Author: Carter

As a programming tool, Claude Code stands out as an exceptional assistant and has significantly boosted my productivity as an engineer—likely making me several times more efficient. That said, Claude Code extends far beyond coding tasks. It excels in areas like building presentations—easily generating them through code in languages such as Python or LaTeX. It also handles non-technical work, including managing sales outreach or constructing a knowledge base, which is the focus of this article. An LLM-driven knowledge base is a game-changer for efficiency, letting you retrieve critical information in seconds. Here, I’ll walk you through setting one up, why…

Last year, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather was experimenting with climate data visualizations, searching for fresh and striking ways to illustrate just how rapidly the planet is heating up. He was brainstorming with an artificial-intelligence tool, having it quickly code and generate new designs. Together, they created inventive tree-ring-style charts — with months arranged around each ring, annual circles expanding outward over time, and colors representing temperature. Then Hausfather posed a question to the AI: what if these charts were rendered in 3D?The outcome was what Hausfather calls a thermal helix animation — a visualization of temperature spiraling upward through time,…

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is scheduled to release the April Consumer Price Index (CPI) report on Tuesday. The data is anticipated to reveal another notable surge in consumer prices following March’s steep climb, fueled by rising Oil costs stemming from the ongoing tensions between the United States (US) and Iran. Economists predict the monthly CPI will increase by 0.6%, down from the 0.9% jump seen in March, while the yearly figure is projected to reach 3.7%—its highest point since September 2023—up from 3.3% in March. Core CPI numbers, which strip out unpredictable food and energy costs, are…

Many of the most severe supply chain vulnerabilities stem from weaknesses introduced into software during the CI/CD build process. A build application firewall could offer a powerful solution. The 2020 SolarWinds supply chain breach—impacting roughly 18,000 organizations—should have served as a critical wake-up call. It exposed a major attack vector: infiltrating the development lifecycle of widely adopted tools. Yet, despite its scale, we failed to implement effective defenses. Since then, attackers have repeatedly exploited the same strategy with success. In March 2026, North Korean threat actors took over the account of an Axios npm library maintainer and released two malicious…

On Monday, President Donald Trump put forward Cameron Hamilton as his pick to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This marks a significant return for the ex-Navy SEAL, who was dismissed from his position as FEMA’s acting chief last year after publicly supporting the agency’s continued existence. Hamilton’s selection follows a shift in the Trump administration’s stance, moving away from earlier pledges to eliminate FEMA—an agency that has faced intense criticism from the president. Hamilton’s nomination, given his previous argument that ending FEMA would not serve the nation’s interests, is the most recent sign of this evolving position. Should he…

David Gewirtz / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways Gemini can analyze YouTube, MP4, and MOV files.Claude still cannot handle video content directly.ChatGPT requires assistance from Codex for more advanced video tasks.AI tools are great at processing text from prompts and documents. Most handle image interpretation effectively, but what about video? Can your preferred AI actually make sense of video content? And if it can, what can you do with that capability?Also: I compared ChatGPT Plus and Gemini Pro to determine which performs better – and whether switching is…

“Let the Sunshine In” is a popular song from the 1960s musical *Hair*. Today, the title feels fitting, as more drivers are choosing cars with panoramic glass roofs over standard metal ones. Glass roofs attract drivers who want brighter interiors, a more open cabin feel, or a sleek, modern look. They also make it easier for engineers to add advanced solar technology to vehicles. Car makers and suppliers are actively developing solar-powered vehicle tech to boost driving range, improve energy efficiency, and reduce reliance on charging stations. Solar panels can also run extra features like entertainment systems, lights, and air…

The legal battle waged by Elon Musk against OpenAI and Microsoft moved into its closing phase on Monday, with key appearances from Microsoft’s chief executive Satya Nadella, ex–OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and current OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor.Sutskever emerged as the center of attention after disclosing his ownership share in OpenAI’s for-profit division, now valued at roughly $850 billion overall, with his personal stake estimated at about $7 billion. This positions him among the biggest individual investors ever identified in OpenAI. Earlier during proceedings, OpenAI president Greg Brockman publicly confirmed for the first time that he holds OpenAI shares…

Researchers from Meta, Stanford University, and the University of Washington have unveiled three innovative techniques that dramatically speed up text generation in the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT) — a language model architecture that processes raw bytes directly, bypassing traditional tokenization. Why Byte-Level Models Struggle with Speed To appreciate the significance of this new work, it helps to understand the fundamental tradeoff in byte-level language modeling. Most modern language models operate on tokens — text fragments generated by subword tokenizers such as byte-pair encoding (BPE). A single token often covers multiple characters or even an entire word. While this approach is…

The Department of Defense has put forward a major new regulation that would dramatically broaden how the government monitors foreign ownership and influence within the defense industry. Under this proposal, tens of thousands of contractors without security clearances would face the same security obligations that were previously reserved only for firms dealing with classified data. The draft Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement rule, published last week, would mandate that any contractor or subcontractor pursuing DoD business must share their beneficial ownership details with the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency and disclose whether they fall under foreign ownership, control, or influence—commonly…