Author: Carter

In brief Apple CEO Tim Cook cautioned that Mac mini and Mac Studio units could face ongoing shortages for “several months,” as AI-fueled demand dramatically outpaced the company’s projections. OpenClaw—the open-source AI agent platform now supported by OpenAI—made Apple’s unified memory architecture the go-to hardware choice for running large AI models locally. Apple’s M4 Ultra chip supports up to 192GB of unified memory, enabling developers to run models that exceed the capacity of any single consumer Nvidia GPU, which tops out at 32GB of VRAM. The Mac mini has long been the unassuming, easy-to-overlook desktop tucked away in the corner…

Conversational AI has long faced a tough tradeoff: be fast or be smart. Real-time speech-to-speech (S2S) models — the ones behind natural-sounding voice assistants — start responding almost immediately, but their answers tend to lack depth. On the other hand, cascaded systems that pass speech through a large language model (LLM) deliver much richer responses, but the processing delay is long enough to make conversations feel awkward and mechanical. Sakana AI, a research lab based in Tokyo, has unveiled KAME (Knowledge-Access Model Extension), a hybrid design that preserves the near-instant response time of a direct S2S system while pulling in…

Terry Gerton It seems like we’ve been discussing market fluctuations for months now, whether driven by worries over war, interest rates, or various other uncertainties. Yet when you actually examine TSP performance, both stocks and bonds have gained this year. So let me pose a fundamental question that many federal investors might have. How does that happen? Art Stein Well, explaining how it happens is far more difficult than acknowledging that it did. The market rises and falls for numerous reasons, and in the short term, it may fluctuate due to current events. And one thing I’d tell TSP investors…

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNETStay updated with ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. Key Points from ZDNET High temperatures significantly contribute to early battery deterioration.Charging your phone in a car creates ideal conditions for overheating.You can still charge your device in the vehicle, but certain precautions are necessary.I’ve been monitoring the battery condition of my primary iPhones for so long that it’s become almost automatic. It’s like an unusual hobby or routine I’ve developed. Every few days since I received my iPhone 17 Pro Max, I’ve been opening the Settings app and checking my battery statistics. I’m especially interested because,…

From 2018 to 2022, English urban councils saw almost double the level of electoral volatility. The median volatility climbed from 12.0 up to 22.5. But the number of competing parties didn’t actually grow. This difference only became clear after resolving a bug in how party categories were handled. In this context, volatility tracks how much vote share shifted between party groups, while fragmentation measures how many parties were truly competing with a realistic chance of winning. A council can experience dramatic swings in voter support without becoming more fragmented — for instance, when one dominant party falters and another picks…

Historically, crypto markets have been driven by a dominant narrative. Not today. In one corner, miners are trying to break free of four-year cycles. IREN is being recast as an AI infrastructure company, with analysts pointing to data centers and compute demand as the real growth engine. In another corner, BitMine is doing the exact opposite, pouring billions deeper into Ether (ETH) even as losses mount. The disconnect doesn’t stop there. Stablecoin balances have ballooned to over $300 billion, yet activity has dropped sharply. It reflects capital waiting, with no clear consensus on what comes next.Meanwhile, institutions are building a…

The majority of back-office IRS staff who were temporarily reassigned to handle frontline tax filing duties will continue in their new roles for the time being. In early February, the IRS assigned roughly 1,500 employees from IT and human resources departments to 120-day temporary positions assisting taxpayers. Most of these workers had no prior experience in taxpayer services and have spent several months undergoing training. The agency faced a 27% reduction in its workforce last year and failed to meet its hiring targets for the filing season. During a Friday morning conference call, Joseph Ziegler, the IRS chief of internal…

[3], a web-based vector compression technique, garnered significant attention at ICLR 2026. To me, it appeared strikingly similar: it shares substantial common ground with EDEN—a compression approach initially proposed as the 1-bit technique DRIVE at NeurIPS 2021 [1] and later extended to support any bit-width at ICML 2022 [2]. I co-authored EDEN alongside Ran Ben-Basat, Yaniv Ben-Itzhak, Gal Mendelson, Michael Mitzenmacher, and Shay Vargaftik. The TurboQuant publication introduces two versions: TurboQuant-mse and TurboQuant-prod. In our recent thorough evaluation [5], we demonstrate that TurboQuant-mse is actually a simplified variant of EDEN, and that EDEN’s approaches consistently deliver superior performance. How EDEN…

Microsoft has rolled out KB5083631, an optional cumulative update for Windows 11. This release delivers 34 changes, featuring a brand-new Xbox mode for PCs, better security and performance for batch files, and faster startup app launches. KB5083631 is a preview update designed for IT administrators to evaluate bug fixes, enhancements, and upcoming features ahead of next month’s Patch Tuesday general release. Unlike standard cumulative updates, optional monthly updates focus solely on quality improvements and do not address security vulnerabilities. With the April 2026 optional update, Microsoft has boosted the performance of apps registered under Settings > Apps > Startup when…

By Chandrakant Deshmukh, Senior Vice President – Architecture & IP Governance, Mastek Step into any enterprise IoT project today and you’ll encounter the same frustrating reality: the devices are in place, the data is streaming, yet the operational insights promised years ago remain frustratingly elusive. The issue is seldom the hardware, and almost never the network connection. It’s the underlying architecture – the choices about where data gets processed, how it travels, and what transformations it undergoes along the way. After nearly twenty years building data platforms for manufacturing, supply chain, and infrastructure clients, I’ve reached a clear conclusion: the…