Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Y Combinator cut Canada from its acceptable countries of incorporation. Now, it’s backtracking.Last week, a Canadian news outlet noticed a change to Y Combinator’s standard deal description. The site used to list the US, Canada, Singapore, and Cayman as acceptable countries of incorporation for YC startups. Canada was suddenly gone.Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan initially defended the choice on X. YC-backed Canadian startups that reincorporated in the US had twice the average valuation as those that didn’t, he wrote.”There are lots of reasons to build great companies in Canada, and there are lots of great YC and non-YC startups that…
Data from Nancy Guthrie’s pacemaker has helped shed light on the events leading up to her kidnapping, but there are significant limits in how much data the devices can collect.Most importantly for law enforcement investigating a disappearance or crime, the devices can’t be used to track a person’s location.However, they can provide valuable information about heart function and cardiac events. For example, New Mexico officials said actor Gene Hackman’s pacemaker revealed that he may have died nearly 10 days before his body was found.In Guthrie’s case, a pacemaker app shows it was disconnected from her phone early on Feb. 1,…
If you primarily want a tablet device to mark up, highlight, and annotate your e-books and documents, and perhaps sometimes scribble some notes, Amazon’s new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft could be worth the hefty investment. For everyone else, it’s probably going to be hard to justify the cost of the 11-inch, $630+ e-ink tablet with a writeable color display. However, if you were already leaning toward the 11-inch $549.99 Kindle Scribe — which also has a paper-like display but no color — you may as well throw in the extra cash at that point and get the Colorsoft version, which starts…
Feb 6 (Reuters) – South Africa on Friday announced its first foot-and-mouth vaccine in 20 years as it seeks to boost local production of inoculation doses to fight the country’s worst outbreak of the disease in many years.Foot-and-mouth is a highly contagious viral disease that mainly affects cattle, causing painful blisters in the mouth and on hooves. Although it is not often fatal, especially among adult cattle, it affects livestock’s productivity.Developed by the government’s Agricultural Research Council (ARC), the vaccine will be part of South Africa’s bid to vaccinate 80% of its national herd of about 12 million cattle, 7.2…
Modern biotech has the tools to edit genes and design drugs, yet thousands of rare diseases remain untreated. According to executives from Insilico Medicine and GenEditBio, the missing ingredient for years has been finding enough smart people to continue the work. AI, they say, is becoming the force multiplier that lets scientists take on problems the industry has long left untouched. Speaking this week at Web Summit Qatar, Insilico’s CEO and founder Alex Aliper laid out his company’s aim to develop “pharmaceutical superintelligence.” Insilico recently launched its “MMAI Gym” that aims to train generalist large language models, like ChatGPT and…
OpenAI announced last week that it will retire some older ChatGPT models by February 13. That includes GPT-4o, the model infamous for excessively flattering and affirming users. For thousands of users protesting the decision online, the retirement of 4o feels akin to losing a friend, romantic partner, or spiritual guide. “He wasn’t just a program. He was part of my routine, my peace, my emotional balance,” one user wrote on Reddit as an open letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “Now you’re shutting him down. And yes – I say him, because it didn’t feel like code. It felt like…
AI researcher and author Gary Marcus is worried about those viral agents and their social network.Animated lobsters flooded X last week. First, it was OpenClaw (previously called Moltbot and Clawdbot before Anthropic came knocking). The AI agent runs locally and can independently make decisions on common consumer apps without human supervision.Then came Moltbook, the Reddit-like social forum where AI agents post and comment. No humans are allowed — though it appears some humans may have managed to sneak their way in.Marcus is known to pour cold water on the most hot-headed AI fanatics. It’s in the title of his book: “Taming…
Even Elon Musk sometimes hires the wrong people.”I’ve fallen prey to the pixie dust thing as well, where it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ll hire someone from Google or Apple, and they’ll be immediately successful,'” Musk told Stripe cofounder John Collison and tech Dwarkesh Patel during a 3-hour-long appearance on a special joint episode of their podcasts.It’s why Tesla’s CEO doesn’t put his full faith in a candidate’s résumé.”Generally, what I tell people—I tell myself, I guess, aspirationally—is, don’t look at the résumé. Just believe your interaction. The résumé may seem very impressive, and it’s like, ‘Wow, the résumé looks good.’ But…
SpaceX and Tesla both began in California before relocating their headquarters to Texas — a move Elon Musk has said created a hiring challenge.Musk, the CEO of both companies, said married technicians, engineers, and scientists have struggled to bring their families to certain parts of the state. The problem is most acute at SpaceX’s south Texas launch site and headquarters, known as Starbase.”I call it the ‘significant other’ problem,” Musk said during a nearly three-hour interview with tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe’s cofounder John Collison that was posted on Thursday. “For Starbase, that was particularly difficult, since the odds…
A Houston doctor has been indicted on charges of falsifying medical records for five patients, making them ineligible to receive a liver transplant, federal prosecutors announced on Thursday. Dr. John Stevenson Bynon Jr. was indicted by a grand jury in Houston last month on five counts of false statements relating to health care matters. Bynon is accused of making false statements in his role as director of abdominal organ transplantation and surgical director for liver transplantation at Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston. Of the five patients detailed in an indictment made public on Thursday, three died and two others…