Comment on Five things you need to know today, and breaking a (bad?) habit

Some electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids are set to get less affordable from next year, it seems. As expected, the incoming Trump administration has set its sights on killing off the IRS clean vehicle tax credit, according to a report in Reuters this afternoon. The clean vehicle tax credit was overhauled as part of President Joe Biden's signature climate legislation.

For some PC buyers, doing a clean install of Windows right out of the box is part of the setup ritual. But for Arm-based PCs, including the Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X Plus and Elite chips in them, it hasn't been possible in the same way. Microsoft (mostly) hasn't offered generic install media that can be used to reinstall Windows on an Arm PC from scratch. Microsoft is fixing that today—the company finally has a download page for the official Arm release of Windows 11, linked to but separate from the ISOs for the x86 versions of Windows.

Without question, inactivity is bad for us. Prolonged sitting is consistently linked to higher risks of cardiovascular disease and death. The obvious response to this frightful fate is to not sit— move. Even a few moments of exercise can have benefits, studies suggest. But in our modern times, sitting is hard to avoid, especially at the office.

In 2017, eight machine-learning researchers at Google released a groundbreaking research paper called Attention Is All You Need, which introduced the Transformer AI architecture that underpins almost all of today's high-profile generative AI models. The Transformer has made a key component of the modern AI boom possible by translating (or transforming, if you will) input chunks of data called "tokens" into another desired form of output using a neural network.

Meta has been fined nearly 800 million euros ($844.6 million) by Brussels after regulators accused Facebook’s parent company of stifling competition by “tying” its free Marketplace services with the social network. Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s outgoing competition chief, said on Thursday that by linking Facebook with its classified ads service Meta had “imposed unfair trading conditions” on other providers. She added: “It did so to benefit its own service Facebook Marketplace, thereby giving it advantages that [others] could not match.

The satirical news publication The Onion won the bidding for Alex Jones’ Infowars at a bankruptcy auction, backed by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims whom Jones owes more than $1 billion in defamation judgments for calling the massacre a hoax. “The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed in the 2012 shooting in Connecticut, said in a statement provided by his lawyers. The Onion acquired the conspiracy theory platform’s website; social media accounts; studio in Austin, Texas; trademarks; and video archive.