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Customers can hop on to Amazon Autos and search for the Hyundai make and model they want, then find vehicles at nearby dealerships with the combination of features they want. Shoppers can select trim, color, and interior features, then get a valuation on their current vehicle to estimate a trade-in price. (Amazon says it is working with an “independent third party” to determine trade-in values.)

The checkout process gives options to pay in full or to find help securing financing—though interest rates may vary. Finally, shoppers can e-sign most of the paperwork on Amazon, then schedule a time to pick up their new ride at the Hyundai dealer. There are also the familiar features that have come to feel like the stalwarts of buying stuff on Amazon: user reviews, star ratings, and an add-to-cart button. (Throw some soap in there too while you’re buying that $66,000 Ioniq 5.)

ere’s the problem with this, which many people don’t seem to understand: to figure out what a “reasonable and prudent” person would do is an after-the-fact judicial analysis. That means that any time something bad happens online that works up enforcers into a frenzy, they will go after any website they dislike where said “bad thing” was discussed, and insist that the platform should have “prevented and mitigated” the bad thing.

Then the platform would need to go to court and spend roughly $5 million across three to four years to argue that the “bad thing” which was discussed (but didn’t actually happen on the platform) wasn’t “reasonably foreseeable.”

Most platforms aren’t going to want to do that. Instead, they’ll just remove all sorts of content that might otherwise lead to such a lengthy, draining, and resource-intensive legal fight (including all the negative headlines that will go along with it).

That’s why this is a censorship bill, first and foremost.

On Monday, Nature released a paper from Google's quantum computing team that provides a key demonstration of the potential of quantum error correction. Thanks to an improved processor, Google's team found that increasing the number of hardware qubits dedicated to an error-corrected logical qubit led to an exponential increase in performance. By the time the entire 105-qubit processor was dedicated to hosting a single error-corrected qubit, the system was stable for an average of an hour.

In fact, Google told Ars that errors on this single logical qubit were rare enough that it was difficult to study them. The work provides a significant validation that quantum error correction is likely to be capable of supporting the execution of complex algorithms that might require hours to execute.

With its own modem in the pipeline, Apple is investigating the idea of bringing cellular connectivity to the Mac for the first time. That means users wouldn’t need Wi-Fi to get online. To date, that capability has been reserved for the iPhone, Apple Watch and iPad. But cellular connections are unlikely to come to the Mac before 2026, when Apple is planning a second-generation modem that includes support for faster speeds.

The company is also discussing bringing cellular support to headsets, including future models of the Vision Pro. Someday, the technology may also be used in lightweight augmented reality glasses, though such a device is years away.

More than half a decade in the making, Apple’s in-house modem system will debut next spring, according to people familiar with the matter. The technology is slated to be part of the iPhone SE, the company’s entry-level smartphone, which will be updated next year for the first time since 2022.

A modem is a critical piece of any mobile phone, letting the device connect to cell towers in order to make calls and link up with the internet. Apple’s first version of the component will be followed by further generations that become increasingly more advanced. The company aims to ultimately overtake Qualcomm’s technology by 2027, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the project is confidential.

On Monday, OpenAI released Sora Turbo, a new version of its text-to-video generation model, making it available to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers through a dedicated website. The model generates videos up to 20 seconds long at resolutions reaching 1080p from a text or image prompt.

Open AI announced that Sora would be available today for ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers in the US and many parts of the world but is not yet available in Europe. As of early Monday afternoon, though, even existing Plus subscribers trying to use the tool are being presented with a message that "sign ups are temporarily unavailable" thanks to "heavy traffic."

Global Internet traffic grew 17.2% in 2024. 🔗

Google maintained its position as the most popular Internet service overall. OpenAI remained at the top of the Generative AI category. Binance remained at the top of the Cryptocurrency category. WhatsApp remained the top Messaging platform, and Facebook remained the top Social Media site. 🔗

Global traffic from Starlink grew 3.3x in 2024, in line with last year’s growth rate. After initiating service in Malawi in July 2023, Starlink traffic from that country grew 38x in 2024. As Starlink added new markets, we saw traffic grow rapidly in those locations. 🔗

Googlebot, Google’s web crawler, was responsible for the highest volume of request traffic to Cloudflare in 2024, as it retrieved content from millions of Cloudflare customer sites for search indexing. 🔗

Traffic from ByteDance’s AI crawler (Bytespider) gradually declined over the course of 2024. Anthropic’s AI crawler (ClaudeBot) first started showing signs of ongoing crawling activity in April, then declined after an initial peak in May & June. 🔗

13.0% of TLS 1.3 traffic is using post-quantum encryption. 🔗

AI retrospectives often bristle at the ignorance of other disciplines, yet its early practitioners had their own blind spots. Their inability to conceptualize topics such as boredom was not an isolated oversight: it reflects their fundamental failure to reckon with the non-teleological forms of intelligence—those that aren’t focused on problem solving or goal attainment. By reducing all intelligence to such matters, they overlooked alternative paths—ones that explore how computer technologies might amplify, augment, or transform other forms of intelligence, or how the technology itself would need to evolve to accommodate and nurture them.

In fairness, it’s unsurprising they didn’t ask these questions. The Efficiency Lobby knew exactly what it wanted: streamlined operations, increased productivity, and tighter hierarchical control. The emerging AI paradigm promised all of that and more. Meanwhile, there was no organized opposition from citizens or social movements—no Humanity Lobby, so to speak—advocating for an alternative. Had there been one, what might this path have looked like?

TikTok asked that a US law forcing a sale or ban of the app by China-based parent company ByteDance Ltd. be put on hold to give the US Supreme Court a chance to review.

A pause to the law will also give the incoming administration under President-elect Donald Trump time to determine its position, which could “moot both the impending harms and the need for Supreme Court review,” according to a filing on Monday to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.

A pause will pose “no imminent threat to national security” or “material harm on the government,” according to the motion.

The government asked that the court quickly deny TikTok’s request.

With Reddit Answers, redditors can ask questions and receive answers using a new, AI-powered conversational interface. Once a question is asked, curated summaries of relevant conversations and details across Reddit will appear, including links to related communities and posts. Redditors can easily read relevant snippets and answers inline from real redditors, jump into the full conversations, and go deeper in their search with their own or suggested follow-up questions.

Reddit Answers is initially rolling out to a limited number of users in the U.S., with support currently in English; we plan to expand to additional languages and locations in the future. Redditors who want to learn more and be notified when the feature is available in their location can head here.

In a paper published in Nature, DeepMind researchers said they found that GenCast outperforms the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ ENS — apparently the world’s top operational forecasting system.

And in a blog post, the DeepMind team offered a more accessible explanation of the tech: While its previous weather model was “deterministic, and provided a single, best estimate of future weather,” GenCast “comprises an ensemble of 50 or more predictions, each representing a possible weather trajectory,” creating a “complex probability distribution of future weather scenarios.”

The thorium atom transition has a frequency roughly one million times higher than the caesium atom's. This means that, although it has been measured with a lower accuracy than the current state-of-the-art strontium clock, it promises a new generation of clocks with much more precise definitions of the second.

Measuring time to the nineteenth decimal place, as nuclear clocks could do, would allow scientists to study very fast processes. Think of two runners tied in a photo finish. If the referee's stopwatch had a few extra digits, they would be able to identify the winner.

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Intel’s disclosures include new research that enhances gate-all-around (GAA) transistor scaling and performance both with silicon and with atomically-thin 2D transistors that use beyond-silicon materials. Intel also outlined its subtractive Ruthenium technology that improves interconnect performance and scalability, ultimately enabling smaller wires between transistors, and a chip packaging breakthrough that improves chip-to-chip assembly throughput by 100x.

Intel’s Technology Research team, formerly known as the Components Research team for the last 50 years, is part of Intel Foundry. This team works on developing products intended for commercialization in the nearer term than the more far-looking initiatives at Intel Labs. The Technology Research team is known for paving the way for many of Intel’s fundamental technologies, with the latest innovations like the PowerVia backside power delivery and RibbonFET gate-all-around architecture originating in this group.

TikTok creators took to the app to express their shock and dismay on Friday after a panel of federal judges unanimously upheld a new law that could lead to the popular Chinese-owned video app being banned in the United States by mid-January.

“I’m, like, shaking — I’m so mad, I’m so anxious, because TikTok changed my life,” Katie Wolf, a 38-year-old book editor in Charleston, S.C., said in a video she posted on Friday. She finds 80 percent of her clients through the app, she said, and does not know what she would do without it.