Author: NY TIMES

Starship, the gargantuan rocket under development by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, launched on Thursday morning to make a fourth attempt to get to space and back.The previous three flights of the vehicle all ended in explosions, but each got farther than the last. Such progress is regarded as success in SpaceX’s break-it-then-fix-it approach to engineering and has been celebrated by some of the company’s fans. Those include Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, whose agency is depending on Starship to land astronauts on the moon.Here’s what you need to know about today’s ongoing launch attempt.The Starship lifted off and the flight…

The perceptive dramedy “I Used to Be Funny” features a mic-drop performance by Rachel Sennott as a rising stand-up comedian derailed by a vague, internet-viral crime. What happened to Sam (Sennott) is no laughing matter. But she and her fellow comics crack oblique jokes about it, anyway. Making her first feature, the writer-director Ally Pankiw lets most zingers land. Comedy is just how these strivers communicate — it’s how they break awkwardness, bond, fight, forgive and heal.Pankiw warms up the audience with Sam’s roommates Paige and Philip (Sabrina Jalees and Caleb Hearon, both terrific) poking fun at a 14-year-old runaway,…

An Israeli airstrike early Thursday hit a United Nations school complex in central Gaza that had become a shelter for thousands of displaced Palestinians, killing dozens of people. Israel’s military said the attack had targeted Hamas operatives but Palestinian officials said it had killed civilians. The strike was the latest in a deadly surge in fighting in central Gaza, where Israeli forces have announced an offensive against what they describe as a renewed insurgency by Hamas militants. The bodies of more than 40 people killed in the attack were brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central Gaza city of…

An A.I. antitrust fight is coming Nvidia has joined the $3 trillion valuation club as a blistering A.I. rally has turned it into the world’s second-most valuable company behind Microsoft.Both companies are at the center of the artificial intelligence boom that has lifted the wider S&P 500 — and both have attracted regulatory scrutiny of the sector’s biggest players.The F.T.C. and Justice Department are set to proceed with antitrust investigations against the duo, and OpenAI, writes The Times’s David McCabe. The F.T.C. is already looking into Microsoft, according to The Wall Street Journal, over how the company structured a deal…

Days before gadget reviewers weighed in on the Humane Ai Pin, a futuristic wearable device powered by artificial intelligence, the founders of the company gathered their employees and encouraged them to brace themselves. The reviews might be disappointing, they warned.Humane’s founders, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, were right. In April, reviewers brutally panned the new $699 product, which Humane had marketed for a year with ads and at glitzy events like Paris Fashion Week. The Ai Pin was “totally broken” and had “glaring flaws,” some reviewers said. One declared it “the worst product I’ve ever reviewed.”About a week after the…

Richard Gere plays it way too cool as a man learning about the son he didn’t know he had. Source link

A train crash in the Czech Republic late Wednesday killed at least four people and injured more than 20 others, according to officials.A passenger train was bound for Kosice, Slovakia, with roughly 380 passengers on board when it hit a freight train, according to the national Fire and Rescue Service. The crash occurred in Pardubice, a city around 62 miles east of Prague, which is where the passenger train had started its journeyThe accident occurred after the passenger train proceeded down a track despite “a signal in a position prohibiting the passage of an express passenger train,” the transport minister,…

Ruth Whippman had three sons and a lot of questions. In her memoir “Boy Mom,” she hopes to offer parents some of the reporting she gathered on the road to understanding her children. Source link

Last year, my colleague Tara Siegel Bernard and I wrote a series of articles about banks that shut down the checking accounts of scores of everyday citizens and small businesses. There was often no clear reason, explanation or recourse.JPMorgan Chase seemed to have done a lot of this in recent years. Customers would get a call from the bank, or their A.T.M. cards would stop working and then their credit cards would freeze as well.One question that lingered was what the long-term ramifications would be for those whose accounts were closed. Thankfully, people who had experienced this usually weren’t blacklisted…

Installed on vintage hardware at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, laid out chronologically, the first career survey of the innovative Net artist Auriea Harvey tells a story about mortality, and survival.In Harvey’s jewel-box worlds, there aren’t heroes or villains, just people, losing and loving, enmeshed in the slipstream of tech.Harvey, born in 1971 in Indianapolis, helped expand the vistas of digital art — utopias, games, crashes and all. In the 1990s, she created boundary-bending imagery with GIFs, Shockwave animations, and the HTML and Java programming languages. Her sumptuous personal website, Entropy8.com, restored for the show, won…