Mcclatchy Launches Excelerate, A Full-service Digital Marketing Agency

Boston — A lawsuit was filed Thursday against Hershey, Walgreens and several others in the case of a Massachusetts teen who died after he participated in a spicy tortilla chip challenge that was widely promoted on social media. Harris Wolobah, a 10th grader from the city of Worcester, died Sept. 1, 2023, after eating the Paqui chip as part of the manufacturer’s “One Chip Challenge.” An autopsy found Wolobah died after eating a large quantity of chile pepper extract and also had a congenital heart defect. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Harris died of cardiopulmonary arrest “in the setting of recent ingestion of food substance with high capsaicin concentration,” according to the autopsy from the Chief Office of the Medical Examiner.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans had their debit cards compromised last year after falling victim to ATM skimming—and the problem is only growing. Skimming is a type of fraud that takes consumers’ credit and debit card information at Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), fuel pumps, and checkout stations. The Federal Bureau of Investigation says it costs consumers and financial institutions more than $1 billion a year.

Enlarge / Whatever you do, don't ask the AI how many horizontal lines are in this image. (credit: Getty Images) In the last couple of years, we've seen amazing advancements in AI systems when it comes to recognizing and analyzing the contents of complicated images. But a new paper highlights how many state-of-the-art "vision learning Models" (VLMs) often fail at simple, low-level visual analysis tasks that are trivially easy for a human. In the provocatively titled pre-print paper "Vision language models are blind" (which has a PDF version that includes a dark sunglasses emoji in the title), researchers from Auburn University and the University of Alberta create eight simple visual acuity tests with objectively correct answers.

Enlarge / An Arm sample image meant to show off its new "Accuracy Super Resolution" upscaling tech. (credit: Arm) Some of the best Arm processors come from companies like Apple and Qualcomm, which license Arm's processor instruction set but create their own custom or semi-custom CPU designs. But Arm continues to plug away on its own CPU and GPU architectures and related technologies, and the company has announced that it's getting into the crowded field of graphics upscaling technology. Arm's Accuracy Super Resolution (ASR) is a temporal upscaler that is based on AMD's open source FidelityFX Super Resolution 2, which Arm says allows developers to "benefit from the familiar API and configuration options." (This AMD presentation from GDC 2023 gets into some of the differences between different kinds of upscalers.) AMD's FSR and Nvidia's DLSS on gaming PCs are mostly sold as a way to boost graphical fidelity—increasing frame rates beyond 60 fps or rendering "4K" images on graphics cards that are too slow to do those things natively, for example.

Enlarge (credit: Maskot | Maskot) In two weeks, iPhone users in the European Union will be able to use any mobile wallet they like to complete "tap and go" payments with the ease of using Apple Pay. The change comes as part of a settlement with the European Commission (EC), which investigated Apple for potentially shutting out rivals by denying access to the "Near Field Communication" (NFC) technology on its devices that enables the "tap and go" feature.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Wednesday, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi announced in a letter to the company that it would be laying off 1,800 employees—about 10 percent of its workforce of around 18,000—while simultaneously planning to hire the same number of new workers as part of a major restructuring effort purportedly focused on AI. "As I’ve shared many times, the era of AI is one of the most significant technology shifts of our lifetime," wrote Goodarzi in a blog post on Intuit's website.