An NBA-commissioned investigation found that Steve Ballmer made false statements about a $28 million no-show endorsement deal benefiting Kawhi Leonard, leading to a one-year suspension for Ballmer and Clippers executive Gillian Zucker. The league also fined the Clippers $30 million and stripped the team of five future draft picks, while Leonard himself accepted a $700,000 fine and a ban for his business manager.
Thinking Machines, the AI lab started by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is reportedly negotiating a $1 billion funding round that would value it at $40 billion or more, with existing investor Accel potentially leading the deal. That figure would mark a step down from the $50 billion valuation the startup had sought late last year, though it still dwarfs the company's reported annual revenue run rate of over $100 million.
Market Street, once San Francisco's bustling commercial core, has become a largely deserted stretch lined with boarded-up storefronts and a barren, car-free roadway used mainly by buses. The decline followed the city's 2019 decision to ban private vehicles from the street, compounded by a wave of pandemic-era crime and looting and the mass shift to remote work that emptied downtown offices. Because San Francisco's downtown is zoned mostly for offices rather than housing, the pandemic-driven exodus left the area far emptier than mixed-use downtowns common in Europe and Asia.
Fusion startup Realta Fusion signed a deal with utility Madison Gas and Electric to explore building a 200-megawatt fusion power plant in Wisconsin by the mid-2030s. The utility also made an undisclosed equity investment in Realta, which is converting a former Oscar Mayer factory in Madison into its research facility.
Three climbers attempting an 8-hour summit of Mount Shasta ended up stranded for three days after one was injured during the descent and the group got lost. Rescuers with the Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office said the hikers had used Google's Gemini AI to plan their route and supplies, but the tool told them to pack far less food and water than they needed once the trip stretched into a multiday emergency. The group also lost phone battery power and had no offline maps, worsening their disorientation before being airlifted to safety.
A new repository presents a Lean 4 formal proof deriving the bound liminf(p_{n+1}-p_n) ≤ 186 for consecutive primes, building on the Maynard-Tao style DHL[40,2] admissible-tuple framework. The proof chain is conditional on three explicit input axioms covering Kloosterman sum bounds and related estimates, which have not themselves been formalized as Lean proofs despite being backed by established results like Deligne's theorem via Katz's monograph.
Nolan Lawson notes that several prominent frontend web development educators—including Axel Rauschmayer, Salma Alam-Naylor, Josh W. Comeau, Kent C. Dodds, Addy Osmani, Rachel Nabors, and Lydia Hallie—have either scaled back their work or pivoted toward AI-related topics. To illustrate the shift, Lawson tested Claude Sonnet on a nuanced Chrome performance debugging scenario involving high 'Style Calculation' costs, a problem that has historically tripped up even experienced developers, and found the AI's answer impressively accurate.
More workers are tapping their 401(k) accounts through loans or hardship withdrawals, even as retirement balances climb to record levels amid rising savings rates. The trend reflects the strain of inflation pushing some savers to dip into retirement funds despite overall growth in their accounts.
A new English edition of Seicho Matsumoto's classic Japanese mystery novel, translated by Jesse Kirkwood, has been published by Modern Library. The book follows police investigating what appears to be a double suicide by lovers on a Kyushu beach, a death later complicated by a single suspicious receipt. The essay accompanying the release traces the novel's roots in Japan's shinjū tradition of lovers' suicide and its use as a plot device.
A writer describes a recurring pattern in reading fiction: novels often begin tediously before hitting a turning point—borrowed from the poetic term 'volta'—after which they become compulsively readable. To test the idea, the author had several friends read Graham Greene's 'The End of the Affair' and report when this shift occurred for them, finding the moment varied widely, from page 20 to much later in the book.
Epic Games introduced Epic Parties, a voice chat system that works across Fortnite, the Epic Games Store, and the Epic Games app, regardless of the hardware players use. Users can start a call in one app and carry it seamlessly into another, and the chat can keep running in the background while playing other titles or using mobile devices. Accepting an Epic Party invite also automatically groups friends into the same Fortnite lobby.
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the widely used open AI model distribution platform, for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face will keep its brand and remain open to third-party models, clouds, and hardware, according to Nvidia.
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