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AI PROBLEMS Lifehacker: AI Note-Taking Apps Are Violating User Privacy. "A few years ago, AI note-taking and transcription tools were a niche productivity hack used by busy executives and the media. Now, […]
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Refined GitHub is an Open Source extension/add-on that simplifies navigating and utilizing the GitHub repository. It intends to enable features that should be included in GitHub to make using it easier by adding many small, productivity-enhancing tweaks. [License: | Requires:
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AI PROBLEMS TechSpot: Amazon is blocking some users from seeing reviews after mistaking them for AI bots. "WTF?! Amazon is restricting access to customer reviews for some shoppers after mistakenly identifying them […]
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As Europe swelters in a heatwave, residents probably don't want to hear about ways to make their homes even hotter, but that's what Polish property developer Citylink is talking about, with plans to dump waste heat from a new data center in Wroclaw into the municipal district heating network.
Citylink is designing the data center so that heat from servers can be recovered instead of being dissipated via cooling systems — and as the data center grows, any increase in computing power will mean more energy available for recovery.
The collaboration with local power company Kogeneracja will provide "valuable experience in designing and operating modern data centers, with a particular focus on infrastructure dedicated to AI nodes," said Michal Starybrat, development director at Citylink.
"The dynamic growth of the artificial intelligence and cloud technology markets generates unprecedented demand for computing power, this collaboration demonstrates how modern digital infrastructure can actively contribute to building the energy ecosystem of the future," he added.
This type of initiative is not new. There have been similar projects in the UK and
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Wispr, the startup behind dictation tool Wispr Flow, has created an AI note-taking assistant that records meetings and generates conversation summaries for users.
The Wispr Flow Notetaker tool "captures your meetings so you can stop splitting your attention between listening and writing things down," said Sahaj Garja, Wispr CTO and co-founder.
Notetaker starts recording with one click, and doesn't require a bot to attend a video or voice call. It can also be used to capture in-person conversations.
The software has three key functions. Before a call, Notetaker displays a meeting brief with information such as meeting purpose and background of participants.
Once the meeting starts, a live transcript displays the dialogue text and labels speakers. A "what did I miss?" button provides a summary of talking points from the previous few minutes.
Finally, post-meeting, Notetaker generates a more detailed summary organized by topic that includes information such as key dates, decisions, and next steps. Users can search across notes from previous meetings in the Notetaker app. "Over time your meeting history stops being a folder of documents you have to go find and becomes something you can ask questions of," said Garja.
Notetaker integrates with AI assistants such as Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT via model context protocol. Th
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AI PROBLEMS Mother Jones: Inside a Mass Shooter's Harrowing History With ChatGPT. "Throughout the prior 12 months, [Phoenix] Ikner messaged with ChatGPT more than 6,600 times—including dozens of conversations revealing he was […]
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Unitree Robotics wants to raise about $900 million in an I.P.O. that tests market interest in humanoid robots, a technology that wows but has yet to prove its viability.
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AI note-taking app maker Granola is accused of violating privacy laws by developing software that can record conversations without all participants' consent, according to a lawsuit filed July 30 in a California federal court.
It follows a similar ongoing case in the same district, filed last year, that involves another note-taking and transcription software vendor, Otter.ai.
AI note-taking apps have proliferated in recent years, with dedicated tools emerging from vendors including Fellow, Fireflies, Otter, and others, some of which claim to have tens of millions of users. These AI assistants record and transcribe meeting conversations, generating automated summaries and follow-up items. Similar note-taking functionality is also built into virtual meeting platforms such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.
However, the use of these AI note-taking tools has raised privacy concerns over the ability of some to record and transcribe conversations without the consent of all participants.
The proposed class action complaint against Granola, filed by Florida resident Tarra Chamberlain in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges the company "purposefully" designed its app to record calls without requiring disclosure to all participants.
While some note-taking tools require
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As newspapers move online, the buildings that once housed their printing presses need new occupants.
The Minnesota Star Tribune has just sold its old printing plant on the edge of Minneapolis to the aptly named property developer Legacy Investing, which plans to create a new data center there. has found the ideal way to bring them back to life.
This is the second such move by Legacy. It has already bought a building in downtown Minneapolis that it has transformed into a data center for artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
These old buildings, already connected to power, are an attractive option for developers — especially with some grid operators threatening power cuts for new-build data centers during power shortages.
Legacy is taking a small-is-beautiful approach rather than replicating the massive data centers being built for Big Tech firms. Those are the size of small towns and consume huge volumes of water and hundreds of megawatts of power, while the capacity of Legacy's downtown building is about 30 MW, and it expects the Star Tribune site to host around 20 MW
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ANTI-AI ACTIVISM Reuters: Data center opponents stage 142 protests across 42 US states. "Opponents of the rapid buildout of data centers held ?142 protests across 42 states on Saturday in the first […]
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Image Credit: Nasa
Object 90377 Sedna - a distant transneptunian object best known for its highly elliptical, 11,390-year-old orbit - is currently en-route to perihelion (its closest approach to the Sun) in 2076. After that, Sedna will return to the 'space. deep and will not return for millennia, making this overview a unique (or, once in ~ 113 lifetimes) opportunity to study an object from the far reaches of our solar system. There are no Sedna missions in the works yet, but astronomers are starting to plan for the possibility and ideal launch date for such a mission is fast approaching, with two of the best launch windows coming in 2029 and 2034.
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