标签：#tech

One of the big tradeoffs with Xteink's pocket-friendly e-readers is a lack of easy access to ebooks. On a Kindle or Kobo you can download tens of thousands of titles through each device's respective online bookstores, but with Xteink's devices you have to source DRM-free ebooks on your own. That's about to change, as the […]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 140, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, don't forget to hydrate, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Will Ferrell and Fabrizio Romano and Heather Cox Richardson, […]

PayPal is still reportedly negotiating a potential sale to Stripe and private equity firm Advent, as the fintech firm's new CEO attempts to turn the company around.

TL;DR: ByteChef's workflow editor now exposes the full set of flow controls : alongside the familiar Condition , Branch , and Loop , you can drop Parallel , Fork/Join , Each , Map , and Subflow onto the canvas. That means workflows that fan out over lists, run independent steps concurrently, and call other workflows as reusable building blocks - all visually, no custom code. This closes out issue #1057 , one of the longest-running feature checklists in the ByteChef repository. Some GitHub issues are essays. Issue #1057 is a checklist: [x] condition [x] loop [x] each [x] branch [x] map [x] parallel [x] fork-join [x] subflow Each of those checkboxes is a flow control - what the workflow engine internally calls a task dispatcher . A regular component does work: it sends the email, queries the database, calls the API. A task dispatcher never does work itself. It decides which tasks run, when, how many times, and with what data - it directs traffic. We wrote about the first half of that checklist in our guide to flow controls : Condition routes on true/false, Branch picks one of several paths based on an expression, and Loop repeats steps over a list. Those cover decisions and repetition . This post is about the second half - the controls that cover concurrency and composition . They've been running behind a feature flag while we hardened them one checkbox at a time; with the list complete, the flag is going away and the full set is available to everyone. Why Sequential Isn't Always Enough Every workflow starts as a straight line: trigger, then step one, then step two. That's the right default - it's easy to reason about, and each step can use the output of the one before it. But real processes aren't always lines: Onboarding a customer means creating a CRM record, provisioning an account, and notifying the sales channel - three things that don't depend on each other, so why wait? Enriching 200 leads one at a time takes 200× as long as enriching them all at once. Five di

Airline-backed venture aims to develop a hybrid-electric commercial aircraft.

Arguably the coolest new photo feature for the Pixel 11 lineup is Google's new Camera Looks, which process image data differently at the sensor level to produce photos that don't have that "smartphone" look. The result is new styles like "Digi," which mimics the style of photos taken by older digital cameras. But to use […]

Instagram's wordmark is iconic. Well, was iconic. Apparently Instagram thought it looked old, so the company rolled out a new one this week. It doesn't look like the old Instagram wordmark. It doesn't even look like it spells Instagram anymore. And we cannot figure out why Instagram decided to do this. On this episode of […]

Google will now allow you to remove visible watermarks from the images, videos, and music made with AI tools. With the update, you can toggle off a new "Media watermark" setting in Gemini and Google's AI video generator, Flow. When toggled off, Google will remove the "sparkle" watermark that appears in the bottom-right corner of […]

President Macron has asked the government to rewrite France's proposed social media ban for children.

Third-party app stores are about to become more visible in Google Play.

Tim O’Reilly built a publishing empire that AI is helping to destroy. Yet he loves AI—as long as it’s open source.

Clip earbuds are an exercise in compromise. It's an inherent aspect of their design - and physics. They can be more comfortable for people that don't like something jammed in their ear, but sound response suffers. Ambient awareness is great because you can easily hear the sound around you, which means to hear your own […]

Samsung didn't have to change much this year because its hardware is just that good.

Hoto is introducing its first soldering iron through its modular Snapbloq collection that lets you assemble your own custom toolbox by stacking magnetic cases and tools together. The new I-A06 Cordless Soldering Iron can heat to just over 200 degrees Celsius in about three seconds and offers an adjustable temperature range from 100 to up […]

Apple has reportedly trained a custom AI model for the China market alongside domestic tech giant Alibaba, a rare cross-border partnership that cuts across growing tensions between Beijing and Washington. The China-focused large language model was developed in partnership with Alibaba and trained with the company's support, Reuters reports, citing three unnamed people familiar with […]

This week I spoke to scientists who have found a way to turn male mouse embryos female. They’ve developed a CRISPR-based approach to essentially cut out the Y chromosome. It allowed them to create female clones of male mice. That’s right: female animals that are genetically identical to males, except for the missing Y chromosome.…

In 2017, Deanne Taylor attended a presentation at the University of Pennsylvania, just a short walk from her office. A researcher was there to unveil the Human Cell Atlas, an ambitious project that aimed to map every cell in the human body. Taylor was floored, and then concerned. As details emerged, she discovered that the…

Cards Against Humanity is gearing up to build "something that will annoy Elon Musk," and it's crowdfunding the project with its usual flavor of vulgarity. The company behind the card game announced plans to build "a grand monument" to Musk on the parcel of land it owns near Starbase, Texas, with the aim to "make […]

I'm building a small tool that converts bank CSV files into .qbo files for QuickBooks ( qbofile.com ). When a generated file is wrong, QuickBooks rejects it with vague errors and the OFX spec doesn't tell you what QuickBooks actually checks. So I ran some experiments. Notes below, in case someone else hits the same wall. The file is not XML .qbo is Intuit's version of OFX 1.0.2, which is SGML. Leaf tags have no closing tag: <TRNAMT> -42.50 <FITID> 8f3a2b... Only aggregate tags close. The file also needs a 9-line key:value header, then one blank line, then the body. Line endings are CRLF. My first bug was closing every tag like XML. "Missing bid data" means one tag: INTU.BID QuickBooks checks <INTU.BID> against an internal list of banks that pay Intuit for Web Connect. I tested three variants on QuickBooks Desktop for Mac 2024: Variant Result No <FI> block, no <INTU.BID> Rejected: "Missing bid data" Only <INTU.BID> Accepted <FI> block + <INTU.BID> Accepted So the whole <FI> block (bank name, org id) can be dropped, but INTU.BID cannot. I have only tested the Mac version. If you know whether Windows versions behave the same, I'd like to hear. FITID decides duplicates QuickBooks dedupes on FITID, not on date + amount. If a converter generates random FITIDs, re-importing an overlapping date range creates duplicate transactions. I hash account + date + amount + description, so the same transaction always gets the same FITID. Credit card statement cycles never match calendar months, so overlapping imports happen more often than I expected. QuickBooks cannot export .qbo This one surprised me. No version of QuickBooks can produce a .qbo file. The format only goes one direction, from bank to QuickBooks. Every .qbo file in the world came from a bank's download button or from a converter. That's what I have so far. The tool is free for single files and runs fully in the browser, nothing gets uploaded. I have only tested against QuickBooks Desktop — if you use QuickBooks Online

In a new filing in its long-running legal dispute with Epic Games, Apple has proposed a structure that would allow it to collect fees on digital purchases made via external links that don't use the company's in-app purchase system. Epic has already responded, saying that Apple's request is "far outside of the bounds" of the […]