The Maritime Transportation Security Act (MTSA) requires plans to protect OT systems, audits by independent third parties, and a hybrid OT-security role.

Plus: How to use Claude Routines, Gemini comes to desktop, Square's Managerbot offers a refreshing alternative to Chat boxes

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The problem with thinking you’re part Neanderthal There’s a theory that many of us have an “inner Neanderthal.” The idea is that Homo sapiens and a cousin species once bred, leaving…

Calling a large language model API at scale is expensive and slow.

Architectures, pitfalls, and patterns that work The post A Practical Guide to Memory for Autonomous LLM Agents appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Abhinav Parmar / Reuters: Counterpoint: India's smartphone shipments fell 3% YoY in Q1 2026, a six-year low, as price hikes weigh on sales; 80+ smartphone models saw price hikes of ~15%  —  India's smartphone shipments fell 3% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, marking their weakest quarterly performance …

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Financial Times: SynMax: ~40% of US data centers due in 2026 are facing delays, with major sites for Microsoft, OpenAI, and others likely set back by more than three months  —  Delays to a swath of new US data centres threaten to slow the rollout of AI by the world's biggest tech companies …

Here's which players are winning the race to transition to post-quantum crypto.

Several multibillion-dollar megadeals drove a spike in first-quarter investment in autonomous vehicles, signaling that investors aren't just paying for research, but betting on companies that are ready to scale up and put their AI technology into actual cars people can buy or hail.

AI cybersecurity is shifting from model performance to deployment strategy. Explore how access models (OpenAI and Anthropic) are shaping security

Axios: Sources: Dario Amodei is set to meet with WH Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on Friday, a breakthrough in Anthropic's effort to resolve its fight with the Pentagon  —  Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is scheduled to walk into the West Wing on Friday for a meeting with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles …

Financial Times: Uber agrees to pay ~€270M for an additional 4.5% stake in German food delivery rival Delivery Hero from Prosus, which would bring its total stake to ~7%  —  German delivery group's largest shareholder Prosus has agreed to reduce its stake over EU competition concerns

The handsome new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, by the tech industry legend Stewart Brand, promises to be the first in a series offering “a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance.” One of Brand’s several biographers described him as a mainstay of both counterculture and cyberculture, and with Maintenance, Brand wants us…

Roboticists used to dream big but build small. They’d hope to match or exceed the extraordinary complexity of the human body, and then they’d spend their career refining robotic arms for auto plants. Aim for C-3P0; end up with the Roomba.  The real ambition for many of these researchers was the robot of science fiction—one…

Bloomberg: Sources: Sequoia raised ~$7B for a new fund, the first fundraising round under its new leadership; the firm's last expansion fund was a $3.4B vehicle in 2022  —  Sequoia Capital, one of the largest and most prominent venture capital firms, has raised about $7 billion for a new fund according …

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PLUS: Run an LLM on your laptop for free with Ollama

Citadel Chief People Officer Alexander DiLeonardo Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty Images Citadel Chief People Officer Alexander DiLeonardo says in a way he's looking for managers "from day one." In an agentic AI world, he wants employees who understand how to delegate work to humans and tech. His comments show how AI is continuing to revolutionize the workforce. Citadel Securities' Alexander DiLeonardo wants new employees ready to manage on day 1, because in this AI world, they probably will. "In a way, you're almost hiring managers from day one," DiLeonardo, Citadel Securities' chief people officer, said Thursday during a panel discussion at Semafor's World Economy Summit in Washington, DC. DiLeonardo, who said he had just returned from speaking with students in Boston, said that at a time "when technical skills are being commoditized to an extent," he's focused on broader traits. "You assess on behavioral characteristics that are more intrinsic and more broad," he said. "Those are things like creativity, leadership potential, raw problem-solving ability, commerciality." DiLeonardo said leadership qualities are valuable right now because even entry-level employees are doing some degree of management when they delegate tasks out to AI agents. "You need to bring people in who can think about, 'How do I organize the problem? How do I disaggregate the work? How do I assign that to different people, as well as technology tools that can get that work done?" he said. "And then, what's the cadence of kind of, like, performance management, checking on both the people and the technology tools as that progresses." The characteristics DiLeonardo is looking for largely echo what hiring managers at the market maker previously told Business Insider they want when hiring software engineers. The difference is that, with the advent of agentic AI, non-technical jobs arguably require more technical skills than ever before. It's not just Citadel Securities either. Business Insider has previously reported that big firms like Meta and McKinsey are revamping their interview processes to ensure prospective workers can demonstrate they are truly AI adept. DiLeonardo said if employers shift their parameters to meet the current moment, they can find workers who meet a high technical bar, as well as those who are very adaptable and "can be the future leaders of your organization." At the same time, he said firms need to understand how to meet the expectations of students who are eager to get to work. "We spend a lot of time as an organization underwriting what every single individual who enters our organization from campus does in their first year," DiLeonardo said. "It's not about, 'oh, here's some extra capacity." Read the original article on Business Insider

Getty Images When Massiel Lugo's parents moved to Jackson Heights, Queens, from the Dominican Republic nearly 50 years ago, the working-class neighborhood was an affordable place to raise a family. Now that Lugo is in her early 30s and raising her own two kids in the same neighborhood, that's increasingly not the case. Though she took over her aunt's lease and the landlord hasn't raised the rent to market rate, Lugo's approximately $1,700 a month rent still adds up to more than 30% of her income, the threshold at which housing experts generally define housing as unaffordable. Rents all around her have soared — data from StreetEasy indicates median rent in Jackson Heights rose about 26% between 2020 and 2025 — pushing more households into the rent-burdened category. Lugo worries she'll never be able to afford to move. "At the end of the day, it's home, but it has changed so much," Lugo said. A growing share of New Yorkers are struggling to afford life in one of the most expensive cities in the world — and the rising cost of housing is a big part of that. Once-affordable neighborhoods from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to Jackson Heights, have been gentrified by higher-income newcomers fleeing costlier areas, prompting the question: Who can afford the concrete jungle anymore? Where NYC rents are sky high New York City's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, was elected on a pledge to make the city affordable for working-class New Yorkers again, including by freezing rents on the city's nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments and fast-tracking housing construction on city-owned land. "As many working people know, it is increasingly impossible to find an affordable home in New York City, to build a dignified life without making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year," Mamdani said during a press conference. More than half of New York City's tenants are rent-burdened, and nearly 30% of renters fork over more than half their income on housing each month, comparable to the share of cost-burdened renters in the country as a whole. The vast majority of rent-burdened New Yorkers make far less than the median income, but a substantial share of middle- and higher-income renters and homeowners are cost-burdened, too. Analyzing data from the Census Bureau's 2019-2023 American Community Survey, we found that most New York City neighborhoods have a significant population of both renters and homeowners who are cost-burdened, with that share concentrated in the outer boroughs. Few parts of the city are in the clear. "A high-income household that's paying 40% of income toward housing probably can still afford medication and afford food," said Emily Goldstein, director of organizing and advocacy at Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, a coalition of housing groups. Homebuilding isn't keeping up with the city For decades, New York City has not built enough new homes, creating a severe shortage that's driven up rents and home prices. Between 2011 and 2023, the city added 895,000 new jobs, but only about 350,000 new homes. The city's housing vacancy rate fell to 1.4% in 2023 — the lowest since 1968 — and far below the widely considered healthy vacancy rate of 5 to 8%. The housing that's been built in recent years is dominated by higher-end one- and two-bedroom apartments designed for higher earners. While the median renter household in the city makes about $70,000, the median rent citywide is about $4,400 per month, or $52,800 a year — significantly above the recommended 30% of income max spend on housing. New Yorkers who made the city's average wage of around $88,600 in 2023 could afford less than 5% of rentals on the market that year, according to Streeteasy. Essential workers making typical wages could afford less than 1% of rentals. We want to hear about how your city is trying to make more life affordable. Fill out this form if you have a story to share. Family-sized apartments with two or three bedrooms are especially hard to come by. The cost crisis is pushing many out of the city, particularly families with young children and lower-income Black and Hispanic residents, according to a 2024 study by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. New Yorkers who manage to find larger apartments tend to hang onto them — more than 40% of apartments with three or more bedrooms have been occupied by the same tenants for more than a decade. Mamdani has made big promises on housing affordability, some of which would require state approval, including freezing rents on rent-stabilized apartments, which have gone up between 2.75% and 3.25% for one-year leases over the last couple years. His campaign also promised that the city government would build 200,000 permanently affordable housing units over 10 years. Those moves are not without their critics — landlords who own rent-stabilized units are worried about keeping up with their own bills, and building new housing is notoriously difficult in a city where many stakeholders have veto points. "There's no question that the majority of New Yorkers are struggling with housing costs, and that, especially in the last election, we saw a really clear mandate that voters want the government to do everything in their power to address the cost of living and affordability," said Annemarie Gray, the executive director of Open New York, a nonprofit group that supports housing development, who's also advised Mamdani's team. Gray said the city needs to add about 500,000 new homes — market-rate and affordable — over the next decade to bring down housing costs. In late 2024, the city enacted a sweeping zoning reform package, known as "City of Yes," designed to pave the way for 80,000 new homes across the city over 15 years. Gray called the potential impact of those reforms "a drop in the bucket." "There are not nearly enough types of housing of different sizes, of different scales, that are meeting different income levels," Gray said. The real estate industry is pushing for more subsidies for new housing, continued zoning reforms, and fewer regulations that slow down construction. The Real Estate Board of New York, an industry lobbying and advocacy group, released a report in December that concluded it takes, on average, 3.4 years to build a new apartment building or four years if it's in Manhattan. "We must strengthen existing financing tools to promote new construction, expand development opportunities through zoning, and streamline the permitting process," said Basha Gerhards, REBNY's executive vice president of public policy. When affordable housing isn't really affordable Much of the subsidized affordable housing that's been built in recent years — largely by private developers with government incentives — isn't affordable enough for many lower-income, rent-burdened New Yorkers. Freezing rents for stabilized units, which are disproportionately home to lower-income New Yorkers, would prevent some New Yorkers from being forced out of their homes because they can't afford rent, advocates say. "At an individual level, freezing rents is actually an eviction prevention approach," Goldstein said. Lugo wouldn't directly benefit from a rent freeze since her apartment isn't rent-stabilized. She dreams of moving to Bayside, a wealthier, more suburban part of Queens, but housing and transportation costs out there would be even higher. She doesn't think she can find a better deal on any similarly sized apartment in a comparable neighborhood in the city. For now, she's sticking it out. "I know I am very fortunate with the apartment that I have," she said. Read the original article on Business Insider