Families earning $300,000 annually -- placing them among America's highest earners -- are increasingly finding themselves unable to afford elite college tuition without taking on substantial debt. Bloomberg's analysis of financial aid data from 50 selective colleges reveals households earning between $100,000 and $300,000 occupy a precarious middle ground: too affluent for meaningful aid but insufficiently wealthy to absorb annual costs approaching $100,000. The squeeze begins around $150,000 income, where families typically contribute 20% ($30,000) annually toward tuition. At $270,000 income, expected contributions reach $61,000 per year. Most institutions eliminate financial aid entirely at approximately $400,000 income. Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania recently expanded free tuition thresholds to $200,000, acknowledging this middle-class pressure. The changes take effect for 2025-26.

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Microsoft has finally released Windows Recall to the general public, nearly a year after first announcing the controversial feature. Available exclusively on Copilot+ PCs, Recall continuously captures screenshots of user activity, storing them in a searchable database with extracted text. The feature's original launch was derailed by significant security concerns, as critics noted anyone with access to a Recall database could potentially view nearly everything done on the device. Microsoft's revamped version addresses these issues with improved security protections, better content filtering for sensitive information, and crucially, making Recall opt-in rather than opt-out. The rollout includes two additional Copilot+ features: an improved Search function with natural language understanding, and "Click to Do," which enables text copying from images and quick summarization of on-screen content.

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Intel is grappling with an unexpected market shift as customers eschew its new AI-focused processors for cheaper previous-generation chips. The company revealed during its recent earnings call that demand for older Raptor Lake processors has surged while its newer, more expensive Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake AI PC chips struggle to gain traction. This surprising trend, first reported by Tom's Hardware, has created a production capacity shortage for Intel's 'Intel 7' process node that will "persist for the foreseeable future," despite the fact that current-generation chips utilize TSMC's newer nodes. "Customers are demanding system price points that consumers really want," explained Intel executive Michelle Johnston Holthaus, noting that economic concerns and tariffs have affected inventory decisions.

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An anonymous reader shares a Nature story: The United States is known for the deep polarization between its two major political parties -- the right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats. Now an analysis of hundreds of thousands of policy documents reveals striking differences in partisan policymakers' use of the scientific literature, with Democratic-led congressional committees and left-wing think tanks more likely to cite research papers than their right-wing counterparts. The analysis also shows that Democrats and left-leaning think tanks are more likely to cite high-impact research, and that the two political sides rarely cite the same studies or even the same topics. "There are striking differences in amount, content and character of the science cited by partisan policymakers," says Alexander Furnas, a political scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and a co-author of the analysis, published in Science on 24 April. The researchers used the government-policy database Overton to assemble around 50,000 policy documents produced by US congressional committees in 1995-2021 and around 200,000 reports from 121 ideologically driven US think tanks over a similar period. These documents contained 424,000 scientific references. A statistical analysis revealed that congressional reports are now more likely to cite science papers than before. But, in each two-year congressional cycle, documents from committees under Democratic control had a higher probability of citing research papers, and the gap between the two parties has increased. Overall, documents from Democratic-controlled committees were nearly 1.8 times more likely to cite science than were reports from Republican-led ones. The differences were starkest for reports produced by partisan think tanks, which the researchers say are "key resources for partisan policymakers." Left-leaning think tanks were 5 times more likely to cite science than right-leaning ones. And there was little overlap between the science referenced by the two sides: just 5-6% of studies were cited by both groups.

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The head of the Swiss National Bank said on Friday that cryptocurrencies failed to meet the institution's currency reserve standards, rebuffing calls by crypto advocates that it hold bitcoin as a hedge against growing global economic risks. From a report: Cryptocurrency campaigners are ramping up pressure on the SNB to buy bitcoin, arguing that the economic turmoil triggered by U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs made it more important for the central bank to diversify its reserves. They have launched a referendum campaign to change the Swiss constitution and require the SNB to hold bitcoin in its reserves alongside gold. SNB Chairman Martin Schlegel, however, rejected the idea at the central bank's shareholder meeting in Bern.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: At Microsoft's annual executive huddle last month, the company's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users. On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT's growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users. OpenAI's iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft's best hope for a mass-adoption AI tool was idling. It was a sobering chart for Microsoft's consumer AI team and the man who's been leading it for the past year, Mustafa Suleyman. Microsoft brought Suleyman aboard in March of 2024, along with much of the talent at his struggling AI startup Inflection, in return for a $650 million licensing fee that made Inflection's investors whole, and then some. [...] Yet from the very start, people inside the company told me they were skeptical. Many outsiders have struggled to make an impact or even survive at Microsoft, a company that's full of lifers who cut their tech teeth in a different era. My skeptical sources noted Suleyman's previous run at a big company hadn't gone well, with Google stripping him of some management responsibilities following complaints of how he treated staff, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. There was also much eye-rolling at the fact that Suleyman was given the title of CEO of Microsoft AI. That designation is typically reserved for the top executive at companies it acquires and lets operate semi-autonomously, such as LinkedIn or Github.

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Microsoft will remove its Maps app from the Microsoft Store in July 2025, delivering an "update" that renders the application completely nonfunctional. Following the cutoff, users won't be able to reinstall the app even if previously downloaded, according to a Microsoft support document. While the app will retain personal data like saved navigation routes and map URLs, this information will become unusable after the deprecation. The Maps application, a remnant from the Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile era, will disappear completely while Bing Maps will continue functioning as a web service through bing.com/maps. Microsoft hasn't provided specific reasoning for the decision to sunset the desktop application, which has existed as an increasingly anachronistic holdover from Microsoft's abandoned mobile platform efforts.

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The iconic "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" anti-piracy campaign, which dramatically equated digital piracy with physical theft, appears to have used a pirated font in its own materials. New evidence indicates the campaign utilized "XBAND Rough," a free clone of the commercial "FF Confidential" font, which requires a license. TorrentFreak independently confirmed campaign materials from 2005 embedded the XBAND Rough font rather than the original created by Just Van Rossum in 1992. Researchers discovered the font in PDF files hosted on the campaign's official website. Van Rossum, FF Confidential's creator, called the revelation "hilarious" when informed by TorrentFreak. "I knew my font was used for the campaign and that a pirated clone named XBand-Rough existed. I did not know that the campaign used XBand-Rough," he said.

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Pete Koomen, a Y Combinator partner, argues that current AI applications often fail by unnecessarily constraining their underlying models, much like early automobiles that mimicked horse-drawn carriages rather than reimagining transportation. In his detailed critique, Koomen uses Gmail's AI email draft feature as a prime example. The tool generates formal, generic emails that don't match users' actual writing styles, often producing drafts longer than what users would naturally write. The critical flaw, according to Koomen, is that users cannot customize the system prompt -- the instructions that tell the AI how to behave. "When an LLM agent is acting on my behalf I should be allowed to teach it how to do that by editing the System Prompt," Koomen writes. Koomen suggests AI is actually better at reading and transforming text than generating it. His vision for truly useful AI email tools involves automating mundane work -- categorizing, prioritizing, and drafting contextual replies based on personalized rules -- rather than simply generating content from scratch. The essay argues that developers should build "agent builders" instead of agents, allowing users to teach AI systems their preferences and patterns.

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Apple plans to shift the assembly of all US-sold iPhones to India [alternative source] as soon as next year, according to Financial Times, which cites people familiar with the matter, as President Donald Trump's trade war forces the tech giant to pivot away from China. From the report: The push builds on Apple's strategy to diversify its supply chain but goes further and faster than investors appreciate, with a goal to source from India the entirety of the more than 60 million iPhones sold annually in the US by the end of 2026.

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The Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. have withdrawn several statements regarding banks' crypto-related activities in an effort to support innovation and clarify current policies. From a report: Two joint statements from 2023 on liquidity and other risks regarding banks' crypto-related activities were pulled on Thursday, the FDIC said. The move aims to clarify that banking organizations may engage in crypto activities so long as they are consistent with current laws and regulations. Banks may also provide products and services to people and firms engaged in crypto-related activities, the FDIC said. Providing more clarity on banks' crypto activities in the coming weeks and months is being considered, the agencies said.

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Legacy search brand Yahoo has been working on its own web browser prototype, and says it would like to buy Google's Chrome if the company is forced by a court to sell it. From a report: The information came out during the fourth day of the Justice Department's remedies trial to rectify Google's search monopoly. The DOJ has -- among other proposals -- requested Judge Amit Mehta break up Google by requiring it sell its Chrome browser, which the agency says is a key distribution channel for its popular search engine that's amassed too much power for anyone else to compete. Yahoo isn't the only company interested in buying Chrome. While DuckDuckGo's CEO said they wouldn't be able to afford it, witnesses from Perplexity and OpenAI both expressed interest in the popular browser on the stand this week. Yahoo obviously isn't worth Chrome's estimated price tag of tens of billions of dollars. So the company is saying that its owner, the hedge fund giant Apollo, will help bankroll the purchase should the opportunity present itself.

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South Korea's data protection authority said on Thursday that Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek transferred user information and prompts without permission when the service was still available for download in the country's app market. From a report: The Personal Information Protection Commission said in a statement that Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co Ltd did not obtain user consent while transferring personal information to a number of companies in China and the United States at the time of its South Korean launch in January.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple will remove its secret robotics unit from the command of its artificial intelligence chief, the latest shake-up in response to the company's AI struggles. Apple plans to relocate the robotics team from John Giannandrea's AI organization to the hardware division later this month, according to people with knowledge of the move. That will place it under Senior Vice President John Ternus, who oversees hardware engineering, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the change isn't public. The pending shift will mark the second major project to be removed from Giannandrea in the past month: The company stripped the flailing Siri voice assistant from his purview in March.

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India's capital New Delhi plans to limit gasoline and diesel-powered cars a family can buy as well as ban sales of fuel-guzzling motorbikes and scooters, according to a draft policy aimed at cleaning up one of the world's most polluted cities. From a report: The measures represent one of the most drastic steps the city has lined up to tackle pollution, which often forces local authorities to ban some construction, shut schools and disrupt flights in the city of more than 30 million people during the winter season. Under Delhi's new electric vehicle policy, the city government will also waive some local taxes on the purchase of hybrids, putting them on par with concessions given to EVs, while imposing a new levy of 0.5 rupees ($0.0059) on every litre of petrol sales, according to the 74-page draft seen by Reuters. The primary objective "is to unlock the next phase of EV adoption, reduce air pollution and contribute to India's energy independence and net-zero targets," the draft stated.

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Grand Theft Auto V topped Twitch viewership charts in 2024 with a staggering 1.4 billion hours watched, according to data released by the streaming platform. The 11-year-old game outperformed all competitors, including League of Legends, which also surpassed the billion-hour mark. Competitive shooters filled the remaining top spots, with Valorant recording 804 million hours, Fortnite exceeding 500 million, and Call of Duty reaching 451 million hours watched. V-Tubers -- streamers using animated avatars instead of showing their faces -- saw viewership increase by 10% year-over-year, accumulating over a billion hours watched collectively.

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Google's search AI is confidently generating explanations for nonexistent idioms, once again revealing fundamental flaws in large language models. Users discovered that entering any made-up phrase plus "meaning" triggers AI Overviews that present fabricated etymologies with unwarranted authority. When queried about phrases like "a loose dog won't surf," Google's system produces detailed, plausible-sounding explanations rather than acknowledging these expressions don't exist. The system occasionally includes reference links, further enhancing the false impression of legitimacy. Computer scientist Ziang Xiao from Johns Hopkins University attributes this behavior to two key LLM characteristics: prediction-based text generation and people-pleasing tendencies. "The prediction of the next word is based on its vast training data," Xiao explained. "However, in many cases, the next coherent word does not lead us to the right answer."

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Male college enrollment in Lake County, Ohio plummeted by more than 15% over the last decade -- the steepest decline among any large U.S. county. Nationwide, men now constitute virtually the entirety of the 1.2 million student drop in college attendance between 2011 and 2022. Financial concerns dominate decision-making, with even public in-state education costing approximately $25,000 annually. One high school senior secured a $15/hour collision repair job, Bloomberg reports, calculating he'll earn "upwards of a grand every other week" while avoiding student debt. Social media significantly influences these choices. "You see a lot of influencers saying you don't need to go to college, and when people see that, they listen," explained one student from Perry High School.

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US government agencies and Fortune 500 companies are turning to AI to modernize mission-critical systems built on COBOL, a programming language dating back to the late 1950s. The US Social Security Administration plans a three-year, $1 billion AI-assisted upgrade of its legacy COBOL codebase [alternative source], according to Bloomberg. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly stressed the need to overhaul government systems running on COBOL. As experienced programmers retire, organizations face growing challenges maintaining these systems that power everything from banking applications to pension disbursements. Engineers now use tools like ChatGPT and IBM's watsonX to interpret COBOL code, create documentation, and translate it to modern languages.

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The software-as-a-service industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation, abandoning the decades-old "per seat" licensing model in favor of usage-based pricing structures. This shift, Business Insider reports, is primarily driven by the astronomical compute costs associated with new "reasoning" AI models that power modern enterprise software. Unlike traditional generative AI, these reasoning models execute multiple computational loops to check their work -- a process called inference-time compute -- dramatically increasing token usage and operational expenses. OpenAI's o3-high model reportedly consumes 1,000 times more tokens than its predecessor, with a single benchmark response costing approximately $3,500, according to Barclays. Companies including Bolt.new, Vercel, and Monday.com have already implemented usage-based or hybrid pricing models that tie costs directly to AI resource consumption. ServiceNow maintains primarily seat-based pricing but has added usage meters for extreme cases. "When it goes beyond what we can credibly afford, we have to have some kind of meter," ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said, while emphasizing that customers "still want seat-based predictability."

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