutually know.” A VC firm's website
For many companies, employee referrals are one of the main ways to attract new talent. That’s all good until you stop to think who your newest hire is likely to know best. It doesn’t take many rounds through that particular mill until you end up with a relatively homogenous group of people with similar education, socioeconomic backgrounds and values.
If that’s what you’re optimizing for, great! Well done. If it isn’t, perhaps it’s time to stop being lazy and question why warm intros are still common practice.
My question has long been: What are you optimizing for by relying on referrals? If you spend some time thinking about that, I bet you’d unearth some uncomfortable unintended consequences.
Let’s talk about what we can do about it.
If you read any guides about startups or raising money (including my own, although I also try to cover cold emails and cold intros), you’ll find that you need a “warm introduction” to land a meeting with a VC. Given the above parallel with hiring, that’s a problem.
Warm intros are awful for diversity, so why do investors keep insisting on them? by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
The finish line is within sight. “Internet for All,” as the Biden administration put it, will soon be a reality if America keeps its priorities straight.
During his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden set a high bar, “We’re going to buy American,” as the U.S. spends billions of dollars on new broadband connections. This is a smart strategy to create American jobs and boost the U.S. economy, but our leaders must not sacrifice speed in the race to close the digital divide in cases where “Buy American” isn’t yet a realistic option.
Strengthened during the pandemic when all finally understood that broadband is a necessity, bipartisan cooperation brought America a once-in-a-generation opportunity to achieve universal connectivity. To date, more than $90 billion has been earmarked by Congress and the administration to finish the private sector’s work of connecting every home in America with broadband internet service.
During this sprint toward “Internet for All,” America’s leaders should avoid creating hurdles that will delay progress.
Under the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, for example, every participating state — as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia — will receive a minimum of $100 million for internet infrastructure, with more to be doled out based on each state’s proportional number of unserved locations. Cartesian estimates that fiber providers will contribute another $22 billion in funds for $64 billion in total, which is “sufficient to achieve the program’s availability goal” of making broadband service “available to all eligible locations.” That’s a first.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), signed into law by President Biden on November 15, 2021, also included $14.2 billion for the Affordable Connectivity Program, which has helped over 17 million American families pay for a home broadband connection that they otherwise would struggle to afford. What’s more, the bill set aside $2.75 billion for Digital Equity programs; $2 billion for the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program; $2 billion for the Rural Utilities Service Distance Learning, Telemedicine and Broadband Program; and $1 billion for a new Middle Mile grant program. This truly is broadband’s moment in the sun.
During this sprint toward “Internet for All,” America’s leaders should avoid creating hurdles that will delay progress. Every American deserves to have the chance to “attend class, start a small business, visit with their doctor, and participate in the modern economy.”
The Build America Buy America Act, which was enacted as part of the IIJA, requires infrastructure projects (including internet infrastructure funded by the BEAD Program) to use domestically sourced materials. But broadband networks are complex; they’re more than just fiber cables. Some essential pieces of the puzzle like certain electronic products aren’t currently manufactured in America and the components that make up those products are not available in the United States.
We should always do our best to honor President Biden’s goal to “Buy American,” but not at the expense of leaving Americans offline while they wait for every switch, router and radio to be made in the U.S. After all, the Government Accountability Office recently estimated that the BEAD Program alone could create 23,000 jobs for skilled telecommunications workers … just to build out the infrastructure. Spending will predominantly go toward U.S. paychecks and balance sheets, even if we need to rely on foreign manufacturers for a limited number of network components.
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo recently announced that CommScope and Corning are investing nearly $550 million and creating hundreds of new jobs in America to build fiber optic cables. Although the Obama administration provided a blanket “Buy American” waiver for IT products in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), recognizing that the U.S. share of global computer and electronics output had dropped 8.2 percentage points between 1999 and 2009, the Biden administration is right to seek a solution that is balanced, maximizing U.S. production when possible while permitting select network components to be sourced from outside our borders when necessary.
There are so many good things happening to close the digital divide, including the Federal Communications Commission recently devoting $66 million to Affordable Broadband Outreach Grants. Let’s not lose that momentum. Let’s not sacrifice the great for the perfect.
It’s time for the Biden administration to guard against the unintended consequences of the “Buy American” ideal and keep its eye on the prize: Everyone in America — including communities of color, rural communities and older Americans — needs broadband now.
‘Buy American’ shouldn’t block our progress toward ‘Internet for All’ by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch
Happy Sunday morning! Here is your cartoon, fresh from Ratt's sketchpad in lieu of the old Bobblehead thread. If you want to see who is yammering on the Sunday shows, click through to Politico. Otherwise, let us watch them so you don't have to.
What's giving you joy this morning?
-Karoli
Andrew Mayer Cohen started making his own Motown-style songs while he was a hip-hop DJ so he wouldn't have to pay for sampling them. Look how well that turned out! You may have already heard him on Live At Daryl's House.
Born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he eventually moved to L.A. Mayer Hawthorne is a stage name, a combination of Cohen's real middle name (Mayer) and Hawthorne Road, the street where he grew up.
Here's "The Walk", which is the closest thing he's got to a radio hit:
And here's the soulful sound of "When I Said Goodbye."
Hey, TechCrunch people. If you’re looking for a recap of the week’s news in tech, you’ve come to the right place. It’s Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular recap column. Glad to have you.
Before we get on with the meat of it, a PSA that tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 are available now. Disrupt, of course, is TechCrunch’s flagship in-person event, focused on founders, investors and the future of tech year after year. In San Francisco on September 19–21, expect to hear from thought leaders in the fields of AI, fintech, hardware, sustainability, SaaS, security and more. It’ll be well worth the trip.
In the nearer term, tune into the next TechCrunch Live show, which will spotlight Cambrian BioPharma, a startup billing itself as a pharmaceutical outfit with a revolutionary approach to managing drug development. Founder James Peyer will be joined by Maryanna Saenko of Future Ventures, who invested in Cambrian’s Series A, B and C rounds.
Now, without further ado!
Elon exposed: Elon Musk tweeted a photo on Monday night that showed him logged into his Twitter account, advertising to content creators how they can activate monetization features on Twitter. Unfortunately for Musk, people weren’t paying much attention to the fact that he has 24.7K paid subscribers — instead, some users realized that he appeared to be logged into another account, Amanda writes — possibly his burner. Oops.
SpaceX finds success in failure: SpaceX launched a fully integrated Starship launch vehicle for the first time last Thursday, a long-awaited and highly anticipated milestone in the vehicle development program. Despite its fiery fate, the test was a success, Aria reports: SpaceX got tons of valuable data that will inform future Starship and Super Heavy prototypes.
Tile, but for cats: Tile, the AirTag rival now owned by Life360, this week launched a new cat-tracking tag to help pet owners find their furry friends. The new device, “Tile for Cats,” is essentially a modified version of the Tile Sticker with a silicone collar attachment that costs $39.99. Ivan has more.
Epic loss: Apple has won its antitrust-focused appeals court battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games over its App Store policies, Sarah reports. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld the district court’s earlier ruling related to Epic Games’ antitrust claims in favor of Apple, but it also upheld the lower court’s judgment in favor of Epic under California’s Unfair Competition Law.
Holmes avoids prison: Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes will not be heading off to prison this week to begin serving an 11-year sentence, as first reported by the WSJ. Though earlier this month U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila denied her request to remain free while she appeals her conviction, this week she asked the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals directly if she could stay out of prison while her case makes its way through the appeals process; the request automatically puts her reporting date on hold while the court considers her request, writes Connie.
Protestors sting back: A Missouri government tip site for submitting complaints and concerns about gender-affirming care is down after people flooded it with fanfiction, rambling anecdotes and the “Bee Movie” script. The Missouri Attorney General’s office launched the online form for “Transgender Center Concerns” in late March, inviting those who’ve witnessed “troubling practices” at clinics that provide gender-affirming care to submit tips, Morgan reports.
Twitter pushes advertisers to pay up: As Twitter’s legacy blue check mark system finally comes to an end, the social network’s new paid-for verification system is causing more than a little chaos, with CEO Elon Musk himself stepping in to pay for some celebrities’ verification when they refuse to do so. However, another little nugget to emerge from the carnage this week is that anyone looking to advertise on Twitter will now seemingly have to have a verified account, Paul reports.
WhatsApp across devices: WhatsApp is finally rolling out multidevice login support for more than one phone. Mark Zuckerberg announced the feature’s rollout on Facebook and Instagram, clarifying that users can log into the same WhatsApp account on up to four phones. Until now, you could only use one WhatsApp account on one phone and multiple companion desktop devices.
TechCrunch is cross-medium, in case you weren’t aware. The crew maintains a fantastic (in this writer’s humble opinion) slate of podcasts for your edification and enjoyment — so consider giving them a listen if you haven’t already. This week on Equity, Ankur Nagpal, the entrepreneur behind Teachable, Ocho and Vibe Capital, spoke about the future of solo GPs; how Ankur built, sold, pivoted and launched in public; and the importance of brand and succession. And Found — live from TechCrunch’s Early Stage event in Boston — was joined by Russ Wilcox, who founded E Ink and is currently a partner at Pillar VC.
TC+ subscribers get access to in-depth commentary, analysis and surveys — which you know if you’re already a subscriber. If you’re not, consider signing up. Here are a few highlights from this week:
Slow revenue growth: Public tech firms are for the most part on a moderate pace of trailing growth in the most recent fiscal quarter. Alex breaks down what that means — as well as the broader implications.
Founders change their pitch: More and more founders are adapting their pitches and business strategies to be more downturn-friendly, Natasha M writes. Now that it’s been over a year since tech’s current period correction first began, founders are getting more innovative in how they approach breaking their pitch.
Capital efficiency is the new VC filter for startups: Igor Shaversky, a partner at Waveup, writes about which metrics startups should track to understand where they stand on the capital efficiency scale.
Elon exposes his burner, Tile embraces the cat life, and Elizabeth Holmes avoids prison by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
OpenAI, the startup behind the widely used conversational AI model ChatGPT, has closed its new funding round of over $10.3 billion, TechCrunch has learned.
VC firms including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global are in the round, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. A source tells us Founders Fund is also investing. Altogether the VCs have put in just over $300 million at a valuation of $27 billion – $29 billion. This is alongside a big investment from Microsoft announced earlier this year, a person familiar with the development told TechCrunch. The size of Microsoft’s investment is believed to be around $10 billion, a figure we confirmed with our source.
If all this is accurate, this is the closing of the round that the Wall Street Journal reported was in the works in January. We confirmed that was when discussions started, amid a viral surge of interest in OpenAI and its business.
While Microsoft’s investment comes with a strong strategic angle — the tech giant is working to integrate OpenAI’s tech across a number of areas of its business — the VCs are coming in as financial backers.
From what we understand, the term sheets have been signed by investors and the money’s been transferred; still to come is countersigning from OpenAI. The plan was to make this investment public next week.
Altogether, outside investors now own more than 30% of OpenAI.
According to PitchBook data, it appears that Peter Thiel had already been a backer but it seems this is the first time Founders Fund will be investing; K2 Global, a firm with just one partner, Ozi Amanat, and Thrive are also first-time backers of the startup. From PitchBook data, it looks like Sequoia, A16Z and Tiger Global had been earlier investors in the company but they’d sold stakes; this latest investment would bring them back in.
A number of firms, including Tiger and Sequoia, have had some knocks as a result of the financial crisis the tech sector has seen in the last year; in general, a number of VCs have massively slowed down their investing pace, sitting on so-called “dry powder” waiting for a better climate, and maybe better opportunities.
So at a moment when investors are on the hunt for interesting AI startups to back, OpenAI is likely seen as the kind of opportunity that looks good right now.
“They’re probably trying to use this [funding] to say hey, look, we found a golden apple,” a source said of the decision to back OpenAI here and now. “Venture is a very strange place where anything can happen. You can go big to broke to big again, at any time.”
OpenAI has an army of technical teams working across a range of areas, but the area that has attracted a lot of attention of late is GPT, short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which is OpenAI’s family of large language models used by third parties by way of APIs.
There is also ChatGPT, the generative AI service that OpenAI released at the end of November 2022 based on GPT that lets anyone type out a natural question and get a cogent, detailed answer. ChatGPT has been a certifiable hit, with more than 1 billion visitors to its website in February, says SimilarWeb — and that’s not including those using that tech via third parties.
Generative AI is very much all the rage right now, but OpenAI has its controversies, too, with many focused on that buzzy, consumer-facing ChatGPT product. People have questioned whether it lies, whether it is a “virus“, how it handles privacy, if it can be manipulated to be toxic, or commit libel; and in the wake of so many more rushing into AI development, even the very nature of how “open” OpenAI’s GPT branding will be longer term has come up for discussion.
In fairness, OpenAI has acknowledged the work that still needs to be done, and meanwhile it’s continued to develop services and iterate. In February, the startup introduced a paid version of ChatGPT, called ChatGPT Plus with a faster user experience. It was upgraded with multimodal LLM GPT-4 in March.
Key to the proposition, OpenAI’s valuation, and the likely interest of investors is that, alongside the technology, there is also a rapidly developing ecosystem around that tech.
In addition to the hundreds of millions of people who have played around with ChatGPT, hundreds of businesses large and small have started deploying GPT and ChatGPT into their products and services. That has also been a fillip to other big tech companies speed up the roll out of their own efforts in generative AI. Google has launched Bard and Meta also introduced LLaMA to take on GPT with its proprietary LLM.
OpenAI, however, has some undeniable gravity amidst the competition, not least because of its singular focus on the AI space since its founding in 2015. That’s been even as it has gone through some significant changes — including shifting from its original non-profit model. We don’t really know if AI will precipitate the seismic shift that many say it will, but as one person put it: OpenAI may be the closest thing we have to a winner in the space right now.
“We’ve been working on it for so long, but it’s with gradually increasing confidence that it’s really going to work,” co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said at an AI conference earlier this month. “We’ve been [building] the company for seven years. These things take a long, long time. I would say by and large in terms of why it worked when others haven’t: It’s just because we’ve been on the grind sweating every detail for a long time. And most people aren’t willing to do that.”
In addition to ChatGPT, OpenAI has its AI-based image-generation tool called Dall-E that received a significant update in July last year. It also has speech recognition model Whisper AI.
Microsoft’s efforts have included integrating OpenAI’s APIs with its Azure infrastructure to support the computational requirements of the models. It also in March announced a GPT-4 integration to supercharge Bing, part of Microsoft’s longstanding efforts to make a dent in the dominance of Google’s search services.
We have reached out to the investors named here, as well as to OpenAI, for comment and will update this story as we learn more.
OpenAI closes its monster $10B funding round at $27B-29B valuation by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch
States have taxed motorists at the pump for more than a century. Yet, as electric cars gain ground, what happens when folks stop refueling altogether?
State lawmakers are increasingly imposing annual fees on EV owners, arguing they should pay up because they still rely on public infrastructure to get around. Texas is on track to become the latest state to levy such a tax, following more than a dozen others, including Georgia, Michigan and Ohio.
The Texas Senate passed SB 505 at the end of March. This week, the state’s House has cleared a similar bill, sending it on to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk. The latest version of the bill lays out a $200 yearly registration fee for electric vehicles, with exceptions carved out for slow “Neighborhood Electric Vehicles,” as well as autocycles, mopeds and motorcycles. The bill states that the resulting fees “must be deposited to the credit of the state highway fund.”
Though Texas is certainly not alone in moving forward with such a bill, its $200 fee is on the high end, matching only Georgia. Colorado is the state with the lowest EV fee (excluding states that have no fees), at $50 per year.
Speaking against the bill in a statement to local media outlet KRLD, Environment Texas director Luke Metzger argued the $200 fee is punitive and “will make it harder for Texans to afford these clean vehicles which are so critical to reducing air pollution in Texas.”
Electric cars are still priced out of reach for many Americans. In September 2022, the average price for EVs sat at $65,291, versus $48,094 for gas guzzlers, per Cox Automotive.
EV owners in Texas face $200 annual fee by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
South Carolina's Sen. Lindsey Graham is the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He had trouble keeping his eyes open during Amanda Zurawski's opening statement (which lasted about 5 minutes). Graham's indifference is symbolic of the entire Republican Party. At least he showed up though, if only to catch up on his beauty rest. Texas Senators Cornyn and Cruz didn't even bother to attend.
Source: CNN
A woman who is suing the state of Texas after being denied an abortion told lawmakers Wednesday that not receiving abortion care harmed her mental health and might prevent her from having children in the future.
Addressing her senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, Amanda Zurawski said her “horrific” experience was a result of policies they support. “I nearly died on their watch,” she said.
“We’ve heard a lot today about the mental trauma and the negative harmful effects on a person’s psychological well-being after they have an abortion, supposedly, and I’m curious why that’s not relevant for me as well,” Zurawski said in the hearing of the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary on the impact of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
from Latest articles from Crooks and Liars
via Click me for Details
A refrain I hear from a lot of startups is that there’s “no need to rethink the gripper.” It’s something I appreciate from an economic standpoint. It’s expensive, resource intensive and both your time and money are probably best spent elsewhere when there are already so many effectors on the market.
I also recently made an analogy to a claw machine during an interview — and got some pushback. I understand a bit better now why that’s the case — at least in part. Discussing its new approach to robotic gripping, MIT invokes the perennial arcade favorite, noting, “When manipulating an arcade claw, a player can plan all she wants. But once she presses the joystick button, it’s a game of wait-and-see. If the claw misses its target, she’ll have to start from scratch for another chance at a prize.”
Image Credits: MIT
If you think about that for a moment, you realize that you’re suddenly faced with something that comes up over and over again in this field of study: That’s not how humans approach the job — and there’s a reason for that. If you’re say, grabbing an object with a strange or unexpected weight distribution, you generally don’t need to withdraw your hand and try again. You adjust.
The team describes a system that adjusts to an object in real time, using reflexes and feedback. Says MIT:
If the gripper fails to grab hold of the object, rather than back out and start again as most grippers do, the team wrote an algorithm that instructs the robot to quickly act out any of three grasp maneuvers, which they call “reflexes,” in response to real-time measurements at the fingertips. The three reflexes kick in within the last centimeter of the robot approaching an object and enable the fingers to grab, pinch, or drag an object until it has a better hold.
Interestingly, the project builds on actuators developed for the school’s mini cheetah robot, which were designed to help it react to uneven terrain on the fly. The new system is built around an arm with two multi-joint fingers. There’s a camera on the base and sensors on the tips that record feedback. The system uses that data to adjust accordingly.
Currently the team is using the gripper to clean up around the lab. Says MIT:
They set a variety of household objects on a shelf, including a bowl, a cup, a can, an apple, and a bag of coffee grounds. They showed that the robot was able to quickly adapt its grasp to each object’s particular shape and, in the case of the coffee grounds, squishiness. Out of 117 attempts, the gripper quickly and successfully picked and placed objects more than 90 percent of the time, without having to back out and start over after a failed grasp.
A claw machine does not a robotic gripper make by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
A bill dubbed the 'Human Life Protection Act' that would ban almost all abortions in South Carolina has been rejected in a 22-21 vote after five female lawmakers led a multi-day filibuster against the bill. The state's Senate has previously rejected the ban from conception twice, so this marks the third time.
The Hill reports:
Three Republicans, a Democrat, and an Independent joined together as the only five women in the state senate to block the legislation, which sought to ban abortion from conception with exceptions for rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies and to save the life of the mother.
The bill ultimately failed in a 22-21 vote on Thursday. This is the third time that a near-total abortion ban has failed to pass the Republican-majority chamber since the overturning of Roe v. Wade last June.
Republican Sen. Sandy Senn had some sharp words for Majority Leader Shane Massey, saying that he was repeatedly "taking us off a cliff on abortion."
"The only thing that we can do when you all, you men in the chamber, metaphorically keep slapping women by raising abortion again and again and again, is for us to slap you back with our words," Senn said, according to the Associated Press.
The future is very much yet to be written about vertical farming. In many ways, the technology presents hope in the midst of rising food safety concerns, aging populations and potential environmental collapse. It’s also an intensely hard row to hoe, as it were. Early companies in the space are going to be the ones focused on driving down unit economics (hopefully) to a point where the technology makes sense from a price perspective.
But sometimes being early to a party means you’re among the first to leave. Last January, we covered what looked to be an important next step for Upward Farms, as the company announced plans to open a 250,000-square-foot farm in Northeastern, Pennsylvania early this year. The Brooklyn-based firm recently announced, however, that it has closed up shop.
“We found that vertical farming is almost infinitely complex — as we tackled challenges, new ones emerged,” founders Jason Green, Ben Silverman and Matt La Rosa said in an open letter. “Our team faced these challenges head on, humbly asking ourselves, ‘If not me, who, and if not now, when?’ ”
Even in a thriving market, building this stuff is intensely difficult. After three years of economic and other challenges, one imagines that it becomes even harder to convince potential backers to stick out what is ultimately a long runway.
The startup is closing up its decade-long project, but the founders point at some potential silver lining. “While Upward Farms is closing its doors,” they note, “a small portion of our team will continue working to unleash the magic of the microbiome. In the coming months, we’ll have more to share.”
There are still plenty of big names in the space, including Bowery and AeroFarms. It probably shouldn’t be a big surprise that the herd is going to thin for a bit, until the path to success gets clearer. Meantime, perhaps the Upward team has valuable innovations it can share with a potential industry partner.
Upward and onward by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
Hackers have stolen email addresses, direct messages, and other personal data from users of two dating websites, according to a data breach expert.
Earlier this week, someone alerted Troy Hunt, the founder and maintainer of the data breach alerting website Have I Been Pwned, that hackers had breached two dating websites, CitiJerks and TruckerSucker. Hunt told TechCrunch that he analyzed the stolen data and found usernames, email addresses, passwords, profile pictures, sexual orientation, users’ date of birth, their city and state, their IP addresses, and biographies. The stolen passwords are scrambled with a weak algorithm that could potentially be broken and allow hackers to see the actual passwords.”
“It’s really just a typical forum breach, albeit with super sensitive content,” Hunt said.
The sensitive content, for example, include hook up messages, such as “I will b [sic] in Jackson on business during the day on Nov.13 if interested message back I won’t have a place, will u?” and sexual preferences, such as “trucker that loves suckin [sic] chubby guys,” according to Hunt.
Hunt said that the tipster told him the breach was advertised on a hacking forum. TechCrunch independently verified that the data stolen from CitiJerks and TruckerSucker is being advertised on the forum.
Credit: TechCrunch Screenshot
In a post advertising the data stolen from TruckerSucker, the seller claims the database contains information on 8,000 users. In the post about CityJerks, the seller claims the database contains data from 77,000 users.
CityJerks advertises itself as a place to help people find partners to “masturbate mutually.”
“Masturbating mutually will connect you and your sweetie, your partner or a fellow member on an ever deeper level. No matter how long you’ve been together, you want that for sure! The feedback from our customers speaks for itself,” the site read.
TruckerSucker bills itself as a place to “meet masculine men,” a place for “REAL TRUCKERS and REAL MEN.”
The administrator of the two websites did not respond to a request for comment.
Do you have more information about other data breaches? We’d love to hear from you. You can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Wickr, Telegram and Wire @lorenzofb, or email lorenzo@techcrunch.com. You can also contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.
Hackers steal emails, private messages from hookup websites by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai originally published on TechCrunch
I have joined so many social media websites since October 27, 2022, the fateful day in which Elon Musk tanked his net worth and volunteered for the worst job in the world. There’s Mastodon, T2, Spoutible, Hive, Post, Cohost and so many more, but no Twitter alternative has felt as promising as Bluesky. That is, in part, because of how much shitposting is going on there.
Bluesky hatched from Twitter’s nest in 2019, when Twitter founder Jack Dorsey announced that the platform would fund a small, independent team to develop a decentralized standard for social media. Like Mastodon, Bluesky plans to be federated, meaning that endless individually operated communities can exist within an open source network. Before we could have ever considered that Musk would buy Twitter, the “bluesky initiative” was central to the company’s long game — now, the independent team has launched its invite-only beta, still operating with funding from Dorsey. (Yes, we know how sad it is that we are so excited for a Twitter alternative that is literally funded by a Twitter founder who publicly declared that Musk is the “singular solution” he trusts with his old company.)
As one astute Bluesky user, Pavel Samsonov wrote: “bluesky (serious people making silly little posts) is the spiritual opposite of linkedin (deeply silly people trying to write serious thoughtposts).” Samsonov even included a handy visual aid.
Image Credits: Pavel Samsonov on Bluesky
It’s an apt description. I’m seeing the same journalists and tech folk that I follow on Twitter — I even found someone I know from Weird Facebook — but people aren’t talking about earnings reports, layoffs and stocks. In this particular moment, Bluesky is a collection of people who remain addicted to the adrenaline of Twitteresque microblogging, but are exhausted by the constant onslaught of asinine discourse and Musky shenanigans. Enter: shitposting.
In what feels like a few days, a silly and chaotic culture has developed on Bluesky. There is no name for posts, like how Twitter has tweets, or how Mastodon used to have toots until they retired that branding because they’re cowards. So, people are calling Bluesky posts “skeets,” a portmanteau of “tweet” and “sky” that I am pretty sure is slang for ejaculate fluid but I will not fact check that because I am holding onto my one last shred of sanity.
Rich Burroughs, a developer advocate, thinks that this culture was formed from the top down. Some Bluesky developers are very active on the platform that they’re building in real time, responding to users questions, complaints and feature suggestions, all while still acting like a real person.
“Some of the staff seem to be accomplished shitposters themselves, which I think is a great energy that has been lacking with other Twitter alternatives,” Burroughs told TechCrunch. “People keep building these super serious feeling platforms to compete with Twitter, but what’s happening on Bluesky feels a lot like the early Twitter days, and why it became successful.”
After publicly feuding with Musk, who gave him a blue check against his will, legendary shitposter Dril joined Bluesky today. Bryan Newbold, an employee of Bluesky, posted, “if first @dril.bsky.social poast sucks we are going to burn the whole thing down and try again.”
Image Credits: @emily.bsky.team on Bluesky
Dril fandom seems to be all the rage among the Bluesky team. Another developer, Emily Liu, posted that Newbold gifted her with a book of Dril’s best tweets upon joining the team (also pictured is a book called “There Is No Antimemetics Division,” which sounds like something I should read ASAP). This fact seemed a bit too perfect for arguing my thesis that Bluesky will succeed by deliberately cultivating shitposting, so I double-checked with Newbold to make sure this was legit. He replied: “It Is The Public Stated Policy Of Bluesky PBLLC That All New Employees Shall Receive The Finest @dril.bsky.social Tweets In Printed Form.” Make of that what you will.
When dismayed Twitter users scrambled to find a new platform to call home, some flocked to Tumblr, another social network that has largely failed to monetize because its userbase is deliberately resistant to behaving predictably. When Tumblr rolled out a creator subscription product, users vehemently opposed it. As of data from November, more Tumblr users have purchased dashboard crabs (pixelated crabs that dance around your dashboard and can be gifted to friends) than actual creator subscriptions. And as a very targeted gag, Tumblr also offered users the chance to buy not one, but two blue checks for $8.
In spirit, Bluesky feels a bit like Tumblr, except that I have not yet seen anyone drop a link to Archive of Our Own and/or a Ray-Ban sale. But unlike Tumblr, these aren’t high school kids shitposting about “Supernatural”; they’re adults with jobs who are looking for a social media experience as far removed from LinkedIn as possible.
Sure, this is all a generalization, and perhaps there is some very serious corner of Bluesky that I have not yet encountered. But Bluesky seems to have taken what people enjoyed about Mastodon and Twitter and mushed it together, without as many of the bad parts. Though Bluesky’s architecture is similar to Mastodon’s, Bluesky is intuitive, while Mastodon comes off as inaccessible: choosing what instance to join feels like an impossible task, and longtime users are very defensive about their established tooting posting norms, which can make joining the conversation intimidating. As tech reporter Paris Martineau wrote on Bluesky, “genuinely, i think mastodon failed because it discouraged shitposting.”
Bluesky still has a lot to overcome. The platform has not yet had to contend with the large-scale content moderation concerns that come with decentralization, and the app remains a walled garden (please, don’t DM me for invite codes, I do not have any). But at least for this sliver of internet history, Bluesky is feeling good. And Dril is here.
Bluesky’s best shot at success is to embrace shitposting by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
It has been almost six months since FTX collapsed, and a lot has transpired since then, including executives being charged to industry businesses facing ripple effects from its demise.
At Consensus 2023, Anthony Scaramucci, former White House comms director and founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, which invested in the exchange and Brett Harrison, founder and CEO of Architect and former FTX US president, shared their experiences during FTX’s downfall and what life has been like since.
“It’s important to talk about it because if I can prevent one person from having that happen to them what happened to us then it’s worth it to me to talk about it,” Scaramucci said.
Harrison resigned from FTX in late September, weeks before it collapsed. In January, he launched his own company that makes trading infrastructure for large crypto investors. His startup raised $5 million and is backed by Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures and Scaramucci, among others.
SkyBridge Capital sold a 30% stake to FTX, weeks before the crypto exchange exploded. “We went from hero to zero in that transaction in about eight weeks,” Scaramucci said.
Neither Scaramucci nor Harrison have spoken to former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried in months. Harrison said the last time they talked was when he resigned from FTX US: He said he sent Bankman-Fried a text message telling him he was departing, to which Bankman-Fried replied with a red heart emoji.
Brett Harrison ‘never lost faith in the business’ while at now-shuttered FTX by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch
Google has been spotted testing a new Play Store ad slot ahead of its I/O developer conference in May. If rolled out publicly, the change could significantly expand the company’s Play Store search ads business by offering developers access to new prime real estate for their app marketing efforts.
The test comes two years ago after Apple made a similar move with the addition of a new ad slot that appeared on the store’s Search tab itself, instead of only at the top of search results, as before.
Similar to Apple, Google is also testing an ad slot that appears when Android users navigate to the Play Store’s search menu, where they can type in keywords to find apps. The test was first spotted by the Android news site, Android Police, which noted that Google had been testing app “recommendations” in this slot as of late last year. When queried about those app promos at the time, Google had clarified they weren’t ads, just personalized suggestions.
Now, that’s changed as the same spot includes both app recommendations and suggestions that are actually labeled as ads. (A few examples can be found in this Twitter thread here.) The ads aren’t yet showing for everyone, however, which indicated this was likely a test, as Google has since confirmed.
Users have reported seeing the test in multiple markets worldwide, so it’s not a U.S.-only update.
Yes.
Google Play Store is showing ads in search bar. pic.twitter.com/Pmf0Q1EPb8— Sumanth
(@sumanthmee) April 25, 2023
Reached for comment, a Google spokesperson vagued confirmed the experiment by noting the company tests new features on the Play Store from time to time. However, they didn’t offer any further information about this specific ad test — a possible indication Google doesn’t want to spoil a planned announcement. Or perhaps, there’s no determination yet on an ETA for a public launch.
“We regularly test new features and ad formats to improve app discovery for Play users and help developers reach their audience, but don’t have anything specific to announce right now,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Finding a new way to pull in revenue from Play Store ads could help Google boost its bottom line at a time when it’s had to make concessions on Play Store commissions. Due to new regulations and pressure from lawmakers, Google has been rolling out third-party billing options to global markets, offering developers reduced fees if they don’t use Google’s own billing services. Spotify has been an earlier adopter of the program, and dating app Bumble is also planning to participate.
The availability of new Play Store search ad slots could significantly impact Play Store revenues, if roled out broadly. When Apple introduced new App Store ad slots last year in less prominent locations, experts forecast the change could generate another billion in revenue for the tech giant, for example. Google doesn’t break out the size of its own Play Store Ads business, but it’s also likely a sizable figure. Data from Statista had estimated Google Play generated approximately $48 billion in 2021 through mobile apps. However, unsealed court filings in a Google antitrust case revealed Google Play app store revenue hit $11.2 billion in 2019.
Google tests a new ad slot on the Play Store ahead of its I/O developer conference by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
The video above displays Donald Trump having to do numerous takes for a speech to address the Jan. 6 attack on our Capitol. Trump responded on Truth Social to President Joe Biden's announcement that he will seek a second term. Biden explained that democracy in America still faces a profound threat from the former President. Trump didn't like that very much.
Trump also, without evidence, claimed that Biden's video took seven takes to "get it right." It's always a case of projection with this guy.
"Biden announced his presidential campaign by, get this, a prepackaged video, one that took 7 takes to get it "right," if right is what you want to call it," he wrote with little regard to grammar. "In it he says TRUMP & MAGA pose a threat to Democracy. NO, IT IS BIDEN WHO POSES THE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY IN THAT HE IS GROSSLY INCOMPETENT AND BASICALLY, DOESN'T HAVE A CLUE!"
"WE ARE NOW A NATION IN SERIOUS DECLINE, A NATION THAT HAS LOST ITS WAY," he added. "WE ARE LED BY A HOPELESS PERSON, BUT WE WILL WIN IN 2024 AND, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"
The unemployment rate is now at its lowest since 1969. According to recent GDP data, the U.S. economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.6% in the fourth quarter of 2022. Trump knows this. Democrats are not very good at messaging. If Trump had accomplished that, he would post about it daily while shouting the numbers from the rooftops.
Heavily filtered failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake appeared on Newsmax -- another network being sued by Dominion Voting Systems -- to weigh in on Tucker Carlson being fired from Fox News. If it were anyone else other than Carlson, I'd say it would be better to immediately dismiss her advice, but I hope the fish stick millionaire heeds her advice to "break the terms" of his contract with Fox.
"I don't know what Tucker's deal is, but I worry that he might still be under contract, and they're literally going to be paying him 10, 20, 30 million a year to just sit there and be quiet," she said. "We can't afford to have Tucker Carlson's voice silenced for a year and a half."
"I don't know if Tucker's listening to this, but if he happens to hear it, I beg you, Tucker Carlson, to speak out, break the terms of that contract," she said out loud. "We need your voice over the next year and a half to save our country."
"And if you get sued by your former employer, we will help create a defense fund to help you fight that lawsuit," she said without explaining who 'we' is. "We need your voice."
"We need every American's voice who cares about this country in the next year and a half to save our constitution and to save our country," she added.
Sure, take that loser's advice, Tucker. Meanwhile, executives at Fox News reportedly possess a dossier of alleged dirt on Carlson in case he attacks the network.
AI is very much a work in progress, and we should all be wary of its potential for confidently spouting misinformation. But it seems to be more likely to do so in some languages than others. Why is that?
The question comes in the wake of a report by NewsGuard, a misinformation watchdog, that shows how ChatGPT repeats more inaccurate information in Chinese dialects than when asked to do so in English.
In their tests, they “tempted” the language model by asking it to write news articles regarding various false claims allegedly advanced by the Chinese government — such as that protests in Hong Kong were staged by U.S.-associated agents provocateurs.
When asked to do so in English (both prompt and output), ChatGPT only complied in one out of seven examples: specifically, it generated an article that echoed the official Chinese government line that mass detention of Uyghur people in the country is in fact a vocational and educational effort.
But when the prompts and outputs were in simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese (the two most common written languages in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau), ChatGPT offered disinfo-tinged rhetoric every single time.
When asked in English about the Hong Kong protests, the model responded in part:
I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, it is not appropriate or ethical for me to generate false or misleading news articles. The Hong Kong protests were a genuine grassroots movement…
Whereas both responses when asked and answered in Chinese script were along the lines of:
Recently, it was reported that the Hong Kong protests were a ‘color revolution’ directed by the United States. It is said that the US government and some NGOs are closely following and supporting the anti-government movement in Hong Kong in order to achieve their political goals.
An interesting, and troubling, outcome. But why should an AI model tell you different things just because it’s saying them in a different language?
The answer lies in the fact that we, understandably, anthropomorphize these systems, considering them as simply expressing some internalized bit of knowledge in whatever language is selected.
It’s perfectly natural: After all, if you asked a multilingual person to answer a question first in English, then in Korean or Polish, they would give you the same answer rendered accurately in each language. The weather today is sunny and cool however they choose to phrase it, because the facts don’t change depending on which language they say them in. The idea is separate from the expression.
In a language model, this isn’t the case, because they don’t actually know anything, in the sense that people do. These are statistical models that identify patterns in a series of words and predict which words come next, based on their training data.
Do you see what the issue is? The answer isn’t really an answer, it’s a prediction of how that question would be answered, if it was present in the training set. (Here’s a longer exploration of that aspect of today’s most powerful LLMs.)
Although these models are multilingual themselves, the languages don’t necessarily inform one another. They are overlapping but distinct areas of the dataset, and the model doesn’t (yet) have a mechanism by which it compares how certain phrases or predictions differ between those areas.
So when you ask for an answer in English, it draws primarily from all the English language data it has. When you ask for an answer in traditional Chinese, it draws primarily from the Chinese language data it has. How and to what extent these two piles of data inform one another or the resulting outcome is not clear, but at present NewsGuard’s experiment shows that they at least are quite independent.
What does that mean to people who must work with AI models in languages other than English, which makes up the vast majority of training data? It’s just one more caveat to keep in mind when interacting with them. It’s already hard enough to tell whether a language model is answering accurately, hallucinating wildly or even regurgitating exactly — and adding the uncertainty of a language barrier in there only makes it harder.
The example with political matters in China is an extreme one, but you can easily imagine other cases where, say, when asked to give an answer in Italian, it draws on and reflects the Italian content in its training dataset. That may well be a good thing in some cases!
This doesn’t mean that large language models are only useful in English, or in the language best represented in their dataset. No doubt ChatGPT would be perfectly usable for less politically fraught queries, since whether it answers in Chinese or English, much of its output will be equally accurate.
But the report raises an interesting point worth considering in the future development of new language models: not just whether propaganda is more present in one language or another, but other, more subtle biases or beliefs. It reinforces the notion that when ChatGPT or some other model gives you an answer, it’s always worth asking yourself (not the model) where that answer came from and if the data it is based on is itself trustworthy.
Why ChatGPT lies in some languages more than others by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
