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Dotter: Dotfile manager and templater written in Rust

What is Dotter? Dotter is a dotfile manager and templater. Dotfiles are configuration files that usually live in the home directory and start with a dot. Often times, it is desirable to have a backup of all the configurations on your system, which is why a lot of users have their dotfiles saved in a git repository, then symlinking them to their target locations using ln -s . However, there are several issues with that barebones approach: Hard to keep track of what comes from where once you h

This handy Apple Intelligence feature saves me over $200 a year

Nina Raemont/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Apple Intelligence can transcribe your voice memos for free. The transcriptions are easy to access and fairly accurate. The Otter.ai alternative is $17 per month. When you hear of AI features on smartphones, you often think of the flashiest, agentic AI features that could carry out tasks for you without you having to lift a finger. However, I am a firm believer that the litmus test as to whethe

This Apple Intelligence tool saved me from paying a hefty subscription

Nina Raemont/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Apple Intelligence can transcribe your voice memos for free. The transcriptions are easy to access and fairly accurate. The Otter.ai alternative is $17 per month. When you hear of AI features on smartphones, you often think of the flashiest, agentic AI features that could carry out tasks for you without you having to lift a finger. However, I am a firm believer that the litmus test as to whethe

Can AI Predict Powerball Numbers?

With the Powerball ballooning to $650 million after Wednesday’s drawing, hopeful players have been asking: Is winning the lottery a matter of luck or something that science and artificial intelligence can predict? Three students at the University of Salento in southern Italy say that science wins out. They say they used AI to analyze patterns from past draws to predict future winning numbers. Their experimental approach resulted in a €43,000 jackpot in April, which now has people wondering if

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

The lottery ticket hypothesis: why neural networks work

How AI researchers accidentally discovered that everything they thought about learning was wrong 18 Aug, 2025 The lottery ticket hypothesis explains why massive neural networks succeed despite centuries of theory predicting they should fail Five years ago, suggesting that AI researchers train neural networks with trillions of parameters would have earned you pitying looks. It violated the most fundamental rule in machine learning: make your model too large, and it becomes a glorified photocop

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

‘Weird Looking’ Otter Poo Reveals an Unexpected Role in Parasite Control

Receiving an unsolicited photo of worm-infested animal poop would make anyone cringe, unless you’re a parasite expert like Katrina Lohan. When a colleague sent her a snapshot of a watery pile of feces with a fire-engine red worm inside, she was instantly intrigued. “She sent this to me and was like, ‘I think this is a parasite, are you interested in studying river otters?’ And I was like, ‘Ooh, I think that’s a parasite too. And yes, I am,’” Lohan, a parasite ecologist who leads the Coastal Dis

Audible's 'Harry Potter' Full-Cast Audio Production Debuts Nov. 4. You Can Preorder Now

The Boy Who Lived will live on for a new generation of audiobook listeners, as Audible and Pottermore Publishing gear up for the release of their full-cast English audio production of Harry Potter. The project is slated to kick off with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on Nov. 4, the companies said Tuesday, with the remaining six books debuting each month after that. Preorders are available now. The leading cast members for the project have also been announced. They include Hugh Laurie as

HBO’s new Harry Potter series will premiere in 2027

is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. Warner Bros. Discovery’s new Harry Potter series for HBO and HBO Max will premiere in 2027, the company announced. Production has started on the show in the UK. The show is set to be a “faithful adaptation of the beloved Harry Potter books,” according to WBD, and the original Harry Potter movies will still be available on HBO Max. When the show was first announced in 2023, WB

You Only Have Until July 7 to Grab Some Rare First Chapter Lorcana Cards

The folks over at Ravensburger have been doing a lot of good work for fans of its wildly successful trading card game (TCG), Lorcana. The Reign of Jafar set gave us some amazing new cards, and the new Fabled set is looking to bring back some fan favorites as the game moves into a new phase, one that almost all TCGs go through, by rotating sets out of standard play. Because the first four sets will no longer be legal in competition play, the Fabled set will reprint some cards from those first fou

AI Harry Potter Vlogs Are an Unholy Combo of Fanfic and Veo 3 Slop

There are lots of ways to make a generic vlog on YouTube nowadays, but only one way to make a vlog using the likeness of Harry Potter characters—or at least only one way to do that without technically doing it at all. Thanks to Veo 3, Google’s newest video generation model, smooth-brain YouTube content is getting a lot smoother. Loads of people have already demonstrated ad nauseam how Veo 3 can generate man-on-the-street-style vlogs or unboxing videos that look fairly close to the real thing. Na

The Scheme That Broke the Texas Lottery

On Wednesday, April 19, 2023, the Lotto Texas jackpot was seventy-three million dollars. There was no winner that night—there hadn’t been a winner for the past ninety-one drawings—and so the pool of money rolled over. By the next drawing, that Saturday, it had reached ninety-five million. Dawn Nettles started getting worried. For the jackpot to have grown so quickly, sales volume must have been ten times what Nettles thought was normal. “I knew right then,” she told me. “Somebody was buying all