Science and Technology

California has long championed renewable energy, but a change in the state’s policies last year has led to a sharp decline in the installation of residential rooftop solar in the state.Thousands of companies — including installers, manufacturers and distributors — are reeling from the new policy, which took effect in April and greatly reduced incentives that had encouraged homeowners to install solar panels. Since the change, sales of rooftop solar installations in California dropped as much as 85 percent in some months of 2023 from a year earlier, according to a report by Ohm Analytics, a research firm that tracks…

For more than a decade, Apple was the stock market’s undisputed king. It first overtook Exxon Mobil as the world’s most valuable public company in 2011 and held the title almost without interruption.But a transfer of power has begun.On Friday, Microsoft surpassed Apple, claiming the crown after its market value surged by more than $1 trillion over the past year. Microsoft finished the day at $2.89 trillion, higher than Apple’s $2.87 trillion, according to Bloomberg.The change is part of a reordering of the stock market that was set in motion by the advent of generative artificial intelligence. The technology, which…

El gusto de Taylor Swift por Le Creuset es real: su colección de utensilios de cocina ha aparecido en una cuenta de Tumblr dedicada a la decoración del hogar de la estrella del pop, se evidencia en los regalos de boda que le dio a una seguidora y en un documental de Netflix que fue destacado en la página de Facebook de Le Creuset.Lo que no es real es el supuesto patrocinio de Swift hacia los productos de la empresa, que en las últimas semanas han aparecido en anuncios publicados en Facebook y otros medios en los que sale su…

OpenAI said on Monday that a New York Times lawsuit against it was “without merit” and that it supported and created opportunities for news organizations, as it waded further into a debate over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Dec. 27, accusing the companies of infringing on its copyrights by using millions of its articles to train A.I. technologies like the ChatGPT chatbot. Chatbots now compete with The Times as a source of reliable information, the lawsuit said.In a 1,000-word blog post on Monday, OpenAI said it collaborated with…

This time of year, everyone asks what you like least about your life, but they phrase it as, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?”My biggest regret of 2023 was my relationship to my smartphone, or my “tech appendage” as I’ve named it in my iPhone settings. My Apple Screen Time reports regularly clocked in at more than five hours a day.That’s only an hour more than the average American, but I still found it staggering to think that I spent the equivalent of January, February and half of March looking at that tiny screen (April too, if we only count waking…

The Justice Department is in the late stages of an investigation into Apple and could file a sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company’s strategies to protect the dominance of the iPhone as soon as the first half of this year, said three people with knowledge of the matter.The agency is focused on how Apple has used its control over its hardware and software to make it more difficult for consumers to ditch the company’s devices, as well as for rivals to compete, said the people, who spoke anonymously because the investigation was active.Specifically, investigators have examined how the…