Month: January 2025

Substack is spending $20 million to court TikTokers

by

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Meta and YouTube aren’t the only platforms looking to benefit from TikTok potentially disappearing — Substack wants in on the action, too. The company announced Thursday it’s launching a $20 million “creator accelerator fund,” promising content creators they won’t lose revenue by jumping ship to Substack. Creators … Read more

Fitbit fined $12 million for Ionic smartwatches that burned 78 people

by

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Fitbit is paying a $12.25 million fine over its Ionic smartwatches, which the company recalled in 2022 after reports that the watches’ lithium-ion batteries overheated and, in some cases, burned customers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has provisionally accepted the settlement. The commission worked with Fitbit to recall … Read more

Google’s Identity Check for Android keeps phone thieves out of your digital accounts

by

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is officially launching a new Android security feature for Pixel devices with Android 15 to prevent phone thieves from accessing your digital accounts. The feature, called Identity Check, requires biometric authentication to access some account and device settings when you’re not at a trusted location (such as … Read more

Deep Mutual Learning Optimizes Multi-Task Recommender Systems with Cross Task Feature Mining

by

Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction Methodology Experiments Conclusion and References 2. METHODOLOGY In this section, we first introduce the problem of multi-objective ranking for recommender systems. Second, we describe the general design of DML. Finally, we elaborate on the introduced components. 2.1 Multi-Objective Ranking for Recsys 2.2 Overall Design of DML Please refer … Read more

DML Boosts Multi-Task Recommender Performance with Enhanced Models and Real-World Gains

by

Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction Methodology Experiments Conclusion and References 3. EXPERIMENTS In this section, we conduct extensive offline experiments[1] and online A/B testing to prove DML’s effectiveness. 3.1 Experimental Settings for Public Data 3.1.1 Datasets. We evaluate our methods on two public datasets. • MovieLens-1M[8]: One of the currently released MovieLens datasets, … Read more

DML Revolutionizes Multi-Task Learning with Proven Effectiveness and Real-World Deployment

by

Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction Methodology Experiments Conclusion and References 4. CONCLUSION In this paper, we propose the framework of Deep Mutual Learning across task towers(DML), which is compatible with various backbone multi-task networks. Extensive offline experiments help to verify DML’s effectiveness on multiple real-world datasets and across various base models. Moreover, thorough … Read more

New Framework for Deep Mutual Learning (DML) to Improve Multi-task Recommender Systems

by

:::info Authors: (1) Yi Ren, Tencent, Beijing, China (yiren_bj@outlook.com); (2) Ying Du, Tencent, Beijing, China (yingdu@tencent.com); (3) Bin Wang, Tencent, Beijing, China (hillmwang@tencent.com); (4) Shenzheng Zhang, Tencent, Beijing, China (qjzcyzhang@tencent.com). ::: Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction Methodology Experiments Conclusion and References ABSTRACT Recommender systems usually leverage multi-task learning methods to simultaneously optimize several … Read more

Building a Web App? This Method Makes It Faster, Safer, and Smarter

by

Optimizing the development workflow of a project is important to ship faster and better. In this article, you’ll explore how to set up an optimal local development environment for a Next.js project using Neon Postgres and deploying it to Vercel. The emphasis is on best practices and opinionated—thus, the article will cover local development and … Read more

Android 16’s first beta version brings iOS-style live notifications

by

After releasing two developer beta versions last year, Google introduced the first public beta for Android 16 on Thursday. New features include live updates on the lock screen (like Live Activities on iOS), Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec for high-quality video recording, and a framework for developers to make their apps adaptable for different screen … Read more

Android 16’s first public beta adds Google’s more limited take on live lockscreen notifications

by

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Android 16’s first public beta will start rolling out later today, bringing with it dynamic lockscreen notifications for ride-sharing and food delivery, following yesterday’s reveal of a similar feature in Samsung’s Galaxy S25 phones. The new beta also forces apps to be resizable, a move to make sure they … Read more

Binance Labs Gets Major Overhaul With CZ Taking Active Role in Investments

by

Binance Labs, the former investment arm of exchange giant Binance, gets a major overhaul under a new name, YZi Labs, with former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao being closely involved in the operations, the firm announced on Thursday. The rebrand means that the investment firm turns from being the exchange’s venture capital arm into the … Read more

Substack introduces a $20M funding guarantee to entice creators to migrate to its platform

by

Substack on Thursday announced the launch of its Creator Accelerator Fund, which provides a $20 million funding guarantee aimed at helping creators grow their audience and move their paid subscribers from another subscription-based platform to Substack. The company says the fund is designed to ensure that creators will retain all of their current revenue during … Read more

X sees a jump in consumer spending on mobile, despite decline in daily active users

by

Social network X has grown its in-app revenue over the past year, despite a decline in active users, new data shows. Global consumer spending in the X mobile app across both iOS and Android has climbed by 76.3% year-over-year, when comparing two similar periods in January, according to data from app intelligence firm Appfigures. However, … Read more

A New (Digital) Age at the SEC

by

As technology evolves, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) must evolve with it. Nowhere is this truer than in crypto, and now: The market for crypto assets has grown in size and sophistication such that the SEC’s recent harmful approach of enforcement and abdication of regulation needs urgent updating. While the long-term future of … Read more