Tech

After years of providing free services without any bells attached, WhatsApp is now going to start showing ads on the popular chat app. To be clear, users will only see ads on the Status screen — the app’s take on Instagram’s Stories.

So just like you see an ad after watching a few stories on Instagram, you will see ads on WhatsApp after you’ve scrolled through a few Status updates.

The company said that its ad mechanism uses signals like users’ country or city, language, and the channels they’re following, as well as data from ads that users interact with.

Meta said it is not using personally identifiable data, such as users’ phone numbers, messages, calls, and groups to serve targeted ads. If a user has added their WhatsApp account to Meta’s Account Center, the company will use their Account preferences to show ads.

A Chinese hardware repair YouTuber received four allegedly faulty RTX 4090 graphics cards that needed repairing. The YouTuber discovered that three of the four cards were fake graphics cards modded from RTX 3090s and RTX 3080s to look like the real deal. The three fake cards had to be scrapped since they were apparently incapable of running. The customer of the four GPUs apparently paid $1,394 (10,000 yuan) for each GPU and purchased all four from an overseas vendor or supplier.

The Chinese repair YouTuber shared key insights to detect fake RTX 4090s. For starters, the QR code on every legitimate RTX 4090 is located on the very bottom left corner of the GPU substrate. On legitimate RTX 3090s and RTX 3080s, the QR code is located in the same area but slightly above the bottom left corner of the substrate. Most modders will allegedly not move the QR code of a GPU die they are trying to make look like another one, making this an easy way to verify whether an RTX 4090 is real.

Everyone in quantum computing agrees that error correction will be the key to doing a broad range of useful calculations. But early every company in the field seems to have a different vision of how best to get there. Almost all of their plans share a key feature: some variation on logical qubits built by linking together multiple hardware qubits.

A key exception is Nord Quantique, which aims to dramatically cut the amount of hardware needed to support an error-corrected quantum computer. It does this by putting enough quantum states into a single piece of hardware, allowing each of those pieces to hold an error-corrected qubit. Last week, the company shared results showing that it could make hardware that used photons at two different frequencies to successfully identify every case where a logical qubit lost its state.

That still doesn't provide complete error correction, and they didn't use the logical qubit to perform operations. But it's an important validation of the company's approach.

I'm currently using an old charger like this:

It's great. Easy to carry with me, uses a two-pin cable so I can easily buy a cheap 2 dollar cable in the country I'm traveling. It's light, and I use a few short (30cm) cables to charge my laptop, phone and other stuff.

I would like to get another one, but it seems like they are no longer sold from the original manufacturer.

I'm searching around online, but the only alternatives I find seem to be very bulky and not easily carried with you. Or they are wall chargers, which is very inconvenient, needing 4 long cables to reach your devices, and often taking up multiple plugs because they are so bulky.

Anybody that knows if these are still sold anywhere? This one is 65W, but with GaN tech, I expected to see more of these compact chargers with the same weight and thickness outputting maybe 100W. But I can't find anything

TLDW:

Pros: backup for GPS with more resilience

Cons: patent, potential DRM uses

TLDW:

• pros: redundant alternative to GPS, which works in some contexts where GPS has trouble
• cons: patent, potential for DRM

For centuries, refrigeration tech has stayed the same — energy-hungry and reliant on harmful gases. Enter magnetocaloric cooling: a new solution claiming to be 30% more energy-efficient than current cooling systems. And it's scalable. From fridges to cooling buildings and server farms.

It's a widely known problem with roots in urban legend: Devices with motherboards failing in the early 2000s with a sudden pop, a gruesome spill, or sometimes a burst of flames. And it was allegedly all due to one guy who didn't copy a stolen formula correctly.

The "capacitor plague" of the early 2000s was real and fairly widespread among devices, even if the majority of those devices didn't go bad at the same time or even in the same year. The story of this widespread failure, passing between industry insider stories and media reports, had a specific culprit, but also a broad narrative about the shift from Japanese to Taiwanese manufacturers and about outsourcing generally.

The Asianometry channel on YouTube recently dug into the "capacitor plague" in a video that asks, "What happened to the capacitors in 2002?" and comes to some informed, broad, and layered answers. It explains the specifics of what's happening inside both a working capacitor and the faulty models, relays the reporting on the companies blamed and affected, and, crucially, puts the plague in the wider context of hotter chips, complex supply chains, counterfeits, and, sure, some industrial sabotage.

"We will never know what exactly happened, but let's try," the host says at the start. It is recommended you follow along.