Technology

Ford, the leading automaker when it comes to making and selling specially designed vehicles for law enforcement, revealed the F-150 Lightning Pro SSV, an electric truck specially designed for law enforcement. The truck is a variant of the F-150 Lightning Pro, which is a version of Ford’s electric pickup that’s aimed specifically at commercial customers and fleet owners. Ford is pitching the F-150 Lightning Pro SSV (which stands for “Special Service Vehicle”) as an ideal fleet vehicle with all the features cops have come to rely on over the years, as well as other advantages specific to EVs, like quick acceleration and a lower total cost of ownership. an ideal fleet vehicle with all the features cops have come to rely on over the years And interestingly, the new version of the F-150 Lightni...

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a biopic about the musician starring Daniel Radcliffe, will release on November 4th on The Roku Channel, the streaming company has announced. The film will be available to stream everywhere where Roku’s free service is available, and is the latest step in the company’s push into producing original content that reportedly includes as many as 50 shows. The biopic covers the life of musician Weird Al Yankovic including his “rise to fame in the music industry to his celebrity love affairs” according to Roku. It’s being directed by Eric Appel (who most recently directed all ten episodes of Quibi show Die Hart) and is written by Appel and Weird Al himself. Alongside Radcliffe, Evan Rachel Wood and Rainn Wilson also star. It’s an interesting move for Roku, a company ...

The power demands of data centers can be staggering, with larger facilities using as much electricity as tens of thousands of homes. Now, in parts of London, those energy requirements are reportedly stopping developers from building new houses because there’s simply not enough electricity to go around. According to a report from The Financial Times, which shared letters sent to housing developers by London’s local governing body (the Greater London Authority, or GLA), the issue is affecting new developments in three west London boroughs: Ealing, Hillingdon, and Hounslow. The GLA said west London’s electricity grid was at capacity, and told one developer there may not be “sufficient electrical capacity for a new connection” until 2035. It seems there are a few factors at play here, includin...

DeepMind is releasing a free expanded database with its predictions of the structure of nearly every protein known to science, the company, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, announced today. DeepMind transformed science in 2020 with its AlphaFold AI software, which produces highly accurate predictions of the structures of proteins — information that can help scientists understand how they work, which can help treat diseases and develop medications. It first started publicly releasing AlphaFold’s predictions last summer through a database built in collaboration with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). That initial set included 98 percent of all human proteins. Now, the database is expanding to over 200 million structures, “covering almost every organism on Earth that has...

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the company will be pushing more content from recommended accounts on Facebook and Instagram by the end of 2023. The new algorithm will seemingly start drifting away from the old traditional feed filled with posts and images of your friends and accounts followed. Instead, it will start pushing more recommended content, such as trending Reels. Zuckerberg noted the push as building the “Discovery Engine,” with the primary goal of competing with TikTok’s use of serving up videos to users’ feed with the help of AI, which has successfully kept users engaged and led them to become one of the most used apps. The CEO stated that recommendations take up to 15% of the content seen on Facebook and an even higher percentage on Instagram. “AI finds additional...

An original Apple-1 computer prototype owned by the company’s co-founder Steve Jobs himself is now up for auction. Currently priced at more than $400,000 USD, the computer was created in 1976 by Jobs and Apple‘s other co-founder Steve Wozniak, who actually hand-soldered the circuit board and electronics himself. The computer was then used by Jobs as a demonstration unit when he convinced Paul Terrell to stock it at Mountain View, California’s The Byte Shop, one of the world’s first personal computer stores. Terrell went on to buy 50 Apple-1 computers, and Wozniak called the sale “the biggest single episode in all of the company’s history.” He added that “Nothing in subsequent years was so great and so unexpected.” Unfortunately, the computer board was damaged in later years, resulting in a...

Facebook’s decade-long streak of nonstop revenue growth has come to end. The social network reported its first-ever yearly decline in revenue for the second quarter, announcing a 1 percent drop to $28.8 billion, and predicted that growth in the third quarter could fall even more. The overall profit for its parent company, Meta, fell 36 percent to $6.7 billion. The Reality Labs division responsible for building Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse dreams lost $2.8 billion in the quarter. While the first-ever drop in revenue growth was expected on Wall Street going into Wednesday’s earnings report, it solidifies how challenged Meta’s business has quickly become on all fronts. Apple’s “Ask app not to track” prompt on iPhones has made its ads much less effective, costing Meta $10 billion in ad revenue ...

Electric automaker Rivian is laying off around 6 percent of its 14,000 employees, or around 800 people, Amy Mast, a spokesperson for the company, confirmed in an email. The company made the decision in part to speed up development on future versions of its electric trucks and SUVs, she said. “Today we announced the difficult decision to reduce the size of the Rivian team by approximately 6%,” Mast wrote. “This decision will help align our workforce to our key business priorities, including ramping up the consumer and commercial vehicle programs, accelerating the development of R2 and other future models, deploying our go-to-market programs and optimizing spend across the business.” This follows a report from earlier in the month that suggested the company’s leadership was looking to remove...