McDonald’s pulls AI-generated Christmas advert following backlash

McDonald’s pulls AI-generated Christmas advert following backlash

🚀 Read this trending post from Hacker News đź“– đź“‚ Category: âś… Here’s what you’ll learn: Following the video being made private on the McDonald's Netherlands YouTube channel, The Sweetshop's chief executive Melanie Bridge defended the advert.As quoted in Futurism, external, she said the production process took "seven weeks" where the team "hardly slept" and created "thousands of takes - then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production"."This wasn't an AI trick," she said. "It was a film."In a statement to BBC News, McDonald's Netherlands said the video was meant to "reflect the stressful…
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“Confessions of a Shopaholic” Novelist Sophie Kinsella dies at the age of 55 | books

“Confessions of a Shopaholic” Novelist Sophie Kinsella dies at the age of 55 | books

🚀 Discover this awesome post from Culture | The Guardian đź“– đź“‚ Category: Books,Sophie Kinsella,Culture,Romance books,Fiction 📌 Main takeaway: Madeleine Wickham, best known for writing the best-selling novel Confessions of a Shopaholic under her pseudonym Sophie Kinsella, has died at the age of 55.Wickham, whom novelist Jojo Moyes called the "Queen of Romantic Comedies," has written more than 30 books for adults, children and teens, which have sold more than 45 million copies.In April 2024, Wickham announced that she had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain cancer, at the end of 2022, and underwent radiotherapy and chemotherapy…
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Amazon intends to invest an additional $35 billion in India by 2030, bringing total planned spending to $75 billion.

Amazon intends to invest an additional $35 billion in India by 2030, bringing total planned spending to $75 billion.

🔥 Discover this insightful post from TechCrunch đź“– đź“‚ Category: Commerce,Amazon,Amazon India 📌 Main takeaway: Amazon said on Wednesday it will invest an additional $35 billion in India by 2030, bringing its total planned commitment in the country to about $75 billion as its retail and cloud operations expand in the South Asian nation. The e-commerce giant said the new investment will support its efforts to digitize small businesses and strengthen its logistics and operational footprint in India. The company said it aims to enable access to AI for up to 15 million small businesses and generate 1 million direct,…
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The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered

The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered

🔥 Read this must-read post from Hacker News đź“– đź“‚ Category: đź’ˇ Key idea: Early microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers. But in 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point coprocessor, performing floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This was a huge benefit for IBM PC applications such as AutoCAD, spreadsheets, and flight simulators. The 8087 was so effective that today's computers still use a floating-point system based on the 8087.1 The 8087 was an extremely complex chip for its time, containing somewhere between 40,000 and 75,000 transistors, depending on the source.2 To explore how the 8087…
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Harry Potter to Eyes Wide Shut: 12 of the Best Alternative Festive Films

Harry Potter to Eyes Wide Shut: 12 of the Best Alternative Festive Films

🚀 Check out this awesome post from BBC Culture đź“– đź“‚ Category: đź’ˇ Main takeaway: Scientific(Credit: Alamy)Great Day Out (1998)Before the advent of Wallace and Gromit feature films in recent decades, every Christmas my family would listen to reruns of the original Aardman claymation classics of the 1980s and 1990s on the BBC. Today, the cozy feeling of tea and toast on the sofa still perfectly embodies the holiday season for me. My favorite is the first, A Grand Day Out, which despite running less than 25 minutes, somehow fits within the heaps of copious stories. After all, why not…
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Stock futures decline ahead of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decision

Stock futures decline ahead of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decision

🚀 Discover this insightful post from Investopedia | Expert Financial Advice and Markets News đź“– đź“‚ Category: Live Markets News,Markets News,News âś… Here’s what you’ll learn: This Wall Street expert believes the Fed has 'more room to cut' than most people expect in 2026 1 minute ago A nice surprise in US labor market data may be the gift that keeps on giving next year. Michael Wilson, chief investment officer and chief US equity strategist at Morgan Stanley, when he asked why the market was behaving the way it did – the S&P 500 had a strong year by all…
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10 Years of Let’s Encrypt Certificates

10 Years of Let’s Encrypt Certificates

🚀 Check out this insightful post from Hacker News đź“– đź“‚ Category: âś… Main takeaway: On September 14, 2015, our first publicly-trusted certificate went live. We were proud that we had issued a certificate that a significant majority of clients could accept, and had done it using automated software. Of course, in retrospect this was just the first of billions of certificates. Today, Let’s Encrypt is the largest certificate authority in the world in terms of certificates issued, the ACME protocol we helped create and standardize is integrated throughout the server ecosystem, and we’ve become a household name among system…
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Fairphone updates its good-looking, repairable headphones

Fairphone updates its good-looking, repairable headphones

✨ Check out this must-read post from TechCrunch đź“– đź“‚ Category: Gadgets,headphones,Fairphone,repairable âś… Main takeaway: Colors like black and white for appliances are classic, but when a company offers a different color without it looking garish, it tends to stand out. That's what it felt like to unbox the new $229 Fairphone Fairbuds XL over-ear headphones in a forest green shade. The new headphones, which also come in black, compete with others on the market, such as Nothing Headphones (1), the previous generation Sony WH-1000XM5, and Sonos Ace. While some of these headphones offer better sound and noise cancellation capabilities,…
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This Wall Street expert believes the Fed has ‘more room to cut’ than most people expect in 2026

This Wall Street expert believes the Fed has ‘more room to cut’ than most people expect in 2026

đź’Ą Read this must-read post from Investopedia | Expert Financial Advice and Markets News đź“– đź“‚ Category: Markets News,News 📌 Here’s what you’ll learn: Key takeaways Morgan Stanley expects the S&P 500 to reach 7,800 by the end of next year and is optimistic about laggards in the sector this year.One reason she sees strength ahead: a setup that should support at least two additional rate cuts next year. A nice surprise in US labor market data may be the gift that keeps on giving next year. Michael Wilson, chief investment officer and chief US equity strategist at Morgan Stanley,…
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Big Tech are the new Soviets

Big Tech are the new Soviets

✨ Explore this must-read post from Hacker News đź“– đź“‚ Category: 📌 Main takeaway: Big Tech’s so-called Magnificent Seven are on everyone’s lips. The exorbitant stock market valuations of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon and Tesla provoke an amalgam of awe and fear. Their trillion-dollar investments in AI prompt some to predict the brightest of futures and others to dread humanity’s dumbing down, unemployment, redundancy even. In this overwhelming din, it is easy to miss the larger picture: a new type of capital is killing markets, capitalism’s habitat. At its very beginning, capitalism was underpinned by faith in competitive…
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