Posted Dec 23 Remote Full Stack Engineer ZenOne View company profile & all jobs Full-TimeFull-Stack ProgrammingAnywhere in the WorldFull Stack EngineerTeam: Engineering /// Location: RemoteWork schedule: Central Time ZoneMain framework: Laravel + VueAbout the Role:We are seeking a skilled and motivated Full Stack Engineer to join our team and help bring a brand new product from MVP into general availability. The ideal candidate will be a self-starter with experience in building scalable web applications, working closely with a group of engineers, passionate product team, and most importantly the end user! You are not afraid to get your hands dirty and decide if something needs a complete rewrite or just a minor update. We are looking for someone who can work long hours to help us meet the deadline of launching the product. In return we promise you will be talking to actual users and seeing what you have built in real life with real customers, solving real world problems!Some of the responsibilities will include:Develop, record and maintain cutting edge web-based PHP applicationsGood grasp of UX and UI design principles, design patterns, and modern architectureFamiliarity with REST APIEnsure HTML, CSS, and shared JavaScript is valid and consistent across applicationsPrepare and maintain all applications utilizing standard development toolsUtilize backend data services and contribute to increase existing data services APILead the entire web application development life cycle right from concept stage to delivery and post launch supportConvey effectively with all task progress, evaluations, suggestions, schedules along with technical and process issuesDocument the development process, architecture, and standard componentsKeep abreast of new trends and best practices in web development Related Jobs See more Full-Stack Programming jobs

Im moving to Boston in three weeks! At my high school graduation, I had just learned Id been accepted into the Interphase EDGE program, an incredible opportunity to acclimate to life at MIT before the 2022 school year began. I was glad to have that chance, since I faced a big change from life at home in Claremore, on the Cherokee Nation reservation in northeastern Oklahoma. Id been away on my own only once, on a fifth-grade trip to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, where I first fell in love with aerospace engineering. It didnt take long to find community on campus. To my surprise, out of the dozen students at a welcome event for the Indigenous community, three grad students and an undergrad were in the aero-astro department. As a prospective Course 16 major and a FIRST Robotics alum, I was excited to discover that they planned to start a new team for the First Nations Launch (FNL) rocketry competition, a NASA Artemis Student Challenge. It was the perfect opportunity to merge my technical passion with my cultural roots. That first year, many people questioned the need for our team. MIT already has a Rocket Team, theyd say. But while most build teams are defined by the specific projects they work on, the product is just one aspect of the experience. Yes, Ive learned to design, build, launch, and safely recover a model rocket. But doing that alongside other Indigenous engineers on the team we call MIT Doya (, Cherokee for beaver) has taught me more than engineering skills. Beyond learning how to work with composites or design fins, Ive learned how to navigate classes and connect with professors. Ive learned about grad school. And Ive learned how to celebrate my Indigenous identity and honor my ancestors with my work. For instance, we often hold smudging ceremoniesburning sage to purify ourselves or our rocketsat our team meetings and competitions. Our team emphasizes universal consensus and buy-in on the technical side and pays attention to the success of each team member on a personal level. We call this gadugi () in Cherokee, or everyone helping each other. Ive also learned that embracing my culture can offer a better approach to engineering challenges. While many engineering settings foster top-down decision-making, our team tests and incorporates as many ideas as possible to engage everyone, emphasizing universal consensus and buy-in on the technical side while paying attention to the success of each team member on a personal level. We call this gadugi () in Cherokee, or everyone helping each other. And we find its led to better technical resultsand a better experience for everyone on the team. I feel incredibly fortunate to work closely with other Indigenous students on an engineering project we all deeply care about. Ive looked up to the senior members of the team, seeing in them proof of what an Indigenous student at MIT can be and accomplish. And Ive loved mentoring newer members, passing along what Ive learned to help them excel. Our launch weekends expand our community further, allowing us to work alongside inspiring Indigenous engineers from NASAs Jet Propulsion Lab and Blue Origin. Ive gotten to meet my heroes and seen that its possible to succeed as a Native American in aerospace engineering. In fact, my FNL experiences have already helped me secure an amazing internship. Last summerexactly a decade after setting my heart on aerospace engineering at Space CampI returned to Huntsville as a lunar payloads intern on the Mark I Lunar Lander at Blue Origin. Through the FNL team, Ive significantly advanced my technical skills. As our systems and simulations lead the first year, I integrated all the components of the physical design into a cohesive computer model with accuracy in both geometry and mass distribution. From that model, I can run simulated flights while adjusting for various launch conditions and trying out different motors. A small change on the ground can yield a big change in our final altitude, which must be within a specific rangeso this analysis drives the overall design. In our first year, our challenge was to re-create the design of a kit rocket while making it lighter by fabricating all the parts ourselves, primarily using hand-laid carbon fiber and fiberglass. We finished in second place and were named Rookie Team of the Year. For 202324, our challenge was to build a rocket large enough to carry a deployable drone, leading us to build an airframe 7.5 inches in diameter. We also had to design and fabricate the drones chassis to meet strict specifications: It had to fit inside the rocket on the launchpad, deploy at apogee (ours was 2,136 feet), unfold from a compact stowed configuration to 16 by 16 inches, descend by parachute to 500 feet, and then release the parachute for piloted navigation to a landing pad. To meet FAA requirements, two of our team members studied for and earned Part 107 remote pilot certificates so they could operate the drone. Since this new challenge required us to fabricate a rocket while also designing and building the drone, we broke up into two subteams to work on both in parallel. This approach required precise coordination between the subteams to ensure that everything would integrate well for the final launch. As team captain, I managed this coordination while staying involved on the technical side as systems and simulations lead and airframe lead. And as we worked our way through the project milestones from proposal through flight readiness review, we kept in mind that we needed both an operational drone and a safe flight to the right altitude to meet the challenge. In April our team traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to put our rocket to the test. We loaded the parachutes and payload, blessing it with some medicine before sending our hard work into the sky. But when I went to load our motor, the motor mount fell off in my hand. We quickly proceeded to the range safety officer, who was able to salvage our rocket and our launch with the last-minute addition of an external motor retention device. After that minor (but almost catastrophic) delay, we had a safe launch and successful recoveryand earned the Next Step Award, a $15,000 grant to represent FNL in the University Student Launch Initiative, a NASA-hosted competition open to everyone, for the 202425 season. Six weeks later, when the overall competition winners were announced, we were thrilled to learn we had won the grand prize! Along with bragging rights, we won a VIP trip to Kennedy Space Center in August and got to walk through the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building, explore the shuttle landing strip, see Polaris Dawn on the launchpad, and watch a Starlink launch from the beach in the early morning hours. This year, Im honored to serve as team captain again, leading an expanded team as we tackle the challenges of the new Student Launch Initiative. Im already looking forward to May, when well launch the rocket well be perfecting between now and then. And to honor our Indigenous heritage and send it into the sky with good intentions, Ill make sure we smudge before flight. Hailey Polson 26, an aero-astro major and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, is captain of MITs First Nations Launch team.

When I last wrote to you in this magazine, I told you a bit about the MIT Collaboratives, an effort to spark new ideas and modes of inquiry and help the people of MIT solve global problems. Since then, weve launched the first collaborative, grounding it in the human-centered fields represented by our School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). Were calling it the MIT Human Insight Collaborative, or MITHIC. In broad terms, MITHIC is an endorsement of the quality of our faculty in these fields and an expression of how deeply we value the scholarly and artistic practices that expand our understanding of the things that make us human. In a practical sense, its designed to help our scholars in human-centered disciplines go big. MITHIC will give them the resources to pursue their most innovative ideas within their discipline, create opportunities for them to collaborate with colleagues outside it, and enable them to explore fresh approaches to teaching our students. We celebrated the launch of MITHIC with a showcase of creative excellence. MIT faculty shared research that blends the humanistic with the technological, MIT students improvised on jazz saxophone, and in a keynote conversation, the acclaimed novelist Min Jin Lee talked about her dedication to putting the human at the center of her work. Our faculty are wonderfully energized by MITHIC, and more than 100 have already taken part in the collaboratives Meeting of the Minds events, organized to connect researchers across the Institute who work on similar topicsfrom cybersecurity to food security, climate simulations to the bioeconomy. There may never have been a more important time for society to make humane choices about new technologies. And Im thrilled that at MIT weve created a collaborative powered by human insight to support our scholars, students, explorers, and makers in shaping a future of technology in service to humanity.

We need a strategy to deal with a hydra. Its Sunday, January 14, 2024, more than 50 hours since the annual MIT Mystery Hunt kicked off at noon on Friday, and Setec Astronomy is one of more than 200 teams racing to solve hundreds of puzzles over three days. The 60-some members of Setec, many of whom are joining remotely from as far away as Australia, are making good progress, even though many of us are running on limited sleep and questionable nutritional decisions. Several of the chalkboards in the Building 2 classroom weve been assigned for our team headquarters are covered in lists of puzzle solutions or messy diagrams charting out theories about how to crack the various challengesall of them constructed, as Mystery Hunt tradition dictates, by the most recent winner, in this case The Team Formerly Known as the Team to Be Named Later. The hydra were dealing with is a metapuzzle: We have to find a way to use the solutions from other puzzles that weve already solved to extract one more answer. If we solve this one, well be rewarded with more puzzles. We know we need to diagram the answers for this round of puzzles as a binary tree. In keeping with the hydra metapuzzles mythological analogue, every time we solve one puzzle, two more branch off until we have a diagram five levels deep. Were still missing answers from several unsolved puzzles that would help us figure out how the diagram works and how to extract an answer to the metapuzzle. The diagram weve drawn, in green chalk, gets more chaotic with every addition, erasure, and annotation we squeeze onto the overcrowded chalkboard. But we can sense that were just one aha! away from a solution. MITs Mystery Hunt has been challenging puzzle enthusiasts every year since Brad Schaefer 78, PhD 83, wrote 12 subclues on a single sheet of paper as a challenge for friends during Independent Activities Period (IAP) in 1981. The answers led solvers to an Indian Head penny he had hidden on campus. Todays Hunts are still built around that basic concept, but what constitutes a challenge has changed over four decades. One of the clues from the original 1981 Hunt is just a missing word in a quote: He that plays the king shall be _____; his majesty shall have tribute of me. Its easy to solve today with Google, but in 1981, even if you knew it was Shakespeare, if you didnt notice the subtle hint that you should look for a character referring to a play within the play, it might have taken a few hours of skimming the Bards collected works to find the answer. The Setec Astronomy team tries to map out whether the human knot theyve gotten themselves into can be untangled.JADE CHONGSATHAPORNPONG 24/MIT TECHNIQUE We add a few more solutions to the hydra diagram over the next few hours. Eventually someone notices that all the answers in the fifth level of the diagram seem to have an odd prevalence of Ls and Rs. This is the aha! moment: They tell us how to navigate the binary tree. From the first node at the top of the tree, we follow the Ls and Rs in the order they appear in each of the 16 solutions on the fifth level. Take the left branch, then right, then left again, landing on a word that starts with H. The second fifth-level answer leads us to a word that starts with E. Repeating the process with all 16 answers spells out an apt way to deal with a hydra: HEADTOHEADBATTLE. (Puzzle solutions are traditionally written in all caps with no spaces or punctuation.) Those of us whove been tackling the puzzle take a moment to enjoy our victory before splitting up to find new puzzles to work on. Some elements of the Mystery Hunt are hard to describe, the kind of must-be-seen ingenuity that also inspires hacks on the Great Dome and any number of above-and-beyond engineering projects showcased around campus every year. Most of the puzzles are utterly unique, although they do often incorporate logic and word problems as well as more mainstream elements like crosswords, sudoku, and Wordle. But almost anything can be turned into a puzzle. For example, chess puzzles might be combined with the card game Magic: The Gathering. Or solvers could be asked to organize a Git repository with 10,000 out-of-order commits (that is, find the correct sequence of 10,000 changes to a file as it was tracked in a version control system), identify duets from musicals, or draw on their knowledge of pop culture trivia. For most of its history, the Mystery Hunt had little official status on campus. By tradition as much as any organizational effort, teams simply showed up in Lobby 7 on the Friday before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday for the kickoff. In 2014, the MIT Puzzle Club was formed to help provide year-to-year continuity and other support, such as securing rooms for teams to work in and reserving Kresge Auditorium for the opening ceremonies. Puzzle Club also hosts other events, such as mini puzzle hunts and sudoku and logic puzzle competitionswhich Becca Chang 26, the clubs current president, says has helped a lot with outreach to new students or anyone who might be interested in [puzzles]. Technology has enabled the Mystery Hunt to grow and evolve in significant ways, and not just in terms of the kinds of puzzles that are possible. Through the mid-1990s, a single person could take on the responsibility of writing and running the event. Today its a yearlong commitment for the winning team to design the next years Hunt. Doing so requires managing creative output and technological infrastructure that rival those of a small business. Duties include spending thousands of hours writing and testing puzzles, constructing physical puzzles and props, and building a dynamic website that can withstand the huge influx of puzzle-hungry visitors. Todays Hunts are built around a story. Here John Bromels as the god Neptune checks in on Galactic Trendsetters progress to restore the god Pluto after his planet was demoted.JADE CHONGSATHAPORNPONG 24/MIT TECHNIQUE Just organizing a team of solvers can be a major undertaking, especially now that more and more participants are joining remotely. Anjali Tripathi 09, who started the team Im Not a Planet Either in 2015, got her introduction to puzzle hunts through a miniature Mystery Hunt that Simmons Hall runs for first-years. After tackling the main event with the Simmons team on campus as an undergrad, she participated remotely for the first time in 2010. I was abroad in England and still wanted to do Hunt, and I remember how hard that was, she says. The team had no infrastructure for it. Its about connecting with other humans thats why we do it. Erin Rhode 04, whose team name one year was the entire text of Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged Today, solvers can work together across the room or across a continent. Platforms like Slack and Discord have become indispensable to many teams, which use them for updates and announcements as well as creating separate channels where people can tackle a given puzzle together. Many teams use applications that organize the convoluted deluge of puzzles into a workflow so everyone can see which have been solved, which need attention, and whos working on what. Google Docs and Google Sheets make it easy for multiple people to contribute to progress on the same puzzle whether theyre sitting side by side on campus or are separated by several time zones. I think especially post-2020, there is just the expectation that everything is going to be accessible online, says Tripathi, who still has a Hunt-related Google doc from 2008, just a couple of years after the service launched. But even as the Mystery Hunt has adapted to the internetand to increasingly powerful search engines, smartphones, the Zoom era, and even some machine-learning applicationsat its core it remains a very human experience. Its about connecting with other humansthats why we do it, says Erin Rhode 04, a longtime Mystery Hunter whose team has won twice. She recalls being inducted into the Hunt as a first-year in 2001. An upperclassman came in and was like, Youre coming to the math majors lounge. Were doing this puzzle hunt thing. The name of Rhodes team changes every year, though they might be best known for the year their name was the entire text of Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged. Last year, they were . (Thats not a typo or a missing wordits the zero-width space, a Unicode non-character primarily used in document formatting.) Early Mystery Hunts led solvers to an Indian Head penny hidden on campus. Today, winning teams are awarded coins unique to each years Hunt. Ringed with a repeating MH24, the 2024 coin shows the cities teams visited on their quest.JADE CHONGSATHAPORNPONG 24/MIT TECHNIQUE Like so much of the Hunt, team names are an exercise in creativity. The full name of the team running the 2024 Mystery Hunt was officially The Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team to Be Named Later. Some teams keep their name every year, like Setec Astronomy (an anagram for too many secrets, in a reference to the classic 1992 heist film Sneakers). Others change every year or every few years, or when teams merge, as when Death from Above joined forces with Project Electric Mayhem to become Death and Mayhem. Rhode remembers one particular puzzle from her first Hunt that she and her team (known that year as the Vermicious Knids) worked on through the night. They had to figure out that a list of enigmatic phrases were clues to song titles. For example, Of course; you just go north on Highway 101 clued the song Do You Know the Way to San Jose? I think today, we would have solved that puzzle in about an hour, Rhode says. There werent song lyric databases back then. And so it was a lot more sitting around on your own trying to come up with songs as opposed to just finding some master list and then searching it. Writing puzzles with the knowledge that solvers will have a slew of tools at hand is just part of the process. Use whatever technology you have at your disposal to solve the puzzle is the general rule of thumb, says Jon Schneider 13, a machine-learning researcher who hunts with Galactic Trendsetters . (The in their team name is pronounced like a plane taking off and landing, respectively.) Schneider has been hunting since 2010, when it was common for solvers to have to identify clips of songs or other audio. Hes seen that change in the past decade, though: Audio recognition [technology] like Shazam has become a thing, so its harder to create puzzles that require the skill of music recognition. When youre a constructor, you try to figure out: What is my challenge for the solver? says Dan Katz 03. Katz has solved and written a lot of puzzles. (In fact, he created a five-puzzle mini Hunt for this issues Puzzle Corner.) He attended his first Mystery Hunt in 1998, as a junior in high school, before he had even applied to MIT. Hes been part of a winning team eight times (probably a record) and competes in events like the World Sudoku Championship and US Puzzle Championship. In Katzs view, technology should make puzzling more interesting for the solver. While solvers might need to, say, code a program, organize information in a spreadsheet, or navigate a video-game-like interface to arrive at an answer, what he prizes most is the mental challenge of figuring out how to solve a puzzle. During whats known as the Mid-Hunt Runaround, a team follows a set of cryptic instructions that lead them on a subterranean journey across campus.JADE CHONGSATHAPORNPONG 24/MIT TECHNIQUE Rhode misses the days before an app was able to listen to a few seconds of a song and identify it. One of my superpowers in the early days of the Hunt was: Play me a bunch of pop songs and I can identify like 90% of them, she says. Now everybodys got Shazam on their phone. And so as fast as I might be, Shazam was always going to be faster. That doesnt mean puzzles cant be based on song identificationor image identification, another common puzzle element that has been made trivial by tools like Googles image search capabilities. It just means constructors must become more creative. You have to obscure the images or the music in such a way that the technology cant find it quickly, Rhode says. She describes a puzzle she wrote when she wanted solvers to identify songs without using technology: I arranged eight songs a cappella and sang them myself, but buzzing like a bee. And the whole idea was you cant Shazam that. Schneiders team took a similar approach to constructing a puzzle in which solvers had to identify specific visual artistsnot by their work, but by their distinctive style. Solvers were prompted to upload an image of their choosing, and a generative AI tool similar to DALL-E rendered it in the style of the artist they were supposed to name. I mostly justwant to be surprised. Jon Schneider 13 of the team Galactic Trendsetters Thats not the only puzzle to have incorporated some machine-learning elements in the last few years. A few examples have used semantic similarity scoring systems where solvers have to guess words or phrasesa kind of machine-learning-enabled version of hot or cold. Even if machine learning has potential as a tool for puzzle constructors, generative AI is unlikely to solve Mystery Hunt puzzles anytime soon. ChatGPT can answer questions that might be helpful in getting started and maybe even help solve a crossword clue or two, but the puzzles are often so unusual that it doesnt know where to begin. When presented with them, it usually responds by stating that it would need more context or clues in order to proceed. Schneider did find ChatGPT very helpful, though, in solving a nonMystery Hunt puzzle about navigating the byzantine rules of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which he admits hes never played. A few years ago, there would have been no way around spending hours digging through the rulebooks and figuring out each step, but giving the puzzle to ChatGPT worked. It was really good at doing this. I guess it had trained on enough data of people playing Dungeons & Dragons that this was within its capabilities, he says. Schneider is optimistic that new technology will be integrated into Mystery Hunt in creative ways, expanding the scope of what puzzle constructors can come up with to entertain solvers. Ultimately, he says, I mostly just want to be surprised. As the sun sets on Sunday, Setec continues solving puzzles at a steady pace, but were also still unlocking new sections of the Hunta sign that were still some distance from the endgame, though rumors (but never spoilers) from friends on other teams suggest that a few teams might be closing in. As midnight rolls around theres still no announcement, and so we push on. Ultimately, the 2024 Hunt ends up running into Monday morning, one of only a handful of times its taken more than 60 hours to complete. The 2024 Mystery Hunt included what was called the Herc-U-Lease Scavenger Hunt. As part of the scavenger hunt, teams were asked to have as many members as possible look as identical as possible. Death and Mayhem realized that many members were wearing black T-shirts and decided to unify the look with paper hats fashioned from copies of The Tech someone found on campus.MOLLY FREY/DEATH & MAYHEM A little after 5 a.m., team Death and Mayhem solves the final puzzle to win the 2024 Mystery Huntand the responsibility of developing the 2025 Hunt, which kicks off on January 17. In the end, 266 teams have solved at least one of the 2024 Hunts 237 puzzles and Setec Astronomy has solved 174. (Teams typically care less about postgame rankings than about how many puzzles they get to before time runs out.) The Team Formerly Known as the Team to Be Named Later sends out an announcement that a wrap-up event, at which theyll give a full overview of the weekend and hand over the reins to Death and Mayhem, will begin at noon in 26-100. Because creating a Mystery Hunt is such a daunting task, Death and Mayhem got to work on this years within hours of winning, says James Douberley 13, who assumed the title of benevolent dictator to orchestrate and oversee the teams puzzle writing. The weight of expectation is not lost on Douberley and his teammates: This is a once-a-year event that holds a lot of meaning for many participants. The Mystery Hunt is about solving puzzles, but its also far more social and immersive than puzzle books and escape rooms. In 2024, nearly 2,000 people representing 91 teams showed up on campus to participateand another 2,450 or so signed up to puzzle from afar. All told, solvers included 52 faculty members, 278 students, and 950 alumni, ranging from recent graduates to those who got their degrees decades ago. For Chang, the Hunt is an opportunity to connect with the broader community, including alumni from her dorm whom she doesnt see often. This is the one time in the year that we get to all just be in one place together and do this thing that we love, she says. Its just a really great bonding experience. Shortly after solving the final puzzles in the 2024 MIT Mystery Hunt, members of Death & Mayhem received the custom coins awarded to the victors and posed for a photo with Aphrodite (of the Team Formerly Known as the Team to Be Named Later), who blew kisses in celebration.COURTESY OF DEATH & MAYHEM The MIT campus plays a special role in the Hunt. Maybe you have to use the walls of the List Visual Arts Center lobby as a grid for a logic puzzle, or find certain names on the memorial plaques in Lobby 10 whose first letters spell out an answer. But its not just that clues can be part of the physical spaceits that campus is the epicenter for the MIT spirit of creativity, inventiveness, and industriousness that makes the Mystery Hunt unique. People talk about New York being a character in movies, Katz says. I feel like MIT is a character in Mystery Hunt. For Douberley, the Mystery Hunt takes him back to his student days, when he tackled hard challenges through marathon work sessions and all-nighters. You fall asleep on the floor, and youre in the dorm lounge and your friend comes and wakes you up and says, Heres a coffeeI need your help with something, he says. And that is something that lives with you for the rest of your life. Editors Note: The 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt kicks off on January 17, 2025. But if youre eager to start puzzling before thenor get a taste of puzzling if youve never taken part beforecheck out theMIT Mystery Heist, a pre-Hunt round of puzzles written by the Mystery Hunt team known as the Providence Crime Syndication. Learn more and solve atmitmysteryheist.com.

Catch a few holiday classics on no-cost streaming services.

Written by Matt Elliott Our expert, award-winning staff selects the products we cover and rigorously researches and tests our top picks. If you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Reviews ethics statement How we test What to consider Price Statistically, youll hold onto your next laptop for at least three years. The current sweet spot for a reliable laptop to handle average work, home office or school tasks is between $700 and $800 and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming is upward of about $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models in all price ranges to get the best configuration you can for your money. Operating System Choosing an operating system is part personal preference and part budget. For the most part, Microsoft Windows and Apple's MacOS do the same things but they do them differently. Unless there's an OS-specific application you need, go with the one you feel most comfortable using. MacBooks currently start at $999, so if you need a laptop for significantly less, its Windows. A Chromebook running on Googles ChromeOS is an excellent (and less expensive) alternative to Windows or MacOS if almost everything you do is in a web browser. They cant run Windows or Mac software. Size Remember to consider whether having a lighter, thinner laptop or a touchscreen laptop with a good battery life will be important to you in the future. Size is primarily determined by the screen, which in turn factors into battery size, laptop thickness, weight and price. Screen When it comes to deciding on a screen, there are a myriad number of considerations: size, resolution, what types of content you'll be looking at and whether or not you'll be using it for gaming or creative work. Higher resolutions are better for fitting more on a screen and look for a dot pitch of at least 100 pixels per inch as a rule of thumb. If the color range is important, look for at least 100% sRGB, or better yet 100% DCI-P3. Processor Intel and AMD are the main CPU makers for Windows laptops with Qualcomm emerging as a third option with its Arm-baed Snapdragon X chips. Apple makes its own Arm-based chips for MacBooks, which makes things slightly more straightforward. You'll still want to pay attention to the number of cores -- the more, the better -- to gauge potential performance as well as Intel x86 vs Arm. Graphics The graphics processor handles all the work of driving the screen and generating what gets displayed, as well as speeding up a lot of graphics-related (and increasingly, AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: integrated (iGPU) or discrete (dGPU). Because the iGPU splits space, memory and power with the CPU, it's better for smaller, lighter laptops, but it doesn't perform nearly as well as a dGPU. For things like video editing, gaming, design and so on, you'll need a dGPU. Memory For memory, we highly recommend 16GB of RAM (8GB absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all the data for currently running applications, and it can fill up fast. After that, it starts swapping between RAM and the storage drive, which is slower. A lot of sub-$500 laptops have 4GB or 8GB, which in conjunction with a slower disk can make for a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. Also, many laptops now have the memory soldered onto the motherboard. Storage You'll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives have all but replaced hard drives in many models. Not all SSDs are equally speedy, and cheaper laptops typically have slower drives. Get the size you can afford, and if you need to go with a smaller drive, you can always add an external drive or use cloud storage to bolster a small internal drive. The one exception is gaming laptops: Get at least a 512GB SSD. Table of Contents Back to selection

Edgar Cervantes / Android AuthorityTL;DRThe PayPal Honey extension has been caught stealthily replacing YouTubers affiliate revenue cookies with its own.Despite directing customers to the products, creators get nothing, as PayPal Inc. poaches the commission.The Honey extension also intentionally misleads users and often displays bad deals when collaborating with merchants.PayPal Honey is a highly popular browser extension that promises users the best deals when e-shopping. Right before you check out, the tool scans the web for applicable coupon codes and, theoretically, presents them all to you. Sounds too good to be true, right? Thats because it is. A new investigation has revealed how the Honey extension actually works, and apparently, its scamming both the creators who promote it and the customers who rely on its discounts.YouTube channel MegaLag has investigated how PayPal Honey works in the background and exposed the malicious activities it opts for to hurt everyone involved. For years, many well-known YouTubers, bloggers, and other creators have been promoting the browser extension on their platforms. Little do they know that Honey has been stealing their affiliate revenue all along.When a customer lets Honey search for coupons during checkout, the service silently deletes the existing affiliate cookies and injects its own. This predatory behavior allows PayPal Inc. to poach the commission despite creators actually directing users to the selected products. Simply put, YouTubers have been advertising a tool that steals from them this entire time.Honeys implications extend beyond creators; the service also adversely affects you the user. While the extension promises to find the best deals online, it sometimes intentionally hides them from you. When a merchant enrolls in Honeys (insignificant) cashback program, it gives them full control over the coupons presented by the extension. This enables sellers to hide better discounts publicly shared on the web from Honey users.Given the blind trust, many customers dont bother to search the web, believing Honey is providing honest results. So, they end up missing out on the most advantageous promotions shared elsewhere, as they opt for the minor ones presented by the deceitful extension.Got a tip? Talk to us!Email our staff at news@androidauthority.com. You can stay anonymous or get credit for the info, it's your choice.You might like

xAI, Elon Musks AI company, has raised $6 billion, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.Investors gave a minimum of $77,593, per the filing (97 participated, but the document doesnt reveal their identities). xAI later announced (confirming some earlier reporting) that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Nvidia, AMD, and others numbered among them.The new cash brings xAIs total raised to $12 billion, adding to the $6 billion tranche xAI raised this spring. CNBC reported in November that xAI was aiming for a $50 billion valuation double its valuation as of six months ago.According to the Financial Times, only investors whod backed xAI in its previous fundraising round were permitted to participate in this one. Reportedly, investors who helped finance Musks Twitter acquisition were given access to up to 25% of xAIs shares.Ramping up AIMusk formed xAI last year. Soon after, the company releasedGrok, a flagship generative AI model that now powers a number of features on X, including a chatbot accessible to X Premium subscribers and free users in some regions.Grok has what Musk has described as a rebellious streak a willingness to answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems. Told to be vulgar, for example, Grok will happily oblige, spewing profanities and colorful language you wont hear fromChatGPT.Musk has derided ChatGPT and other AI systems for being too woke and politically correct, despite Groks own unwillingness to cross certain boundaries and hedge on political subjects. Hes also referred to Grok as maximally truth-seeking and less biased than competing models, although theres evidence to suggest that Grok leans to the left.Over the past year, Grok has become increasingly ingrained in X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. At launch, Grok was only available to X users and developers skilled enough to get the open source edition up and running.Thanks to anintegrationwith the open image generator Flux, Grok can generate images on X (without guardrails, controversially). The model can analyze images as well, and summarize news and trending events (imperfectly, mind).Reports indicate that Grok mayhandle even more X functions in the future, from enhancingXs search capabilities andaccount bios to helping with post analytics and reply settings.xAI is sprinting to catch up to formidable competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic in the generative AI race. The company launched an API in October, allowing customers to build Grok into third-party apps, platforms, and services. According to The Wall Street Journal, xAI is preparing to release a standalone consumer app similar to OpenAIs in December.Musk asserts that it hasnt been a fair fight.In a lawsuit filed against OpenAI and Microsoft, OpenAIs close collaborator, attorneys for Musk accuse OpenAI of actively trying to eliminate competitors like xAI by extracting promises from investorsnot to fund them. OpenAI, Musks counsel says, also unfairly benefits from Microsofts infrastructure and expertise in what the attorneys describe as a de facto merger.Yet Musk often says that Xs data gives xAI a leg up compared to rivals. Last month, Xchangedits privacy policy to allow third parties, including xAI, to train models on X posts.Musk, its worth noting, was one of the original founders of OpenAI, and left the company in 2018 after disagreements over its direction. Hes argued in previous suits that OpenAI profited from his early involvement yet reneged on its nonprofit pledge to make the fruits of its AI research available to all.An xAI ecosystemxAI has outlined a vision according to which its models would be trained on data from Musks various companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, and its models could then improve technology across those companies. It is already powering customer support features for SpaceXs Starlink internet service, according to The Wall Street Journal, and the startup is said to be in talks with Tesla to provide R&D in exchange for some of the carmakers revenue.Tesla shareholders, for one, object to these plans. Several have sued Muskover his decision to start xAI, arguing that Musk hasdiverted both talent and resourcesfrom Tesla to whats essentially a competing venture.Nevertheless, the deals and xAIs developer and consumer-facing products have driven xAIs revenue to around $100 million a year. For comparison, Anthropic is reportedly on pace to generate $1 billion in revenue this year, and OpenAI is targeting $4 billion by the end of 2024.Musk said this summer that xAI is training the next generation of Grok models at its Memphis data center, which was apparently built in just 122 days and is currently powered partly by portable diesel generators. The company hopes to upgrade the server farm, which contains 100,000 Nvidia GPUs, next year; in its press release, xAI said it plans to fully double that number. (Because of their ability to perform many calculations in parallel, GPUs are the favored chips for training and running models.)In November, xAI won approval from the regional power authority in Memphis for 150MW of additional power enough to power roughly 100,000 homes. To win the agency over, xAI pledged to improve the quality of the citys drinking water and provide the Memphis grid with discounted Tesla-manufactured batteries. But some residents criticized the move, arguing it would strain the grid and worsen the areas air quality.Tesla is also expected to use the upgraded data center to improve its autonomous driving technologies.xAI has expanded quite rapidly from an operations standpoint in the year since its founding, growing from just a dozen employees in March 2023 to over 100 today. In October, the startup moved into OpenAIs old corporate offices in San Franciscos Mission neighborhood.xAI has reportedly told investors it plans to raise more money next year.It wont be the only AI lab raising immense cash. Anthropic recently secured $4 billion from Amazon, bringing its total raised to $13.7 billion, while OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in October to grow its war chest to $17.9 billion.Megadeals like OpenAIs and Anthropics drove AI venture capital activity to $31.1 billion across over 2,000 deals in Q3 2024, per PitchBook data.TechCrunch has an AI-focused newsletter!Sign up hereto get it in your inbox every Wednesday.

From Keith Rabois to Matt Miller, a lot of VCs have switched firms or spun out of storied VC institutions this year. These employment changes are surprising because unlike in many other fields, venture capitalists dont traditionally move around very much especially those who reach the partner or general partner level.VC funds have 10-year life cycles, and partners have good reason to stay that course. In some instances, there may be a key man on a firms fund, meaning that if they leave, the funds LPs have the right to pull their capital out if they choose. Many partners and GPs also have some of their own money invested in their firms funds, which gives them further reason to stick around.So, while big-name investor moves in venture capital arent common, they seem to have become so in 2024. So far this year, there have been notable instances of investors returning to old firms, striking out on their own, or taking a pause from investing entirely. There have also been some key hires to note.Heres who we know of so far:DecemberMichelle Volz is leaving her role as an investment partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Volz, who announced her departure on December 21, joined more than two years ago, where she built up the firms American Dynamism vertical. Prior to a16z, Volz was an operator at numerous defense tech startups, including Palantir.Longtime Sequoia partner Matt Miller announced on December 18 that he was leaving the firm to start his own firm focused on European founders. Miller joined Sequoia in 2012 and has backed companies, including DBT Labs, Confluent, and Grafana, among others.After more than a decade at Lux Capital, Bilal Zuberi announced on December 11 that hed be leaving the firm. Zuberi was a general partner at Lux and backed companies, including Desktop Metal, Tendo Health, and Evolv Technology, among many others. Zuberis next move will be partnering with early-stage founders.On December 3, Alex Taussig announced hed be transitioning out of his role as partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where he was a partner since 2016 and served as one of the co-leads of the firms consumer practice. Taussig plans to focus his efforts on his board positions.Nicole Quinn also announced on December 3 that she will be transitioning into a board partner role at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Quinn was also a co-lead of Lightspeeds consumer practice. Quinn joined the firm in 2015 and was most recently a general partner.NovemberSriram Krishnan announced on November 27 that he would be departing Andreessen Horowitz after four years as a general partner. Krishnan, who was focused on AI and crypto investments at a16z, will be joining the incoming Trump administration as a senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence.On November 5, Andreessen Horowitz announced that Brian Roberts is joining the firm as a general partner and will work across the firms American Dynamism and AI Apps funds. Roberts previously worked as a CFO at numerous notable companies, including Splunk, OpenSea, and Lyft.Andreessen Horowitz also announced on November 5 that Andy McCall is joining the firm as a general partner to work across the firms American Dynamism and AI Apps funds. McCall most recently held numerous roles at cloud company Samsara.OctoberParis Heymann left his role as a partner at Index Ventures to join J.P. Morgan as a co-managing partner within the asset managers venture and growth equity practice. The move was announced on October 15. Heymann helped Index launch its New York office in 2022 and was a partner at Arena Holdings before that.On October 9, Julian Eison announced on LinkedIn that he was stepping away from his role as managing partner at Next Ventres. Eison said in his post that he is taking some time to figure out whats next. Hes backed companies such as Pair Team, Juno Medical, and Vital Biosciences.After four years as a partner at Khosla Ventures, Sandhya Venkatachalam has spun out of the firm and launched Axiom Partners, a new VC firm that is targeting $50 million for its debut fund to back AI and machine learning startups. The news of Venkatachalams departure was confirmed on October 8.SeptemberJames da Costa announced on September 17 that he was joining Andreessen Horowitz as a partner focused on B2B software and financial services. This marks da Costas first foray into venture investing; he was previously the co-founder of Fingo, an African neobank.On September 11, Jacob Westphal announced that he was leaving Andreessen Horowitz. Westphal was a partner at a16z for three and a half years. He left to become the portfolio lead at Will Ventures.AugustFreestyle VC announced on August 15 that Maria Palma had joined the firm as a general partner based in San Francisco. Palma was most recently a general partner at Kindred Capital, based in London. Palma has backed companies such as Moov, Novo, and Lottie.JulyAfter nearly seven years, Alex Cook is getting ready to leave Tiger Global, sources familiar with the matter tell TechCrunch. While at Tiger Global, Cook led deals including TradingView, Scalapay and TrueLayer, among others. Prior to Tiger Global, Cook worked at Apollo.Bessemer Venture Partners announced it added Lauri Moore as a partner on July 22. Moore was previously a partner at Foundation Capital for two years and an operator at LinkedIn before that. Moore will be focused on early-stage investments in sectors including data, AI and developer tools.On July 17, DCVC announced it had brought on Milo Werner as a general partner to lead the firms climate investing practice. The firm is currently raising its first dedicated climate fund. Werner was most recently a general partner at Engine Ventures for two and a half years. Werner was a partner at Ajax Strategies prior to that.Anne Lee Skates announced on July 11 that she had left Andreessen Horowitz where she had been a partner on the consumer team since 2019. She added that shes off to do her lifes work and will post more about her future plans soon. At Andreessen, she backed companies including Whatnot, Kindred and Prisms, among others.JuneOn June 17, Spencer Peterson announced that hed left Bedrock, where he served as partner for five years, to become a general partner at Coatue. Peterson is an investor in companies including OpenAI and Rippling, among others.Amanda Robby Robson announced her departure from Cowboy Ventures in a LinkedIn post in early June. Robson had been at Cowboy Ventures since October 2019 and at Norwest Venture Partners for three years prior to that. Robson plans to launch a fund of her own.MaySerena Ventures founding partner Alison Stillman announced shed stepped back from the firm on May 14 after a nearly six-year run working with tennis star Serena Williams. Stillman did not announce her next step.Terri Burns announced on May 13 that she was launching a new venture firm called Type Capital. Burns was previously the first Black woman partner at GV and left the firm back in 2022. Her new fund will focus on pre-seed and seed-stage startups.Last week TechCrunch scooped that Fika Ventures co-founder Eva Ho was going to transition out of the firm after Fika finished deploying its current fund. Ho is stepping back for personal reasons. The move was confirmed by the firm in a blog post on May 9.On May 9, Alison Lange Engel announced she was taking on the role of CEO at Ceros, an AI-powered design company. Lange Engel left Greycroft in December, where she had been a partner since 2019, to take the role.After 15 years, Vic Singh announced on X that he was stepping down from Eniac Ventures on May 1. Singh helped launch the firm in 2009 and is planning to launch a new firm of his own.AprilOn April 30, Ethan Kurzweil announced he was leaving his role as partner at Bessemer Venture Partners after 16 years. Kurzweil will be launching an early-stage-focused investment firm, according to reporting from Axios. Kurzweil will launch the firm with Kristina Shen, who left Andreessen Horowitz after four years on March 29, and Mark Goldberg, who left Index Ventures after eight years last fall.On April 1, Christina Farr announced that shed be leaving OMERS Ventures, where she has served as a principal investor and the lead of the firms health tech practice since December 2020. Farr announced on X that shed be working on her health tech newsletter, writing a book focused on the power that storytelling can have on businesses, and consulting health tech founders.MarchAfter six years as a partner at Accel, Ethan Choi announced that hed be leaving the firm to head to Khosla Ventures in March. Choi will be focused on growth-stage investing at his new firm and has backed such companies as Klaviyo, Pismo and 1Password.While many of the recent VC moves have been by folks looking to start something new, or take on a different opportunity, not all of them have been. On March 13, Chamath Palihapitiyas Social Capital announced that it fired partners Jay Zaveri and Ravi Tanuku. Bloomberg reported that this was due to a matter involving raising money for AI startup Groq.Rabois was not the only person looking to boomerang back to an old haunt in this recent rise of investor reshuffling. On March 5, Miles Grimshaw announced that hed be returning to Thrive Capital as a general partner after serving the same position at Benchmark Capital for three years. Grimshaw originally started at Thrive Capital in 2013 and has backed such companies as Airtable, Lattice, and Monzo, among others.While transitioning from operator to VC is a common career progression in the startup ecosystem, it isnt for everybody. On March 4, Sam Blond announced he had come to that conclusion and would be leaving Founders Fund, where he had been a partner for about 18 months. Blond said he would return to operating and has held roles at companies such as Brex, Zenefits and EchoSign.JanuaryAfter 12 years at Andreessen Horowitz, Connie Chan announced she was leaving the firm on January 23. Chan had served as one of the firms general partners the last five years and has backed companies such as Cider, KoBold and Whatnot.Famed venture investor Keith Rabois announced on January 9 that he was leaving Founders Fund to return to Khosla Ventures. Rabois had been a general partner at Founders Fund for nearly five years; he returned to Khosla as a managing director, his prior role.TechCrunch is monitoring the recent venture moves and will continue to update this article as they happen. If you have any tips or callouts to bring to our attention, contact me here: rebecca.szkutak@techcrunch.com.This post was originally published on May 1. It has since been updated on May 13, July 12, August 15, September 23, November 18, and December 23, 2024, to include additional moves within venture.This post has been updated to better reflect Anne Lee Skates investments at Andreessen Horowitz.

The Byron Thomas Potter House is located at 8 Stimson Avenue in Providence, Rhode Island, and is one of the citys few examples of the Beaux Arts architectural style in a single-family residence. The Beaux Arts style uses an Italian Renaissance form and materials (Roman bricks), classical Greek and Roman decorative elements like columns and balustrades, and a steep mansard roof punctuated by large dormers, to create a grand and imposing architectural statement. The house was designed by 1896 by local architect, Edward I. Nickerson, who was known for his use of traditional forms in an unconventional manner, with emphasis on ornament and differing materials; with this house being a great example of his work in his later years. The residence was built for newlyweds Helen Sheldon Potter and Byron Thomas Potter, a real estate and insurance broker. The residence is now occupied by the International House of Rhode Island, a non-profit that provides a home away from home for international students, scholars, professors, researchers, and their families by providing a venue for folks of different backgrounds, ethnicities, and life experiences to celebrate our similarities and differences and envision a world in which friendship and understanding beat anonymity, isolation, and ignorance. The world needs more of this.