Cybertruck Finally Gets Full Self-Driving (Supervised)

A select number of all-electric Tesla Cybertrucks now have the ability to drive on US highways hands-free, after the automaker pushed an update to vehicles this morning. Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy wrote on X that Cybertrucks will be the first Tesla vehicles to receive the “end-to-end on highway” driving feature, which the company says uses a “neural net” to navigate all parts of highway driving.

“Nice work,” Tesla CEO (and X owner) Elon Musk responded to his AI chief.

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Pilots Are Dying of Tiredness. Tech Can’t Save Them

India’s $13.9 billion aviation industry—projected to cater to over 300 million domestically by 2030—is a ticking time bomb.

This July, in the sweltering heat at the Delhi High Court, additional solicitor general Aishwarya Bhati announced that new rules on pilot duty and rest periods would not be implemented this year after all. Introduced by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in January, the rules were designed specifically to combat pilot fatigue. They were set to take effect in June, but were abruptly retracted. The hearing addressed a writ petition filed by the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP), seeking clarity on when the new norms would be enforced. The DGCA’s response followed its request to airline companies in April for a tentative implementation timeline.

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Meta Missed Out on Smartphones. Can Smart Glasses Make Up for It?

Meta has dominated online social connections for the past 20 years, but it missed out on making the smartphones that primarily delivered those connections. Now, in a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to position itself at the forefront of connected hardware, Meta is going all in on computers for your face.

At its annual Connect developer event today in Menlo Park, California, Meta showed off its new, more affordable Oculus Quest 3S virtual reality headset and its improved, AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. But the headliner was Orion, a prototype pair of holographic display glasses that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said have been in the works for 10 years.

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X’s First Transparency Report Since Elon Musk’s Takeover Is Finally Here

Today, X released the company’s first transparency report since Elon Musk bought the company, formerly Twitter, in 2022.

Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter would release transparency reports every six months.These largely covered the same ground as the new X report, giving specific numbers for takedowns, government requests for information, and content removals, as well as data about which content was reported and, in some cases, removed for violating policies. The last transparency report available from Twitter covered the second half of 2021 and was 50 pages long. (X’s is a shorter 15 pages, but requests from governments are also listed elsewhere on the company’s website and have been consistently updated to remain in compliance with various government orders.)

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FTX Insider Caroline Ellison Sentenced to Two Years in Prison

A US federal judge in the Southern District of New York has sentenced Caroline Ellison, a member of the ring of executives who presided over the fraud that led to the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, to two years in prison. In addition, she has been ordered to forfeit $11 billion.

Ellison entered the courtroom Tuesday accompanied by her family, somber and quiet. The hour-long hearing was the culmination of a protracted downfall for the math whiz turned crypto executive. In the end, said presiding judge Lewis Kaplan, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried had been her “kryptonite.”

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Proposed Ban Would Be a ‘Death Sentence’ for Chinese EVs in the US

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After officially hikingtariffs on Chinese electric vehicle imports earlier this month, the US government is getting even more serious about keeping China-made autos out of the country. On Monday, the US Commerce Department proposed a new rule that would ban some Chinese- and Russian-made automotive hardware and software from the US, with software restrictions starting as early as 2026.

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Attention, Spoiled Software Engineers: Take a Lesson from Google’s Programming Language

Many of today’s programmers—excuse me, softwareengineers—consider themselves “creatives.” Artists of a sort. They are given to ostentatious personal websites with cleverly hidden Easter eggs and parallax scrolling; they confer upon themselves multihyphenate job titles (“ex-Amazon-engineer-investor-author”) and crowd their laptops with identity-signaling vinyl stickers. Some regard themselves as literary sophisticates. Consider the references smashed into certain product names: Apache Kafka, ScyllaDB, Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Much of that, I admit, applies to me. The difference is I’m a tad short on talents to hyphenate, and my toy projects—with names like “Nabokov” (I know, I know)—are better off staying on my laptop. I entered this world pretty much the moment software engineering overtook banking as the most reviled profession. There’s a lot of hatred, and self-hatred, to contend with.

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Big Tech’s New Adversaries in Europe

If the past five years of EU tech rules could take human form, they would embody Thierry Breton. The bombastic commissioner, with his swoop of white hair, became the public face of Brussels’ irritation with American tech giants, touring Silicon Valley last summer to personally remind the industry of looming regulatory deadlines.

Combative and outspoken, Breton warned that Apple had spent too long “squeezing” other companies out of the market. In a case against TikTok, he emphasized, “our children are not guinea pigs for social media.”

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Apple Must Pay $14.4 Billion to Ireland in Crackdown on ‘Sweetheart Deals’

Apple has been ordered to pay €13 billion ($14.4 billion) of back taxes to the Irish state, in a court ruling that ended a decade-long fight between Europe and the big tech company.

In a judgment handed down on Tuesday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) agreed with a European Commission ruling in 2016, which found that for a period of more than 20 years Apple enjoyed illegal tax advantages that constituted state aid from the Irish government.

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This iPhone ‘Supercycle’ May Not Be So Super

Apple’s just-announced iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro will likely go down in the books as the “AI” iPhone, the one that’s supposed to power all kinds of new generative artificially intelligent features, and in a very Apple-y way. But some analysts are predicting that these new phones will catalyze an even more important phenomenon for Apple’s future: The start of an iPhone “supercycle.”

A “supercycle” is what it sounds like: an extended period of economic growth in a boom and bust cycle. In this instance the phrase is being applied to a specific commodity. And those who track the tech market closely believe—or want to believe—that that time has come for iPhone sales to heat up.

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