Amid ongoing economic anxieties, BLK and other companies are giving away basic essentials to appeal to the public. While Gen Z catches a lot of flack for being single, or even antisocial, there's a brutal economic reality underscoring why some people aren't going out: They simply don't have the disposable income . Dating apps, already struggling to maintain user bases due to enshittification and a lack of quality matches, are contending with this affordability crisis. In a dystopian sign of the times, BLK, the app for Black singles, announced on Wednesday that it is giving away free gas in an attempt to incentivize people to go on dates. As part of the promotion, BLK is providing $500 gas gift cards to 10 people who download the app and tag three friends in the campaign post across its social channels.

Tune into live broadcasts from your Windows desktop with Trdo, a free and open-source application. I may be old-fashioned, but I prefer actual radio stations to Spotify's algorithms. The best human DJs find music I'd never seek out, and that even the best recommendation system would never point out to me. Even better: If you're good at finding community and public radio stations that appeal to your tastes, there are no commercials. I've found several of my favorite bands in the past few years listening to radio stations like KEXP, Indie XFM, and the various stations offered by SomaFM . It's simple to listen to such stations in your browser, but leaving a tab open just for the radio annoys me.

Toward the beginning of the 2002 film, a domineering lawyer (played by James Spader) barges into the office of his assistant (Maggie Gyllenhaal) with evidence of a work infraction: a memo she has written that has "three typing errors." "Do you know what this makes me look like to the people who receive these letters?" Setting aside that his screed turns out to be foreplay, Spader's character was channeling a widespread cultural revulsion: Typos were the ultimate shorthand for careless work. A spelling mistake was proof that the writer hadn't bothered putting much effort into a piece of correspondence, that their instructions or advice shouldn't be taken seriously--and perhaps that the recipient shouldn't invest time in reading their note at all. More than two decades later, as AI-generated writing has flooded workplaces, social media, and dating apps, old hallmarks of sloppiness--typos chief among them--are getting a new gloss. Some job applicants are intentionally adding typos to their cover letters to prove that they, and not an AI program, wrote them.

Smooth functions on graphs have wide applications in manifold and semi-supervised learning. In this paper, we study a bandit problem where the payoffs of arms are smooth on a graph. This framework is suitable for solving online learning problems that involve graphs, such as content-based recommendation. In this problem, each recommended item is a node and its expected rating is similar to its neighbors. The goal is to recommend items that have high expected ratings. We aim for the algorithms where the cumulative regret would not scale poorly with the number of nodes. In particular, we introduce the notion of an effective dimension, which is small in real-world graphs, and propose two algorithms for solving our problem that scale linearly in this dimension. Our experiments on real-world content recommendation problem show that a good estimator of user preferences for thousands of items can be learned from just tens nodes evaluations.

Google's Gemini Spark is an agentic AI assistant Google's Gemini Spark is an agentic AI assistant The AI agent is rolling out to testers this week. Google has announced a 24/7 personal AI agent called Gemini Spark at this year's I/O developer conference. The company says Spark transforms Gemini from a standard AI assistant to an active partner that actually perform tasks for you. Spark is powered by Gemini 3.5 and is deeply integrated with Google Workspace apps, including Gmail, Docs and Slides. You can teach it to perform various tasks, such as creating a list of critical deadlines in your Gmail and sending it to you, or writing up a summary of ongoing updates in lengthy email threads.

Google is transforming its search engine into an AI-powered assistant called Spark, featuring conversational interactions and a personalized'daily brief' for task management. PCWorld reports the company is expanding mobile search capabilities to handle complex queries using text, images, and video while integrating restaurant reservations and payments. This evolution blurs the line between traditional search and AI assistance, keeping users within Google's ecosystem through proactive monitoring and personalized results.

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a target treatment policy (e.g., a recommender system) using data collected by a different logging policy. It enables high-stakes experimentation without live deployment, yet in practice accuracy depends heavily on the logging policy used to collect data for computing the estimate. We study how to design logging policies that minimize OPE error for given target policies. We characterize a fundamental reward-coverage tradeoff: concentrating probability mass on high-reward actions reduces variance but risks missing signal on actions the target policy may take. We propose a unifying framework for logging policy design and derive optimal policies in canonical informational regimes where the target policy and reward distribution are (i) known, (ii) unknown, and (iii) partially known through priors or noisy estimates at logging time. Our results provide actionable guidance for firms choosing among multiple candidate recommendation systems. We demonstrate the importance of treatment selection when gathering data for OPE, and describe theoretically optimal approaches when this is a firm's primary objective. We also distill practical design principles for selecting logging policies when operational constraints prevent implementing the theoretical optimum.

Apple's new Siri app will reportedly offer auto-deleting chat options Apple's new Siri app will reportedly offer auto-deleting chat options Apple might have a secret weapon for its revamped Siri that could help it compete against other AI chatbots. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that Apple will introduce a feature that automatically deletes chats, as seen in its Messages app, to the updated Siri. According to Gurman, users will get a Siri setting that toggles between saving chatlogs for 30 days, a year or forever. Gurman added that Apple will also offer an option of whether Siri launches with the context of its previous conversation or starts a completely new chat. However, automatically deleting chatlogs comes with a serious downside. Most LLMs prefer swallowing up as much personal data from chats as possible to enhance its capabilities and better tailor its future responses.

Go fully hands-free with these tips for Android and iOS. With the arrival of digital assistant apps like Gemini and Siri, most of us have grown used to talking to our phones. But conversing with your Android or iOS device can go way beyond interacting with AI. You can also use your voice to launch apps, fill out text fields, and do just about everything that was previously only possible with your fingers and thumbs. Of course, the traditional touchscreen input will often be the way to go.

Some of the world's biggest and most powerful brands are attempting to be more cute and cuddly. Tech giants Microsoft and Apple are among a wave of businesses who have recently introduced new cartoon character mascots, a tactic experts say is often used to make a brand seem more human and friendly, and to build a stronger connection with customers. Apple's character, a blue and white figure with an outsized head, has become unofficially known as Little Finder Guy. Introduced in March in social media videos to promote a new laptop, it has gained some positive coverage. Microsoft, which years ago shelved its widely-disliked Clippy paperclip virtual assistant, has also unveiled a new cartoon character for its AI assistant Copilot.