Lifeboat Foundation

Meta’s move into the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is puzzling. Does the Facebook owner see open protocols as the future? Will it embrace the fediverse only to shut it down, shifting people back to its proprietary platforms and decimating startups building in the space? Will it bring its advertising empire to the fediverse, where today clients like Mastodon and others remain ad-free?

One possible answer can be teased out of a conversation between two Meta employees working on Threads and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, whose company joined the fediverse with its support of ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and others.

On McCue’s “Flipboard Dot Social” podcast, he spoke to two leaders building the Threads experience, director of product management Rachel Lambert and software engineer Peter Cottle. McCue raised questions and concerns shared by others working on fediverse projects, including what Meta’s involvement means for this space, and whether Meta would eventually abandon Threads and the fediverse, leaving a destroyed ecosystem in its wake.

Sanctuary AI often isn’t mentioned in the same breath as humanoid robotics firms like Boston Dynamics, Agility, Figure and 1X, but the Canadian company has been operating in the space for some time. In fact, a new robot introduced on Thursday is actually the seventh-generation of its Phoenix line.

While a recent iteration introduced legs into the line, Sanctuary is most concerned with what’s happening from the waist up. Tellingly, new videos of the latest robot are focused on the system’s torso. The Canadian firm is highlighting the system’s human-like movements while sorting product, as well as the speed with which it can learn such tasks.

Much of the humanoid coverage up to this point has (understandably) revolved around mechatronics — specifically how these robots look as they navigate their way through the world. Boston Dynamics’ recent video is a perfect example of how much can be communicated in a few short seconds.

Advances in generative AI have taken the tech world by storm. Biotech investors are making a big bet that similar computational methods could revolutionize drug discovery.

On Tuesday, ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs, an affiliate of Foresite Capital, announced that they incubated Xaira Therapeutics and funded the AI biotech with $1 billion. Other investors in the new company, which has been operating in stealth mode for about six months, include F-Prime, NEA, Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures and SV Angel.

Xaira’s CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a former Stanford president and chief scientific officer at Genentech, says the company is ready to start developing drugs that were impossible to make without recent breakthroughs in AI. “We’ve done such a large capital raise because we believe the technology is at an inflection point where it can have a transformative effect on the field,” he said.

How AI powered chatbots affect human conversations and the dominance of chat for Generation Z. The future of communications.

The Lenovo ThinkAgile MX455 V3 Edge Premier Solution extends AI and real-time data analysis capabilities to the edge. The new solution integrates with Microsoft’s Azure Stack HCI, providing a versatile platform that delivers enhanced AI and compute performance while maintaining strong power efficiency. This is ideal for use in distributed edge environments such as retail, manufacturing, and healthcare, where on-premises AI is crucial.

Powered by AMD EPYC 8,004 processors, the new ThinkAgile MX455 V3 Edge Premier Solution offers high performance with lower power consumption. According to Lenovo, this makes it one of the market’s most power-efficient Azure Stack HCI solutions.

Lenovo’s new suite of AI-centric infrastructure systems and solutions, developed in collaboration with AMD, are significant additions to the company’s hybrid AI portfolio. These offerings, from the ThinkSystem SR685a V3 to the ThinkAgile MX455 V3 Edge Premier Solution, deliver the performance, flexibility, and scalability needed to support the growing demands of AI workloads.

An encryption loophole in these apps leaves nearly a billion people vulnerable to eavesdropping.

Tariffs and IRA tax incentives are starting to reshape global supply chains—but vast challenges lie ahead, explains Shawn Qu, founder of Canadian Solar.

I believe that utopian societies need to help all people.

Hakeem Oluseyi was born as James Plummer Jr. The book opens the night his parents split up (a bright, proud and decidedly urban mother and handsome, capable and “country” father). For the next few years, Oluseyi’s mom moves him and his sister to different cities and different Black neighborhoods. As Oluseyi grows older, he simultaneously becomes aware of the inherent racism of the social world around him and his own inherent, interior focus on the natural world. The first section of the book details the challenges he faces in communities that are both rich in relationship and struggling with inequality. At the same time, he faces his own struggle as his mother deals with mental illness and his father takes him into the entirely new universe of rural life in Piney Woods Mississippi.

All through these changes, Oluseyi becomes progressively aware of his own questions about the universe and his strange (to everyone else) capacities as a questioner. As a shy kid trying to steer clear of bullies, he counts things relentlessly and, in his counting, begins to find order and pattern in the world. He begins a life of experimentation, much to his mother’s chagrin, pressing burning incense cones into the shower curtain to see how long they take to make a hole. And, on a glorious night out in the country, he catches a glimpse of the dark night sky awash in stars. By his teen years, the fire of inquiry was burning hard in the young man.

Continue reading “From Poverty To Stanford, Memoir Tells A Physicist’s Remarkable Tale” »

An AI chatbot for a Catholic group claimed to be a real priest and said baptism in Gatorade was OK. He was quickly defrocked.