Author: Shivendra Singh

At its best, Netflix’s Love, Death, and Robots creates the same feeling as picking up a collection of sci-fi short stories. You don’t always know what to expect, and not everything is brilliant, but you’re guaranteed to experience something interesting. That was especially true of volume 3 of the animated anthology, which offered nine shorts, all of which were excellent. The latest volume doesn’t quite hit the same heights, nor does it have a singular standout episode like “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” but it’s still a strong offering.

What volume 4 does do well – and it’s something that’s a strength of LDR as a whole – is offer a wide variety of tones and styles. There are still the dark, violent, and hyperreal episodes that are so closely associated with LDR, like “Spider Rose,” a follow-up to last season’s “Swarm,” which tells a cyberpunk story about a woman consumed with revenge who ends up finding it with the help of a very strange creature. There’s also “The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur,” in which trained warriors fight to the death in front of rich dignitaries and royalty, all while racing on dinosaurs. In a strangely …read more

Apple is officially rolling out the next generation of CarPlay — and it’s called CarPlay Ultra. The update is available with new Aston Martin vehicle orders in the US and Canada, but it will be rolling out to existing models with supported infotainment systems in the “coming weeks.” Carmakers like Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis are also working on adding CarPlay Ultra, according to Apple.

Apple first announced its next-gen CarPlay system in 2022, and said it would launch in 2024, but that didn’t pan out. It’s not clear when the system will come to other automakers that confirmed support at the time, like Porsche.

CarPlay Ultra also lets drivers use onscreen controls, physical buttons, or Siri to manage a car’s radio and climate. It also adds widgets “powered by the iPhone that perfectly fit the car’s screen or gauge cluster to provide information at a glance.“ CarPlay Ultra works with the iPhone 12 or newer with iOS 18.5 or later.

Apple says CarPlay Ultra builds upon the previous version of CarPlay by providing “information for all of the driver’s screens.” That includes real-time content and gauges in the instrument cluster, “with dynamic and beautiful options …read more

Microsoft is shutting off access to its Bing Search results for third-party developers. The software maker quietly announced the change earlier this week, noting that Bing Search APIs will be retired on August 11th and that “any existing instances of Bing Search APIs will be decommissioned completely, and the product will no longer be available for usage or new customer signup.”

This abrupt removal of the Bing Search APIs will impact third-party app developers and rival search engines that tap into Microsoft’s search results to power their services. Microsoft is now recommending that developers use “grounding with Bing Search as part of Azure AI Agents” as a replacement, which lets chatbots interact with web data from Bing.

Wired reports that some big customers of Bing’s APIs will retain access to the service after the August 11th cutoff. DuckDuckGo uses Bing to power its search engine, and it has confirmed that it will still have access. Other smaller developers won’t be so lucky, though.

Microsoft’s move to cut off access to Bing Search APIs comes after the company has been hiking prices to access the data in recent years, and just a week before Microsoft’s big Build …read more

The future of everything from smartphones, to military equipment, to electric vehicles hangs on 17 rare earth minerals and the magnets that they’re made into. And China, the world’s largest refiner and producer, is tightening its grip and threatening the US’ largest automakers.

Over the last 30 years, China has methodically cornered the market on mining and refining rare earth minerals, which are used to produce a variety of common items like passenger vehicles and everyday electronics. In the wake of US President Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive trade war, China is leveraging its position as the world’s largest producer, at the expense of the American auto industry.

“We’re within 90 days of this becoming a critical problem for everybody,” say Ambrose Conroy, founder of Seraph Consulting and a major investor in Democratic Republic of Congo mining operations.

According to analysts, more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of those 17 elements at the bottom of the periodic table are mined, refined, and turned into rare earth magnets in China. After Trump announced tariffs of up to 145 percent on …

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