Industry
Papa Johns Is Getting Into Drone Delivery--but Not for Pizza
A new collaboration with Alphabet's Wing will only deliver sandwiches. It demonstrates the tricky parts of taking to the sky. Starting today, eager customers of the US pizza restaurant chain Papa Johns living in one corner of southern North Carolina will have the opportunity to receive their food from the sky, thanks to a new collaboration with Alphabet's drone company, Wing . But Papa Johns' signature pizzas won't be on offer. Instead, drone-loving North Carolinians will have to choose between three kinds of sandwiches, a newer product for the fast-food chain: Philly cheesesteak, chicken bacon ranch, or steak and mushroom varieties.
Who is Gerhard Schroeder, Putin's pick for Ukraine peace talks mediation?
What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' Who is Gerhard Schroeder, Putin's pick for Ukraine peace talks mediation? Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested that former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder could coordinate talks with the European Union to secure a peace deal in Ukraine - a proposal met with scepticism by EU officials. European Council President Antonio Costa said recently he believed there was "potential" for the EU to negotiate with Russia and to discuss the future of Europe's security architecture. A day later, the Russian leader said the four-year-old war may be "coming to an end", adding that he was ready to hold direct talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Moscow or a neutral country. Speaking after Saturday's celebrations for Victory Day, which marks Russia's victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 at the end of World War II, Putin added he would be willing to meet Zelenskyy only once the terms of a peace agreement had already been settled.
I was wrong about robot pool cleaners -- 7 myths, busted
These independent devices combine brushes with suction for optimal cleaning, use treads over wheels for better wall climbing, and operate efficiently in short cycles. Robot cleaners excel at daily maintenance of already-clean pools but cannot handle severely neglected pools with algae blooms or poor water clarity. In my (new!) role as the editor of PCWorld's growing home robotics category, I was only vaguely aware of robot pool cleaners . And when I did think about them, I assumed they shared many of the same limitations faced by robot vacuums .
I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI
For screenwriters like me--and job seekers all over--AI gig work is the new waiting tables. In eight months, I've done 20 of these soul-crushing contracts for five different platforms. My name on the platform is ri611. I work as an AI trainer. I assess whether a chatbot's tone is natural or flat, affected or annoying. I identify patterns in pictures of furniture; search the internet for group photos of strangers whom I'll eliminate from the portrait, one by one. I trawl through bizarre videos so I can annotate and time-stamp the barking of a dog, the moment a stranger walks past a window, the precise millisecond a balloon pops. I generate anime sex scenes and decapitate young women, coax LLMs into giving me recipes for bombs made of household items, and generate invites to a reprise of January 6 at the White House, all as part of a red team whose purpose is to test safety precautions and probe weaknesses. I work for companies with names like Mercor and Outlier and Task-ify and Turing and Handshake and Micro1. In my "other" career, I am a Hollywood writer and showrunner. I create prime-time TV, usually featuring a middle-class white lady having the worst day of her life, with some salt-of-the-earth police interference to raise the stakes. You can find my shows on Paramount and Hulu and the BBC.
CUDA Proves Nvidia Is a Software Company
There's a deep, forbidding moat that surrounds Nvidia--and it has nothing to do with hardware. Forgive me for starting with a cliché, a piece of finance jargon that has recently slipped into the tech lexicon, but I'm afraid I must talk about "moats." Popularized decades ago by Warren Buffett to refer to a company's competitive advantage, the word found its way into Silicon Valley pitch decks when a memo purportedly leaked from Google, titled "We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI," fretted that open-source AI would pillage Big Tech's castle. A few years on, the castle walls remain safe. Apart from a brief bout of panic when DeepSeek first appeared, open-source AI models have not vastly outperformed proprietary models.
Fears of an AI breakthrough force the U.S. and China to talk
Things to Do in L.A. Fears of an AI breakthrough force the U.S. and China to talk Quiet discussions have taken place ahead of President Trump's state visit to China this week to explore reviving talks on an emergency channel, officials told The Times. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Discussions have taken place ahead of President Trump's state visit to China to explore reviving talks on an emergency channel for AI matters between Washington and Beijing, officials say. Any talks between the United States and China over AI regulations will be fraught with suspicion and risk.
Keyboard Shortcuts I Learned From My Cat
Every time my cat Mira walks across a keyboard, I learn a few new Mac and PC keyboard shortcuts I never knew about. All cats love keyboards (but this is not a photo of my cat). My cat Mira is perfect, and has never done anything wrong. She also loves walking on laptop keys--both my MacBook and my wife Kathy's Windows PC . You might think that walking on laptops is an example of Mira doing something wrong. And, in any case, we've both learned a lot about how our computers work because of this.
One of the easiest PC upgrades--Office Windows 11 Pro for a one-time 35
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Get a lifetime of Microsoft Office 2021 Pro + Windows 11 Pro for $34.97. Others just clean up your entire setup in one move--this is closer to the second. No subscription fees every month, no renewals--just a clean, one-time upgrade to both your workflow and your system. On the productivity side, Office 2021 Pro gives you the full stack: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, and Publisher.
SoftBank plans to make large-scale batteries for AI data centers
SoftBank will partner with South Korea's Cosmos Lab and DeltaX to enable mass production of large-scale battery cells from the fiscal year starting next April. SoftBank Group's mobile unit said it plans to begin large-scale battery cell manufacturing at its plant in Sakai, Osaka Prefecture, to address growing power demand for AI services. SoftBank Corp. will partner with South Korea's Cosmos Lab and DeltaX to enable mass production from the fiscal year starting next April, the company said in a statement Monday. The aim is to output energy storage systems at a scale of one gigawatt-hour per year, SoftBank said, which would make it one of the largest facilities in Japan, according to data from BloombergNEF. SoftBank could scale up to a capacity of several GWh, Bloomberg reported last month.