Finding a radula, the chitinous, toothed, conveyor-belt-like tongue used by mollusks to scrape food, was the definitive proof that Pohlsepia was indeed a mollusk. A more precise answer came in the form of the teeth. The synchrotron scan was sharp enough to let researchers count the tiny, individual tooth impressions across the radula’s transverse rows. … Read More “Oldest octopus fossil found to not be an octopus” »
YouTube is raising subscription prices for YouTube Premium and YouTube Music in the U.S., the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Friday. The YouTube Premium individual plan is increasing from $13.99 to $15.99 per month, while the family plan is increasing from $22.99 to $26.99 per month. YouTube Premium Lite, which offers ad-free viewing for most … Read More “YouTube Premium and YouTube Music are getting more expensive” »
Pay with your wallet or your attention Unlike with most streaming services, those who can’t stomach YouTube’s latest price increase have an option. Free users can browse and stream as many YouTube videos as they want, but they’ll have to contend with ads. After earning more than $40 billion in ad revenue in 2025, the … Read More “YouTube increases Premium price again, says 90-second unskippable ads are a bug” »
A feature is deployed, and the database queries run well. The team is happy with the results. However, six months later, the main table has grown from 50,000 rows to 5 million, and the same query now takes eight seconds. Then, someone adds an index, and read latency drops to milliseconds, which seems like a … Read More “Database Performance Strategies and Their Hidden Costs” »
It was at Uber that I met one of the single best engineers I’ve had the fortune to work with; let’s call them “Sam” for this article. As engineers, we briefly worked together, and when I became a manager, Sam’s name regularly came up during performance calibrations as being among the company’s top 10% engineers. … Read More ““How to be a 10x engineer” – interview with a standout dev” »
We saw a host of excellent Bose discounts during Amazon’s so-called Big Spring Sale last month; however, none of them were quite as steep as the current price drop we’re seeing on the latest Bose Soundlink Flex. Right now, the portable speaker is on sale at Amazon in select colors starting at $109 ($50 off), … Read More “Bose’s rugged Soundlink Flex Bluetooth speaker is on sale for up to $50 off” »
The past few weeks, it feels like procrastination is everywhere. It might just be the frequency illusion — but it’s on my mind, so I need to write about it. Not too long ago, I finished a video on my channel, a couple of days after filming. Even though my regular schedule would require me … Read More “Productive procrastination — Max van IJsselmuiden” »
Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Want to make AI go better? Figure out how to measure it:…One simple policy intervention that works well…Jacob Steinhardt, an AI researcher, has written a nice blog laying out … Read More “Nuclear LLMs; China’s big AI benchmark; measurement and AI policy” »
Mixing corn starch and water in appropriate amounts produces a slurry that is liquid when stirred slowly but hardens when you punch it—a substance colorfully dubbed “oobleck.” (The name derives from a 1949 Dr. Seuss children’s book, Bartholomew and the Oobleck.) High-speed imaging and force measurements have revealed another surprising property of oobleck drops hitting … Read More “"Oobleck" still holds some surprises” »
France is trying to move on from Microsoft Windows. The country said it plans to move some of its government computers currently running Windows to the open source operating system Linux to further reduce its reliance on U.S. technology. Linux is an open source operating system that is free to download and use, with various … Read More “France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech” »
