Hints and answers for Connections for April 14, #673.

Pokémon Go developer Niantic has finally opened up about its recent acquisition, assuring its staff as well as players that the tentpole franchise will "not undergo any major changes" after Niantic was sold to Saudi-backed Monopoly Go maker Scopely as part of a $3.5bn deal last month. Read more

President Donald Trump and White House officials walked back a Friday announcement that there would be tariff exemptions on imported electronics.In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump directly denied the tariff exemption announcement. “NOBODY is getting ‘off the hook’ for the unfair Trade Balances, and Non Monetary Tariff Barriers, that other Countries have used against us, especially not China which, by far, treats us the worst! There was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday,” he said, adding that Americans can look forward to “more and better paying Jobs, making products in our Nation, and treating other Countries, in particular China, the same way they have treated us” as a result of his agenda.AdvertisementTrump also said that the National Security Tariff Investigations will be reviewing “the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN.”Correspondingly, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer indicated that semiconductor tariffs were “not really an exception,” in an interview on CBS News’ “Face The Nation.“We certainly need to have semiconductors, and the downstream electronics supply chain move to the United States. What happened is- it’s not really an exception. That’s not even the right word for it,” Greer said. “So, it’s not that they won’t be subject to tariffs geared at reshoring. They’ll just be under a different regime. It’s shifting from one bucket of tariffs to a different bucket of potential tariffs.”AdvertisementOn the other hand, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Trump’s tariff exemption on imported electronics is only temporary.According to Lutnick in a Sunday interview on “This Week” with Jonathan Karl, electronics will be included in semiconductor tariffs, which will likely be enforced within a month or two. Trump, Greer and Lutnick’s remarks on Sunday come in direct contrast with communication from U.S. Customs and Border Protection late on Friday that claimed imported electronics, such as smartphones, laptops and more, would be exempt from Trump’s tariffs.Advertisement“We can’t be beholden and rely upon foreign countries for fundamental things that we need,” Lutnick added. “So this is not like a permanent sort of exemption. [Trump is] just clarifying that these are not available to be negotiated away by countries. These are things that are national security that we need to be made in America.”The exemption would have been great news for big tech companies that manufacture many of their products abroad — as Apple does in China. According to a statement from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, “These companies are hustling to onshore their manufacturing in the United States as soon as possible.”Advertisement“President Trump has made it clear America cannot rely on China to manufacture critical technologies such as semiconductors, chips, smartphones, and laptops. That’s why the President has secured trillions of dollars in U.S. investments from the largest tech companies in the world, including Apple, (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), and Nvidia,” Leavitt said in the statement, according to CNN on Saturday. The news is the latest in Trump’s tariff back and forth with dozens of other countries. Trump announced a bulk of his so-called “reciprocal tariffs” on April 2, a day which he dubbed “Liberation Day.” Days later, however, he then implemented a 90-day pause on the Liberation Day tariffs, leaving behind a basic 10% tariff on most countries. But Trump has put 145% tariffs on China.People in the business world took to social media in response to Lutnick’s interview and Trump’s ever-evolving tariff policies, according to Mediaite.AdvertisementFox Business correspondent Charles Gasparino said on X that CEOs and investors he has talked to have called Trump’s tariff policies “a sad, scary and at times, silly spectacle.”“Plus they will say Howard Lutnick is a horrible spokesman for whatever trade regime the White House comes up with,” Gasparino added.“So Lutnick says we are zigging and zagging on the electronic and technology tariffs,” Anthony Scaramucci, entrepreneur and former White House Director of Communications, wrote on X. “It’s ok to admit at this point that they have no idea what they are doing.”Advertisement“This is really mind-boggling. If this was serious industrial policy, the main thing you want is certainty: ‘Here’s the tariff, it will be in place for the indefinite future, and you should plan accordingly,’” Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank, said, according to The Washington Post. “Here, it’s basically: ‘Come back next week and see what we’ve got.’ That’s no way to run an economy.”

OpenAI may soon require organizations to complete an ID verification process in order to access certain future AI models, according to a support page published to the company’s website last week. The verification process, called Verified Organization, is “a new way for developers to unlock access to the most advanced models and capabilities on the OpenAI platform,” reads the page. Verification requires a government-issued ID from one of the countries supported by OpenAI’s API. An ID can only verify one organization every 90 days, and not all organizations will be eligible for verification, says OpenAI. “At OpenAI, we take our responsibility seriously to ensure that AI is both broadly accessible and used safely,” reads the page. “Unfortunately, a small minority of developers intentionally use the OpenAI APIs in violation of our usage policies. We’re adding the verification process to mitigate unsafe use of AI while continuing to make advanced models available to the broader developer community.” The new verification process could be intended to beef up security around OpenAI’s products as they become more sophisticated and capable. The company has published several reports on its efforts to detect and mitigate malicious use of its models, including by groups allegedly based in North Korea. It may also be aimed at preventing IP theft. According to a report from Bloomberg earlier this year, OpenAI was investigating whether a group linked with DeepSeek, the China-based AI lab, exfiltrated large amounts of data through its API in late 2024, possibly for training models — a violation of OpenAI’s terms. OpenAI blocked access to its services in China last summer.

If AI can perfectly forge W-2s and tax documents, how will the IRS know what's real in the future? Answer by Pat Kinsel.

Table of Contents Table of Contents Why I wanted to change my browser What I like about Vivaldi Vivaldi’s next-level customization Oh, and it’s private too My primary PCs have been MacBook Airs for nearly a decade now, and for most of that time, I’ve used a mix of Safari and Google Chrome as my browsers. I then had a brief stint with Mozilla Firefox, but its performance was pretty disappointing. Now, I’m using the Vivaldi browser and I’m pretty sure I’ve found the one. There are two main things I want from a browser: privacy and good features. (I want performance as well but that much ought to go without saying.) With my awkward mix of Safari and Chrome, I wasn’t getting what I wanted at all. Recommended Videos While Google’s browser is quite feature-packed and has a never-ending supply of extensions, its privacy policy is frankly horrendous and I no longer want anything to do it. Related Safari is a tiny bit better with privacy but is completely lacking in features — or at least the kind of features I want. I first decided I wanted to change browsers when this whole “EU tech sovereignty” thing started (I’m currently living in Denmark). I switched my email provider to Proton Mail and changed a few other things. I already used Signal as my messenger and I don’t have any personal social media profiles so I was already golden on that front. For my search engine, I went with the French company Qwant, and for my browser, I tried out Firefox. However, I tend to have a lot of browser windows open when I work and Firefox seemed to really struggle with it all. If I didn’t close down all the windows and restart the browser each day, things would start to go wobbly. A few times, my computer slowed down to a crawl and I couldn’t even type properly. I was dealing with it for a while when one day I wrote a news piece about Vivaldi adding the Proton VPN to its browser. While I was reading up on Vivaldi, this section of the features list on its website caught my eye. Tab tiling, tab stacking, web panels, and workspaces. All four of these features looked extremely useful — and most of them were unavailable to me in Chrome, Safari, or Firefox. Well, strictly speaking, there could be extensions like this available for Chrome but I was never much of an extension person. Either way, I downloaded Vivaldi and now I am using all of these features every day. Workspaces Willow Roberts / Digital Trends Workspaces are a little bit like the Tab Groups feature Safari has nowadays, but way more useful in my opinion. If you’re in a position where you want to declutter your tabs but you’d also prefer not to close them all, you can simply click the Workspaces button on the tab bar and save your current tabs as a Workspace. Name it, and then make another new one — and bam, you’re all decluttered but you can switch back to your old mess of tabs any time you want. I have a few different Workspaces based on the different types of work I do, and an obligatory “Fun” Workspace as well. It really beats opening new window after new window and keeping them all open until I need them again. To be fair, that probably wasn’t the best way to do things in Safari or Chrome either — but if there was something better, it wasn’t right in my face and super easy to use like Workspaces are. Tab stacking Willow Roberts / Digital Trends Tab stacking is also really useful if you end up with a bunch of tabs with clear categories to them. For instance, when I’m doing research it tends to lead down rabbit holes, so it’s super useful to turn each rabbit hole into a tab stack, allowing me to keep my tab bar tidier and simply click on the source tab to see everything related to it. I extended the size of my tab bar for the screenshot but you can shrink it way down — narrow enough that you can only see the icons if you want. And if you think it’s weird that the tabs are on the right rather than on the top — don’t knock it until you try it. But if it’s not your thing, you can just choose to have your tab bar on top, the bottom, or the left instead. Isn’t customization great? Tab tiling Willow Roberts / Digital Trends If you want to see more than one tab at the same time, tab tiling is amazing. You can squeeze up to four tabs in the same window, which is great when you’re working with information from multiple different places and don’t want to keep switching between tabs. On a laptop, in a window with four tabs tiled, things obviously get pretty small — probably too small for some people — but when you’re using a monitor there’s plenty of space to see everything. Web panels Willow Roberts / Digital Trends When tabs are tiled they essentially become one tab, so when you click on something different, the tiled group disappears and is replaced with a normal full-window version of whatever you clicked on. If you want to keep a specific tab open permanently while you change others, that’s where web panels come in. When you add a website to your web panel bar, it will stay there as a bookmark until you get rid of it. Whenever you open it up, you’ll get a resizable panel that stays put regardless of what you do with your other tabs, even if you switch Workplaces. You can choose to have the panel float over your other tabs, which is good if you’re collapsing and opening the panel a lot, or you can have it adjust the size of your open tabs to make room for itself. Since you can use this feature even when you have four tabs tiled, it means you can actually have five different tabs showing in one window at the same time. I personally use the web panel for Microsoft Teams since I find it easier to use the browser version over the desktop app. It’s great because I can have my chats showing all the time without needing a separate window. Willow Roberts / Digital Trends The last great thing about Vivaldi is the level of customization it provides. If you don’t think you’ll need the web panel feature, you don’t need to have the bar showing. You choose where your tabs go. You can hide just about all UI in the window if you’re into minimalism. You can choose from a ton of themes or even make your own. Just look at how many settings are available for tabs. It can look overwhelming, but it’s actually quite fun to read through these and realize just how many make you think “Wow, that would be super useful.” You can see on the left-hand side just how many other tabs of settings there are too — there’s a lot of choice. I just realized that I got way too caught up in the features and was getting ready to wrap this up without mentioning the other thing I claimed to care about — privacy. Luckily, a good privacy policy is pretty short and simple, so this won’t take long. Google is known for collecting, using, and selling just about every move you make while using its browser, but Vivaldi is pretty much the exact opposite of that. All of your searches, downloads, activity, and visited websites are encrypted or stored locally on your machine, with no way for Vivaldi to access them. The data that isn’t stored locally is hosted in Iceland, where privacy laws keep it pretty much untouchable. The browser also comes with a built-in blocker for ads and trackers, and it has Proton VPN built right into it as well. Everything I’ve mentioned here is really just scratching the surface — I still have more features to discover and the ones I chose to talk about are just the ones I enjoy personally. Listing every single thing Vivaldi can do would honestly take too long — and I’d just end up with a rewritten version of its website. But I assure you that it has a lot to offer, so it’s absolutely worth checking out to see if any of those offerings would suit you. Editors’ Recommendations

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin wants more clarity regarding President Donald Trump's tariff goals. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images 2025-04-13T21:34:30Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Sen. Ron Johnson on Sunday said he wants to know the "endgame" for Trump's tariff plan. Johnson said during a NewsNation interview that businesses are looking for "certainty." Trump last week issued a 90-day pause on the higher "reciprocal" tariffs for select countries. Sen. Ron Johnson, during a Sunday NewsNation interview, raised questions about President Donald Trump's tariff strategy, arguing that he wanted to know the commander in chief's "endgame.""One thing I learned in the private sector is unpredictability can work pretty well in the negotiation, but businesses want certainty," the Wisconsin Republican said on the "The Hill Sunday" program."They want stability. They don't like to see volatility," he continued. "I've just been questioning exactly what's the endgame here? What's the strategy?"Johnson, a conservative three-term lawmaker, is a reliable ally of Trump. His remarks come just days after Trump temporarily paused higher "reciprocal" tariffs for select countries.For now, Trump's 10% baseline tariff rate remains in place for most countries. Meanwhile, the US continues to engage in an escalating trade war with China.Trump announced late Friday he would relieve many tech products from the China tariffs, only to then say on Sunday that separate tariffs on tech products would be coming in the future.Trump's rapid tariff rate changes have led to volatility in the stock and bond markets, and a range of economists have expressed concern about the administration's trade strategy.Johnson sits on both the Senate Budget and Finance committees. He also serves as a member of the subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness.During Johnson's interview on Sunday, he described himself as an "unabashed free trader.""From my standpoint, I think trade is good," he said. "You obtain goods from people that have a comparative advantage of producing those particular goods, and you sell them things where we have the comparative advantage."However, Johnson also said tariffs can sometimes be useful."I can understand that there could be some good uses for tariffs," he said. "President Trump has proven that, for example, when he threatened Mexico with tariffs if they wouldn't cooperate with 'Remain in Mexico.' That helped secure the border.""So there's certainly a use for it, but tariffs are a double-edged sword and a pretty blunt instrument," he added.Johnson said he doesn't want to use tariffs to boost federal revenue."You raise revenue by growing your economy, having a simplified and rational tax system that incentivizes economic growth — not just slapping on higher tax rates or engaging in a massive trade war that obviously has disrupted and scared the markets," he said. Recommended video

Diablo Canyon, California’s sole remaining nuclear power plant, has been left for dead on more than a few occasions over the last decade or so, and is currently slated to begin a lengthy decommissioning process in 2029. Despite its tenuous existence, the San Luis Obispo power plant received some serious computing hardware at the end of last year: eight NVIDIA H100s, which are among the world’s mightiest graphical processors. Their purpose is to power a brand-new artificial intelligence tool designed for the nuclear energy industry. Pacific Gas and Electric, which runs Diablo Canyon, announced a deal with artificial intelligence startup Atomic Canyon—a company also based in San Luis Obispo—around the same time, heralding it in a press release as “the first on-site generative AI deployment at a U.S. nuclear power plant.” For now, the artificial intelligence tool named Neutron Enterprise is just meant to help workers at the plant navigate extensive technical reports and regulations — millions of pages of intricate documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that go back decades — while they operate and maintain the facility. But Neutron Enterprise’s very existence opens the door to further use of AI at Diablo Canyon or other facilities — a possibility that has some lawmakers and AI experts calling for more guardrails. PG&E is deploying the document retrieval service in stages. The installation of the NVIDIA chips was one of the first phases of the partnership between PG&E and Atomic Canyon; PG&E is forecasting a “full deployment” at Diablo Canyon by the third quarter of this year, said Maureen Zawalick, the company’s vice president of business and technical services. At that point, Neutron Enterprise—which Zawalick likens to a data-mining “copilot,” though explicitly not a “decision-maker”—will be expanded to search for and summarize Diablo Canyon-specific instructions and reports too. “We probably spend about 15,000 hours a year searching through our multiple databases and records and procedures,” Zawalick said. “And that’s going to shrink that time way down.” Trey Lauderdale, the chief executive and co-founder of Atomic Canyon, told CalMatters his aim for Neutron Enterprise is simple and low-stakes: he wants Diablo Canyon employees to be able to look up pertinent information more efficiently. “You can put this on the record: the AI guy in nuclear says there is no way in hell I want AI running my nuclear power plant right now,” Lauderdale said. That “right now” qualifier is key, though. PG&E and Atomic Canyon are on the same page about sticking to limited AI uses for the foreseeable future, but they aren’t foreclosing the possibility of eventually increasing AI’s presence at the plant in yet-to-be-determined ways. According to Lauderdale, his company is also in talks with other nuclear facilities, as well as groups who are interested in building out small modular reactor facilities, about how to integrate his startup’s technology. And he’s not the only entrepreneur eyeing ways to introduce artificial intelligence into the nuclear energy field. In the meantime, questions remain about whether sufficient safeguards exist to regulate the combination of two technologies that each have potential for harm. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was exploring the issue of AI in nuclear plants for a few years, but it’s unclear if that will remain a priority under the Trump administration. Days into his current term, Trump revoked a Biden administration executive order that set out AI regulatory goals, writing that they acted “as barriers to American AI innovation.” For now, Atomic Canyon is voluntarily keeping the Nuclear Regulatory Commission abreast of its plans. Tamara Kneese, the director of tech policy nonprofit Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program, conceded that for a narrowly designed document retrieval service, “AI can be helpful in terms of efficiency.” But she cautioned, “The idea that you could just use generative AI for one specific kind of task at the nuclear power plant and then call it a day, I don’t really trust that it would stop there. And trusting PG&E to safely use generative AI in a nuclear setting is something that is deserving of more scrutiny.” For those reasons, Democratic Assemblymember Dawn Addis—who represents San Luis Obispo—isn’t enthused about the latest developments at Diablo Canyon. “I have many unanswered questions of the safety, oversight, and job implications for using AI at Diablo,” Addis said. “Previously, I have supported measures to regulate AI and prevent the replacement and automation of jobs. We need those guardrails in place, especially if we are to use them at highly sensitive sites like Diablo Canyon.” How AI Came to SLO Before Lauderdale moved into artificial intelligence and nuclear energy, he founded a health care software company called Voalte, which was designed to help hospital staff communicate over iPhones, reducing their reliance on loudspeaker paging and desktop computer systems. At the time, circa 2008, Lauderdale said his pitch was met with worries and resistance from hospital staff. He likes to draw parallels between that experience, which culminated in 2019 when he sold his company to a hospital bed manufacturer for $180 million, and the pushback he’s heard about Atomic Canyon. In 2021, Lauderdale moved to San Luis Obispo so he, his wife, and kids could be closer to his wife’s family in Northern California. Lauderdale told CalMatters he didn’t realize how close Diablo Canyon was to his new home until after he relocated. It was through meeting Diablo Canyon workers out in the community, he says, that he learned more about nuclear energy and landed on his next startup idea. Atomic Canyon launched in 2023 with a task of downloading roughly 53 million pages of publicly available Nuclear Regulatory Commission documents, which encapsulate all of America’s nuclear energy fleet and are available on a database called ADAMS. That process started around January 2024, after Lauderdale gave the Nuclear Regulatory Commission a heads-up about what Atomic Canyon was planning to do: “I reached out to [the commission] just to say, hey, I’m Trey Lauderdale, American citizen, entrepreneur. We’re going to start building AI in the nuclear space, and we just wanted to make sure the NRC was aware that when they see all these downloads, it’s not a foreign actor or someone trying to do anything bad to their system.” Lauderdale said the commission supported Atomic Canyon’s efforts. After downloading the data, Atomic Canyon partnered with the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to kick off research and development. The lab houses the Frontier supercomputer, which was the world’s fastest when it debuted two years ago. Atomic Canyon used Frontier to build a form of AI that can perform “sentence-embedding models,” which Lauderdale says are capable of processing nuclear jargon and are less likely to “hallucinate,”or answer a question using fabrications. “You basically teach the artificial intelligence how to understand nuclear words, their context, what different acronyms mean,” he said. In the spring of 2024, Lauderdale and PG&E representatives kicked off formal discussions about how Atomic Canyon could be of use at Diablo Canyon. PG&E soon invited Atomic Canyon staff to visit the nuclear facility, where they shadowed employees for a few weeks, “observing where there were operational inefficiencies that we could try to target with AI,” Lauderdale said. Then, in September 2024, Atomic Canyon announced the completion of testing on its AI, referred to as “FERMI”; these models, which are open-source, are what collectively make up the Neutron Enterprise software. A few months later, in November, came the first-of-its-kind announcement with PG&E. How Neutron Enterprise Works PG&E brought in NVIDIA hardware to Diablo Canyon to run FERMI. Zawalick and Lauderdale both told CalMatters that the Neutron Enterprise software is being installed without cloud access so that sensitive, internal, documents don’t leave the site. Zawalick said their data storage policies meet all Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Energy nuclear information requirements, and will be continuously tested and inspected. Initial Neutron Enterprise users are currently only using the software to search through publicly available regulatory data. PG&E and Atomic Canyon hope to initiate the next phase of Neutron Enterprise’s rollout in the third quarter of 2025, when more on-site employees will be able to use the service, and it will be able to search for and summarize internal documents by utilizing optical character recognition (which allows more documents to be indexed), and retrieval-augmented generation (which allows more flexible querying). According to Lauderdale, the use of artificial intelligence to speed up document searches isn’t risky. If AI fails to find the information sought by a worker, the person can “just fall back to the previous way they would search,” he said, referring to sifting through multiple on-site databases and sometimes manually pulling paper files. Neutron Enterprise also generates short summarizations of documents while users are searching databases, and it’s possible those summarizations could produce incorrect information, too — but they would not alter the actual contents/instructions contained within the documents that are read over by workers. CalMatters asked a number of state lawmakers — especially those near Diablo Canyon — what they think of Atomic Canyon’s first-of-its-kind partnership with PG&E. The consensus response was positive, though tailored to Neutron Enterprise’s currently limited functionality. Malibu Democratic Sen. Henry Stern, a member of the Senate Energy Committee, told CalMatters he’s “reticent to rain on AI tools that can do better grid management,” so long as proper safety protocols are followed. Democratic Sen. John Laird, who represents San Luis Obispo, took an even-keel stance: “As AI integration expands, so does its energy demand… Balancing technological advancement with public safety, environmental stewardship, and regulatory oversight will be critical in shaping AI’s role in our state’s energy future,” he said. San Francisco Sen. Scott Wiener, whose ambitious AI safety legislation was vetoed by the governor last year, agrees with his Democratic colleagues: “If AI can help improve the day-to-day efficiencies of Diablo Canyon, that’s great.” Out of five San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors, three responded to requests for comment. Supervisor Bruce Gibson said that “using AI to access and organize required information in this situation makes sense,” but he stressed the need for transparency and public updates from PG&E. Supervisor Heather Moreno said that it’s a good thing PG&E will be taking “advantage of a ‘supercharged’ search engine… As it will not be used for operations, this appears to be a good first step in using AI at Diablo Canyon.” And Supervisor Dawn Ortiz-Legg, a former PG&E employee, said she was “encouraged” that Diablo Canyon was working with Atomic Canyon “to navigate the enormous amounts of data collected from thousands of pages of audits and reports.” Varying Rules and Regulations However innocuous the use of AI at Diablo Canyon today, there are big-picture concerns about how the technology could later be used there and at other facilities. “I think we have to be really careful when we talk about broader AI decision-making,” Wiener said. “That’s why it’s really, really important to beef up government capacity to set standards around use of AI in sensitive contexts such as a nuclear power plant.” In November 2024, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Inspector General Robert J. Feitel came to the same conclusion. He identified “planning for and assessing the impact of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning on nuclear safety and security” as one of the nine major challenges the agency faced. The month prior, a commission-sponsored report by the Southwest Research Institute looked into artificial intelligence-related “regulatory gaps” in the nuclear energy industry. It found fewer than 100 gaps, but also noted that “no practical AI standards were identified” from outside sources that could help address those gaps. The report recommended developing a number of AI-specific guides. Atomic Canyon and PG&E appear to be keeping the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the loop on their own accord. “I wouldn’t claim we have an official relationship with the NRC, but we make sure to brief them on what we’re doing, because, being newer in the nuclear industry, surprises are bad,” Lauderdale said. He believes that the nuclear energy industry’s cautious approach will, in itself, act as a “natural buffer” against overly invasive or dangerous AI integrations, though he conceded that “as we start to traverse into applications that do introduce risk, we absolutely will want guardrails and regulation to make sure that AI is properly deployed.” When CalMatters first spoke with PG&E’s Zawalick in December, she mentioned she’d just recently met with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s AI working group, an advisory committee of sorts. Since then, she hasn’t had further discussions with the commission about AI regulations, she recently told CalMatters. And the Diablo Canyon Independent Safety Committee, a state-appointed safety group that inspects the nuclear facility and provides recommendations about its operations, first learned about PG&E’s deal with Atomic Canyon through media reports, the committee’s legal counsel Bob Rathie told CalMatters. In December 2024 and January 2025, a committee representative participated in two fact-finding visits about Neutron Enterprise, meeting with PG&E workers to learn more about the software. The committee concluded from those visits that Diablo Canyon’s use of artificial intelligence is “positive,” and they have no safety concerns at this time. What Happens Next? Lauderdale spoke to CalMatters while traveling to another nuclear facility, though he couldn’t reveal which one. He said that Atomic Canyon is “in discussions” with “many other nuclear organizations,” and that some “really exciting announcements” will come later this year. Through Atomic Canyon’s partnership with Diablo Canyon, he wants to demonstrate a proof of concept for existing nuclear facilities, as well as companies interested in building or re-commissioning nuclear facilities. He hopes Diablo Canyon’s lifecycle is expanded beyond the current decommissioning timeline, but if it’s not, his software can be used for the facility’s decommissioning process, he said. “As we gain more trust in the product and build out more capabilities, we will pick other non-risky activities that will take off one-by-one, and we’ll keep creating more value with this new technology,” he said. Responding to questions about whether the rollout of AI at Diablo Canyon has had sufficient oversight, Lauderdale reiterated that his startup product does not have a significant operational role. “I consider our company the leader in deploying AI and nuclear,” he said, before giving a future-facing assessment that left the door just slightly ajar: “and I think we will not have AI running nuclear power plants for a very long time.” This article was originally published on The Markup and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Casa Figueira / buck&simpleSave this picture!© Prue Ruscoe Architects: buck&simple Area Area of this architecture project Area:  680 m² Year Completion year of this architecture project Year:  2020 Photographs Photographs:Prue Ruscoe Manufacturers Brands with products used in this architecture project Manufacturers:  Miele, Agape, Allied Maker, Autodesk Revit, Briggs Veneers, Brodware, Criteria, Earp Bros, Earth Structures Group, Liebherr, Modinex, Real Flame Lead Architect: Peter Ahern More SpecsLess Specs Save this picture! Text description provided by the architects. Named after and centred around the century-old heritage-protected fig tree, Casa Figueira is a home nestled into its surroundings. Quietly secluded at the end of a cul-de-sac in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Rose Bay, the topography of the site eventuates to gun barrel views of the harbour and city beyond.Save this picture!A highly complex design resolution and approvals process relied on a collaborative approach to bring the project to fruition. Working from the base of a planar curved form designed by Luigi Roselli Architects, we focussed on tangibility, material, and detail. As lead Architect, buckandsimple in company with Interior design team Atelier Alwill and landscape architects Dangar Barin Smith worked to hone the design and build processes. Integral to this unique build was a design-focussed client who placed trust in their team to fulfil their brief and deliver a truly bespoke family home balancing poise and resilience.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!We built from early brief concepts of a mid-century Brazilian aesthetic, seeking to define an open-air living space framed by robust materials. From above, off-form board marked concrete ceilings offset a perpendicular mass of American Walnut joinery, framing and drawing the experience to the outside and surrounding cultivated landscape. Generous open-plan living spaces are separated into functional nodes, folding around a central courtyard. The main pavilion is dominated by a solid one-piece stainless steel kitchen work surface and monolithic timber block, a physical and cultural nexus. The opposing side ends in a focal sunken lounge, consolidating a place to sit, relax, and share.Save this picture!Save this picture!Restrained lines of joinery belie the complex program hidden beyond. Service areas, equipment, guest quarters, and the powder room all quietly sit concealed, allowing the main program to be read uninterrupted. Puncturing the formal program and the minimal, restrained approach, we sought to introduce detail and repetition of material touchpoints. The Bronze, etched entrance door, the curved skeletal foyer stair, steel ribbed open fireplace; hand sewn sunken lounge; custom lighting fixtures and floating joinery in front of slimline glazing. Each encapsulates the function of a space: welcome, retreat, gather, converse, eat, and work.Save this picture!From the outset, it was important for our clients that this home withstood the test of time and weathered gracefully. Balancing aesthetics and performance, we gave careful consideration to material selection and material-specific detailing. We researched and worked closely with suppliers, focussing on the finishing of timberwork and resilient protective coatings and favouring the use of non-ferrous metals externally. The result was a continuous thread throughout the home. Intricate touchpoints of aged brass bring highlight, offset against planar raw concrete, mass rammed earth, and crisp white rendered bands that intersect and are balanced by the soft warmth of timber. Set to patina gently against its namesake backdrop,p the home exudes an estate feel, relaxed in its role as a family home and place of respite from the bustling city beyond.Save this picture! Project gallerySee allShow less About this officebuck&simpleOffice••• MaterialsWoodConcreteMaterials and TagsPublished on April 13, 2025Cite: "Casa Figueira / buck&simple" 13 Apr 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1028970/casa-figueira-buck-and-simple&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream

Nature, Published online: 09 April 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08772-yA laser-plasma electron beam generated using active energy compression demonstrates reduction in energy spread and jitter by an order of magnitude to below the permille level, comparable with modern radio-frequency accelerators.