Techmeme
April 4, 2024, 5:30 AM

Top News

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple is exploring home robotic devices, including a mobile robot that can follow users and a table-top device that uses robotics to move a display  —  - The company has teams working on automated home devices  — The search is on for new growth sources after EV gets nixed
Financial Times:
The Guardian:
Sources: Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza used Lavender, an AI system that identified 37,000 potential human targets based on their apparent links to Hamas  —  Israeli intelligence sources reveal use of ‘Lavender’ system in Gaza war and claim permission given to kill civilians in pursuit of low-ranking militants
Amrita Khalid / The Verge:
X adds blue checks to some large accounts as part of its plan to give free Premium memberships to those with at least 2,500 “verified subscriber followers”  —  Just as Elon Musk said, X is doling out free Premium and Premium memberships to accounts with a high number of verified followers.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Memo: AWS plans to cut several hundred jobs in its Sales, Marketing, and Global Services organization, and a few hundred in its Physical Stores Technology team  —  Amazon Web Services will cut several hundred jobs in its Sales, Marketing, and Global Services organization …
Joyce Lee / Reuters:
SK Hynix plans to invest ~$3.87B in an advanced packaging plant and R&D facility in West Lafayette, Indiana, to produce high bandwidth memory chips from H2 2028  —  SK Hynix (000660.KS), the world's second-largest memory chip maker, said on Wednesday it will invest around $3.87 billion …
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
An interview with Andres Freund, a Microsoft database engineer working on PostgreSQL, on discovering the XZ Utils backdoor, doubting his own findings, and more  —  The internet, as anyone who works deep in its trenches will tell you, is not a smooth, well-oiled machine.
Threads: @jenvalentino_nytX: @kevinrooseLinkedIn: Affan DarForums: Hacker News, r/technology, and r/neoliberal
Wired:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Windows 10 security updates will cost $61/device for year one, doubling for year two and doubling again for year three, after ending support on October 14, 2025  —  Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 on October 14th, 2025, and you'll need to pay yearly if you want to continue using the operating system securely.
Richard Lawler / The Verge:
Apple resolves an outage impacting some of its online services, including the App Store, Apple TV, Podcasts, and Music, that lasted for over an hour on April 3  —  Apple's online services were hit with an outage that cut many of us off from the App Store, Apple TV, and Apple Music on Wednesday night.
Mark Bergen / Bloomberg:
Paris-based Pigment, a subscription-based business planning and forecasting service, raised $145M, sources say at a $1B+ valuation, for $393M in total funding  —  - French software startup said to be valued above $1 billion  — Funding round comes as VC financing remains sluggish globally
More: TechCrunch
Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch:
Self-driving software startup Ghost Autonomy, formerly Ghost Locomotion, shuts down, after raising ~$220M, and just five months after partnering with OpenAI  —  Ghost Autonomy, a startup working on autonomous driving software for automaker partners, has shut down, TechCrunch has learned.
Alex Koller / CNBC:
Uber Eats rolls out delivery services with Waymo's self-driving cars in the Phoenix area, Uber's seventh site with autonomous deliveries and first with Waymo  —  Two Waymo autonomous vehicles drive themselves down Central Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S., March 18, 2024.
TechCrunch:
A look at some exciting startups from day one of YC's Winter 2024 Demo Day, including those using AI for creating music and helping lawyers review documents  —  Springtime means rain, the return of flowers and, of course, Y Combinator's first demo day of the year.
Business Insider:
Meta is testing giving cash bonuses to creators who post engaging content on Threads, as part of an invite-only program  —  - Meta is testing cash bonuses for creators who post engaging content on Threads.  — Threads is currently the top app in Apple's App Store, and had 130 million active users in February.

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Featured Podcasts

Hard Fork:
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The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
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The Upstarts Podcast:
Pigment's Eléonore Crespo: Building France's Next Unicorn With AI Agents And Tom Cruise
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This AI will push back if you're rude to it
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Big Technology Podcast:
AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber: AI Already Feels Pain, Loves, and Is Self-Aware
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Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
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More News

Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Ina Fried / Axios:
Amrita Khalid / The Verge:

Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Emilia David / The Verge:
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: