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Why these tech startups turned down millions of dollars in PPP loans from the federal government

GeekWire

But that’s exactly what two venture capital-backed Pacific Northwest tech startups did recently with their Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. The decision to refrain from accepting money in the midst of a global pandemic reflects larger confusion around the $660 billion program to support U.S. million ready for the taking.

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Seattle’s newest unicorn: Rec Room raises $100M as social gaming popularity fuels big growth

GeekWire

And honestly that wasn’t an atypical year for us,” said Fajt, who previously was at Microsoft as a producer and program manager on HoloLens. Sequoia Capital’s Stephanie Zhan told the Wall Street Journal that Rec Room plans to eventually go public. The company is not yet profitable. Acquisition target?

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How Nvidia beat everyone else in the AI race

Vox

Nvidia was founded to design a specific kind of chip called a graphics card — also commonly called a GPU (graphics processing unit) — that enables the output of fancy 3D visuals on the computer screen. For most of Nvidia’s existence, game graphics were Nvidia’s raison d’etre.

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AI experts are increasingly afraid of what they’re creating

Vox

DeepMind’s AlphaFold system, which uses AI to predict the 3D structure of just about every protein in existence, was so impressive that the journal Science named it 2021’s Breakthrough of the Year. You can even see it in the first paragraph of this story, which was largely generated for me by the OpenAI language model GPT-3.

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University of Washington researchers develop smaller, cheaper form of LiDAR technology

GeekWire

LiDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, is a 3D laser imaging technology that has been around for over half a century. The paper, “ Frequency-angular resolving LiDAR using chip-scale acousto-optic beam steering ,” was published in the journal Nature on June 28.

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The Hacker Mind Podcast: Hacking Biology

ForAllSecure

Did you know that you could program DNA to behave in certain ways. Green: So originally, like, first fuzzing paper was basically these researchers, throwing just random data at Unix programs, and getting a lot of crashes that way. During numerous Capture the Flag competitions in his day to day work now with computational biology.

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The ad industry is going all-in on AI

Vox

While the festival’s official programming happens at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès convention center, the real networking happens at beachside business meetings, yacht deck happy hours, and celebrity-studded after-parties. Will it save (or destroy) journalism? Will it be able to lift digital advertising out of its slump?