Author: Carter

Artie Beaty/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysAndroid Auto can cause your phone to overheat due to its intensive data usage.There are several tricks you can use to keep your phone cool.Closing apps, running your car’s AC, and using a new cable can all help.Android Auto can be an incredibly useful tool, but it’s pretty taxing on your phone. When your device is navigating, streaming music, charging, sending data, and more at the same time, it’s no surprise it might start to run hot — especially if you live in a warm climate. I’ve seen high…

In my piece on Taming Entity and Relationship Sprawl in Knowledge Graphs, I covered how the Proxy-Pointer design helps pinpoint the right entities and relationships quickly. Still, that tackles just the second half of a major hurdle in loading data into a graph. The trickier—and costlier—task is actually spotting those entities (NER) and relationships to begin with. Knowledge Graphs are designed to handle layered queries and aggregation across entities and relationships found in similar documents—contracts, compliance guides, credit terms, global policies, and more. These files often stretch beyond 100 pages, with text that easily surpasses 500,000 characters. Companies routinely upload…

The Office of Personnel Management is still dealing with a spike in retirement applications, a result of the large number of federal workers who took the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA) offer and the deferred resignation program (DRP). In February 2026, OPM issued a justification for a new contract aimed at modernizing its HR systems. In that statement, OPM warned of an “expected doubling of the retirement application backlog.” As of May 2026, OPM’s average processing time for federal retirement cases sits at 76 days (50 days for applications filed digitally and 100 days for those submitted on paper). Regardless…

Manufacturer or Full Name/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.The MacBook Neo significantly shook up the consumer laptop market by delivering high-end features at an accessible $599 price. However, its position at the top is now being threatened. PC manufacturers are fighting back with models designed to directly take on the Neo by surpassing its shortcomings. Take the latest Dell XPS 13 — priced from $599 for students and $699 for everyone else — which thins the line considerably. It is lighter than the Neo and boasts a broader display, superior port selection, and includes a backlit…

The essential highlights A newly signed executive order instructs federal agencies to implement more rigorous fraud detection measures and impose stricter credit limits for individuals in the U.S. without legal documentation. Analysts observe that this strategy echoes an alleged initiative during the Biden era intended to pressure cryptocurrency businesses—and mirrors the conditions that contributed to the founding of World Liberty Financial. Opponents caution that excluding large numbers of people from standard financial services could unintentionally aid criminal enterprises or trigger retaliatory actions down the road. As banking restrictions increasingly affected President Donald Trump’s family, they turned to cryptocurrencies. Now, unauthorized…

article. Two situations. Scene 1. A team building a RAG system over a few hundred contracts has read Article 2. Embeddings break on negation, on exact identifiers, on the gap between a question and its answer. The team’s first reflex is the one the literature suggests: add a reranker. Cross-encoder, smaller than an LLM, smarter than cosine, slot it between embeddings and the LLM. They wire in bge-reranker-base, send it the top-100 from the embedding stage, keep the top-10. A few queries that were broken yesterday seem to work today. The team is encouraged. Scene 2. Two weeks in, the…

StepFun today unveiled Step 3.7 Flash, a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model tailored for agentic workloads. It brings native vision input and more dependable tool usage compared to its predecessor, Step 3.5 Flash. What Does Step 3.7 Flash Offer? Step 3.7 Flash is a 198-billion-parameter sparse Mixture-of-Experts vision-language model. It combines a 196-billion-parameter language backbone with a 1.8-billion-parameter vision encoder (ViT) to natively interpret images. During inference, the model activates roughly 11 billion parameters per token. In MoE designs, only a select group of “expert” sub-networks engages for each forward pass—not the entire model—keeping computational demands comparable to an 11-billion-parameter dense…

If you’ve been steadily investing in the C and S Funds, well done. With the S&P 500 recently surging beyond 7,200 and setting new records, your TSP balance has probably never looked stronger. Those gains are well deserved. But now is the moment to guard them. There’s a harsh reality about Wall Street that every investor eventually confronts: Unrealized gains don’t count until you actually secure them. At the moment, the C and S funds are performing well since they track the stock market, which continues to climb. But keeping every dollar of profit allocated there is like winning big…

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETStay updated with ZDNET: Set us as your preferred source on Google.Important points from ZDNETThere are still search engines like Google that barely use any artificial intelligence at all. Startpage and DuckDuckGo lead the pack. Mojeek stands out for running its own separate search index.I’m certainly not the most vocal person against AI, but I’ll be honest—I don’t always appreciate Google condensing the entire internet into a single response for me.Realistically, I would love a way to disable AI Overviews. Plus, having AI Mode pushed onto me with every search gets tiresome. Occasionally, I simply want…

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