Tech

Elon Musk plans to charge new X users to enable posting

Published

2 years ago

April 16, 2024

In a setback for new X users, Elon Musk has revealed they might face charges for posting content on the social platform. Responding to a user on X, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX mentioned that regrettably, “a small fee for new user write access is the only way to combat the continuous influx of bots.”

Musk added, “Current AI (and troll farms) can effortlessly bypass ‘are you a bot’.”

He also noted that the surge of fake accounts depletes the available namespace, “resulting in many good handles being taken.

In October of last year, the platform started charging new unverified users $1 annually in New Zealand and the Philippines.

Earlier this month, the Musk-led platform declared a massive clean-up of spam accounts.

Numerous X users saw a drop in followers as the social media platform initiated the process to eliminate bots.

This move was prompted by a surge of spam and porn bots flooding the platform in recent months, leaving users puzzled.

Musk had announced that a sweeping purge of bots and trolls was in progress.

Tech

Sri Lanka leads South Asia in AI job growth, ranks second in ChatGPT usage: World Bank

Published

2 weeks ago

October 27, 2025

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Sri Lanka has emerged as one of South Asia’s most AI-exposed economies, with strong growth in artificial intelligence–related jobs but also mounting risks of job displacement, according to the World Bank’s South Asia Development Update: Jobs, AI, and Trade (October 2025).

The report’s latest chapter, “Artificial Intelligence, Real Impact: Labor Market Implications of AI Adoption in South Asia,” finds that Sri Lanka and Bhutan have the highest AI exposure in the region, reflecting their relatively skilled and educated workforces.

“Within South Asia, exposure varies by country: Nepal has the lowest average exposure, while Bhutan and Sri Lanka exhibit the highest exposure rates, reflecting their relatively more skilled and educated workforces,” the report states.

Tech

BYD breaks record for world’s fastest car

Published

1 month ago

September 26, 2025

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BYD’s Yangwang U9 “Xtreme” supercar recorded a blistering top speed of 496.22km/h (308 miles per hour) at a test track in Germany earlier this month, the Chinese EV maker said.

That’s a record for a production car, handily beating the 490.5 km/h (304.7 mph) set by Bugatti’s Chiron Super Sport in 2019 and marking the first time the title of world’s fastest car has been held by an EV.

The Xtreme is a high-performance version of Yangwang U9, BYD’s pothole-jumping hypercar, which costs around $233,000 in China.

BYD said just 30 units of the ultra-fast variant, which features an upgraded powertrain and battery system, will be made.

It means that as well as boasting the world’s cheapest EVs, China is now home to the fastest.

Tech

Sri Lanka launches largest Sinhala LLM with 10 million sentences (SinLlama)

Published

2 months ago

August 30, 2025

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Research students at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa have developed the country’s first large-scale large language model (LLM) that exclusively include Sinhala, a breakthrough in advancing local language computing.

This project was jointly supervised by Dr Surangika Ranathunga (Massey University, New Zealand), Dr Nisansa de Silva (University of Moratuwa) and Dr Rishemjit Kaur (Central Scientific Instruments Organisation, India).

The model, named “SinLlama,” was built by continually pre-training Llama-3-8B with nearly 10 million Sinhala sentences. According to the research team, SinLlama is the largest Sinhala LLM to date and has already outperformed Llama-3-8B on Sinhala text classification benchmarks.