In a cozy cafe in Amsterdam, with plush sofas and warm lighting, a group of people sit around talking, laughing, and playing board games. But something noticeable is missing. There is not a single phone in sight. It's one of a regular series of community events held by the burgeoning Offline Club, where members pay around $8.00 to leave their phone in a lock box at the door and spend the next few hours unplugged. Demand is growing rapidly. What started as a local initiative is quickly turning into a global movement with regular events hosted in cafes, churches, and town halls selling out fast across the UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Yondr, founded in the US, partners with comedy clubs, arenas, clubs, and schools to organize phone-free events. Jack White, Bob Dylan, Garth Brooks, John Mayer, Madonna, and Adele have all implemented cell phone bans at their concerts so they could stop looking out at a sea of blinking smartphones, and to help the audience to connect by disconnecting. Meetup, the global platform that enables over 60 million people to use the internet to get off the internet and meet up in the real world, had a 19 percent rise in registrations in 2023. The latest Meetup Measurement Report showed that the number one reason people use the platform is to find meaningful connections in person, a 50 percent rise over previous years. 'Friends' is the most popular search term for events, and 'Book Club' is back in the top 10....

For instance, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and in particular co-founder Marc Andreessen, is repeatedly being mentioned. He, along with Antonio Gracias and Joe Lonsdale, are reportedly being asked to help with Musk's advisory panel, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is examining ways to overcome the technical challenges of collecting data about federal programs, reported the Washington Post on Sunday. Gracias is co-founder of Valor Equity Partners, which has done well backing Musk companies over the years, including SpaceX and Tesla (the latter where he was on the board of directors from 2007 to 2021). Lonsdale is co-founder of VC firm 8VC and an active backer of defense tech like Anduril and other government tech, like financial software provider OpenGov. Lonsdale worked under billionaire VC Peter Thiel and helped co-found Palantir. Andreessen Horowitz has been a big-time investor in SpaceX since around 2022 and buys more stock as it can, TechCrunch previously reported, and Andreessen has been a vocal supporter of Musk....

Developed by Alibaba's Qwen team, QwQ-32B-Preview contains 32.5 billion parameters and can consider prompts up ~32,000 words in length; it performs better on certain benchmarks than o1-preview and o1-mini, the two reasoning models that OpenAI has released so far. (Parameters roughly correspond to a model's problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters. OpenAI does not disclose the parameter count for its models.) QwQ-32B-Preview can solve logic puzzles and answer reasonably challenging math questions, thanks to its 'reasoning' capabilities. But it isn't perfect. Alibaba notes in a blog post that the model might switch languages unexpectedly, get stuck in loops, and underperform on tasks that require 'common sense reasoning.' Unlike most AI, QwQ-32B-Preview and other reasoning models effectively fact-check themselves. This helps them avoid some of the pitfalls that normally trip up models, with the downside being that they often take longer to arrive at solutions. Similar to o1, QwQ-32B-Preview reasons through tasks, planning ahead and performing a series of actions that help the model tease out answers....

Faeces and vomit fossils from dinosaurs reveal how the animals evolved to rule Earth. The study, which was published in Nature on 27 November, analysed hundreds of pieces of fossilized digestive material, called bromalites, to reconstruct what dinosaurs ate and how this changed1. The fossils reveal that the rise of the dinosaurs, over millions of years during the Triassic period, was influenced by factors including climate change and other species' extinction. 'Our study shows that you can use pretty seemingly unremarkable fossils to get pretty remarkable results,' says co-author Martin Qvarnstrom, who studies early dinosaur evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden. Palaeontologists have come up with differing theories for how dinosaurs became the dominant species on Earth. Dinosaurs might have overtaken their rivals because they were particularly able to adapt to a changing ecosystem, for instance, or because random environmental changes favoured them over other species. But there isn't a single hypothesis that fully explains their rise to dominance....