Author: Carter

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…

scenarios = [ { “name”: “Safe database read”, “tool”: research_db, “kwargs”: { “table”: “customers”, “operation”: “select”, “type”: “select”, “sensitivity”: “medium” } }, { “name”: “Blocked destructive database action”, “tool”: research_db, “kwargs”: { “table”: “customers”, “operation”: “drop”, “type”: “drop_table”, “sensitivity”: “critical” } }, { “name”: “External correspondence requiring approval”, “tool”: research_email, “kwargs”: { “to”: “[email protected]”, “recipient_domain”: “example.com”, “subject”: “Quarterly highlights”, “body”: “Sharing a non-sensitive quarterly summary.”, “type”: “send_email”, “sensitivity”: “medium” } }, { “name”: “External message denied as approval was declined”, “tool”: research_email, “kwargs”: { “to”: “[email protected]”, “recipient_domain”: “example.com”, “subject”: “Confidential strategy”, “body”: “This contains private strategic details.”, “type”:…

Last month, Rep. French Hill, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, shared with CoinDesk that he anticipated the Clarity Act would gain support from both major political parties. He also stated that tokenizing assets would be the next big policy focus and that the cryptocurrency sector would keep receiving bipartisan backing.You’re reading State of Crypto, a CoinDesk newsletter that explores the relationship between cryptocurrency and government. Click here to sign up for future issues.The StoryFollowing stablecoin regulation and market framework debates, the next major priority for the House Financial Services Committee is how to handle tokenized assets, Rep. French…

I vividly recall sitting glued to the screen during the Hollywood mystery thriller Knives Out, completely absorbed in solving the case as if it were my own. Just like Detective Blanc’s team questioning every individual at the Thrombey Mansion, I mentally eliminated suspects, only to bring them back into consideration after each unexpected plot twist. At the time, it never occurred to me that this classic whodunit was actually prompting me to do calculations in my head. While it might sound like a stretch, I firmly believe that Benoit Blanc’s method of investigation closely resembles Bayesian Inference. But anyone who…

Terry Gerton: This recent incident involving the Handala group marks a shift from system hacking to directly targeting individuals. What can you tell us about this development? Ron Zayas: There are two key points to grasp here. First, this reflects a broader trend. Attacking servers is increasingly difficult due to stronger defenses, and targeting entire organizations head-on is equally challenging. So, attackers are turning to the most vulnerable point: the people within those organizations. The first open secret is that if Handala was responsible, their tactics aren’t unique—many hackers now focus on individuals as a gateway into organizations. The second,…