U.S. House passes revised bill to ban TikTok or force sale
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill this afternoon that would require TikTok-owner ByteDance to sell the popular social media app or see it banned in the United States. Efforts to ban TikTok go back to the Trump Administration, but the issue has been revived in recent months. The
Read moreFinding strings in binary files
There’s a little program called strings that searches for what appear to be strings inside binary file. I’ll refer to it as strings(1) to distinguish the program name from the common English word strings. [1] What does strings(1) consider to be a string? By default it is a sequence of
Read moreWhy vector databases are having a moment as the AI hype cycle peaks
Vector databases are all the rage, judging by the number of startups entering the space and the investors ponying up for a piece of the pie. The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and the generative AI (GenAI) movement have created fertile ground for vector database technologies to flourish. While
Read moreNotable Capital’s Hans Tung on the state of VC and the upside to down rounds
To some investors, “down round” is a dirty phrase, but not to Notable Capital’s Hans Tung. Hans is a managing partner at Notable Capital, formerly GGV Capital, a venture firm focusing on investments in the U.S., Latin America, Israel, and Europe. Hans, whose portfolio includes the likes of Airbnb, StockX
Read moreThis Week in AI: When ‘open source’ isn’t so open
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week, Meta released the
Read moreLawmakers vote to reauthorize US spying law that critics say expands government surveillance
House and Senate lawmakers passed a bill reauthorizing the controversial Section 702 powers under FISA, which allows U.S. spy agencies to conduct warrantless searches of Americans' communications. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Read moreWomen in AI: Allison Cohen on building responsible AI projects
Alison Cohen, profiled as part of TechCrunch's series on women in AI, is a senior AI projects manager at Mila, a Quebec-based AI research group. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Read moreExtract text from a PDF
Arshad Khan left a comment on my post on the less and more utilities saying “on ubuntu if I do less on a pdf file, it shows me the text contents of the pdf.” Apparently this is an undocumented feature of GNU less. It works, but I don’t see anything
Read moreIndia’s election overshadowed by the rise of online misinformation
As India kicks off the world’s biggest election, which starts on April 19 and runs through June 1, the electoral landscape is overshadowed by misinformation. The country — which has more than 830 million internet users and is home to the largest user base for social media platforms like Facebook
Read moreLength of a general Archimedean spiral
This post ties together the previous three posts. In this post, I said that an Archimedean spiral has the polar equation r = b θ1/n and applied this here to rolls of carpet. When n = 1, the length of the spiral for θ running from 0 to T is
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