Was Lil Uzi Vert disrespecting Kai Cenat? Here's what exactly transpired during the live stream

Suumit Shah, founder of an e-commerce website, said that his firm had laid off 90% of its support staff.

As CeeCee Smith came up in gaming — both as a gamer and industry professional — she found a community in the women-centric PMS Clan that helped her realize two things: that there were career paths in the industry for people like her (avid fans with no art or coding skills), and that there was space for women to love and excel at first-person shooter games like Halo and Call of Duty, which were rising in popularity at the time. “[Video games] are all about that challenge to complete objectives,” she said during Thursday’s Refinery29 Twitch stream. “It was about being transported to different worlds, and from that, you constantly want to be doing better than last time … That’s kind of where [my passion] started in my soul.”

The world’s second-biggest carbon-credits project has halted its operations after the government of Zimbabwe said earlier this year

Researchers have come up with a new way to generate electricity with solar panel technology by harvesting the energy produced by raindrops. The method, proposed by a team from Tsinghua University in China, involves a device called a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) that creates electrification from liquid-solid contact. These are typically used to harvest energy from waves, as droplet-based TENGs (D-TENGs) have previously faced technical limitations that prevented them from working at any significant scale. By using solar panel bridge arrays, the researchers discovered such barriers could be overcome “Referring to the design of solar panels in which multiple solar power generation units are connected in parallel to supply the load, we are proposing a simple and effective method for raindrop harvesting,” said Professor Zong Li, who led the research. “The peak power output of the bridge array generators is nearly five times higher than that of the conventional large-area raindrop energy harvesting. The results of this study will provide a feasible scheme for large-area raindrop energy harvesting.” A study detailing the breakthrough, titled ‘Rational TENG arrays as a panel for harvesting large-scale raindrop energy’, was published in the journal iEnergy. “As an important part of the natural energy and water cycle, rainfall contains abundant renewable energy,” the study notes. “However, this kind of renewable energy lacks effective utilisation today... Therefore, finding a reasonable topology to relieve the inherent constraints of D-TENGs is of great significance for realising the large-scale raindrop energy harvesting.” It is one of a number of promising advances with solar panel technology in recent months, with an Australian team of researchers developing self-healing cells capable of recovering 100 per cent of their original efficiency after suffering degradation from space radiation. Earlier this week, scientist’s at the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) unveiled a design for a double-sided solar panel capable of boosting efficiency rates by up to 20 per cent by harvesting reflected sunlight. Read More Scientists invent double-sided solar panel that generates vastly more electricity How tech could turn our homes into renewable energy power stations Scientists invent double-sided solar panel that generates vastly more electricity Scientists invent self-healing solar panels with ‘miracle material’ ‘Miracle material’ smashes solar panel efficiency threshold

By Chibuike Oguh NEW YORK U.S. investors are awaiting a slew of initial public offerings (IPO) in coming

There were rumors going around that Joe Rogan and his podcast, 'The Joe Rogan Experience' would be included in 'GTA 6 '

Adverts promoting crypto scams are appearing on X, formerly Twitter, amid an exodus of major brands from the platform. Many of the scam ads use the likeness of Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, to promote fake cryptocurrency giveaways. The scam ads work by promoting a fake pre-sale of “X Token”, which fraudulently offers early investors large profits if they buy the cryptocurrency before it officially launches on exchanges. Some of the adverts seen by The Independent have even appeared on the profile page of Elon Musk, who has 165 million followers on X – more than any other user. The scammers have paid for the sponsored posts, providing much-needed revenue for X as the company struggles with retaining traditional advertisers. Over 100 brands and other advertisers have pulled their ads from X in recent weeks, according to internal documents seen by The New York Times, which could lead to losses of around $75 million in earnings this year. The exodus reportedly began after Mr Musk engaged with a controversial tweet about an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The X owner responded to claims that he is antisemitic by saying “nothing could be further from the truth”. Companies to have withdrawn ads include Airbnb, Apple, Coca-Cola, Disney, IBM, Netflix and Uber. X disputed the figure reported, claiming it “represented an internal exercise to evaluate total risk” and that the true figure was closer to $11 million. The emergence of scam crypto ads has already resulted in significant financial losses for X users, according to the MalwareTips forum, with some victims reporting they lost their entire crypto savings. “The anonymity of cryptocurrency enables the scammers to quickly withdraw funds without being tracked down,” a post to MalwareTips notes. A twitter-hackers-cryptocurrency-a8620436.html">2018 investigation by The Independent found that crypto scams shared on Twitter had tricked people into sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to cyber criminals posing as Mr Musk. Hackers were able to take over Twitter accounts belonging to verified brands like Matalan and Pantheon Books, before switching the name and profile picture in order to impersonate the tech entrepreneur. They then posted messages offering fake giveaways that required people to send cryptocurrency in order to verify their bitcoin address. Analysis of the addresses found that more than 400 people sent bitcoin to one address, with transactions totalling 28.2 bitcoins ($1.1m at current exchange rates). Mr Musk cited the cryptocurrency scam epidemic as one of the motivating reasons for his purchase of Twitter, pledging to fix the issue upon his takeover. “If our Twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying,” he tweeted in April 2022. In June 2022, Mr Musk also criticised YouTube for fake cryptocurrency promotions that featured on the platform. “YouTube seems to be nonstop scam ads,” he tweeted. Efforts to defeat the bot endemic have included subscriptions and a $1 charge to new users, which was introduced in New Zealand and the Philippines last month. The “Not a Bot” subscription method is designed to “reduce spam, manipulation or our platform and bot activity,” the company said at the time. It is not clear how this approach will prevent accounts from promoting crypto scams, with all of the ads seen in October and November coming from verified X accounts. X did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent about the issue of crypto scam ads. Read More Elon Musk mocked for trying to resurrect QAnon Pizzagate conspiracy Elon Musk set to meet Netanyahu and hostage families in Israel Elon Musk weighs in on Dublin riots claiming country’s PM ‘hates the Irish people’ X introduces limits to prevent non-paying users from replying to posts

Apple Inc. is cutting production targets for its long-awaited mixed-reality Vision Pro headset due to difficulties in producing

Hollywood’s actors and writers have both gone on strike for the first time since 1960 to protest against a number of decisions by major studios that include not just job cuts but also a potentially unsettling future in which they could be replaced by artificial intelligence. The leaders of SAG-AFTRA, the Hollywood union representing 160,000 television and movie actors, went on strike on Thursday, joining the industry’s screenwriters who have already been picketing for over 70 days. Among the many issues flagged by both the writers and actors in the protests has been how generative AI tools could replace their roles in the industry. Over the last decade, AI has found several uses in the movie and television industry, from de-aging actors, analysing patterns and behaviours of viewers on streaming platforms, bringing back the voices of late actors and even helping stitch together entire movie trailers. One of the proposals, as explained by SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, feels like it is straight out of dystopian science fiction series Black Mirror. During a press conference on Thursday, Mr Crabtree-Ireland alleged that a proposal from Hollywood studios was to use “groundbreaking AI” to scan background performers and only offer them a day’s pay while the companies get to own the scans and use them for any project they want. “This ‘groundbreaking’ AI proposal that they gave us yesterday, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation,” the executive said. “If you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again,” Mr Crabtree-Ireland said. A statement from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), that represents the studios, claims the “groundbreaking AI” proposal “protects actors’ digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members”. “We are being victimized by a very greedy enterprise... The entire business model has been changed by streaming and AI If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in jeopardy,” the actors’ guild president Fran Drescher said on Thursday. Follow along here for real-time updates on the SAG-AFTRA strike Writers who have already been protesting since May have also sought assurances from studios that their jobs would not be threatened by AI. With the steady rise of online streaming services looking to rack up user subscriptions by churning out endless amounts of digital content, writers on strike have sought new pay structures, guaranteed periods of work as well as better discussions on the limits of AI use. Members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) shared concerns that producers may seek to use AI to write scripts or at least use the technology to complete unfinished screenplays, and have also urged production houses to agree to safeguards around its usage. Screenwriters fear AI could be used to churn out a rough first draft with a few simple prompts and writers may then be hired after this initial step to punch such drafts up – albeit at a lower pay rate. Without further dialogue with studios, writers have raised concerns there could be a number of new ways that AI could be used to craft outlines for stories, fill in scenes and even come up with mock-up drafts. “There are ways it can be useful. But too many people are using it against us and using it to create mediocrity. They’re also in violation of copyright. They’re also plagiarizing,” Michael Winship, president of the WGA East, said in May. With these risks in mind, the WGA seeks more safeguards on how AI can be applied to the screenwriting process. Read More Hollywood actors and writers strike after ‘disgusting’ studios turn down deal. Here’s what it means for you Hollywood in historic shutdown as actors union joins writers strike: ‘The eyes of the world are upon us’ Cast of Oppenheimer walk out of UK premiere ahead of actors’ strike announcement What happens next as striking actors send Hollywood into meltdown? Issa Rae and Jamie Lee Curtis lead A-listers voicing support for actors strike Hollywood in historic shutdown as actors union joins writers strike

By Tom Wilson LONDON (Reuters) -Bitcoin's gains from a U.S. court ruling that bolsters future prospects for retail investor-friendly funds

General Motors said on Wednesday it will cut 940 information technology jobs in Arizona and cease IT operations