Google will tell European Union antitrust regulators Tuesday that the bloc's Digital Markets Act is stifling innovation and harming European users and businesses. The tech giant faces charges under the DMA for allegedly favoring its own services like Google Shopping, Google Hotels, and Google Flights over competitors. Potential fines could reach 10% of Google's global annual revenue.

Google lawyer Clare Kelly will address a European Commission workshop, arguing that compliance changes have forced Europeans to pay more for travel tickets while airlines, hotels, and restaurants report losing up to 30% of direct booking traffic.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After 13 years of deploying robots into its warehouses, Amazon reached a new milestone. The tech behemoth now has 1 million robots in its warehouses, the company announced Monday. This one millionth robot was recently delivered to an Amazon fulfillment facility in Japan. That figure puts Amazon on track to reach another landmark: Its vast network of warehouses may soon have the same number of robots working as people, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. The WSJ also reported that 75% of Amazon's global deliveries are now assisted in some way by a robot. Amazon also unveiled a new generative AI model called DeepFleet, built using SageMaker and trained on its own warehouse data, which improves robotic fleet speed by 10% through more efficient route coordination.

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Tech enthusiast Matt Cole has created a comprehensive MicroSD card testing database, writing over 18 petabytes of data across nearly 200 cards since July 2023. Cole's "Great MicroSD Card Survey" uses eight machines running 70 card readers around the clock, writing 101 terabytes daily to test authenticity, performance, and endurance.

The 15,000-word report covering over 200 different cards reveals significant quality disparities. Name-brand cards purchased from Amazon performed markedly better than identical models from AliExpress, while cards with "fake flash" -- inflated capacity ratings -- performed significantly worse than authentic storage. Sandisk and Kingston cards averaged 4,634 and 3,555 read/write cycles before first error, respectively, while Lenovo cards averaged just 291 cycles. Some off-brand cards failed after only 27 cycles. Cole tested 51 cards to complete destruction during the endurance testing phase.

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artiegillispie has added a photo to the pool:

Part of an awesome shrine complex with zero tourists. There is also a pigeon in the lower left.

Travis Estell has added a photo to the pool:

artiegillispie has added a photo to the pool:

Frits Abrahams

Voor de verjaardagen van mijn kleinkinderen doe ik elk jaar een donatie aan Stichting Jarige Job. Een feestje voor een ander kind, dat idee.

Living Colour recently visited the NPR Music office for a Tiny Desk Concert. Cult of Personality might be an all-time top 10 song for me — I vividly remember their 1989 appearance on Saturday Night Live.¹ They still got it!

1. I probably saw their performance on Arsenio as well, but the SNL set is the one that sticks in my brain.↩

Tags: Living Colour · music · Saturday Night Live · Tiny Desk Concerts · video

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Slice of Life (trailer) is a feature-length documentary about the American Dream through the lens of former Pizza Huts that have been transformed into everything from bars to churches to candy stores to cannabis dispensaries. A woman who runs an LGBTQ+ church out of a former Pizza Hut says:

It’s the stained-glass windows that draw people and touch people, and I think really takes it out of the realm of a Pizza Hut. It’s the power of transformation. When things continue to transform, beauty can come from it, good things can come out of it.

You can rent or buy the film from their website.

I’ve written before about how Pizza Hut was a special place to visit when I was a kid:

Pizza Hut was the #1 eating-out destination for me as a kid. My family never ate out much, so even McDonald’s, Arby’s, or Hardee’s was a treat. But Pizza Hut was a whole different deal. Did I enjoy eating salad at home? No way. But I had to have the salad bar at Pizza Hut. Did I normally eat green peppers, onions, and black olives? Nope…but I would happily chow down on a supreme pizza at Pizza Hut.

Tags: architecture · food · movies · pizza · Pizza Hut · real estate · Slice of Life · video

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Warns investors its codebase is harder to maintain as it bakes in brainboxes

Web design tools developer Figma on Tuesday filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to propose an initial public offering of company shares.…

Google's TPUs might not be on Altman's menu just yet, but he's never been all that picky about hardware

Analysis  No longer bound to Microsoft's infrastructure, OpenAI is looking to expand its network of compute providers to the likes of Oracle, CoreWeave, and apparently even rival model builder Google.…

"You will note, upon inspection of the menus, that the lobsters served here are identified either as medium or large. When you receive your 'medium' lobster, you will understand at once why nothing could be found to fit the bill of 'small'. This lobster must have been caught with a mosquito net, for he could have slipped the bars of any trap. But when you put on your reading glasses and commence to eat, your dismay is instantly magnified, for what you are not getting enough of is a perfectly broiled lobster, the meat so rich it seems buttery, its flavor vivid enough to make you heady."

For two all-too-brief decades, self-appointed restaurant critic Seymour Britchky made it his mission to capture it all in shockingly astute, hilarious, quotable prose before disappearing in his own right to become one of the city's best-fed (and, essentially, forgotten) ghosts. ... Britchky's people are in it for his acid tongue and gimlet eye—the way he etched a menu, a moment, a space, a feeling, an era in dining when not every plate was Instagram-ready, every interaction Yelp-able to the world. For him, every meal was personal, every review a master class in the art of food writing.

(previously)

Glenmorangie has been named as the Official Whisky of Formula 1, with Hollywood icon Harrison Ford helping reveal the partnership ahead of the British Grand Prix this weekend.

As our countdown of F1's 25 greatest races continues, Anna Francis recalls the 2007 European Grand Prix at the Nurburgring, an event that featured everything from a backmarker leading on their debut, a dramatic Turn 1 pile-up courtesy of treacherous rain and a thrilling late-race duel that sparked quite the fallout after the chequered flag.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

handwritten on back of photograph, "Long Beach from Signal Hill, 1930"

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: