Author: Vidya Saras

Van Eck says BTC can reach a price of $180,000 this cycle but warned that elevated funding rates could be showing early signs of “overheating.” 

Follow Nikolaus On X Here What an enormous day it has been today.Gary Gensler officially announced that he is stepping down from his position as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and minutes later, Reuters reported that Donald Trump’s “crypto council” is expected to “establish Trump’s promised bitcoin reserve.” A bitcoin reserve, that would see the United States purchase 200,000 bitcoin per year, for five years until it has bought 1,000,000 bitcoin.  Image via Julian Fahrer Right after both of those, Bitcoin continued its upward momentum and broke $99,000, with $100,000 feeling like it can happen at any…

Queridos amigos, It’s happening. Devcon is back! When we first announced that Devcon would take place in Bogotá, we spoke about all the city had to offer, and what we dreamed the event could become. Later this year, we will finally meet in Bogotá. With Devconnect now wrapped up, our team is working to bring Devconnect’s older sister, Devcon, to life. We can’t wait to unite the Ethereum ecosystem in the vibrant capital of Colombia. But enough with the teasers! Today we’re releasing details on ticketing, speaker applications, supporter information and more. Enjoy! Ticketing This year, as in prior years,…

Blockchain-based sandbox MMORPG WorldShards has launched its Trials Event, providing players with an opportunity to earn NFTs valued at over $100,000.The event runs from November 18 to December 9 at 13:00 UTC and serves as a preliminary test for the game’s upcoming token economy.Participants can collect in-game items by defeating enemies and redeem them for various NFT prizes. Source: WorldShardsWhat is the WorldShards Trials Event?The Trials Event is a testing phase aimed at evaluating the mechanics of WorldShards’ forthcoming cryptocurrency token before its official launch.During this event, players collect Shards Fragments by defeating enemies on Wild Islands. These fragments help…

Would Bill Buckley Yell Stop?

In an interconnected world, effective communication across multiple languages and mediums is increasingly important. Multimodal AI faces challenges in combining images and text for seamless retrieval and understanding across different languages. Existing models often perform well in English but struggle with other languages. Additionally, handling high-dimensional data for both text and images simultaneously has been computationally intensive, limiting applications for non-English speakers and scenarios requiring multilingual contexts. Jina-CLIP v2: A 0.9B Multilingual Multimodal Embedding Model Jina AI has introduced Jina-CLIP v2—a 0.9B multilingual multimodal embedding model that connects images with text in 89 languages. Jina-CLIP v2 supports a wide range…

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles this week unsealed criminal charges against five men alleged to be members of a hacking group responsible for dozens of cyber intrusions at major U.S. technology companies between 2021 and 2023, including LastPass, MailChimp, Okta, T-Mobile and Twilio. A visual depiction of the attacks by the SMS phishing group known as Scattered Spider, and Oktapus. Image: Amitai Cohen twitter.com/amitaico. The five men, aged 20 to 25, are allegedly members of a hacking conspiracy dubbed “Scattered Spider” and “Oktapus,” which specialized in SMS-based phishing attacks that tricked employees at tech firms into entering their credentials and…

Trump’s choice of leadership for the SEC and other agencies could reshape the U.S. crypto landscape over the next four years. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will likely appoint policy leaders who are friendly to the crypto sector, The Washington Post reported on Nov. 11. Trump’s team is initially considering leaders for financial regulatory agencies, including a chair for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The team has reportedly considered former SEC official and current Robinhood legal executive Daniel Gallagher for the role. It has also considered Republican SEC commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda, former SEC commissioner Paul Atkins,…

What are the key differences between ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and other top AI tools? Which one is best? How deeply should you be concerned about AI systems using your personal data? Are the reported inaccuracies and biases of the AI platforms really as bad as what I read?Earlier this month, we asked you, WIRED subscribers, to send in your questions about generative artificial intelligence, and these are just some of the excellent queries we received. On November 20 we hosted a live Q&A session with WIRED’s Reece Rogers, the author of the “AI Unlocked” newsletter, the monthly AI ethics…

Paramount Pictures “Gladiator II” spoilers follow. Is an empire — or a nation, for that matter — doomed to self-destruct? Is a dream of a better life, a better society, a better world, something completely foolish, or might there still be worth in it? If, as Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe) says in the first “Gladiator,” “what we do in life echoes in eternity,” will these echoes ever reach us on the mortal plane in time for real change to happen? These and many more questions have been on my…