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New York City has imposed a temporary ban on artificial intelligence use in classrooms through middle school, while also setting new limits on student screen time. High school students, by contrast, will gain access to AI literacy courses under the new policy.
Loudoun County, Virginia turned to former AOL infrastructure and empty fiber-optic networks left after the dot-com crash to attract data center investment, led by economic development official Buddy Rizer. The strategy shifted the county's tax base from over 80% residential to just over half commercial revenue, transforming it into a hub handling a large share of global internet traffic.
Cartoon Network Studios will release the second season of 'Adventure Time: Side Quests' on October 2, arriving simultaneously on Disney+ and Hulu. The season will be available as a full binge release rather than a weekly rollout.
Lionel Messi, who this week announced his retirement from Argentina's national team, has for years operated a venture capital fund called Play Time HoldCo, co-founded with Razmig Hovaghimian in October 2022 with an initial target of about $200 million. The fund holds stakes in AI startups including World Labs, Field AI, Fish Audio, Perceptron, Intangible and SuperAnnotate, and Messi separately holds equity in Sorare, KRÜ Esports, and Inter Miami, now valued at $1.45 billion.
A new essay traces how media mogul Steve Ross built his fortune not through glamorous entertainment deals but by acquiring a series of mundane businesses—limousine rentals, parking lots, cleaning services, and building trades—before rolling them into Kinney Services and eventually using that platform to acquire Warner Bros. The piece highlights the overlooked, unglamorous groundwork that preceded his transformation into one of America's best-paid executives, earning $78 million in 1990.
A developer has released Fastpotify, a lightweight native binary alternative interface for Spotify that avoids embedding a browser engine like Electron. The app is designed to launch in under a second and consume minimal system memory during use.
OpenClaw released its largest update yet, built by 933 contributors including 569 first-timers and comprising over 16,000 pull requests. The overhaul touches installation, messaging, memory, skills, models, automations, browser and native apps, plugins, and security, and grew out of a simpler plan to rebuild the browser app and streamline setup. The team took nearly seven weeks between releases, far longer than its usual one-to-two-day cadence, to ensure the update didn't break existing installations.
Standards body CGPM will vote in mid-October on ending the leap second, the periodic one-second adjustment used since 1972 to keep atomic clock time aligned with Earth's rotation. The move is being accelerated because the next adjustment could, for the first time, require subtracting rather than adding a second—a scenario computer systems have never had to handle. In its place, officials are proposing a leap hour that would only realign timescales once they drift a full 3,600 seconds apart.
Artie, a Y Combinator-backed startup building real-time data streaming infrastructure, has announced five open positions for Technical Account Executives. The company is seeking candidates focused on engineering quality, speed of execution, and measurable business impact.
Engadget rounded up its recent reviews, including senior writer Daniel Cooper's take on the Pebble Time 2 smartwatch alongside coverage of Google's Pixel 11 lineup. Cooper praised the Pebble Time 2 for deliberately avoiding heavy AI features, calling it a refreshing option for users who want simpler wearables.
Attimet, a small research lab backed by Y Combinator's Fall 2024 batch, is hiring engineers and researchers to build LLM-powered agent systems and the infrastructure around them, including tools, memory, evaluation and orchestration layers. The founding team, with backgrounds from firms like Optiver, DRW and Argo AI, is looking for people who can work directly with founders and take end-to-end ownership of projects.
CNET's Scott Stein tested the new $225 Pebble Time 2, part of Pebble's relaunch that also includes an upcoming round model. The watch keeps the classic buttons and retro look but adds a touchscreen, color backlit display, heart-rate sensor, and access to a huge library of free legacy Pebble apps and watch faces via a redesigned companion app.