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You’ll soon be able to send photos and video to 911 as easily as to friends

When a serious emergency occurs, a picture can be worth a thousand words. It can be incredibly helpful to first responders to see ahead of time what they will be faced with when they arrive. It is technically possible to send photos and video to 911 operators, but it’s a convoluted process. That’s set to change later this year … If this all sounds familiar, that’s because there had been limited trials of the feature before Apple last year announced Emergency SOS Live Video in iOS 18. The aim w

The Download: Namibia’s hydrogen hopes, and fixing AI evaluation

Factories have used fossil fuels to process iron ore for three centuries, and the climate has paid a heavy price: According to the International Energy Agency, the steel industry today accounts for 8% of carbon dioxide emissions. But it turns out there is a less carbon-­intensive alternative: using hydrogen. Unlike coal or natural gas, which release carbon dioxide as a by-product, this process releases water. And if the hydrogen itself is “green,” the climate impact of the entire process will

Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 benchmarks show why Nothing Phone 3 might not be truly Elite

Hadlee Simons / Android Authority Nothing announced last week that its Nothing Phone 3 will be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chipset. This is a somewhat polarizing move in light of the company marketing the phone as a “true” or “real” flagship, where customers would expect a top-flight Snapdragon 8 Elite processor. However, the POCO F7 just launched today, and it’s the first global phone powered by the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4. So, should you be worried about the Nothing Phone 3’s horse

I Love Lenovo's Latest ThinkPad X1 Carbon but Was Shocked at the Cost of Upgrades

8.3 / 10 SCORE Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition $2,474 at Lenovo Pros Exceptionally lightweight yet sturdy build Lengthy battery life Stellar 2.8K OLED display Best-in-class ThinkPad keyboard Cons Upgrades are pricey, particularly the OLED display Aura Edition features aren't likely to be of any interest or use 1080p webcam is disappointing given the price The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is Lenovo's flagship business ultraportable, and with the 13th generation, Lenovo has made strides

Topics: 14 carbon gen thinkpad x1

AT&T is making it easier to send pictures to 911 dispatchers

AT&T is updating its next-gen 911 network to give users more efficient ways to share important information with emergency services. Starting in October, AT&T’s ESInet emergency communications platform will make it easier for AT&T customers to share pictures and video messages with supported dispatch centers, helping to quickly explain the situation and better prepare first responders who will arrive on the scene. The ESInet platform helps 911 dispatch centers process callouts faster and more re

Namibia wants to build the world’s first hydrogen economy

But environmentalists are not the only ones who’ve criticized the choice of location. An expanded port, built to facilitate ammonia exports, will sit immediately adjacent to a site that housed a labor and extermination camp during Namibia’s 1904–1908 genocide, in which tens of thousands of Nama and Herero people were killed by German soldiers during a period of resistance to colonial rule. A 2024 report commissioned by Nama and Herero leaders argues that the extension of port infrastructure woul

Show HN: Pickaxe – A TypeScript library for building AI agents

Pickaxe: A Typescript library for building AI agents that scale Pickaxe is a simple Typescript library for building AI agents that are fault-tolerant and scalable. It handles the complexities of durable execution, queueing and scheduling, allowing you to focus on writing core business logic. It is not a framework. Everything in Pickaxe is just a function that you have written, which makes it easy to integrate with your existing codebase and business logic. You can build agents that call tools,

Salesforce launches Agentforce 3 with AI agent observability and MCP support

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Salesforce rolled out sweeping enhancements to its AI agent platform Monday, addressing the biggest hurdles enterprises face when deploying digital workers at scale: knowing what those agents are actually doing and ensuring they can work securely across corporate systems. The company’s Agentforce 3 release introduces a comprehensive “Comm

Goldman Sachs Makes a Huge AI Bet

Goldman Sachs has just launched its generative AI assistant across the entire firm, making it available to all employees in what the bank calls a major milestone in its technology strategy. The move follows more than a year of internal development and testing that involved over 10,000 employees piloting the tool. The GS AI Assistant is a conversational AI interface that allows employees to safely interact with large language models like GPT and Gemini, firewalled within Goldman’s own secure com

Researchers get viable mice by editing DNA from two sperm

For many species, producing an embryo is a bit of a contest between males and females. Males want as many offspring as possible, and want the females to devote as many resources as possible to each of them. Females are better at keeping their options open and distributing resources in a way to maximize the number of offspring they can produce over the course of their lives. In mammals, this plays out through the chemical modification of DNA, a process called imprinting. Males imprint their DNA

Show HN: Pickaxe – a TypeScript library for building AI agents

Pickaxe: A Typescript library for building AI agents that scale Pickaxe is a simple Typescript library for building AI agents that are fault-tolerant and scalable. It handles the complexities of durable execution, queueing and scheduling, allowing you to focus on writing core business logic. It is not a framework. Everything in Pickaxe is just a function that you have written, which makes it easy to integrate with your existing codebase and business logic. You can build agents that call tools,

I tested Gemini’s latest image generator and here are the results

Back in November, I tested the image generation capabilities within Google’s Gemini, which was powered by the Imagen 3 model. While I liked it, I ran into its limitations pretty quickly. Google recently rolled out its successor — Imagen 4 — and I’ve been putting it through its paces over the last couple of weeks. I think the new version is definitely an improvement, as some of the issues I had with Imagen 3 are now thankfully gone. But some frustrations still remain, meaning the new version isn

The Brute Squad

The Brute Squad Welcome back! Come one, come all, friends, foes, fart connoisseurs, all are welcome here at Camel Central. It has been an action-packed three months since Revenge of the Junior Developer (RotJD), which is essential reading for this post, so shoo, off you go. You might also want to watch The Princess Bride, up to you. As you wish! What has changed since March? Much and little, more or less. For starters, models got better. Claude 3.7, every programmer's favorite, is now nearly f

Using the Ocean to Suck Up CO2 Could Come With the Small, Unintended Side Effect of Wiping Out Marine Life

As global temperatures soar and emissions remain higher than ever, scientists are exploring the dramatic, planet-wide interventions we could take to stave off the climate crisis. One of the most intriguing possibilities involves using the ocean, already the world's largest carbon sink, to suck up even more of the greenhouse gas by removing some of the carbon that it already stores. Dozens of startups are already experimenting with this form of climate intervention, which is sometimes referred

Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats

Highlights We stress-tested 16 leading models from multiple developers in hypothetical corporate environments to identify potentially risky agentic behaviors before they cause real harm. In the scenarios, we allowed models to autonomously send emails and access sensitive information. They were assigned only harmless business goals by their deploying companies; we then tested whether they would act against these companies either when facing replacement with an updated version, or when their assi

Apple shareholders sue over Apple Intelligence and Siri delays

Apple is continuing to face fallout from its Apple Intelligence rollout. As spotted by Reuters, Apple shareholders have sued Apple in a proposed class action securities fraud case for allegedly “downplaying how long it needed to integrate advanced artificial intelligence into its Siri voice assistant.” The lawsuit alleges that this misrepresentation negatively impacted iPhone sales and Apple’s stock price. In the lawsuit, Apple executives, including CEO Tim Cook, CFO Kevan Parekh, and former C

Ask HN: How can we keep (part of) the web human?

Any ideas for how we can keep the web (or at least part of it) human? It feels like every time I do a web search, more and more of the results are AI generated nonsense. I'm worried that it's going to become much more difficult to find the human-generated content. How can we keep a part of the web human? Any ideas? (I'm not keen on Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning Orb being the "solution.")

AI agents win over professionals - but only to do their grunt work, Stanford study finds

Getty Images/Jonathan Kitchen AI agents are one of the buzziest trends in Silicon Valley, with tech companies promising big productivity gains for businesses. But do individual workers actually want to use them? A new study from Stanford University shows the answer may be yes -- as long as they automate mundane tasks and don't encroach too far on human agency. Also: Don't be fooled into thinking AI is coming for your job - here's the truth Titled "Future of Work with AI Agents," the study se

Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix

I’m Chris McCord, the creator of Elixir’s Phoenix framework. For the past several months, I’ve been working on a skunkworks project at Fly.io, and it’s time to show it off. I wanted LLM agents to work just as well with Elixir as they do with Python and JavaScript. Last December, in order to figure out what that was going to take, I started a little weekend project to find out how difficult it would be to build a coding agent in Elixir. A few weeks later, I had it spitting out working Phoenix a

10 strategies OpenAI uses to create powerful AI agents - that you should use too

Just_Super/Getty Images AI integration is moving at an astonishing pace. Just a few months ago, we were coming to terms with the idea of AI agents, or what the buzzword mavens call "agentic AI." Now, we're starting to look at issues of practical deployment. If you're not fully up to speed on agents, that's okay. Few people are. OpenAI defines agents as "Systems that independently accomplish tasks on your behalf," with an emphasis on "independently." ZDNET has a full guide on the topic, which i

Phoenix.new – The Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix

I’m Chris McCord, the creator of Elixir’s Phoenix framework. For the past several months, I’ve been working on a skunkworks project at Fly.io, and it’s time to show it off. I wanted LLM agents to work just as well with Elixir as they do with Python and JavaScript. Last December, in order to figure out what that was going to take, I started a little weekend project to find out how difficult it would be to build a coding agent in Elixir. A few weeks later, I had it spitting out working Phoenix a

After trying to buy Ilya Sutskever’s $32B AI startup, Meta looks to hire its CEO

In Brief Mark Zuckerberg’s AI talent hiring spree continues. In recent months, Meta tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence, the $32 billion AI startup co-founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, according to a report from CNBC on Thursday. Sutskever ultimately turned Meta down, according to CNBC, but the company is now in talks to hire Safe Superintelligence’s co-founder and CEO, Daniel Gross. Earlier this week, The Information reported that Meta was in talks to hire Gross,

NASA Scientists Find Ties Between Earth's Oxygen and Magnetic Field

The solar wind flows around Earth's magnetic field. A new NASA study suggests that the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere and strength of the magnetic field have been correlated for more than half a billion years. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Laboratory For 540 million years, the ebb and flow in the strength of Earth's magnetic field has correlated with fluctuations in atmospheric oxygen, according to a newly released analysis by NASA scientists. The research suggests tha

Virtual cells

Virtual cells Digital twins of biological cells—often referred to as virtual cells or whole-cell models (WCMs)–aim to recreate every relevant molecular process of a living cell in silico. This interdisciplinary endeavor marries systems biology, computational modeling, high-performance computing, and, increasingly, AI. All models are wrong, but some are alive. Somewhere in a data center right now, a virtual bacterium is dividing for the millionth time. Somewhere else, an AI-enhanced model is l

Virtual Cells

Virtual cells Digital twins of biological cells—often referred to as virtual cells or whole-cell models (WCMs)–aim to recreate every relevant molecular process of a living cell in silico. This interdisciplinary endeavor marries systems biology, computational modeling, high-performance computing, and, increasingly, AI. All models are wrong, but some are alive. Somewhere in a data center right now, a virtual bacterium is dividing for the millionth time. Somewhere else, an AI-enhanced model is l

Estrogen: A Trip Report

The following blog post discusses my personal experience of the phenomenology of feminising hormone therapy. It will also touch upon my own experience of gender dysphoria. I wish to be clear that I do not believe that someone should have to demonstrate that they experience gender dysphoria – however one might even define that – as a prerequisite for taking hormones. At smoothbrains.net, we hold as self-evident the right to put whatever one likes inside one’s body; and this of course includes hor

Midjourney adds AI video generation

AI company Midjourney has released its first video model. This initial take on AI-generated video will allow users to animate their images, either ones made in Midjourney or uploaded from a different source. The initial results will be five-second clips that a user can opt to extend by four seconds up to four times. Videos can be generated on web only for now and require at least a $10 a month subscription to access. Introducing our V1 Video Model. It's fun, easy, and beautiful. Available at 10

We Can Just Measure Things

We Can Just Measure Things This week I spent time with friends to letting agents go wild and see what we could build in 24 hours. I took some notes for myself to reflect on that experience. I won't bore you with another vibecoding post, but you can read Peter's post about how that went. As fun as it was, it also was frustrating in other ways and in entire predictable ways. It became a meme about how much I hated working with Xcode for this project. This got me thinking quite a bit more that th

Christopher Eccleston’s ‘Doctor Who’ Regeneration Remains One of the Show’s Best

Twenty years ago this week, the first season of the revived era of Doctor Who came to an end with “The Parting of the Ways,” as did the tenure of Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor. Ready to sacrifice it all to stop the Daleks, the Ninth Doctor’s final moments remain a vital moment in Doctor Who history. It was the first time in decades since Doctor Who had asked its audience to trust in the magic of the series’ defining trick to survival and re-invention: the magic of regeneration itself. Ec

Google looks likely to lose appeal against record $4.7 billion EU fine

Google suffered a setback Thursday after an advisor to the European Union's top court recommended it dismiss the tech giant's appeal against a record 4.1-billion-euro ($4.7 billion) antitrust fine. Juliane Kokott, advocate general at the European Court of Justice, advised the court to throw out Google's appeal and confirm the fine, which was reduced in 2022 to 4.125 billion euros from 4.34 billion euros previously by the EU's General Court. "In her Opinion delivered today, Advocate General Kok