Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Sriraam Raja, the founding engineer at the software company Decode, has been using generative AI to write code for two years. He says he can get projects done about twice as fast when he uses a chatbot to code with intention. Then one day, he fired off directions, and as he sat there while the bot’s wheels turned, he realized he could have actively written what he was aimlessly waiting for the bot to do. “I was giving away a bit of my agency, and so I made a decision to be very conscious,” he tells me.Raja has become “very…
TOKYO (AP) — I speak decent Spanish, picked up working several decades ago as a news and sports reporter in Spain, Mexico and Argentina.Now I report from Tokyo. After seven years, I still can’t grasp Japanese. My weekly language classes have taught me humility more than anything else.Ayaka Ono, my current Japanese teacher, estimates she’s tutored about 600 students over 15 years. They’ve been mostly between 20 and 50. I’m more than a decade beyond her eldest. “I find older students take tiny, tiny steps and then they fall back,” Ono-san — “san” is an honorific in Japanese to show…
NEW DELHI (AP) — Dense toxic smog blanketed India’s national capital Monday, pushing air pollution levels to their worst levels in weeks, disrupting travel and causing authorities to impose the strictest containment measures.More than 40 flights were cancelled and several dozens delayed. Over 50 trains arriving and departing from New Delhi were delayed by several hours, authorities said.Healthcare experts warned residents to avoid all outdoor activities as hospitals reported an influx of patients with breathing difficulties and eye irritation.“New Delhi is a gas chamber right now. Air purifiers can help only a bit, so it’s high time the government comes…
The parent company of Roomba, which has sold millions of cleaning robots, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday after 35 years of operation.In a Sunday press release, Massachusetts-based robotics company iRobot said it had filed for bankruptcy protection in the District of Delaware court.The company said that it would be wholly acquired by its main manufacturer and lender, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA. Picea has R&D and manufacturing facilities in China and Vietnam, per the release.The Picea deal would allow iRobot to continue operating, developing new products, make “timely payments to vendors and creditors,” and meet its commitments to…
A new law barring children under 16 from opening or maintaining social media accounts took effect last week in Australia, forcing platforms to deactivate accounts for swaths of young users.In the words of Taylor Swift, however, Reddit would very much like to be excluded from this narrative because, it says, it’s not a social media platform.Reddit made the argument in a lawsuit it filed against the Commonwealth of Australia and its Minister of Communications on Friday. The Australian law is meant to protect young people from what it says are the harmful and addictive effects of social media use.Reddit is…
An X user recorded a Tesla Model Y driving through Austin’s streets on Sunday that appears to show no one, not even a safety monitor, inside.Since Tesla launched its robotaxi in Austin in June, the driverless cars have always included a human in the passenger seat.The video generated a fair amount of excitement online from Tesla watchers, some of whom immediately went to their app to order a robotaxi to see whether it would include a safety monitor (they did).Tesla CEO Elon Musk later said on Sunday that the company is now testing driverless taxis without human safety operators, though…
Grok, the chatbot built by Elon Musk’s xAI and popularized on his social media platform X, appears to have repeatedly spread misinformation about today’s mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Australia. Gizmodo pointed to a number of posts where Grok misidentified the bystander — 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed — who disarmed one of the gunmen, and where it questioned the authenticity of videos and photos capturing al Ahmed’s actions. In one post, the chatbot misidentified the man in a photo as an Israeli hostage, and in another post brought up irrelevant information about the Israeli army’s treatment of Palestinians. In…
Just. Type. Faster.If you needed a sign for how determined AI-land is to achieve AGI quickly, it’s that one of its leaders sees the speed of human typing as one of its biggest roadblocks.Alexander Embiricos, who leads product development for Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent, said on “Lenny’s Podcast” on Sunday that the “current underappreciated limiting factor” to AGI is “human typing speed” or “human multi-tasking speed on writing prompts.”AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a still theoretical version of AI that reasons as well or better than humans. It’s the thing all the big AI companies are competing to be…
When Brown University junior Mia Tretta’s phone began buzzing with an emergency alert during finals week, she tried to convince herself it couldn’t be happening again.In 2019, Tretta had been shot in the abdomen during a mass shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California. Two students were killed, and she and two others were wounded. She was 15 at the time. On Saturday, Tretta was studying in her dorm with a friend when the first message arrived, warning of an emergency at the university’s engineering building. Something must have happened, she thought, but surely it couldn’t be a…
If you take cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, you may have noticed a flurry of news coverage since late October 2025 about an extensive recall of thousands of bottles of atorvastatin, the generic version of Lipitor.Both generic atorvastatin and brand-name Lipitor contain the same active ingredient, atorvastatin calcium, and are considered bioequivalent by the Food and Drug Administration. This medication is the No. 1-selling drug in the U.S., with over 115 million prescriptions going to more than 29 million Americans.I am a clinical pharmacologist and pharmacist who has assessed the manufacturing quality of prescription, over-the-counter and illicit drugs, as well as…