Author: knjohn

Smile Direct Club dentistry aligners firm shuts down | BBC News

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Smile Direct Club has shut down months after filing for bankruptcy in the US, leaving some customers confused and stranded as their treatment is ongoing.

Best known for selling clear aligners remotely, the firm said it had made the “incredibly difficult decision” to wind down operations late on Friday.

The US-based dentistry company was offering aligners for about £1,800 without the need to visit a dentist.

A last-ditch rescue attempt failed though as it was weighed down by debt.

Founded in 2014, the orthodontics company styled itself as a disruptor to the “bricks-and-mortar” dental industry.

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Google’s best Gemini demo was faked | TechCrunch

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Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked.

A video called “Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI” hit a million views over the last day, and it’s not hard to see why. The impressive demo “highlights some of our favorite interactions with Gemini,” showing how the multimodal model (i.e., it understands and mixes language and visual understanding) can be flexible and responsive to a variety of inputs.

To begin with, it narrates an evolving sketch of a duck from a squiggle to a completed drawing, which it says is an unrealistic color, then evinces surprise (“What the quack!”) when seeing a toy blue duck. It then responds to various voice queries about that toy, then the demo moves on to other show-off moves, like tracking a ball in a cup-switching game, recognizing shadow puppet gestures, reordering sketches of planets, and so on.

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Apple cuts off Beeper Mini’s access after launch of service that brought iMessage to Android | TechCrunch

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Was it too good to be true? Beeper, the startup that reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users, is experiencing an outage, the company reported via a post on X on Friday. And Apple is to blame, it seems. Users, including those of us at TechCrunch with access to the app, began seeing error messages when trying to send texts via the newly released Beeper Mini and messages are not going through.

The error message reads: “failed to lookup on server: lookup request timed out” spelled out in red letters.

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End-to-End Encrypted Instagram and Messenger Chats: Why It Took Meta 7 Years | WIRED

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Since 2016, the social behemoth now known as Meta has been working to deploy end-to-end encryption in its communication apps. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even promised in 2019 that the data privacy protection would roll out by default across all of the company’s chat apps. In practice, though, it was a wildly ambitious goal fraught with technical and political challenges, and Meta has only been able to move toward it in gradual, incremental steps. But this week the company is finally starting its full rollout.

“It’s been a wild ride,” says Jon Millican, a software engineer within Meta’s messenger privacy team. “I suspect this is the first time that something’s been end-to-end encrypted with all of the constraints that we’re working with. It’s not just that we’re migrating people’s data, but it’s actually that we’re having to fundamentally change a bunch of the assumptions that they work with when they’re using the product.”

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Google’s Gemini Is the Real Start of the Generative AI Boom | WIRED

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The history of artificial intelligence has been punctuated by periods of so-called “AI winter,” when the technology seemed to meet a dead end and funding dried up. Each one has been accompanied by proclamations that making machines truly intelligent is just too darned hard for humans to figure out.

Google’s release of Gemini, claimed to be a fundamentally new kind of AI model and the company’s most powerful to date, suggests that a new AI winter isn’t coming anytime soon. In fact, although the 12 months since ChatGPT launched have been a banner year for AI, there is good reason to think that the current AI boom is only getting started.

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Boss or Leader? 8 Principles to Truly Effective leadership | Entrepreneur

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Throughout my career, I’ve seen the stark differences between mere bosses and true leaders. These experiences have shaped my leadership approach and fueled my drive to help others become outstanding leaders. In today’s ever-changing business world, understanding this distinction is critical. It’s more than semantics; it’s about inspiring belief in your vision and mission. Drawing from over forty years of experience as a business owner and through extensive leadership presentations and writings, I’ve delved into what separates leaders from bosses.

Boss vs. Leader: Understanding the difference

The terms ‘boss’ and ‘leader’ are often used interchangeably, but they represent vastly different approaches to organizational management. A boss typically focuses on processes, compliance and maintaining the status quo.

In contrast, a leader inspires change, fosters a culture of innovation and encourages team growth. This contrast is not just in actions but also in mindset; while a boss thinks about tasks and authority, a leader focuses on people, potential and possibilities.

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Follow This Rule to Become a Better Presenter | Entrepreneur

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Not long ago, I was asked by a research partner and friend to guest speak at his Stanford MBA class on “People Analytics,” which explores how social networks interact and how data can be used to understand them. The lesson I took away from this experience has stayed with me through every presentation I have made since.

The focus of my lecture was on how to make analytics-based solutions for organizational/team coordination purposes commercially viable. I’d never lectured before and spent a ton of time prepping material with slides, points I’d like to make, and a perfectly curated talk track.

The class was an hour long, and I spent around 35 minutes presenting and the rest answering questions. By the end of it, I was mentally exhausted. Absolutely brain-dead.

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Tips for Finding a Job in a New City | Cool Business Ideas 

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Moving to a new city can be exciting and daunting – from searching for a place to live with the help of Black Tie Moving Dallas, learning the local customs, and meeting new people, there’s plenty of adventure ahead. But with all the changes that come with relocating to a different area, one big transition on your agenda is finding a job in your new destination.

Understanding the job market in your chosen city will help set you up for success as you hunt for jobs and hammer out interviews. With these tips in mind, searching for employment in unfamiliar territory doesn’t have to be an intimidating experience. Read on for helpful advice on how to find a job in your new city!

1. Research the job market in your new city – understand the types of jobs and industries available, the average salaries for those positions, and what qualifications you need to land a job

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Elon Musk is no fan of ‘GTA’ — but X is desperate to bring the ‘GTA 6’ trailer to the platform | Mashable

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Elon Musk has voiced his love for video games like Elden Ring in the past. But there’s one extremely popular game that Musk isn’t a fan of: Grand Theft Auto.

“Tried, but didn’t like doing crime,” Musk said in a reply to an X employee who said they had never played a GTA game before. “GTA5 required shooting police officers in the opening scene. Just couldn’t do it.”

GTA is a work of fiction – a video game – and playing it does not mean you are actually doing crime or shooting police officers. But Musk is entitled to his opinion. And GTA was certainly a big topic of conversation on Monday, after the trailer for GTA 6 leaked on Musk’s social media platform a day before it was supposed to launch.

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Klarna freezes hiring because AI can do the job instead | Mashable

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Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski is betting so big on AI that he’s instituted a hiring freeze.

“There will be a shrinking of the company,” said Siemiatkowski per The Telegraph. “We’re not currently hiring at all, apart from engineers.” Last May, 10 percent of the fintech company’s staff was laid off during a period of economic downturn for the tech industry.

This time, however, Klarna isn’t planning any layoffs. Instead, it is refraining from active recruitment with the expectation that AI can now handle many tasks that were previously performed by humans

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