Apple’s rumored smart home display may look a lot like an old friend — the iMac G4 of the early 2000s. In the newsletter this weekend, Mark Gurman reports that the countertop tablet will feature a square screen that’s “positioned at an angle on a small base, making it reminiscent of the circular bottom of the iMac G4.” That may be where the speakers are housed too. The device is expected to arrive sometime next year, followed later on by a higher-end version with a robotic limb that can change the position of the display.

The more affordable model, which will be released first, will have a relatively small screen, according to Gurman, being “about the size of two iPhones side by side.” It’s intended to be used for smart home controls, but will also run apps like FaceTime and Calendar, and display photos and videos. The more expensive model will boast a larger screen in addition to its robotic capabilities, according to Gurman. We likely won’t see that product until at least 2026, as he previously predicted, and it may run you almost $1,000. Both models are expected to come with Apple Intelligence.

I’m a writer and always have been. My writing skills are undeniably central to my career as an in-house public relations leader and communications strategist. Admittedly, I scoffed at the notion of generative AI coming for my job. How could a soulless machine match my creative prowess? Eventually, I realized the threat to my career did not come from AI, but from my reluctance to adopt it. 

Like many, I’ve been working for AI companies for years. I’ve worked with dozens of  AI-based applications, long before OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 sent the world into a frenzy of fear and excitement. 

Recently, at a marketing all-hands meeting, we were asked how often we use gen AI in our work. Everyone replied they were using it literally every day — except for me. There are times when you want to stand out in a crowd. This was not one of them. I suddenly felt like that uncle who still refuses to get a smartphone. 

Letting go of pretentious skepticism

I approached my first conscious encounter with a large language model (LLM) with a mixture of condescension and fear. Surely, no machine could replicate my professional wit and the tailored nuance of my prose, meticulously crafted and fit for purpose. It was an affront to my expertise and my pride to think I needed help from anyone or anything to do my best work. I also didn’t want to be seen as cutting corners. 

Was using AI like cheating? 

I quickly thought back to the impact of my writing on the trajectory of my life. Would I have gotten into Cornell if everyone was using AI to craft brilliant college essays? Has one of my greatest professional strengths now been democratized, chopped up into little easily accessible pieces and distributed to the masses? It felt like a talent I’ve cultivated for years was now everyone’s to tap into with just one click. 

Existential dread popped in and out of my head. Was I a 2007 iPod? 

Why was I so resistant to accepting AI into my work? It doesn’t take AI to figure out where my fear was coming from — a misconception that AI would replace me or, worse, make me average, rather than better. I saw AI-driven writing as a personal sleight, a harbinger signaling the redundancy of my craft. I was too afraid of the risk to my career to imagine the benefits.

Falling for the enemy

Faced with a growing to-do list and the new balancing act of returning from maternity leave to an expanded role leading public relations for a publicly-traded tech company, I opened Jasper AI. 

I admittedly smirked at some of the functionality. Changing the tone? Is this AI emotionally intelligent? Maybe more so than some former colleagues. I began on a blank screen. I started writing a few lines and asked the AI to complete the piece for me. I reveled in the schadenfreude of its failure. 

It summarized what I had written at the top of the document and just spit it out below. Ha! I had proven my superiority. I went back into my cave, denying myself and my organization the benefits of this transformative technology. 

The next time I used gen AI, something in me changed. I realized how much prompting matters. You can’t just type a few initial sentences and expect the AI to understand what you want. It still can’t read our minds (I think). But there are dozens of templates that the AI understands. For PR professionals, there are templates for press releases, media pitches, crisis communications statements, press kits and more. And there are countless tools to discover. Prompting can be the difference between AI improving your writing and wasting a lot of time. 

Models today can write coherent narratives, accurately use industry jargon, match tone and mirror any writing style. I would never copy and paste its work directly, because AI can infringe copyrights and hallucinate falsehoods, but it provides a great starting point and often conquers the initial “blank-page” battle of just sitting down and starting to write. Even just prompting the AI correctly forces you to bake out a decent outline, which is a great place to start for most writing projects. The impact on my time management and productivity was striking. 

Using gen AI felt like I had the antidote to writer’s block. 

I had found a first mate on my PR team who never takes days off. 

Raising the bar

Gen AI capabilities are making their way into countless business applications beyond writing-intensive professional domains like mine — and for good reason. Here’s my advice on making peace with these technologies: 

1. No matter what you do for a living, stop swimming against the current. It will pull you under and take your career down with you. You need to ride this wave and master it. 
2. Generative AI is not going to be your competitive advantage. Instead, it will likely raise the bar for everyone, moving the goalpost for your accomplishments whether you like it or not. 
3. Don’t just regurgitate AI content. It’s obvious, detectable and doesn’t provide any value. Instead, thoughtfully harness gen AI to make what you’re already doing better, faster. 
4. We don’t know how we’ll be using gen AI five years from now (or even next year), but rest assured, almost everyone reading this will be using it — whether they know it or not. AI will be integrated in holistic, human-centric and seamless ways across the apps we use at work and in daily life, as a vital part of systems we don’t see but that shapes our interactions. 

As with so many things in life, adaptability and willingness to embrace change are the keys to staying relevant. Humans are resilient. AI isn’t coming for us. It’s coming for our inefficiencies. Grab these tools with both hands and make them work for you.  

Melanie Holly Pasch is head of public relations at WalkMe.

It’s become a common refrain in political discourse: Europe needs to take radical action to remain competitive. On the long list of potential reforms, one that’s gaining particular traction is a new, EU-wide corporate status for innovative companies.

Known (somewhat obscurely) as the “28th regime,” the innovation is being billed as Europe’s answer to a Delaware C-Corp, and would add to what already exists in the EU’s 27 member states. It is now supported by an entrepreneur and VC-supported grassroots movement that also brought along the much more palatable name of “EU Inc” — and some unexpected momentum. Launched on October 14, the EU Inc petition has already attracted some 11,000 signatures.

The U.S. connotation of the term Inc is not a coincidence; while startups and VCs all over the world are now familiar with the Delaware C Corp, Europe still has a gap in that regard. An existing formulation dubbed ‘Societas Europaea’ (Europe does love its Latin) was aimed at larger companies but has failed to gain traction or any widespread usage. As a result, expanding across the continent is still a demanding process that needs to be conducted country by country, adding to the reasons why pan-European tech champions are still a rarity.

Seeing as a new company vehicle would likely facilitate cross-border investments into European startups, the EU Inc petition has been endorsed by entire VC firms and a who’s who of startup founders and investors, such as Niklas Zennström and Patrick Collison. 

One of the petition’s four leaders, entrepreneur-turned-investor Andreas Klinger, is reminded of how all his first companies ended up being UK Ltds because at the time, the ability to distribute options was so tortuous in places like France or Germany. He says the main issues for startups in Europe are “very fundamental structural problems.” He and the EU Inc backers have effectively marched on the EU Commission. “A, the startup community needs this and wants this; B, it has urgency; and C, make sure it’s implemented the right way,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. 

In a recently added roadmap, the EU Inc movement set out the goal to submit its final petition on December 1, with hopes that the new college of EU commissioners taking office then will make it part of its agenda for the next five years. 

It will certainly help that the call has tacit support from inside the house, or rather, the European Commission, with recently commissioned reports from Enrico Letta and Mario Draghi both vowing for a 28th regime, not to mention President Ursula Von der Leyen herself. But with so many problems and sectors competing for attention, the campaign will have to be careful not to lose momentum. Hence the campaign’s call for the European startup ecosystem to unite around the initiative.

Rallying does seem well underway, in no small part by way of French startup and VC lobby organisation France Digitale. Its working document calling for a 28th regime was already in the works before the EU Inc campaign took off, and has now been endorsed by several other startup associations across Europe. 

This kind of national support could be key for success; but perhaps even more so, given the level of detail included in the proposal that France Digitale penned and amended after conversations with peers. For instance, co-author Antoine Latran pointed out to TechCrunch, it calls for a “regulation” rather than a directive to avoid unwanted differences in national transpositions. This is one of the lessons learned from the Societas Europaea, a cross-border legal form that France Digitale says “has proven to be virtually unworkable for startups, SMEs, and high-growth companies.”

EU Inc and its backers are certainly keen to draw from past experiences, including the Not Optional campaign that contributed to improving stock option policies in 11 European countries. Index Ventures partner Martin Mignot told TechCrunch while he and his team are enthusiasts for EU Inc, leading this previous campaign has shown it’s a long road: “With all things lobbying, you have to be willing to go the distance and keep on applying pressure.”

And some observers are concerned the aspiration for the European equivalent of a Delaware company structure will be dragged down by red tape and nation-states. 

“When it comes to the EU Inc, I have my serious doubts that the countries will be able to agree on a common standard which is simple to understand and most importantly not too bureaucratic,” specialist lawyer Steve Jeitler told TechCrunch. An Austria-based partner at law firm E+H Rechtsanwälte, he gave the example of the very different capital maintenance regimes across the EU countries.

“Applying the (strict) Austrian or German capital maintenance regime to each and every EU Inc,” Jeitler wrote, “would make it rather unattractive in countries with a ‘not so strict’ regime.” France Digitale addressed this specific point in its non-paper, calling for a “1€ company.”

Still, there will be many other similar hurdles along the way. “The devil is in the details, and that’s going to be where we’re going to be very, very watchful,” Mignot said.

Brexit is another can of worms, but Mignot is hopeful that the U.K. could still follow suit, “They could say, ‘Look, if you are an EU Inc, it works for us too.’” The EU Inc shares a similar outlook in its FAQ, noting that while “starting EU centric solutions has the biggest leverage,” its focus is “Europe, not the EU.”

Whether it’s Europe or the EU, there’s growing consensus that the region needs to take action not to stay behind. Says deep tech investor Michael Jackson: “Europe is in a much more competitive landscape than it was 30, 40, years ago, right? China is the big panda in the room. You’ve got other parts of the world that are starting to really grow their economies and focus on tech and innovation. Europe can’t be on the sidelines.”

With all that said, it’s hard to contain the enthusiasm of EU Inc campaigners like Klinger: “The crazy thing about all of this is it’s actually going to happen. […] This is us as an industry saying very clearly on one topic, very focused, not like a list of 20 requests, but like one thing, ‘This is important.’ Plus it can become a platform for other important things like stock options, exits, all this kind of stuff that’s very complex in Europe.”

Ever wondered why some of your Instagram videos tend to look blurry, while others are crisp and sharp? It’s because, on Instagram, the quality of your video apparently depends on how many views it’s getting. That’s according to a video AMA from Instagram head Adam Mosseri, in which he explained why some videos are lower-quality than others.

Here’s part of Mosseri’s explanation, from the video, which was reposted by a Threads user today:

In general, we want to show the highest-quality video we can … But if something isn’t watched for a long time — because the vast majority of views are in the beginning — we will move to a lower quality video. And then if it’s watched again a lot then we’ll re-render the higher quality video.

He continues, adding that the platform does this in order to “show people the highest-quality content we can.”

Instagram devotes more resources to videos from “creators who drive more views,” Mosseri wrote later in response to the Threads post containing the clip.

The shift in quality “isn’t huge,” Mosseri said in response to another Threads user, who’d asked if that approach disadvantaged smaller creators. That’s “the right concern,” he told them, but said people interact with videos based on its content, not its quality.

That’s consistent with how Meta has described its approach before. In 2021, the company projected it wouldn’t be able to keep up with the increasing number of videos uploaded to the platform. (Meta estimated last year that it served 4 billion video streams per day on Facebook.)

Meta wrote in a blog that in order to conserve computing resources for the relatively few, most watched videos, it gives fresh uploads the fastest, most basic encoding. After a video “gets sufficiently high watch time,” it receives a more robust encoding pass. Once it gets popular enough, Meta applies its most advanced (read: slowest, most computationally costly) processing to the video. The result, of course, is that the most popular creators tend to have the best-looking videos.

Japan is often seen as a global leader in cutting-edge technology, known for innovations in robotics, electronics, and high-speed trains – however, the country is also known for its tendency to hold onto older technology long after it has been abandoned elsewhere.

Only recently has Japan begun to phase out floppy disks in government offices, and far too many of its laptops and devices still come equipped with legacy features like VGA connectors. Most recently, we covered a PCI Express adapter that adds a parallel port to modern PCs, allowing buyers to connect long-forgotten devices like HP LaserJet or dot matrix printers. For bonus nostalgia points, the driver for it comes on a CD, and it’s compatible with Windows XP and newer.

Coral bleaching has been gaining notoriety as one of the most severe threats to oceans globally. Experts worry 2024 could be the worst year yet with the fourth global coral bleaching event on record impacting reefs in at least 62 countries and territories worldwide.

These warm water anomalies, driven by climate change, threaten the survival of these vital marine ecosystems. Unless significant efforts are made the walk into the future will be slippery.

The coral reefs play a very important role as far as fisheries and tourism are concerned. They safeguard the coast and keep the coastline in check. The coral reefs form the foundation of the marine ecosystem and have their own ecosystem as well. So, if they are bleached then the economy of regions relying on such practices will degrade.

What is coral bleaching?

Corals are invertebrate animals that harbor algae cells called ‘zooxanthellae’ in their tissues. They share a symbiotic relationship and give corals their color. Coral bleaching is a defense mechanism for corals from external stressors.

“Most of the reefs in the Andamans are dying. 2024 might be the worst year in history for the marine ecosystem. The last time coral bleaching was seen as a huge threat was in 2010,” Diksha Dikshit, a marine biologist from the Andamans, told THE WEEK.

When the corals try to conserve their energy there is an expulsion of algae. When these algae are absent from the corals, they lose their color and appear white, this phenomenon is termed as coral bleaching.

A bleached coral is not necessarily dead, if conditions improve the algae will come back into the limestone structure and give back its color. Also, if water temperatures are regulated with enough sunlight to perform photosynthesis, the algae can survive.

A devastating chain reaction

A warming planet means a warming ocean. Coral bleaching impacts people’s livelihoods and food security. Coral reefs and natural barriers keep the coastal communities safe by absorbing the force of waves and storm surges. Without them, manmade seawalls will have to be made which damage the environment and are not cost-efficient.

Coral reefs are home to reef fish that hide in corals from predators or depend on corals for food and predatory fish come to the reef to hunt. Bleached corals alter the food web, breaking links between the food chain. Reef tourism is a major source of revenue and supports thousands of jobs. Bleached coral reefs, devoid of magnificent marine species, jeopardize it all.

Beyond temperature: A multifaceted problem

Corals can also bleach for other reasons like extremely low tides, pollution and lack of sunlight. Increases in intensity of cyclones, ocean acidification, extreme weather events, water pollution, overfishing and coastal development are also taking a toll on coral reefs.

Carbon pollution threatens reefs worldwide and remains their biggest threat. This has led to mass coral bleaching on The Great Barrier Reef and coral reefs globally. Even Chemicals in sunscreens have been proven to be harmful to corals.

“If we continue burning fossil fuels at the current rate then severe bleaching events are likely to hit reefs annually by the middle of the century,” says the Australian Marine Conservation Society.

Beyond the reef: global impacts

There is a significant boom in the diving industry and tourism. Since profitability is considered more important than a degrading environment. Employing individuals who are not trained or educated about the marine ecosystem while hoping to cut costs will cause more harm than good in the long run.

“Divers directly and indirectly have a role to play in bleached corals. Touching or kicking it during dives or equipment being mishandled by people who are not trained professionally can stress the algae on corals,” says Sahil a scuba diving instructor at DIVEIndia since 2012.

The power of change: sustainable practices in tourism and fishing

If we want to find a balance between coral reefs and economic development, we must bring back age-old practices and create a sustainable practice.

Although the profits generated might not be as much as using machinery, they will be healthier and more sustainable for the ecosystem. The fishing practices used currently are not species specific leading to overexploitation.

Exploring artificial reefs as a solution

Human greed must be put to an end if conservation methods must be effective.  “Assisted evolution, wherein more resistant corals are created and genetically modified makes corals adaptable to changing environmental conditions, making artificially modified corals more efficient” says Diksha Dikshit. According to her, although this might be effective, its implementation is not feasible. Considering how it cannot be executed everywhere.

“We thoroughly cleaned paint, oil and other hazardous pollutants from an old scooter and sunk it to the bottom of the ocean in the Andaman Islands. This artificial reef enabled the growth of corals,” Sahil told THE WEEK. 

DIVEIndia is India’s largest dive center, with operations in the Andamans and training centers in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. Andamans marine biodiversity and warm water make it the perfect dive destination They offer dive trips to some of the leading dive destinations across the world. 

They work similarly to ships sunken due to shipwrecks. Corals can settle on these ships and other artificially planted objects and serve as homes to fish and other species.

On June 18, 2011, Thailand’s Department of Marine and Coastal Resources sank the ship off the coast of Koh Tao with the idea of forming a new artificial reef.

“The science behind genetically engineered drought-resistant crops serves as a blueprint for enhancing heat resistant coral reefs,” says a report by storymaps.com”

A beacon of hope: Success stories in coral conservation

A beach in Andaman, home to the Dugongs or sea cows were debated on being open to water sports. Diksha Dikshit was able to gather enough support to ensure that human intervention did not destroy another region in these Islands. Currently without funds or permits conservation efforts in real time are difficult. Wenzel, a marine researcher at the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) has been following a pattern on the archipelago by conducting research on corals through photography in Lakshadweep. The reef ecosystems are photographed and studied in depth through the images. 

Although monsoon showers are a temporary solution, they decrease the water temperature which in turn prevents the corals from bleaching.

“10 days ago, in the Andamans, we experienced a heavy storm. The rain has cooled the water temperature down which has enabled bleached corals to slowly recover. Nature is doing its part, why aren’t we?” A question that leaves Sahil pondering.