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This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about gadgets and smartphones, follow Dominic Preston. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started In 2023, the European Union agreed on two landmark pieces […]

It’s hard to believe how quickly the tech landscape is evolving, especially with AI/ML at the forefront. Just the other day, I had the chance to attend the Mistral AI Now Summit, and wow, what an experience! I walked in with a notebook full of questions and a mind buzzing with curiosity. I left with a treasure trove of insights, a few new friends, and even more questions. Ever wondered what it’s like to dive deep into the world of AI with some of the brightest minds? Let me take you on a journey through my day at the summit and the lessons I picked up along the way. A New Era of AI Walking into the venue felt electric. The air was thick with excitement, and the buzz was palpable. I’ve been exploring AI for a few years now, and it feels like we’re at the cusp of something monumental. Mistral’s focus on open-weight models really got me thinking. What if we could democratize AI further? Imagine a world where innovation isn't locked behind corporate walls but accessible to everyone. I remember a speaker discussing how open models can help small startups compete against big players. It hit home because I’ve been that small developer trying to fight the good fight. Real-World Applications One of the discussions that resonated with me was about real-world applications of large language models (LLMs). I’ve dabbled in a few projects where I used Hugging Face's Transformers library to create chatbots, but hearing actual use cases from businesses was enlightening. For instance, a startup shared how they used a fine-tuned model to improve customer service response times by 50%. Can you imagine the time and money saved? It got me thinking about how I could implement something similar in my own projects. Here’s a quick code snippet that I’ve found useful when fine-tuning a model for a chatbot: from transformers import Trainer , TrainingArguments training_args = TrainingArguments ( output_dir = " ./results " , evaluation_strategy = " epoch " , learning_rate = 2e-5 , per_device_tra

Microsoft is facing criticism for its handling of zero-day exploits. Someone going by the name Nightmare Eclipse has been publicly feuding with the company, posting proof-of-concept exploit code. Some of their posts suggest that they're a disgruntled former employee. But what caught cyber security researcher Kevin Beaumont's eye was how Microsoft has responded. Microsoft suggests […]

Art TVs aren’t exactly known for being affordable, which is why Woot’s latest sale is notable. Now through June 26th, the retailer is discounting Samsung’s 2025 Frame TV and Hisense’s 2025 CanvasTV. The 65-inch CanvasTV is down to $779.99 ($520 off) — its best price of the year — while Samsung’s like-minded Frame TV is […]

I live in a part of Los Angeles where I feel safer bringing pepper spray on walks. The problem is, I don't always remember to bring it with me, and it's not legal to carry it everywhere I go. Pebblebee's $59.99 Halo Bluetooth tracker surprised me by being a suitable replacement because it doubles as […]

Aliyah, a light-skinned Black woman dressed in country-western gear, is struggling to sell metal buckles she handmade on TikTok. In a video for the social media platform from March, she cries to the camera and pleads for views: "Even as a black woman, I have more faith that white women will stay 13 seconds [on […]

Craig Campbell walked away from the river of investor money flowing into AI to create, of all things, a website. Sure, Campbell probably could have started an AI company. He's a former engineer at Meta and an experienced tech founder who in 2022 sold his last venture - an e-commerce tool for businesses that use […]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 130, 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 Victor Wembanyama and mahjong and Merlin Mann's pearls of […]

E-food delivery is a trillion-dollar market . And most of that trillion is not going to farmers, store owners, or the people who actually move food around. It's going to the infrastructure layer sitting between them — the platform tax, the per-order cut, the SaaS subscription that charges you to exist inside someone else's garden. The walled garden isn't accidental. It's the product. What if food delivery was a protocol, not a platform? Not an app. Not a marketplace. A protocol — like HTTP, like SMTP — that any node can speak, that no single company owns, and that costs near zero to run. That's what DIFP is. The Djowda Interconnected Food Protocol. An open wire format for connecting food ecosystem participants — farms, stores, restaurants, wholesalers, delivery nodes, end users — directly to each other, without a platform in the middle extracting rent at every step. The spec covers: Presence & discovery — participants announce themselves to their spatial cell, others find them by location Orders, asks, and donations — not just commerce, but demand signals and surplus distribution in the same protocol Spatial routing — the MinMax99 grid maps the entire planet into ~500m cells; every message knows where it's going Decentralized registry — nodes find each other through a federated lobby system, no central server required Version 0.4 of the spec dropped a few weeks ago. Today we're publishing the first working implementation. The gRPC preview — what we built DIFP-gRPC is a skull implementation of the full protocol stack over gRPC. Thin, end-to-end, every domain wired — nothing production-hardened yet, everything clearly marked for what it is. What's inside difp.proto — the entire DIFP v0.4 spec as a single protobuf file. Two services, 30+ message types, the full DifpEnvelope wrapper with a oneof payload that covers every domain: message DifpEnvelope { string id = 1 ; string type = 2 ; // "trade.ask" | "presence.announce" | "node.ping" | … string version = 3 ; MessageSen

The Enhanced Games — a singular sporting competition where a majority of the athletes were on performance enhancing drugs — may herald a new business model that the tech industry is ready to embrace.

Soon-to-be-laid-off Meta contractors say they’re being treated differently than Mark Zuckerberg’s full-time employees, who stand to receive more generous severance packages.

The Acer Nitro Blaze Link might run on Linux, but it's no Steam Deck. Acer says it's a "streaming-first handheld and companion device," like a PlayStation Portal for your PC. Announced ahead of Computex on Friday, it's launching in Q4 2026 with a 7-inch (1920 x 1200) display, Wi-Fi 6, just 1GB of LPDDR4 RAM, […]

This week, an AI training startup called Shift said it would clean New Yorkers' homes for free. It has plans to expand into other cities as well, including London, and looking around my flat, I get the appeal. But there's a catch. There's always a catch. In exchange for the cleaning, Shift wants footage of […]

I pondered the other day what's next for Microsoft's Surface PC lineup, and it looks like we're about to find out. Windows and Surface chief Pavan Davuluri has just teased "something new is coming for developers," complete with a mysterious image of what looks like a curved display edge. Davuluri notes that whatever is coming […]

Pope Leo XIV may not be able to disarm AI, but he’s got the attention of the industry.

Border security czar Tom Homan keeps threatening to "flood" New York City with ICE agents. But a new investigation shows that ICE has been quietly ramping up arrests in the New York area already - and disproportionately targeting Latino neighborhoods. The City, a local nonprofit news organization, found 430 street arrests in the metropolitan area […]

If you’re looking for a fast iPhone or AirPods charger that’s easy to toss into your purse, backpack, or carry-on, Anker’s Zolo Magnetic Wireless Charger is a smart pick. It’s tiny and comes with a built-in USB-C cable, and you currently can buy two for $23.99 ($16 off) at Amazon and Anker (with code WS7DV2PK68EW), […]

For nearly 80 years, Ferrari occupied a unique cultural space where its cars were aspirational, even for people who resented those who could afford them. The price, the exclusivity, and the opacity of the buying process allowed Ferrari to sail above ordinary criticism. You might not be able to afford one, but you still wanted […]

Acer is aiming to take on the MacBook Neo more directly with a new Swift Air 14, a new 14-inch laptop that starts at $699. The laptop will use Intel's lower-cost Core Series 3 "Wildcat Lake" chips - either Core 5 or Core 7 models, both of which are six-core processors. It comes in green, […]

AI training startup Shift wants to clean your home for free. The catch - because, despite what its website says, there's always a catch - is that it will record cleaners as they scrub, vacuum, dust, tidy, and wash, and use that footage to train robots. Shift announced the unusual offer on social media on […]