Samsung's unionized workers may strike for 18 days starting May 21st over bonus pay disputes, potentially costing the company $700 million daily in lost memory production. PCWorld reports this strike could worsen the existing chip shortage and drive RAM prices even higher than current levels, which are already 3-4 times more expensive than last year. The disruption threatens global electronics supply chains despite Samsung's $13.4 billion profit in 2025. As if the AI data center boom wasn't causing enough problems for PC hardware, a looming strike in Samsung's home territory of South Korea could grind the memory giant's already-strained production to a halt. According to the latest reporting from Reuters, a long-simmering dispute between Samsung and its unionized labor force has boiled over, with no compromise in sight even after days of government-mediated talks.

OnlyFans' First-Gen Creators Are Retiring--and Some Are Begging You to Forget They Exist As more sex workers quit the industry, some are having to navigate tough questions around consent and the "afterlife" of work they no longer want to be associated with. On April 28, just before noon, Win White logged onto X and posted a series of messages to his 65,000 followers who, until that moment, were mostly unaware of his past as an OnlyFans creator. If you see it, save it cool," he wrote . "I know where I've been and I think I'm entitled to a life after that at least." That morning White, 29, had received several DMs about an old clip of him making rounds. Though he has done his best to separate his old life from his new one--last year he deleted his OnlyFans account and the separate X account where he posted content--it often has a habit of catching up with him. "All that work that I did for OnlyFans, I did out in California.

A Conspiracy Theory About QR Codes Has Led to Chaos Ahead of Georgia's Midterms The state of Georgia banned the use of QR codes for elections, based in part on the assertions of a man who's boosted false claims about Israel and 9/11. Now no one knows how ballots will be counted. QR codes are at the center of the latest conspiracy theory in Georgia's elections. And it's largely thanks to Garland Favorito, a man who has spent decades trying to get people to listen to his conspiracy theories about insecure voting machines being used to rig elections in Georgia. When Georgia became the epicenter of election denial conspiracy theories in 2020, Favorito became an overnight superstar in the election denial community, and an integral part of the vast network of groups across the country that sprang up to promote the baseless claim that US elections are rigged.

Why is Israel still in southern Lebanon? A war to shape Lebanon's future Three Israeli drone strikes on cars on a major highway linking Beirut to southern Lebanon have killed at least eight people, including two children, Lebanon's Ministry of Health reported. A photograph of the bombed cars shared by Lebanon's National News Agency following the attacks on Wednesday in the Jiyeh area, some 20km (12 miles) south of the Lebanese capital, showed the vehicles severely damaged, their exteriors charred and torn apart. "It is a conflict that is taking a high toll on the civilians who live in these areas," she said. Lebanon and Israel are expected to hold a new round of direct negotiations in Washington on Thursday, brokered by the United States.

A team of scientists from Nanyang Technological University Singapore has developed a new biochip that, when paired with computer vision, can detect quickly and accurately extremely small amounts of microRNAs, which are tiny genetic markers linked to diseases such as heart disease. Published in the scientific journal, the new biosensing platform combines a specially designed nanophotonic chip with AI-automated image analysis. With a tiny drop of blood loaded into the chip, it can rapidly detect multiple microRNA biomarkers. With its integrated AI imaging function, thousands of microRNA signals can be imaged and analysed in a single snapshot. Compared with the current gold standard of detecting microRNA - PCR (polymerase chain reaction) detects tiny amounts of genetic material by copying them many times - the new device can cut detection time from hours to 20 minutes. MicroRNAs are short RNA molecules that help regulate genes that work in the body.

SoftBank Group has reported a surge in quarterly profit due to valuation gains on its OpenAI investment, boosting confidence at the Japanese company to bet even more on the ChatGPT-maker. The gains on OpenAI outweighed lackluster investment gains elsewhere in the Tokyo-based technology group's portfolio while war in the Middle East roiled markets. That points to growing reliance on the U.S. startup, which faces rising competition from Anthropic and Google and is reportedly trailing its highest internal targets. SoftBank earned a net income of ¥1.83 trillion ($11.6 billion) in its fiscal fourth quarter, compared with the average analyst estimate of ¥295.2 billion. The profit could be attributed entirely to its booking $25 billion in valuation gains on OpenAI in the quarter, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Kirk Boodry. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

United States President Donald Trump has departed for Beijing ahead of a high-stakes summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, after weeks of unsuccessful US efforts to persuade China to help bring Iran back to negotiations and ease tensions around the Strait of Hormuz. The leaders of the world's two largest economies are due to meet on Thursday and Friday during Trump's first visit to China since 2017, with talks expected to focus on trade, Taiwan, artificial intelligence and the war involving Iran. Why does the Trump-Xi summit matter? The Trump-Xi summit is a high-level meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping taking place in Beijing as the world's two largest economies face growing tensions over trade, technology, Taiwan and the Iran war. The summit is particularly significant because Trump will be the first US leader to visit China in nearly a decade, while the talks also come at a time of heightened geopolitical and economic uncertainty.

US President Donald Trump will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on May 14 and 15, following weeks of delays due to the US-Israel war on Iran. The talks are expected to focus on trade relations and mark the first time a US president has visited China in nearly a decade. In recent decades, the US and China have emerged as the world's dominant superpowers, frequently seen as locked in a contest for who sits atop the world order. A quarter of a century ago, by contrast, the US dwarfed China in most major indicators, but today, Beijing is regarded as the factory of the world and is outpacing its Western counterpart in many regards. Who is the world's top trading power?

Batch normalization (BN) is central to modern deep networks, but its effect on the realized function during training remains less understood than its optimization benefits. We study training-time BN in continuous piecewise-affine (CPA) networks through the geometry of switching hyperplanes and the induced affine-region partition. Conditioned on a mini-batch, we show that BN defines for each neuron a reference hyperplane through the batch centroid, and that breakpoint-switching hyperplanes are parallel translates whose offsets are expressed in batch-standardized coordinates and are independent of the raw bias. This yields an exact criterion for when a switching hyperplane intersects a local $\ell_\infty$ window and motivates a local region-density functional based on exact affine-region counts. Under explicit sufficient conditions, we show that BN increases expected local partition refinement in ReLU and more general piecewise-affine networks, and that this mechanism transfers locally through depth inside parent affine regions where the upstream representation map is an affine embedding. These results provide a function-level geometric account of training-time BN as a batch-conditional recentering mechanism near the data.

Probabilistic partial least squares (PPLS) is a central likelihood-based model for two-view learning when one needs both interpretable latent factors and calibrated uncertainty. Building on the identifiable parameterization of Bouhaddani et al.\ (2018), existing fitting pipelines still face two practical bottlenecks: noise--signal coupling under joint EM/ECM updates and nontrivial handling of orthogonality constraints. Following the fixed-noise scalar-likelihood line of Hu et al.\ (2025), we develop an end-to-end framework that combines noise pre-estimation, constrained likelihood optimization, and prediction calibration in one pipeline. Relative to Hu et al.\ (2025), we replace full-spectrum noise averaging with noise-subspace estimation and replace interior-point penalty handling with exact Stiefel-manifold optimization. The noise-subspace estimator attains a signal-strength-independent leading finite-sample rate and matches a minimax lower bound, while the full-spectrum estimator is shown to be inconsistent under the same model. We further extend the framework to sub-Gaussian settings via optional Gaussianization and provide closed-form standard errors through a block-structured Fisher analysis. Across synthetic high-noise settings and two multi-omics benchmarks (TCGA-BRCA and PBMC CITE-seq), the method achieves near-nominal coverage without post-hoc recalibration, reaches Ridge-level point accuracy on TCGA-BRCA at rank $r=3$, matches or exceeds PO2PLS on cross-view prediction while providing native calibrated uncertainty, and improves stability of parameter recovery.