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The End of Handwriting

People often credit my good handwriting to my Catholic school education—like a nun with a ruler and a taste for corporal punishment perfected my penmanship. But that’s not why. It’s because of my mom. An engineer by trade, she can execute the kind of perfect block letters that only come with years of working on a drawing board. As a kid, I worked to mimic her print as well as her incredibly ornate cursive. I don’t practice those skills nearly enough as an adult, though: As a reporter, speed trum

Grammarly Pushes Beyond Proofreading With AI-Powered Writing Guidance

Grammarly is expanding beyond its grammar-checking roots. The company has announced the launch of several specialized AI "agents" and a new writing tool called Grammarly Docs, designed to help students and professionals with everything from drafting essays to polishing workplace emails. It's another example of generative AI expanding beyond general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini into more specialized domains. Other examples of gen AI in educational circles include Google's NotebookLM

Qwen-Image Edit gives Photoshop a run for its money with AI-powered text-to-image edits that work in seconds

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Adobe Photoshop is among the most recognizable pieces of software ever created, used by more than 90% of the world’s creative professionals, according to Photutorial. So the fact that a new open source AI model — Qwen-Image Edit, released yesterday by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s Qwen Team of AI researchers — is now able to accomplis

Robinhood Tries to Rebrand Sports Betting as Investing

Robinhood has gotten a reputation as a platform where people make wildly speculative investments without sufficient guardrails. So it’s only right that it’s getting into the sports betting business. The company announced on Tuesday that it is launching “prediction markets” for college and professional football as part of a partnership with Kalshi. According to the company, it’ll start listing “contracts” for NFL and NCAA games in the coming days, with plans to make each matchup open for two wee

Changing these 10 settings on my Pixel phone greatly improved the user experience

Even older Pixel models can get in on the optimization tweaks. Kerry Wan/ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Google Pixel phones are notorious for having hidden settings that can greatly enhance the user experience. The list includes options for ramping up the display refresh rate, optimizing the battery life, and gestures. I demo them on a Pixel 9a running on Android 15, but newer and older software versions should have similar capabilities. Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a prefe

Nebraska man gets 1 year in prison for $3.5M cryptojacking scheme

A Nebraska man was sentenced to one year in prison for defrauding cloud computing providers of over $3.5 million to mine cryptocurrency worth nearly $1 million. Charles O. Parks III (also known as "CP3O") was arrested and charged in April with wire fraud, money laundering, and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions. He was facing up to 20 years in prison in December after admitting that he didn't pay a $3.5 million bill after renting cloud computing time from two providers for his cryptojac

WhatsApp starts testing AI-powered writing suggestions on iOS

In the latest TestFlight release for its iOS beta testers, WhatsApp rolled out a tool called “Writing Help,” which suggests replies based on the tone set by the user. Here’s how it works. As noted by WABetaInfo: When Private Processing is enabled from the app settings, some users will notice that after typing a short phrase within the chat text input, the sticker icon in the chat bar is replaced with a pen symbol. This new icon indicates that the AI assistant is available to provide writing su

Topics: ai meta tone user writing

Otter.ai Sued for Allegedly Recording Work Calls Without Consent

Otter.ai, the maker of AI-powered transcription and note-taking tools, is facing a class-action lawsuit in California over alleged privacy violations. The suit, filed Friday in federal court by San Jacinto resident Justin Brewer, claims that Otter.ai is recording private conversations without obtaining consent from all the calls’ participants and then uses those recordings to train its AI. According to the complaint, Brewer doesn’t have an Otter account but joined a Zoom meeting in February whe

Every Google Pixel Watch owner should know these 2 simple performance tricks

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways A restart fixes freezes, errors, and update issues. A reset clears all data to fix major glitches. Use restart first, reset only as a last resort. Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. Like every other piece of tech, our smartwatches can get sluggish after continual use. Maybe you're waiting several seconds for your smartwatch to load functionalities, or you're experiencing anno

Class-action suit claims Otter AI records private work conversations

Class-action suit claims Otter AI secretly records private work conversations toggle caption Source: Otter A federal lawsuit seeking class-action status accuses Otter.ai of "deceptively and surreptitiously" recording private conversations that the tech company uses to train its popular transcription service without permission from the people using it. The company's AI-powered transcription service called Otter Notebook, which can do real-time transcriptions of Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft

Grammarly says its AI agent can predict an A paper

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Grammarly is launching several new AI agents for specific writing challenges, from educators trying to detect plagiarism and AI-generated text to students looking to gauge reader reaction to their paper, needing help with citations, and even seeing their predicted grade. The specialized AI agents are available in docs — which is Grammarly’s new “AI-native writing surface,” according to the company’s press re

Pixel Watch running slow? Do this to instantly improve the performance

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways A restart fixes freezes, errors, and update issues. A reset clears all data to fix major glitches. Use restart first, reset only as a last resort. Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. Like every other piece of tech, our smartwatches can get sluggish after continual use. Maybe you're waiting several seconds for your smartwatch to load functionalities, or you're experiencing anno

The End of Handwriting

People often credit my good handwriting to my Catholic school education—like a nun with a ruler and a taste for corporal punishment perfected my penmanship. But that’s not why. It’s because of my mom. An engineer by trade, she can execute the kind of perfect block letters that only come with years of working on a drawing board. As a kid, I worked to mimic her print as well as her incredibly ornate cursive. I don’t practice those skills nearly enough as an adult, though: As a reporter, speed trum

This open-source fasting app actually helped me hit my fitness goals

Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority I was never an athletic kid, and that continued through most of my 20s. That is, until I decided to change things up, drop some weight, and focus more on my health. Intermittent fasting was a big part of that journey, and I’ve been following it for several years now. In fact, it’s the one constant in my wellness journey that has actually stuck with me. Much as I’ve dabbled with workout plans, picked up the best fitness trackers, tracked macros with obsessive de

Changing these 12 settings on my Android phone extended its battery life by hours

Kerry Wan/ZDNET Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. I've spent large portions of my life looking for ways to extend the battery life on my Android phones. Admittedly, that sounds rather dramatic, but growing up with only budget models meant I was constantly tweaking device settings to squeeze every bit of juice out of their batteries. Thanks to this micromanaging, I successfully pushed the batteries on all my past smartph

Premier League Soccer: Livestream Nottingham Forest vs. Brentford From Anywhere

Two sides that enjoyed somewhat unexpected top-10 finishes last season go head-to-head on Sunday as Nottingham Forest hosts Brentford in the English Premier League. Below, we'll outline the best live TV streaming services for watching Premier League games as they happen, wherever you are in the world, and how to use a VPN if it's not available where you are. Forest were last season's surprise package, booking a long-overdue return to European football by finishing in seventh. While Nuno Espir

Scientists Are Using AI for Improved Gene Hacking

Image by Getty / Futurism Genetics Gene editing has made huge leaps in recent years, such as treating the congenital blood disorders sickle cell anemia and beta thalassemia, which can require lifelong blood transfusions. But scientists still fear that some snipping may lead to unwelcome surprises. However, a research team led by the University of Zurich says that artificial intelligence could help. A new study published in the journal Nature details how the researchers combined AI and the gen

Apple Working on All-New Operating System

Apple is developing an all-new operating system codenamed "Charismatic," according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. This is likely Apple's long-rumored "homeOS" operating system. In a report this week, Gurman said both Apple's rumored smart home hub in 2026 and tabletop robot in 2027 will run the new operating system. He said the software platform will blend elements of tvOS and watchOS. For example, he expects there to be a hexagonal grid of apps, just like on the Apple Watch. The platform larg

Using AI to secure AI

One of Anthropic's quieter releases recently was their "Security Review," where Claude Code can identify and fix security issues in your code. But how good is it really? In my case, will it find issues with code it helped me write for my newsletter service and Chrome extension? The release states it uses a "specialized security-focused prompt that checks for common vulnerability patterns." After throwing so much compute at model training, LLMs are nearing the top of the S-Curve, so finding ways

McKinsey Terrified as It Realizes AI Can Do Its Job Perfectly

Illustrious consulting firm McKinsey is staring down the barrel of AI. All those highly-paid suits are at risk as AI agents, AI models designed to autonomously carry out certain tasks, promise to do what they do with instant results — and without six-figure salary demands. "Do I think that this is existential for our profession? Yes, I do," Kate Smaje, a senior partner tapped to lead McKinsey's AI efforts, told the Wall Street Journal. But, she insisted, "I think it's an existential good for u

Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

Hello Hacker News 🚀🚀🚀 I’ve done a little update on social since publishing of the article, let me copy paste it here. Since I posted my “Open Hardware is dead” article, you’ve been asking me about “that patent” 🤔 I didn’t want you to miss the forest (thousands of filings since 2020) just because of one tree. But let’s take a look now. In this case: the MMU multiplexer (we open sourced it 9 years ago). Anycubic (another IDG Capital-backed company) used the tactic of filing in China for an easy

Letting inmates run the asylum: Using AI to secure AI

One of Anthropic's quieter releases recently was their "Security Review," where Claude Code can identify and fix security issues in your code. But how good is it really? In my case, will it find issues with code it helped me write for my newsletter service and Chrome extension? The release states it uses a "specialized security-focused prompt that checks for common vulnerability patterns." After throwing so much compute at model training, LLMs are nearing the top of the S-Curve, so finding ways

Changing these 10 settings on my Samsung phone greatly improved the user experience

Kerry Wan/ZDNET I've been fairly vocal recently that Samsung's One UI 7 is my favorite Android skin. It is fast, responsive, and intuitive. But nothing comes fine-tuned to your experience straight out of the box. You need to personalize your smartphone to make it more appealing. I change almost a dozen settings on every Samsung Galaxy phone to best suit my needs, and I believe these will elevate your user experience, too. Also: The best Samsung phones to buy From setting the highest available

5 quick ways to make your soundbar sound better than ever (and for free)

Jada Jones/ZDNET Soundbars are gaining in popularity because of their sleek design and ability to provide an ample boost in audio quality compared to built-in TV speakers. Even with their plug-and-play nature, you can make a few modifications to help unleash the best possible sound quality. Also: I replaced my Sonos Arc Ultra with this Samsung flagship soundbar - and it's a worthy alternative Whether you're new to soundbar setups or a self-proclaimed audiophile, familiarizing yourself with so

Why and how to write things on the Internet (2022)

December 2022 Recently I noticed that most existing “why you should write a blog” articles (e.g.) have at least one of two shortcomings, according to me: They mostly focus on counterarguments to not starting a blog, rather than positive arguments in favor of starting one—as if people’s natural state is to produce amazing blogs and the only thing holding them back is silly misconceptions. This might be true for extreme outliers like Scott Alexander, but personally, my natural state is to play l

How to turn off ACR on your TV - and why you shouldn't wait to do it

Adam Breeden/ZDNET Did you know that whenever you turn on your smart TV, you invite an unseen guest to watch it with you? These days, most popular TV models utilize automatic content recognition (ACR), a form of ad surveillance technology that gathers information about everything you watch and transmits it to a centralized database. Manufacturers then use your data to identify your viewing preferences, enabling them to deliver highly targeted ads. Also: Your TV's USB port is seriously underut

Gemini will remember more (or less) of what you say

Google is adding a temporary chat feature to Gemini. The equivalent of a browser's incognito mode, it lets you have one-off AI chats. They won't appear in your history, influence future chats or be used for training. The temporary chats will be saved for up to 72 hours. Google says this is to give you time to revisit the chat or provide feedback. The feature begins rolling out today and will continue to do so over the coming weeks. It arrives alongside a new setting that does, well, pretty muc

Google’s Gemini AI will get more personalized by remembering details automatically

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Google is rolling out an update for Gemini that will allow the AI chatbot to “remember” your past conversations without prompting. With the setting turned on, Gemini will automatically recall your “key details and preferences” and use them to personalize its out

Humanoid Robots Are Beating Each Other to Pulp in an Underground Fight Club

In a tucked-away San Francisco warehouse, four humanoid robots hang out — quite literally, from standalone frames — as they wait for their flesh-and-blood overlords to train them to kill. As reporter and writer Ashlee Vance writes on his Substack Core Memory, this entirely robotic fight club is known as REK, and is operated by virtual reality entrepreneur and fighting robot enthusiast Cix Liv. With one big robot battle win under his belt from San Francisco's Ultimate Fighting Bots (UFB) league