Techmeme
October 15, 2024, 11:10 PM

Top News

Tim Hardwick / MacRumors:
Apple unveils an updated iPad mini with A17 Pro, Apple Intelligence, and the same 8.3" display, starting at $499 with 128GB of storage, available to pre-order  —  Apple today announced a significant update to the iPad mini, featuring the powerful A17 Pro chip and support for the company's new Apple Intelligence system.
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Google rolls out Android 15 to Pixel devices, adding privacy features like a “private space” for apps, security tools, and foldable and tablet improvements  —  Android 15 is now rolling out to Pixel devices, bringing them new privacy features, security tools, and improvements for foldables and tablets.
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
YouTube rolls out new features: granular playback speed controls, an improved miniplayer on iOS and Android, updated playlists, a sleep timer, and more  —  YouTube is making official a number of updates that it's been testing in recent months, like the new miniplayer and several design updates.
CoinDesk:
Trump-backed World Liberty Financial crypto project gets off to a bumpy start, as its website crashes and WLFI token sales fall far short of the $300M target  —  A blockchain wallet connected to the token holds nearly $4 million worth of ether (ETH), $1.2 million of tether (USDT) and around $250,000 USD Coin (USDC) tokens.
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Meta rolls out “activity status” to Threads that shows a green dot next to a user's profile picture to show the user is online, if they have the feature enabled  —  Meta is adding an “activity status” to Threads so that you can see who's actively online as you're scrolling your feed.
Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:
Intel and AMD forge an x86 ecosystem advisory group to ensure a unified x86 instruction set architecture moving forward, amid competition from Arm and RISC-V  —  Cats and dogs, living together!  —  In a rare public-facing display of cooperation between two of the industry's fiercest rivals …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
A teardown of Microsoft's diskless Xbox Series X, which was released today, shows a redesigned motherboard, a 6nm chip, and a new cooling system  —  Microsoft's discless Xbox Series X goes on sale today, and while it looks slightly different on the outside thanks to a white paint job and lack …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Anthropic updates its Responsible Scaling Policy, setting benchmarks for when an AI model's abilities reach a point where additional safeguards are necessary  —  Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the popular Claude chatbot, today announced a sweeping update …
Bloomberg:
Filing: Elon Musk poured ~$75M into his pro-Trump America PAC, making seven donations between July 3 and September 5; Musk was the PAC's only donor  —  - Disclosure is first look into Musks' donations to Trump group  — Super PAC spent $69 million to bolster Trump's ground game
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Google rolls out a personalized Shopping feed based on recent searches and YouTube history, coming to mobile first, and adds AI-generated shopping tips  —  Google Shopping is rolling out a personalized feed that shows you a stream of products you might like.
Michael Kan / PCMag:
Chrome begins disabling uBlock Origin as part of Google's plan to phase out Manifest V2 extensions; uBlock Origin has 39M+ downloads on the Chrome Web Store  —  The browser is doing so as part of Google's plan to phase out older Manifest V2 extensions to bolster Chrome's security.
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune:
Los Angeles-based Ghost, a B2B marketplace for surplus inventory with more than 6,000 members, raised a $40M Series C led by L Catterton  —  Ghost cofounders Josh Kaplan and Dee Murthy.  —  MATT CLERKIN AT CLERK CREATIVE  —  At Ghost, all product development groups are named after, well, ghosts.
New York Times:
Trump signaled he wouldn't break up Google if he regained the presidency, saying “China is afraid of Google” and questioning if it might “destroy the company”  —  The former president also said he would do “something” to make Google “more fair” if he regained the presidency.
P.R. Venkat / Wall Street Journal:
Filing: Chinese smart-driving company Horizon Robotics is targeting to raise ~$700M in its Hong Kong IPO; Alibaba and Baidu are among its cornerstone investors  —  Alibaba, Baidu, and state-owned Beijing Financial Holdings are among the cornerstone investors who have agreed to take over 30% of Horizon Robotics' shares ahead of the IPO
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Adobe teases AI tools that can generate 3D scenes, make animated graphics in different styles, and automatically remove distractions in images and videos  —  Adobe is previewing some experimental AI tools for animation, image generation, and cleaning up video and photographs that could eventually be added to its Creative Cloud apps.

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