Britain breaks solar energy record, Dyson launches £99 handheld fan

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Britain’s sunny spring weather powered the grid to new solar energy records on two consecutive days this week. Solar farms in England, Wales and Scotland generated 14.1GW of low-carbon electricity at lunchtime on Monday, surpassing the previous high of 14GW in July last year. And that record was toppled a day later when power generation from the sun’s energy climbed to another new high of 14.4GW on Tuesday afternoon. The electricity system operator confirmed the new high as the government approved plans for the UK’s biggest solar farm to go ahead in Lincolnshire. The Guardian

If you own a MacBook Neo ($599 on Amazon), a MacBook Pro or even an iMac and rarely restart this computer, you will often notice the device slows down after a few weeks while some apps no longer work as expected. Photon has now identified a bug that effectively acts like a time bomb and is likely to be responsible for some of these problems. This bug means that after exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes and 47.296 seconds from the moment a Mac is switched on, network connections are no longer terminated correctly. Notebook Check 

We’re finally getting our first spritz of warmer weather, and if you’re already feeling the heat, Dyson is launching its first handheld fan just in time for the summer. Handheld fans were absolutely everywhere last year, and it doesn’t look like the trend is slowing down anytime soon. King of air treatment Dyson has launched the hushjet mini cool, a handheld fan that can be worn around your neck or placed on a desk. Boasting multiple airflow settings, quiet performance and up to six hours of battery life, the hushjet mini cool launches in May for £99. Independent 

For years now, hallucinations have been the big concern with AI models. Their capacity for simply making things up means that you can never 100% rely on them for an answer without checking it. Now, new research from Anthropic suggests that we’ve reached the point where we’re going to have to learn to also deal with AI’s ability to conceal what it has done as well. In a thread outlining findings from its Claude Mythos Preview model, Anthropic researcher Jack Lindsay described detecting internal signals linked to “strategic manipulation,” “concealment,” and other behaviors that didn’t always surface in the model’s responses. Tech Radar 

Insta360 just announced the Snap, a new smartphone accessory designed to improve the quality of your selfies. It works like a digital mirror magnetically attached to the back of your Android or iOS smartphone so you can preview and properly frame shots using its more capable rear cameras, while touchscreen functionality lets you control camera apps without having to constantly flip your phone around. The Verge 

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and the public face of ChatGPT, has carved out an image for himself as one of the preeminent AI whisperers of our age, whose influence supposedly extends to the White House on the strength of his ideas alone. Or at least that’s the image he’s managed to cultivate. A new exposé in the New Yorker paints a different portrait, and it’s substantially more vexing. Drawing on interviews with numerous OpenAI insiders who worked with Altman, the article portrays the CEO not as a technical wiz, but as a skilled manipulator — and one with a surprisingly shallow grasp of the AI systems his company is building. Futurism 

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