Author: Vidya Saras

Nearly every survey of the podcast industry in 2024 agrees on one point: Chat podcasts are king. As video rises in popularity (33 percent of US podcast listeners prefer to consume this way), ad spending increases (estimated to top $4 billion worldwide), and listenership steadily grows (8 percent year-over-year), it is the chat format—in its combative, enlightening, and sometimes quite unserious splendor—that continually draws people in.The ecosystem is profuse and unpredictable. There are the mainstays that have become fixtures of culture: The Joe Rogan Experience, Armchair Expert, and The Read. Newer fare like I’ve Had It and ShxtsnGigs (more on…

Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to the Arizona-Mexico border on Friday to discuss border security ahead of the 2024 election.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of AI with their ability to generate human-like text and perform complex reasoning. However, despite their capabilities, LLMs need help with tasks requiring domain-specific knowledge, especially in healthcare, law, and finance. When trained on large datasets, these models often miss critical information from specialized domains, leading to hallucinations or inaccurate responses. Enhancing LLMs with external data has been proposed as a solution to these limitations. By integrating relevant information, models become more precise and effective, significantly improving their performance. The Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technique is a prime example of this approach, allowing…

“Sharing raw data allows us to plot incidents geospatially, track concerns, and overlay with additional data to make conclusions,” he explains. “For instance, local site security assessments are more accurate because our access to real-time data analysis gives us a better understanding of the threats to critical infrastructure.” In addition to helping Avangrid improve its security posture, the state fusion cell partnership highlights the importance of relationships with local, state, and federal agencies when combating cybercrime. Being able to reach out to fusion cells, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, CISA, or the US Coast Guard gives Avangrid a cybersecurity…

Trump meets Zelensky: ‘We’ll work with both parties to get this settled’Donald Trump met Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky at his New York base in Trump Tower on Friday and said it was time Russia’s war in Ukraine was settled.The Republican presidential nominee has repeatedly criticised the Ukrainian leader on the US campaign trail, and a meeting between the pair had seemed unlikely until hours before.As the two men stood side by side, Zelensky said he thought they had a “common view that the war has to be stopped and Putin can’t win”, adding that he would discuss with Trump details of…

LONDON (Reuters) -Britain’s Maggie Smith, one of the most acclaimed actors of her generation with a career ranging from Shakespeare to Harry Potter and Downton Abbey, has died aged 89, her family said on Friday. Smith was one of a select few to win the treble of an Oscar, Emmy and Tony during seven decades on stage and screen, becoming a star known for her sharp intelligence and waspish wit. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Smith “introduced us to new worlds with the countless stories she acted over her long career”. “She was beloved by so many for her…

if you’re bored with your home screen, I have good news for you. With iOS 18, you can finally personalize it however you’d like. You can now change the color of app icons and widgets (and even match them to your wallpaper), change the size to make them look larger, and place them anywhere you’d like on the screen. Below, we break down all the simple steps on how to customize your home screen.Be sure to also check out our iOS 18 roundup for a full list of all the top features in Apple’s latest mobile operating system, as well…

Niko TavernisFrom Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix pairing up to Anna Kendrick making her directorial debut and a Donald Trump biopic, here are the unmissable movies to see this month.Leah Gallo/ NetflixWoman of the HourIn 1978, Rodney Alcala was a contestant on a US television game show, The Dating Game, where he “won” a date with another guest, Cheryl Bradshaw. But Alcala was a serial killer who had murdered five women, and had already served two prison sentences for child molestation. This appalling true-crime story is the subject of Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, Woman Of The Hour. Kendrick herself plays…

We already knew where OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, stands on artificial intelligence vis-à-vis the human saga: It will be transformative, historic, and overwhelmingly beneficial. He has been nothing but consistent across countless interviews. For some reason, this week he felt it necessary to distill those opinions in a succinct blog post. “The Intelligence Age,” as he calls it, will be a time of abundance. “We can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now,” he writes. “Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs—fixing the climate,…

The upcoming regulatory framework could threaten a mass crypto exodus to the Middle East due to more favorable regulations.