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Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch : Sandbar, which is developing the Stream Ring, a $249+ AI-powered wearable that transcribes audio notes, raised a $23M Series A, bringing total funding to $36M   —  Sandbar, a startup by former Meta employees Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong, attracted much attention last year when it showed off its note-taking wearable, the Stream ring.

In a little over a year, the United States has carried out dozens of airstrikes on vessels in the Caribbean tied to alleged narco-trafficking networks, launched sustained operations against Houthi forces in the Red Sea, captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro , struck Iranian nuclear facilities and now embarked on an extended military campaign aimed at degrading Tehran’s missile, drone and command infrastructure. The tempo marks one of the most assertive stretches of American force projection in recent years, spanning Latin America, the Middle East and critical maritime corridors. For War Secretary Pete Hegseth , it also represents a striking turn.  HEGSETH BLASTS BRITS, SAYS IRAN'S CHAOTIC RETALIATION HAS DRIVEN ITS OWN ALLIES 'INTO THE AMERICAN ORBIT' Just before the 2024 presidential election, he described himself as a "recovering neocon," expressing regret over his support for Iraq-era interventionism and warning against open-ended wars.  Several ana...

Jake Angelo / Fortune : NBC News poll of 1,000 registered voters: just 26% had a positive view of AI, while 46% had a negative view, the third worst net negative score of all topics   —  Artificial intelligence has permeated nearly every part of daily American life.  It's being adopted across the professional sphere …

Harvard Business Review : A study of ~1,500 US workers finds AI use can reduce burnout but also cause “AI brain fry”, a mental fatigue from using AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity   —  On New Year's Day, programmer Steve Yegge launched Gas Town, an open-source platform that lets users orchestrate swarms …

Fresh satellite images give a rare aerial view of the damage across Iran after U.S.-Israeli strikes and what Tehran’s retaliation left behind across the region. Planet Labs satellite imagery captured burning ships and damaged facilities at the Konarak base in southern Iran, as well as significant destruction at Iran’s naval headquarters in Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf, reflecting the scale of the strikes on military infrastructure. WATCH SHIPPING THROUGH THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ GRIND TO A HALT AMID IRAN CONFLICT Imagery from Vantor shows damage to facilities and vessels located in Iran's Bushehr port in the Persian Gulf. In addition to naval assets, satellite photos show a bunker at Bushehr air base hit by a strike, leaving a large crater and destroying several nearby small buildings. More strikes targeted the Choqa Balk drone facility in western Iran . Radar systems at the Zahedan air base in eastern Iran — near the country’s borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan — were al...

Matthias Bastian / The Decoder : Luma AI debuts Uni-1, an image model that combines image understanding and generation in a single architecture, topping Nano Banana 2 on logic-based benchmarks   —  Ask about this article...  Like Google's Nano Banana Pro and GPT Image 1.5, Uni-1 is built on an autoregressive transformer …