💾 Why Big Tech shreds millions of storage devices it could reuse

Plus: DeepMind uses its game-playing AI to best a 50-year-old record in computer science, Elon Musk and Twitter Discussed Price Cut to $44 Billion Takeover in Recent Weeks, and more…

Today’s pick

Why Big Tech shreds millions of storage devices it could reuse. Companies like Amazon and Microsoft routinely destroy used hard drives in the name of data security — but industry insiders say there is a better option Mick Payne remembers the moment the madness of the way we dispose of our data was… (Anna Gross, Alexandra Heal and Ian Bott / Financial Times)

Alexandra Heal @alexandraheal

Companies including Amazon and Microsoft are destroying millions of data storage devices — despite the existence of software that experts say can safely wipe them for reuse @AnnaSophieGross & I dug deep into data centres' electronic waste problem 🔍 ft.com/content/311853…

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DeepMind uses its game-playing AI to best a 50-year-old record in computer science. Despite the calculation's ubiquity, it is still not well understood. A matrix is simply a grid of numbers, representing anything you want. Multiplying two matrices together typically involves multiplying the rows of one with the columns of the… (Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review)

Kevin Roose @kevinroose

In other Google AI news from the last 12 hours, I guess an AI that was built to play board games figured out how to beat a 50-year-old record in complex math as a side project? Was today the last day before performance reviews or something?

technologyreview.comDeepMind’s game-playing AI has beaten a 50-year-old record in computer scienceThe new version of AlphaZero discovered a faster way to do matrix multiplication, a core problem in computing that affects thousands of everyday computer tasks.

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Elon Musk and Twitter Discussed Price Cut to $44 Billion Takeover in Recent Weeks. Representatives of Elon Musk and Twitter Inc. held unsuccessful talks about a possible price cut to his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter before he reversed course Monday and said he would buy the company on the agreement's original terms, according… (Cara Lombardo via Wall Street Journal)

Cara Lombardo @CaraRLombardo

.@WSJ scoop w/⁦@AlexaCorse:⁩ - Musk & Twitter held unsuccessful price-cut discussions in recent weeks - Two sides now at odds over outlines of pact to close at original terms - For now, they agreed to delay Musk’s deposition tmrw $TWTR

wsj.comWSJ News Exclusive | Elon Musk and Twitter at Odds Over Terms of Agreement to Close DealThe billionaire and the social-media platform are hashing out conditions tied to financing and dropping litigation over the stalled takeover.

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Working From Home Is Not an Urban Escape Hatch. The mass shift to remote work during the pandemic allowed people with professional and management jobs to do them effectively from mountaintop aeries, beachfront cottages and exotic foreign locales. Mainly, though, it seems to have enabled… (Justin Fox / Bloomberg)

Justin Fox @foxjust

The freedom afforded by remote work has allowed WFHers to congregate in such scenic and low-cost locations as ... central DC and the Inner Mission in San Francisco (column and 🧵) bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

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Google answers Meta's video-generating AI with its own, dubbed Imagen Video. Not to be outdone by Meta's Make-A-Video, Google today detailed its work on Imagen Video, an AI system that can generate video clips given a text prompt (e.g., “a teddy bear washing… (Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch)

TechCrunch @TechCrunch

Google answers Meta's video-generating AI with its own, dubbed Imagen Video tcrn.ch/3M7aE4M by @Kyle_L_Wiggers

tcrn.chGoogle answers Meta’s video-generating AI with its own, dubbed Imagen VideoGoogle’s Imagen Video model, like Meta’s recently detailed Make-A-Video, can generate short looping clips given a text prompt.

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