Author: Olsi
Uber has 30 days to require certain drivers to get fingerprinted if the ride-hail giant intends to continue transporting unaccompanied teens in California. The California Public Utilities Commission issued a ruling Thursday that requires taxi and ride-hail drivers who are carrying unaccompanied minors in the state to pass a fingerprint background check. The ruling also requires transport companies to pay for the cost of those background checks. Uber has a history of fighting back against fingerprint-based background check requirements for drivers. Seven years ago, Uber and Lyft blocked a similar effort in California to fingerprint drivers. The company has argued…
To make military trucks autonomous ARX is launching a platform that looks like a shot A startup with founders who previously served in the German military has created a product akin to an Amazon Firestick for legacy defense equipment, complete with a software stack. ARX Robotics claims its system can turn old equipment into AI-driven devices, such as autonomous-driving trucks. Back in June this year ARX raised a €9 million seed funding round with the NATO Innovation Fund as lead investor, supported by Project A Ventures and Discovery Ventures. ARX first came out with Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) and won…
Getting into the holiday spirit but still stuck at work? A cute new macOS called Festivitas can help you decorate your Mac computer screen with twinkling, holiday lights that are strung up from your menu bar and illuminate your dock. This whimsical holiday treat was dreamed up by software developer Simon B. Støvring, the maker of other iOS apps favored by developers like text editor Runestone, scripting app Scriptable, JSON editor Jayson, and others. He’s been teasing the app on social media in the days ahead of its launch, showing off different customizations he added. At launch, you’re able to adjust…
The company will now set its aim on ramping up production of the new electric vehicle and making the first deliveries — though the company is staying quiet about when it will hand those over to customers. The first Lucid Motors Gravity SUV has rolled off the company’s production line in Casa Grande, Arizona, according to a post on X. It’s a crucial milestone for Lucid, which is banking on the Gravity’s SUV form factor turning it into a bigger success than its lone current model, the Air sedan. The Air has been off to a much slower start than…
In what has become a bit of an annual tradition, I sat down with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at AWS re:Invent this week. Another annual tradition now is that Vogels, who joined Amazon in 2004, publishes a series of predictions for the next year. It’d be easy to think that this year’s predictions are all about AI, but instead, Vogels focuses on how Millennials and Gen Z think about being part of the workforce, nuclear energy, combatting misinformation, open data for disaster preparedness, and the need for intention-driven technology. Unlike his employer, whose keynotes this week focused almost exclusively on…
Ladder, an Austin, Texas-based fitness startup that makes a popular strength-training app, is accusing Peloton of ripping off its work with the launch of Peloton’s new Strength+ app, which exited beta on Wednesday. After receiving feedback from Peloton’s beta testers that the app looked, felt, and functioned much like Ladder’s own, the company says it further investigated and found that 15 Peloton product, engineering, and design team members had been using Ladder’s app since January 2024. Of course, having employees of a rival fitness-focused company use a popular workout app is not a smoking gun—after all, it’s likely that Peloton…
OpenAI confirms new $200 monthly subscription, ChatGPT Pro OpenAI has launched a new subscription plan for ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbot platform—and it’s very, very expensive.Confirming leaks this morning, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Pro, a new $200-per-month subscription tier that provides unlimited access to all of OpenAI’s models, including the full version of its o1 “reasoning” model. “We think the audience for ChatGPT Pro will be the power users of ChatGPT—those who are already pushing the models to the limits of their capabilities on tasks like math, programming, and writing,” Jason Wei, a member of OpenAI’s technical staff, said during a live-streamed press conference on…
Rivian has opened a new charging station in Joshua Tree, California, that is open for other EV owners can use — a first for the company. It’s part of a plan to build out a much larger interoperable charging network across the U.S., though the company is still very early in that process. The new station still uses the CCS charging plug that was the standard until automakers gradually Tesla’s smaller, faster version. Rivian says the company is working to integrate Tesla’s North American Charging Standard tech into future charging stations, and will retrofit existing stations over time. Rivian has…
