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How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

A few eagle-eyed readers have noticed that it’s been 4 weeks since my last entry in what I have been thinking of as my “niblet series” — one small piece per week, 1000 words or less, for the next three months. This is true. However, I did leave myself some wiggle room in my original goal, when I said “weeks when I am not traveling”, knowing I was traveling 6 of the next 7 weeks. I was going to TRY to write something on the weeks I was traveling, but as you can see, I mostly did not succeed. Oh

HP 15.6″ Touch Screen Laptop Is Now Going for Peanuts, Thanks to Nearly 50% Off at Best Buy

If your current laptop is crawling when you’re browsing online, struggling with Zoom calls, or sounding like it’s prepping for takeoff every time you open a new tab, it might be time for an upgrade. But we understand how hard it can be to find a new computer without having to open your wallet as deep and wide as it goes. That’s why we’re here to help. We found a great deal on a reliable brand that you’ll actually like using, and all you need to do is lock it in now so you don’t miss out on the d

Topics: best just laptop ll new

ChatGPT Defeated at Chess by 1970s-Era Atari 2600

OpenAI's ChatGPT has some major competitors in the market: Gemini, Copilot, Claude. Now add to that list the Atari 2600. The OG video game console, which was first released in 1977, was used in an engineer's experiment to see how it would fare playing chess against the AI chatbot. By using a software emulator to run Atari's 1979 game Video Chess, Citrix engineer Robert Caruso said he was able to set up a match between ChatGPT and the 46-year-old game. The matchup did not go well for ChatGPT. "

Today's Wordle Hints, Answer and Help for June 12, #1454

Gael Cooper CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.

OpenAI Launches Improved Version of Latest Reasoning Model. Here's What It's Best For

OpenAI this week announced an improved version of its o3 generative AI reasoning model, saying it performed better on benchmarks and is designed to spend more time thinking on difficult problems. The new model, called o3-pro, is now available for Pro and Team users in ChatGPT and API users, and will come to Enterprise and Edu users next week. In its release notes, OpenAI said the model is similar to o1-pro, which users favored for its math, science and coding skills. It incorporates improvement

Topics: model o3 openai pro users

U.S. Open 2025: TV Schedule, How to Watch, Stream All the PGA Tour Golf From Anywhere

The 125th US Open takes place this weekend, with Bryson DeChambeau looking to clinch the title for a third time at the Oakmont Country Club in Pittsburgh. Keep reading to find out the best live TV streaming services you can use to watch each day of the tournament live wherever you are in the world, and how to use a VPN if they're not available where you are. The third of the year's majors, sees a 156-man field take on the course's notoriously lightning-fast, sloped greens and its punishing 175

Hollywood studios target AI image generator in copyright lawsuit

On Wednesday, Disney and NBCUniversal filed a lawsuit against AI image-synthesis company Midjourney, accusing the company of copyright infringement for allowing users to create images of characters like Darth Vader and Shrek, reports The Hollywood Reporter. The complaint, filed in US District Court in Los Angeles, marks the first major legal action by Hollywood studios against a generative AI company. Midjourney is a subscription image-synthesis service and community that allows its users to su

Apple’s Craig Federighi on the long road to the iPad’s Mac-like multitasking

CUPERTINO, Calif.—When Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi introduced the new multitasking UI in iPadOS 26 at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference this week, he did it the same way he introduced the Calculator app for the iPad last year, or timers in the iPad's Clock app the year before—with a hint of sarcasm. "Wow," Federighi enthuses in a lightly exaggerated tone about an hour and 19 minutes into a 90-minute presentation. "More windows, a pointier poin

Why Silicon Valley Needs Immigration

Katie Drummond: And particularly at a moment where, as you said, we're in this Cold War with China, we're in this AI arms race. You hear it from the administration, you read about it in WIRED, you hear about it from Sam Altman, other leaders of the AI industry, this like, “We must beat China. We must beat China.” And then stuff like this happens and you feel like, “Let's just hand it to them. Let's just give it to them.” Because we are basically doing that by disincentivizing not only Chinese st

Topics: 1b china just people visa

Apple Is Pushing AI Into More of Its Products—but Still Lacks a State-of-the-Art Model

Apple continued its slow-and-steady approach to integrating artificial intelligence into devices like the iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch on Monday, announcing a raft of new features and upgrades at WWDC. The company also premiered the Foundation Models framework, a way for developers to write code that taps into Apple’s AI models. Among the buzzier AI announcements at the event was Live Translation, a feature that translates phone and FaceTime calls from one language to another in real time. Appl

Tesla’s Robotaxis Are Rolling Out Soon—With One Big Unanswered Question

Self-driving vehicle developers don’t usually love talking about “teleoperation”—when a human guides or drives robot cars remotely. It can feel like a dirty secret. Shouldn’t an autonomous vehicle operate, well, autonomously? But experts say teleoperations are, at least right now, a critical part of any robot taxi service, including Tesla's Robotaxi. The tech, though impressive, is still in development, and the autonomous systems still need humans to guide them through less-common and especiall

The 5 Best Organic Mattress Toppers (2025)

If you're happy with your mattress, you probably aren't reading this, so I'll assume your mattress is either causing you some back pain or you're feeling the pressure points that happen when your body isn't quite suited to what you're sleeping on. In those situations, provided your mattress isn't actually sagging or needing to be replaced, a high-quality mattress topper suited to your body and manner of sleeping can indeed help. Keep in mind that there really is no best mattress topper; there's

The best robot vacuum and mop to buy right now

Robot vacuums that can both mop and sweep your floors have improved significantly in recent years. While they are still not as effective as good ol’ manual labor, if you run them regularly, they will help keep your floors cleaner with much less effort on your part. The difference is that newer “combo” robot vacuum and mop models are designed to actually scrub your floors. The first robot vacuums that could also “mop” simply slapped a thin, flat microfiber pad on the bot that kind of Swiffer-ed

ChatGPT will avoid being shut down in some life-threatening scenarios, former OpenAI researcher claims

Former OpenAI research leader Steven Adler published a new independent study on Wednesday claiming that, in certain scenarios, his former employer’s AI models will go to great lengths to try to avoid being shut down. In a blog post, Adler describes a series of experiments he ran on OpenAI’s latest GPT-4o model, the default model available in ChatGPT, to test the AI’s tendency to favor its own self-preservation, even if it’s at the expense of a user’s safety. In one test, Adler instructed GPT-4

Topics: 4o adler ai gpt openai

Sam Altman-backed Coco Robotics raises $80M

In Brief Los Angeles-based Coco Robotics, a startup building last-mile delivery robots, announced it raised $80 million on Wednesday. The funding round included angel investors Sam Altman and Max Altman, both returning investors, in addition to VC firms like Pelion Venture Partners and Offline Ventures, among others. This brings the company’s total funding to more than $120 million. The company last raised a $36 million Series A round in 2021. Coco’s zero-emissions robots can hold 90 liters’

Google, Meta execs blast Europe over strict AI regulation as Big Tech ups the ante

Dado Ruvic | Reuters STOCKHOLM — Executives at U.S. tech giants Google and Meta said that Europe's artificial intelligence industry is being held back by excessive regulation, adding to rhetoric from Donald Trump's administration that the region's strict tech rules are choking innovation. Speaking at the Techarena tech conference in Stockholm, Sweden, public policy chiefs at both Google and Meta used the stage as a platform to voice their concerns about the bloc's strict approach to regulating

Topics: act ai eu europe tech

Start a computer club in the place that you live (2023)

CHOOSE YOUR LANGUAGE: YOU SHOULD START A COMPUTER CLUB IN THE PLACE THAT YOU LIVE ,---------------------------, | /---------------------\ | | | LASTA NOVAĴO: | | | | VI DEVUS ESTABLI | | | | KOMPUTILAN KLUBON | | | | EN LA LOKO, | | | | KIE VI LOĜAS | | | \_____________________/ | |___________________________| ,---\_____ [] _______/------, / /______________\ /| /___________________________________ / | ___ | | | ) | _ _ _ [-------] | | ( | o o o [-------] | / _)_ |______________________________

What's Behind OpenAI's Recent Growth Spurt to 400M Weekly Users?

ChatGPT maker OpenAI says more than 400 million people a week are now actively using its artificial intelligence tools, a jump from the 300 million it reported this past December. OpenAI touted the figure this week, also telling media outlets that it's doubled its number of paid enterprise users to 2 million since September, and that its developer traffic has also doubled in the last six months. The news may surprise people who expected the rise of China's DeepSeek AI model to disrupt the grow

The best robot vacuums

Robot vacuums are impressive devices that will clean your floors well without complaining (much). As prices have dropped, these busy little bots have become less of a luxury and more of a necessity. They can reach places most standup vacs never see (under beds and sofas) and, thanks to better batteries and robot brains, they rarely get tired of cleaning. I’ve been testing robot vacuums for seven years and have run over 60 robot vacuums all over my house. These are my top picks if you’re looking

How DeepSeek used distillation to train its artificial intelligence model, and what it means for companies such as OpenAI

Chinese artificial intelligence lab DeepSeek roiled markets in January, setting off a massive tech and semiconductor selloff after unveiling AI models that it said were cheaper and more efficient than American ones. But the underlying fears and breakthroughs that sparked the selling go much deeper than one AI startup. Silicon Valley is now reckoning with a technique in AI development called distillation, one that could upend the AI leaderboard. Distillation is a process of extracting knowledge

Write Warz developers on how creative writing makes a hilarious party game

Write Warz is the recently launched debut title of Boltz Entertainment, a co-op party game that turns the act of storytelling into strategic (and often funny) warfare against your opponents. Building on the tradition of Jackbox-style titles like Quiplash or RiffTrax, Write Warz instead offers a longer-form avenue of storytelling between friends, as up to 6 players can join together to build the narrative. The game launches on Steam in early access on March 6, with horror and pirate-based themes.

ChatGPT’s weekly user base has exceeded the entire US population

Calvin Wankhede / Android Authority TL;DR ChatGPT has crossed 400 million weekly users, marking a 33% increase in just three months despite rising AI competition. More people are adopting ChatGPT through word of mouth, with personal use driving its continued growth. OpenAI’s enterprise business is also expanding, now with 2 million paying users as companies integrate AI into their workflows. The AI chatbot battle continues to reshape the tech landscape, but OpenAI — the company behind ChatGP

OpenAI bans Chinese accounts using ChatGPT to edit code for social media surveillance

OpenAI has banned the accounts of a group of Chinese users who had attempted to use ChatGPT to debug and edit code for an AI social media surveillance tool, the company said Friday . The campaign, which OpenAI calls Peer Review, saw the group prompt ChatGPT to generate sales pitches for a program those documents suggest was designed to monitor anti-Chinese sentiment on X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. The operation appears to have been particularly interested in spotting call

Windows Notepad and Paint are still free - but the AI will cost you. Here's how much

ZDNET For years, we've been able to freely use all the features in Windows apps like Notepad and Paint. But those days seem to be gone. Yes, the core features are still freely accessible, but the latest AI skills? Not so much. Also: How to remove Copilot from your Microsoft 365 plan A Windows forum post published Thursday described the ways that Microsoft has added AI to Notepad and Paint in Windows 11. In Notepad, you can request a rewrite of the text and even specify whether you want it sho

The CRPG Renaissance, Part 3: TSR Is Dead

“How do you make a small fortune in tabletop gaming?” runs an old joke. The punchline, of course, is that you come to that market with a large one. The tabletop truly is a brutally challenging place to try to earn money, one which you have to be either wildly deluded or unbelievably passionate to even contemplate entering. Nevertheless, people have been making a go of it there for quite some decades by now. We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that love rather than mental illnes

Report: OpenAI plans to shift compute needs from Microsoft to SoftBank

In Brief OpenAI is forecasting a major shift in the next five years around who it gets most of its computing power from, The Information reported on Friday. By 2030, OpenAI expects to get three-quarters of its data center capacity from Stargate, a project that’s expected to be heavily financed by SoftBank, one of OpenAI’s newest financial backers. That represents a major shift away from Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest shareholder, who fulfills most of the startup’s power needs today. The change w

ChatGPT's AI agent Operator is now available for most Pro users

It's now out for most regions where ChatGPT is also available, though the EU isn't included. Operator is now out in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UK and most places where ChatGPT is also available, OpenAI has announced. The company launched Operator in the US back in January, introducing it as an "agent that can go to the web to perform tasks" for the user. Operator can handle various browser-based tasks for users, such as filling out forms, making restaur

Oppo's new foldable phone is one of the thinnest I've seen - and I hope OnePlus and Samsung follow suit

Prakhar Khanna/ZDNET The world's thinnest book-style foldable, the Oppo Find N5, is finally here. I've had it for a week, and it has surprised me in more ways than one -- both positively and negatively. At 8.93mm thick when folded, it's closer to slab phones than any other foldable has ever been. But that slimness didn't come without compromises. Judging by the on-paper camera specifications, I expected it to be underwhelming, but it's better than other foldable phones in almost every regard.

Microsoft's quantum chip Majarona 1 is a few qubits short

Microsoft says its Majorana 1 contains eight topological qubits and can scale to a million, though the details on how it will scale are scant. Microsoft Quantum Microsoft's quantum computing scientists announced they have finally realized a long-held goal of building a "topological qubit", the equivalent of a transistor for ordinary chips, that may help advance quantum computing. The qubit is the functional element of a quantum chip, called Majorana 1, based on an exotic particle, a hybrid of

Sweden Investigates New Cable Break Under Baltic Sea

The European Union vowed on Friday to increase security in the Baltic Sea as the Swedish authorities said they were investigating a new cable break, the latest example of damage to underwater infrastructure in the region. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, said it would take new steps to prevent and detect threats to submarine cables, which carry internet traffic and transmit electricity. The severing of several undersea cables in the Baltic Sea in recent months has raised conc