Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

For the techno-optimized, nearly everything in life can be improved with the help of engineering. Bots can auto-swipe on Tinder and flirt with matches on your behalf. AI avatars can attend Zoom meetings so that you don’t have to. Almost nothing is off limits, including the flesh. For that, there are peptides.Scientifically, peptides are short-chain amino acids, or little chemical messengers that tell cells what to do. Culturally, they are vials of injectable drugs that have taken Silicon Valley and Hollywood hostage. Over the last year, scores of people in both ends of California have begun dosing themselves with compounds…

This week, a topic that has been boomeranging around Silicon Valley bounced into the spotlight: AI tokens as compensation. The idea is straightforward enough — rather than giving engineers only salary, equity, and bonuses, companies would also hand them a budget of AI tokens, the computational units that power tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Spend them to run agents, automate tasks, crank through code. The pitch is that access to more compute makes engineers more productive, and that more productive engineers are worth more. It’s an investment in the person holding them, is the idea. Jensen Huang, the leather-jacket-wearing…

Elon Musk unveiled more details on his Terafab plans on Saturday evening — and the Tesla CEO has an ambitious vision for the project. Loading audio narration… “We’re starting a galactic civilization,” Musk said, speaking from the defunct Seaholm Power Plant in Austin.The Terafab is Musk’s giant chip manufacturing venture between his companies, Tesla and SpaceX. XAI is also included as the AI startup was acquired by Musk’s space company in February.The idea of developing a chip manufacturing plant alone is “herculean,” as Morgan Stanley’s semiconductor analysts wrote in a recent note. The amount of money it would take, along…

I tried something different at my friends’ annual Oscars party this year: I outsourced my ballot to Anthropic’s Claude.It beat around the bush at first, so I asked it to just give me the winners. Claude obliged, delivering confident picks across nearly every category. And it worked.I won the pool and walked away with a box of chocolates and bragging rights. Alistair Barr used Anthropic’s Claude to make Oscar picks  Alistair Barr/Business Insider But here’s the twist: Claude didn’t even complete the assignment fully.It failed to pick a winner for Casting, a new Oscar category this year. Maybe the model…

Hachette Book Group said it will not be publishing a novel called “Shy Girl” over concerns that artificial intelligence was used to generate the text. The novel was scheduled to be published in the United States this spring. Hachette said it will also discontinue the book in the United Kingdom, where it’s already available.  Although the publisher claimed the decision came after a thorough review of the text, reviewers on GoodReads and YouTube had been speculating that the book was likely AI-generated. And The New York Times said it asked Hachette about the “Shy Girl” concerns the day before the…

Georgia police have arrested and accused a 31-year-old woman of murder after she sought emergency medical care when she took pills to induce an abortion.Alexia Moore, of Kingsland, is held in Camden County jail on suspicion of murder and drug possession after police say she terminated her second-trimester pregnancy in late December. Georgia police said Moore violated the state’s abortion law that bans abortions after six weeks, when a heartbeat is detected.Local prosecutors have yet to indict Moore after Kingsland police took her into custody on March 4 in southeastern Georgia, about 100 miles from Savannah, according to court records.…

An anonymous Substack post published this week accuses compliance startup Delve of “falsely” convincing “hundreds of customers they were compliant” with privacy and security regulations, potentially exposing those customers to “criminal liability under HIPAA and hefty fines under GDPR.” Delve is a Y Combinator-backed startup that last year announced raising a $32 million Series A at a $300 million valuation. (The round was led by Insight Partners.) On Friday, the startup attempted to refute the accusations with on its blog, calling the Substack post “misleading” and saying it “contains a number of inaccurate claims.” The Substack post is credited to…

When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage for his annual GTC keynote on Monday, the $4-trillion-dollar company’s stock started to drop. Wall Street investors, it seems, were unmoved by the leather jacket-clad founder’s bullish 2.5-hour speech. Instead, they placed more weight on AI’s uncertain future and fears of a bubble. The nervousness felt by Wall Street couldn’t be more different than the buzzy atmosphere in Silicon Valley, where confidence, not uncertainty abounds. Huang talked for more than two hours about the company’s latest innovations, from new video game graphics tech and updated networking infrastructure to autonomous vehicle deals and…

Nothing calls to mind nonsensical treatments and bizarre religious healing rituals as easily as the notion of Dark Age medicine. The “Saturday Night Live” sketch Medieval Barber Theodoric of York says it all with its portrayal of a quack doctor who insists on extracting pints of his patients’ blood in a dirty little shop.Though the skit relies on dubious stereotypes, it’s true that many cures from the Middle Ages sound utterly ridiculous – consider a list written around 800 C.E. of remedies derived from a decapitated vulture. Mixing its brain with oil and inserting that into the nose was thought…

When Paul DeGeorge felt pressure on his chest in the middle of the night, he thought his 4-year-old son was lying on top of him. DeGeorge had fallen asleep on the couch after coming home late from his job as a police officer, and it wouldn’t be unusual for the boy to snuggle up next to his dad.But when DeGeorge opened his eyes, his son wasn’t there. The “crushing weight” remained.”That was like, ‘Oh my God, something’s up here,'” the 49-year-old DeGeorge said.He wasn’t sure what could be wrong. He was healthy and active. He did jiujitsu and coached his…