Apple’s most affordable laptop, the MacBook Neo, is available once again at its pre-price hike price. All four colors are currently discounted and available refurbished through the company, with the base 256GB model listed for $599 (usually $699 new), and the upgraded version with 512GB of storage and TouchID selling for $679 (usually $799). The laptops have a one-year manufacturer warranty, with the option to purchase an extended AppleCare plan.

MacBook Neo

Apple’s most affordable laptop, with a 13-inch display, A18 Pro chip, 8GB of RAM, and optional Touch ID fingerprint sensor. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $599 at Apple (256GB, Refurbished)

My colleague Antonio G. Di Benedetto reviewed the MacBook Neo, and was impressed with its performance given that it’s running on the A18 Pro – an iPhone 16 Pro processor. While power users might feel a bit limited by the 8GB of memory and relatively slow storage, the excellent screen, keyboard and speakers make this a great choice for people who primarily use browsers instead of system-intensive apps. It’s also a fantastic laptop …read more

We were pretty sure that Fenix Flexin’s “Rubberz” was made using AI, but musician Medasin was confident that it was made using Treblo specifically. Now the company and a new detection tool seem to confirm it.

On Monday, the company announced the open-source Treblo AI Music Classifier, which detects when a song was generated using Treblo, though not other AI tools. According to a blog post, it has a false positive rate of less than 1 in 1,000. That’s not unimpeachable, but it’s notable that the company’s own Classifier determined that “Rubberz” was “very likely Treblo” with “high confidence,” adding more fuel to the PR nightmare for Fenix.

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Google is making some significant AI leadership changes, including a major shift for Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis.

Hassabis will become the chair of Google DeepMind and the chief scientist at Alphabet, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Wednesday. Hassabis will continue to lead Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs, which aims to use AI to develop drugs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind’s CTO, is stepping up to become Google’s SVP of DeepMind and will report to Pichai. Kavukcuoglu will remain Google’s chief AI architect as well.

“​​As you’ve heard me say many times, I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human h …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Once, I had some questions about why SpaceX, Elon Musk’s healthiest company, acquired xAI, his sickliest one. Now I have some questions about why we’re calling the whole thing SpaceX.

Look, what we have here, by revenue, is primarily a telecom company and a company that rents compute, according to SpaceX’s first quarterly earnings statement as a public company. The space sector of the business didn’t break a billion dollars this quarter and contributed only a touch over 10 percent of the company’s revenue. SpaceX remains its own biggest customer. There just aren’t enough other people who want its rockets. And, I dunno, maybe if the rockets …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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At a time when storage space commands a premium price, SanDisk’s Extreme Fit drive is worth a look.

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“It is neither possible nor desirable to own every great independent studio.”

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This was one of the interoperability tools people used before Apple adopted RCS.

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Reddit is enlisting AI to help moderate new subreddits – and eventually the rest of site. The company is introducing automated moderation tools that rely on LLMs to help mods manage their communities, and it’s expanding who can use those tools today ahead of a full launch later this year.

The company calls the suite of tools “Rules Hub,” and the tools let mods decide what rules should be automatically enforced and what should happen when a rule is triggered. Rules Hub relies on LLMs to evaluate “whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule,” which “allows Rules Hub to better handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases while pr …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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The company is also planning to retire its public API.

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