Month: April 2025

Yemenis are turning to DeFi as US sanctions target Houthi group

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Yemeni citizens are increasingly using decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols to bank themselves amid US sanctions aimed at the Houthi group, which they have deemed a terrorist organization.  In the past, internet infrastructure challenges and low financial literacy among the war-torn population contributed to relatively limited crypto adoption, according to an April 17 report from blockchain … Read more

Saylor, ETF investors’ ‘stronger hands’ help stabilize Bitcoin — Analyst

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Bitcoin’s relatively stable price movements despite macroeconomic uncertainty is likely due to resilient spot Bitcoin ETF holders and Michael Saylor’s firm continuing to buy aggressively, according to a Bloomberg analyst. “The ETFs and Saylor have been buying up all ‘dumps’ from the tourists, FTX refugees, GBTC discounters, legal unlocks, govt confiscations and Lord knows who … Read more

Galaxy Research proposes new voting system to reduce Solana inflation

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Crypto research firm Galaxy Research has made a proposal to adjust the voting system that decides the outcome of future Solana inflation following the failure to come to a consensus in a previous vote. On April 17, Galaxy introduced a Solana proposal called “Multiple Election Stake-Weight Aggregation” (MESA) to reduce the inflation rate of its … Read more

TnT-LLM: LLMs for Automated Text Taxonomy and Classification

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Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction 2 Related Work 3 Method and 3.1 Phase 1: Taxonomy Generation 3.2 Phase 2: LLM-Augmented Text Classification 4 Evaluation Suite and 4.1 Phase 1 Evaluation Strategies 4.2 Phase 2 Evaluation Strategies 5 Experiments and 5.1 Data 5.2 Taxonomy Generation 5.3 LLM-Augmented Text Classification 5.4 Summary of Findings and … Read more

Slovenia’s finance ministry floats 25% tax on crypto transactions

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Slovenia’s Finance Ministry is considering a possible 25% tax on crypto trading profits for residents in the country under a new draft law now open for public consultation.  The bill proposes to tax traders when they sell their cryptocurrency for fiat or pay for goods and services, but crypto-to-crypto and transfers between wallets owned by … Read more

TnT-LLM: Automating Text Taxonomy Generation and Classification With Large Language Models

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Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction 2 Related Work 3 Method and 3.1 Phase 1: Taxonomy Generation 3.2 Phase 2: LLM-Augmented Text Classification 4 Evaluation Suite and 4.1 Phase 1 Evaluation Strategies 4.2 Phase 2 Evaluation Strategies 5 Experiments and 5.1 Data 5.2 Taxonomy Generation 5.3 LLM-Augmented Text Classification 5.4 Summary of Findings and … Read more

Batched Prompting for Efficient GPT-4 Annotatio

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:::info Authors: (1) Corby Rosset, Microsoft Research and Correspondence to corbyrosset@microsoft.com; (2) Ching-An Cheng, Microsoft Research; (3) Arindam Mitra, Microsoft Research; (4) Michael Santacroce, Microsoft Research; (5) Ahmed Awadallah, Microsoft Research and Correspondence to hassanam@microsoft.com; (6) Tengyang Xie, Microsoft Research and Correspondence to tengyangxie@microsoft.com. ::: Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction 2 PreliminariesDirect Nash … Read more

How to Set Up Simhub With Gran Turismo 7

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In the world of sim racing, having real-time data at your fingertips can enhance your gaming experience significantly. When I first started sim racing with Gran ==Turismo== 3, there was no external telemetry support. Unlike PC-based games, this telemetry data was only available to console users until recently. In an undocumented feature, Gran ==Turismo== 7 … Read more

Bitcoin dip buyers nibble at BTC range lows but are risk off until $90K becomes support

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Bitcoin’s (BTC) realized market cap reached a new all-time high of $872 billion, but data from Glassnode reflects investors’ lack of enthusiasm at BTC’s current price levels. In a recent X post, the analytics platform pointed out that despite the realized cap milestone, the monthly growth rate of the metric has dropped to 0.9% month … Read more

Kyrgyzstan’s president signs CBDC law giving ‘digital som’ legal status

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Kyrgyzstan President Sadyr Zhaparov has signed a constitutional law authorizing the launch of a central bank digital currency pilot project while also giving the “digital som” — the national currency in digital form — legal tender status. The law gives the National Bank of the Kyrgyz Republic the exclusive right to issue the digital som, … Read more

What Is Go Protobuf? Exploring The New Opaque API

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[Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is Google’s language-neutral data interchange format. See protobuf.dev.] Back in March 2020, we released the google.golang.org/protobuf module, a major overhaul of the Go Protobuf API. This package introduced first-class support for reflection, a dynamicpb implementation and the protocmp package for easier testing. That release introduced a new protobuf module with a new … Read more

The Ethics Board of Axon Resigned Over Taser-Armed Drones – Then the Company Went Even Further

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This article was co-published with WIRED. Less than 10 days after the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, late last May, Axon Enterprises CEO Rick Smith announced the company had formally started developing Taser-equipped drones. The technology, Smith argued, could potentially save lives during future mass shootings by incapacitating active shooters within seconds. For Axon, … Read more

CFPB workers are receiving mass layoff notices

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is sending out mass layoff notices that appear to be in defiance of a court order blocking further layoffs following DOGE-induced cuts.  “I regret to inform you that you are affected by a reduction in force (RIF) action,” says a notice reviewed by The Verge that was sent by … Read more