Author: knjohn

California lawmakers pass AI safety bill SB 53 — but Newsom could still veto | TechCrunch

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California’s state senate gave final approval early on Saturday morning to a major AI safety bill setting new transparency requirements on large companies.

As described by its author, state senator Scott Wiener, SB 53 “requires large AI labs to be transparent about their safety protocols, creates whistleblower protections for [employees] at AI labs & creates a public cloud to expand compute access (CalCompute).”

The bill now goes to California Governor Gavin Newsom to sign or veto. He has not commented publicly on SB 53, but last year, he vetoed a more expansive safety bill also authored by Wiener, while signing narrower legislation targeting issues like deepfakes.

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OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor says we’re in an AI bubble (but that’s okay) | TechCrunch

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OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor says we’re in an AI bubble (but that’s okay).

Bret Taylor, board chair at OpenAI and CEO of AI agent startup Sierra, was asked in a recent interview with The Verge whether he agreed with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s declaration that “someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money in AI.”

Taylor echoed Altman’s sentiments, suggesting that we are indeed in an AI bubble — but like Altman, he didn’t sound too worried about it.

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Big Investors Are Betting on This ‘Unlisted’ Stock | Entrepreneur

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Three of the same VC firms that backed Uber, Venmo, and eBay, respectively, are all investing in Pacaso.

Venture backing in companies like Pacaso is nothing new. After all, early-stage companies often have the potential to deliver the most outsized returns.

But recent regulatory updates have opened the door for individual investors to invest alongside these venture capitalists. Normally, everyday investors have to wait for a company to go public before they can invest, missing out on that early gain potential. Now, some companies are opening up investment opportunities to the public.

This type of investing has already seen some great success stories. For example, in 2016, 433 people invested an average of $2,730 in a private startup named Revolut. Fast-forward to today, those $2,730 stakes are worth more than $1 million, up 89,900%.

Source: Big Investors Are Betting on This ‘Unlisted’ Stock | Entrepreneur

How a Mom’s Garage Side Hustle Hit $1 Billion Revenue | Entrepreneur

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What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your side hustle?

I had just stepped away from seven years at eBay Inc., where I had launched PayPal Mobile and led the eBay fashion business. I was working on a new fashion-related startup idea before I ended up starting KiwiCo in 2011.

Where did you find the inspiration for the side hustle?

When my kids were younger, I tried to find ways for them to exercise their creativity and put their problem-solving skills to work. I wanted them to grow up to feel like they could envision and better the world around them. As an engineer by training, I saw creating and building through hands-on activities as a way to explore, discover, and build creative confidence. At the same time, I was drawing on my own childhood — I have such fond memories of making and building things with my mom while I was growing up.

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Why I replaced my $249 AirPods Pro with $19 wired EarPods | Mashable

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Google came for the wired it girls at its Made by Google showcase last month. The tech giant played a sponsored episode of Kareem Rahma’s SubwayTakes talk show during the event, in which Rahma and his fellow comedian Amber Singletary ripped on wired earbuds for looking “sloppy,” “dumb,” and “not cool.”

“The only thing they [wired earbuds] do is get tangled,” Rahma said, speaking into a corded mic, to which Singletary replied, also into a corded mic, “Yeah, they get tangled and now you look stupid.”

Someone in SubwayTakes’ Instagram comments section said it best: “Wow, this is the easiest disagree ever.” I firmly believe that wired earphones are actually good and worth using in 2025, at least when it comes to Apple’s iconic EarPods.

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A whopper of a Nintendo Direct is coming this week: When is it and how to watch | Mashable

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Who cares about Apple? There’s a Nintendo Direct this week!

After weeks of rumors and speculation, Nintendo confirmed that there will be a Nintendo Direct livestream on Friday, Sept. 12 at 6am PT/9am ET. As per usual, Nintendo gave next to no indication of what will actually be shown in the stream, other than “roughly 60 minutes of information on upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 and Nintendo Switch games.” You can watch it on Nintendo’s YouTube channel.

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Cracker Barrel ‘suspends’ restaurant renovations following logo flop | CNN Business

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Cracker Barrel announced that it’s suspending the renovations of its restaurants following a disastrous logo rollout that sent shares lower.

“You’ve shared your voices in recent weeks not just on our logo, but also on our restaurants,” the chain said on X. “If your restaurant hasn’t been remodeled, you don’t need to worry, it won’t be.”

Cracker Barrel said that its minimalist and lighter design, which removed its dark woods and many of the trademark tchotchkes that lined the walls, was tested at only four out of 660 restaurants.

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Everything Apple announced at its big event: iPhone Air, iPhone 17, new Apple Watches and more | CNN Business

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Apple announced the first major redesign of the iPhone in years on Tuesday when it confirmed the launch of a new, thinner model called the iPhone Air. CEO Tim Cook called it the “biggest leap ever for iPhone.”

That was one of a number of product upgrades that came during Apple’s annual hardware event at its Cupertino, California, headquarters, which also included improvements to the Apple Watch and AirPods Pro.

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A scalding hot ‘sand battery’ is now heating a small Finnish town | Live Science

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A small municipality in southern Finland recently installed the world’s largest “sand battery” to supply the town’s heating.

The new sand battery, designed by Polar Night Energy, is effectively a giant sandpit encased in a roughly 100 by 40 foot (30 by 12 meter) steel container.

The sand is heated using closed-loop heat transfer pipes, and this heat is trapped by two layers of steel sandwiching an insulation layer. The energy is then extracted by blowing cool air through the pipes, capturing the heat to generate hot water, steam, or hot air.

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Do humans and chimps really share nearly 99% of their DNA? | Live Science

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Chimpanzees, along with bonobos, are humans’ closest living relatives. In fact, you may have heard that humans and chimps share 98.8% of their DNA.

But is this actually true? And what does “similar DNA” actually mean?

The truth is that the frequently cited 98.8% similarity between chimp (Pan troglodytes) and human (Homo sapiens) DNA overlooks key differences in the species’ genomes, experts told Live Science.

Human and chimp DNA is made of four basic building blocks, or nucleotides: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). The genomes of both species can be thought of as a “string of the letters A, C, G and T … about 3 billion letters long,” David Haussler, scientific director at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, told Live Science in an email.

When scientists compare human and chimp DNA, they identify the letter (nucleotide) sequence in both genomes and look for stretches of DNA where there is a lot of overlap between the two genomes. Then, they count the number of matching letters in these regions.

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