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Western carmakers retreating from electric vehicles amid softening government mandates could find themselves in a precarious position as Chinese rivals continue gaining ground in the EV market they're choosing to de-prioritize. The EU on December 16th dropped its earlier plan to ban petrol car sales outright from 2035, instead requiring carmakers to cut emissions from new vehicles by 90% from 2021 levels. The day before, Ford announced a $19.5 billion asset writedown as it rethinks its EV strat…

The global smartphone and PC markets face potential contractions of up to 5.2% and 8.9% respectively in 2026, according to downside risk scenarios from IDC that trace the problem to memory chip manufacturers shifting production capacity away from consumer electronics toward AI data centers. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology have pivoted their limited cleanroom space toward high-bandwidth memory for AI servers, restricting supply of the conventional DRAM and NAND used in phones…

An anonymous reader shares a report: China on Friday launched three venture capital funds to invest in "hard technology" areas, state broadcaster CCTV reported. The capital contribution plans for the funds have been finalised, each with more than 50 billion yuan ($7.14 billion), according to the report. The funds will primarily invest in early-stage startups and the targets should be valued at less than 500 million yuan, an official said on Friday, adding that no single investment would amount …

The relentless climb in memory prices driven by the AI boom's insatiable demand for datacenter hardware has renewed an old debate about whether modern software has grown inexcusably fat, a column by the Register argues. The piece points to Windows Task Manager as a case study: the current executable occupies 6MB on disk and demands nearly 70MB of RAM just to display system information, compared to the original's 85KB footprint. "Its successor is not orders of magnitude more functional," the col…

Michael Truell, the 25-year-old CEO and cofounder of Cursor, is drawing a sharp distinction between careful AI-assisted development and the more hands-off approach commonly known as "vibe coding." Speaking at a conference, Truell described vibe coding as a method where users "close your eyes and you don't look at the code at all and you just ask the AI to go build the thing for you." He compared it to constructing a house by putting up four walls and a roof without understanding the underlying …

Apple's Developer Academy in Detroit has spent roughly $30 million over four years training hundreds of people to build iPhone apps, but not everyone lands coding jobs right away, according to a WIRED story published this week. The program launched in 2021 as part of Apple's $200 million response to the Black Lives Matter protests and costs an estimated $20,000 per student -- nearly twice what state and local governments budget for community colleges. About 600 students have completed the 10-mo…

Google appears to be testing a feature that would let users change their @gmail.com address for the first time, according to an official support document. The support page exists only in Hindi, suggesting an India-first rollout, and Google notes that users will "gradually begin to see this option." The feature would let users switch to a new @gmail address while retaining full access to their old one, effectively giving a single account two working email addresses. Emails sent to either address…

Apple has agreed to a settlement with Brazil's antitrust regulator that will require the company to allow third-party app stores on iPhones and permit developers to direct users to external payment options, marking another country where Apple's tightly controlled App Store model is being pried open by government action. Brazil's Administrative Council of Economic Defense approved the settlement this week, resolving an investigation that began in 2022 into whether Apple's restrictions on app dis…

An anonymous reader shares a report: A typosquatted domain impersonating the Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS) tool was used to distribute malicious PowerShell scripts that infect Windows systems with the 'Cosmali Loader'. BleepingComputer has found that multiple MAS users began reporting on Reddit yesterday that they received pop-up warnings on their systems about a Cosmali Loader infection. Based on the reports, attackers have set up a look-alike domain, "get[dot]activate[dot]win," which clo…

Goldman Sachs analysts have identified a notable shift in how investors respond to corporate layoff announcements, finding that even job cuts attributed to automation and AI-driven restructuring are now causing stock prices to fall rather than rise. The investment bank linked recent layoff announcements to public companies' earnings reports and stock market data, concluding that stocks dropped by an average of 2% following such announcements, and companies citing restructurings faced even harsh…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese social media users criticized two key government policies, rare signs of public dissent in the country where the internet is heavily censored. The death of the former head of China's one-child policy agency -- which for decades forced women to carry out abortions and sterilizations -- sparked criticism of the demographic effort, with one netizen lamenting the "children who were lost." Others, meanwhile, criticized Beijing's leadership over its ongoin…

Framework has announced yet another price increase for memory modules, the second in roughly a month, and the company is now actively encouraging customers to source their own RAM elsewhere if they can find better deals. The laptop maker cited "extreme memory shortages and price volatility" as the reason for the hike, noting that 32GB modules and smaller currently cost around $10 per gigabyte while 48GB modules run approximately $13 per gigabyte. Framework said it expects to raise prices again …

Waymo's fleet of autonomous robotaxis can navigate city streets and compete with human taxi drivers, but they become stranded when a passenger leaves a door ajar -- prompting the company to pay tow truck operators around $20 to $24 through an app called Honk just to push a door shut. The owner of a towing company in Inglewood, California, completes up to three such jobs a week for Waymo, sometimes freeing vehicles by removing seat belts caught in doors. Another Los Angeles tow operator said loc…

Nvidia has agreed to buy assets from Groq, a designer of high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator chips, for $20 billion in cash, according to Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led the startup's latest financing round in September. From a report: Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq since the company was founded in 2016, said the deal came together quickly. Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago. Investors…

The Trump administration has announced it would replace the lottery programme used to grant H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers with a system that prioritises higher-paid individuals. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security said it would begin to implement a "weighted" selection process to give an advantage to higher-skilled and higher-paid applicants from February, according to a statement posted on its website. Matthew Tragesser, Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson…