News

‘Searching for SmarterChild’ Kickstarter

After reading my posts earlier today about ELIZA, the first “hit” chatbot from the 1960s, DF reader AP sent me a link to the Kickstarter page for Searching for SmarterChild, a project from documentary filmmakers Lindsey Sitz and Zan Gillies to make a movie about SmarterChild, an …

kickstarter.com

My Conversation With ELIZA

I vaguely recall first trying some version of ELIZA back in the 1990s. I never found it all that impressive nor understood its stature in the AI literature. It’s better than a bunch of if/then statements but not by much. There’s some natural language grammar parsing that is somew…

sites.google.com

Lovable reportedly in talks to double its valuation to $13.2B

The $300 million round is expected to be led by Menlo Ventures, Sifted reported.

Inside the Race to Electrify Semi Trailers for Long Haul Freight

A semi-trailer that helps propel itself entered commercial road testing in late May, when a powertrain kit developed by Nivalis Energy Europe, headquartered in Luxembourg with engineering operations in Germany, was fitted to a trailer supplied by Amsterdam-based TIP Group. The se…

spectrum.ieee.org

AI has collapsed the cyber response window — resilience now starts before the attack

Presented by Rubrik Enterprise cybersecurity is facing a fundamental speed problem. Frontier AI models are now enabling autonomous attacks that can move from initial access to full system breakout in as little as 27 seconds. That’s faster than any human-operated security workflo…

venturebeat.com

Exclusive: EdVisorly Raises $13.3M Series A To Fix The Messy College Transfer Process With AI

Los Angeles-based startup EdVisorly tells Crunchbase News exclusively that it has secured a $13.3 million Series A funding round to scale its AI-native platform, which automates the manual back-office workflows that can slow down university admissions.

news.crunchbase.com

International tech

You blame Visa and Mastercard for the swipe fee, but they keep almost none of it — the fat cut, called interchange, flows straight to the bank that issued your card, and it barely exists in the countries that built their own payment rails

Visa and Mastercard get the blame for card fees, but the biggest slice — called interchange — flows straight to the issuing bank. Here's how the swipe actually splits, and who funds your airline miles.

siliconcanals.com

Xiaomi announces new vehicle brand SkyNomad

Xiaomi EV today unveiled SkyNomad, a new vehicle series that the company said represents “the sky, the nomad — a new name for space and lifestyle.” The first model in the lineup will be Xiaomi’s first range-extended full-size SUV, targeting families and outdoor travel scenarios. …

The hidden ‘interchange’ fee tucked into every card swipe now costs U.S. merchants around $111 billion a year — roughly four times what it drained just 15 years ago

Interchange fees — the invisible cut card issuers take from every U.S. card swipe — have quadrupled since 2009 to roughly $119 billion a year, quietly baked into the price of almost everything sold with plastic.

siliconcanals.com

Elevate Education Bags ₹170 Cr To Scale AI-Led Higher Education Platform

Edtech startup Elevate Education, formerly known as Sunstone, has raised ₹170 Cr ($17.7 Mn) in its Series D funding round…

Behind the Delivery Riders: Meituan Quietly Built a Trillion-Parameter AI Model

Meituan LongCat-2.0, a 1.6 trillion-parameter model trained entirely on domestic AI chips, reveals how food delivery data is powering frontier AI research.

Milo Drive Bags $2.4 Mn To Scale Electric Mobility Platform

Electric mobility startup Milo Drive has raised $2.4 Mn (about ₹22.9 Cr) in a seed funding round co-led by Caret…

‘Moana’ Is an Exercise in How Not to Remake an Animated Classic

Dwayne Johnson and Catherine Laga'aia star in the live-action remake of the 2016 original.

Familiar Names Top Active US Investor Ranks In Q2

To get an expanded sense of how busy startup backers spent Q2, we put together several rankings for active investors. These include active venture backers, lead investors, highest spenders and prolific seed dealmakers.

news.crunchbase.com

Feds demand autonomous vehicle companies stop interfering with first responders

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said emergency scenes are not "edge cases."

Trending

An Analog Synth For The Modern World

We cover so many projects here at Hackaday that lead the author down a rabbit hole of technological investigation that distracts us from the task of bringing them to you. …read more

The Agent Loop: How AI Goes From Answering Questions to Doing Things

In this article, we will walk through that progression. We will also look at how an agent is structured, what choices the model makes on every turn, what scaffolding holds it together, and when an agent is actually the right pattern to reach for.

LAST CALL FOR ENROLLMENT: Become an AI Engineer - Cohort 7

Our 7th cohort of Becoming an AI Engineer starts in less than a week. This is a live, cohort-based course created in collaboration with best-selling author Ali Aminian and published by ByteByteGo.

Hacking Amazon Echo Show 8 3rd Gen via UART and eMMC

Even with Amazon’s Echo Show devices running Linux in the form of the Android-derived FireOS, using them for non-Amazon approved purposes can be a chore at best. In the case …read more

FLOSS Weekly Episode 874: Really, We Do PDFs

This week Jonathan chats with Andrea Gallo about RISC-V! What does it mean for RISC-V to be an Open ISA? Where is RISC-V popping up, and what’s the new frontier? …read more

Linux Fu: The Local Phonebook

I’ll admit it: I miss the simplicity of /etc/hosts. There was something elegant about it. You wanted laserprinter to mean 192.168.1.40, so you opened a text file and wrote: 192.168.1.40 …read more

Good Judgment Beats Good Prompts

2026.04 - "Judgement is the last human skill AI can't replace". Everyone is saying it. I am trying to understand it. I want you to get good at it. Let's get philosophical and practical.

artoftpm on Substack

ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Claude: How They Differ

In this article, we will look at the various architectural forks the teams building these models encountered and the decisions they took.

Pi 5 Becomes ALSA-Compatible TOSLINK Sound Card

This is one of those hacks that makes you stop in your tracks and say, “wait, you can do that!?” — before realizing, oh, yes, of course you can do …read more