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Waymo's monthly membership seems like a bad deal
Waymo's monthly membership seems like a bad deal Waymo's monthly membership seems like a bad deal You'll pay way mo' for a lot less compared to the competition. Waymo -- the Alphabet-owned driverless taxi service which has seen a rapid expansion in recent years -- is rolling out a new rewards program today. The service is called Waymo Premier, and it promises priority pickups along with a 10 percent in-app rebate applied to future rides. Subscribers will also get fee-free cancellations, though only up to five a month. Lastly, Premier gives subscribers the chance to be among the first to use Waymo in new cities as the service expands, which is certainly one way to reframe the concept of paying to beta test those new coverage areas.
Drone strikes on central Sudanese city kill up to 23: NGO
Drone strikes on the central Sudanese city of el-Obeid have killed up to 23 people, officials and a rights group have reported. Both sources reported on Thursday that overnight attacks had killed several people across the key hub in the southern Kordofan region. The reports concerned the latest in a series of attacks using unmanned aircraft, illustrating that drone warfare has become an increasingly prominent feature in the conflict, which erupted in April 2023 between the military government and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Health officials at el-Obeid Hospital said that 15 were killed and more than 10 wounded in the attacks, which hit residential areas, a funeral gathering and a truck carrying food supplies, as well as areas near army positions. Emergency Lawyers blamed the attack on the RSF, which did not immediately claim responsibility.
DuSA: Fast and Accurate Dual-Stage Sparse Attention Mechanism Accelerating Both Training and Inference
This paper proposes the Dual-Stage Sparse Attention (DuSA) mechanism for attention acceleration of transformers. In the first stage, DuSA performs intrablock sparse attention to aggregate local inductive biases. In the second stage, DuSA performs interblock sparse attention to obtain long-range dependencies. Both stages have low computational complexity and can be further accelerated by memory acceleration attention mechanisms directly, which makes DuSA faster than some extremely fast attention mechanisms. The dual-stage sparse attention design provides a lower error in approximating vanilla scaled-dot product attention than the basic single-stage sparse attention mechanisms and further advances the basic sparse attention mechanisms to match or even outperform vanilla scaled-dot product attention. Even in some plug and play situations, DuSA can still maintain low performance loss. DuSA can be used in both training and inference acceleration. DuSA achieves leading performance in different benchmarks: long range arena, image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, text to video generation, and long context understanding, and accelerates models of different sizes.
Drug Sites Hijacked Spotify's Search Ranking Through Fake Podcasts
A joint congressional report describes a spam operation that turned tens of thousands of fake podcasts into search-engine bait for illegal pharmacy and scam sites. For the past year, Spotify has been quietly purging tens of thousands of podcasts that advertised illegal online pharmacies. A report released Thursday by Senator Maggie Hassan, ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, faults the company for acting only after news outlets exposed the content and her office spent nearly a year pressing for answers. None of what it removed was sent to law enforcement, the report says. Spotify reportedly removed more than 57,000 podcast episodes and 3,000 shows, and took enforcement action against 3,500 accounts, all pushing links to illegal online pharmacies advertising opioids, benzodiazepines, and stimulants for sale without a prescription.
Summer Game Fest 2026 roundup: All the shows, trailers, news and reviews
Summer Game Fest just wrapped up its sixth year and, like a beautifully cel-shaded version of The Blob, the show just keeps on growing. The official Summer Game Fest 2026 showcase took place on June 5, but the surrounding buffet of new game reveals, release date announcements, review opportunities and developer spotlights actually ran from June 1 all the way to June 9. That's more than an entire week of near-constant video game news and trailers to consume, and here we've gathered absolutely all of it in one tidy but lengthy package. First up, a collection of Engadget's previews and reporting from Summer Game Fest Play Days in Los Angeles, which ran from June 6-8: Control Resonant's take on New York feels like the Backrooms Silent Hill Townfall brings atmospheric horror to '90s Scotland with incredible attention to detail Saw: Genesis looks the most fun when you're the murderous mastermind Alien: Isolation 2 keeps the classic horror game's uncompromising approach to raising tension Spyro: A Realm Beyond sees the '90s purple dragon make a big comeback Be like Carl from Summer House and get in the MIX with another high-energy stream filled with great-looking upcoming indie games, gathered by the folks at the Media Indie Exchange. The MIX hosts a smattering of annual online indie showcases, and alongside in-person events, they've been spreading the good gaming word for the past 10 years.
AI wealth boom sending San Francisco home prices surging: 'It's ridiculous'
The'painted ladies' in San Francisco on 20 August 2024. The'painted ladies' in San Francisco on 20 August 2024. Home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area's already expensive market are skyrocketing as employees at leading artificial intelligence companies come into gargantuan sums of money thanks to a boom in initial public offerings . With San Francisco's OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as SpaceX, which operates a major facility in the Los Angeles area, eyeing debuts on the stock market, the hot housing market may not abate soon. If their initial public offering (IPO) is well-received, the companies' multibillion-dollar valuations are poised to produce massive wealth for employees and executives holding shares, which experts say could trigger an uptick in demand for the Bay Area's limited housing stock.
What did T. rex's breath smell like?
What did T. rex's breath smell like? More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. T. tex had the strongest bite of any land animal Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . Imagine the world millions of years ago.
The Download: soccer's data renaissance and China's big nuclear plans
Plus: Autonomous drones may have killed soldiers for the first time. Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally kick the ball out of bounds. You may question the logic of surrendering possession seconds into a game. If you were Jesse Davis, though, you'd know that this play could be a prime setup to score. Davis is a professor of computer science at KU Leuven in Belgium and head of its Sports Analytics Lab, which has been at the vanguard of a data awakening in soccer. Using AI and data analytics, his team has uncovered hidden tactical patterns and challenged long-held assumptions about how the game should be played.