FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been sentenced to a total of 300 months in prison for seven counts of conspiracy and fraud charges. He has also been ordered to forfeit more than $11 billion, including property. The sentence is shorter than the 40 to 50 years requested by the prosecutors, but longer than the six and a half years his lawyers asked for and far less than the maximum of 110 years. Bankman-Fried has been residing in custody since August 2023, where he has been subjected to multiple extortion attempts.
Facebook Watch, announced in 2017, never really took off. Recently revealed documents show the company's plans for the platform and how it was confident in its ability to compete with Netflix. Mark Zuckerberg abruptly announced a change in strategy in May 2018, suddenly slashing the budget for the platform. He claimed the budget changes were based on his knowledge of the company's strategy and financial outlook. Months later, Facebook and Netflix announced a new data-sharing agreement that involved Netflix reaching $200 million in advertising spend by 2019. The companies also had a data-sharing agreement that may have allowed Netflix to access Facebook users' private messages.
Recent achievements in AI have been due to three factors: innovation in efficient machine-learning algorithms, the availability of massive amounts of data to train neural networks, and progress in energy-efficient computing through the advancement of semiconductor technology. The industry will need much more powerful devices to continue at its current pace. For the past 50 years, the industry has focused on shrinking the transistor, but now, there are many more possibilities. Future GPUs will not be restricted to the sizes and form factors of current devices - integrated AI systems will be composed of as many energy-efficient transistors as is practical.
A study in mice shows that memories are formed from breaks in DNA. These breaks occur due to a rush of electrical activity and are repaired using an inflammatory response. The findings suggest a mechanism for faulty memory in people with neurodegenerative diseases.
Valkey is a high-performance data structure server that primarily serves key/value workloads. It is an open-source fork of the popular Redis data store. The project started as Redis Labs, the company behind the original Redis codebase, changed Redis to more restrictive licensing. The Valkey fork has assembled an impressive roster of maintainers and contributors and has wide-ranging industry support.
Spice is a runtime that makes querying data by SQL across one or more data sources simple and fast. It provides developers with a unified SQL query interface that can locally materialize, accelerate, and query data tables sourced from any database, data warehouse, or data lake. Spice makes it easy to build data-driven and data-intensive applications. It leverages industry-leading technologies like Apache DataFusion, Apache Arrow, Apache Arrow Flight, and DuckDB.
None of the things mentioned in the DOJ's case against Apple should be a surprise to anyone who has been following in the Apple space for years. People have been hoping the company would change or tweak its ways in many of these areas. While Apple's actions may be disagreeable, they may not be illegal. The DOJ is fighting an uphill battle with its case, but it will hopefully apply some pressure on Apple to loosen its grip on some things.
The Android website has added a new landing page for Google Messages which notes that RCS is coming to the iPhone in the fall of 2024. It is not clear whether RCS will arrive with the initial release of iOS 18 or in an update in the last few months of the year. The updated landing page also notes that animated emoji reactions are coming soon to RCS. Screenshots of the landing page are available in the article.
Researchers at Aston University achieved an internet data transmission speed of 301 terabits per second by utilizing wavelength bands that have not been previously used in fiber-optic systems.
New project creation was halted on PyPI for around 10 hours while the site dealt with an onslaught of package uploads that executed malicious code on any device that installed them.
Modular has shared its full commit history and open sourced Mojo, a programming language that combines Python's syntax and ecosystem with systems programming and metaprogramming features.