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The New York-Los Angeles rivalry may have existed before the Brooklyn Dodgers packed up and moved west in 1958, but that seismic shift certainly didn’t help. America’s two biggest cities are at it again, with baseball at the fore. The Big Apple and The City of Angels are currently going head-to-head in the World Series (with the Dodgers v. the Yankees, with game 5 tonight in New York; Dodgers lead 3-1), but they’ve also been duking it out for weeks online over stadiums, accessibility, and transit.

Los Angeles’s Metro, which operates the city’s bus and train lines, inadvertently stepped into it earlier this month when the agency tweeted an informational video on how to walk to Dodger Stadium. The stadium is disconnected from the city’s train lines and perched on a notoriously hard-to-navigate hill in the Echo Park neighborhood.

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New Yorkers guffawed at the circuitous, 25-minute walk that includes traversing past impatient drivers and stepping over cracked, narrow sidewalks before finally reaching the Chinatown A Line station. Metro fended off some criticism by pointing out its Dodger Express service, a free bus shuttle from two different city spots. The buses are popular, yet far from efficient, often getting caught in traffic out of the stadium (the buses have dedicated lanes prior to the games).   

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While there is a proposal to build a gondola (yes, a gondola) from L.A.’s Union Station to Dodger Stadium, the lack of direct rail transit is a bugaboo for Los Angeles, which has managed to build 109 miles of rail in 34 years, connecting places like Hollywood, Inglewood, Santa Monica, and Downtown L.A. (Beverly Hills will even get a subway stop next year). While many Angelenos are making the arduous walk work, according to the New York Times, Yankees fans benefit from New York’s more robust system, only having to walk a few hundred feet from the 161 St./Yankee Stadium station in the Bronx that serves the D and 4 lines.

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On Monday, shots were fired at New York by Eric Spillman, a reporter at Los Angeles’s KTLA. 

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Of course, New York had to respond. It wasn’t from the MTA, but the NYC DOT, which oversees all public transit in the metropolis. And they brought AI into it!

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We can all agree that both cities have their pluses and minuses — and it sure feels nice to have Americans arguing about something that doesn’t involve politics. In the meantime, folks can cruise over to the Bronx for Wednesday night’s game at Yankee Stadium. If the Yanks win, the Series moves back to L.A., where fans can lace up their walking shoes and dream of that gondola. 

The influential cryptocurrency exchange has undergone several reorganizations in recent years.

The Silicon Valley company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it does not plan to slow down its investments anytime soon.

The company’s profit increased 11 percent to $24.7 billion, beating Wall Street’s expectations and its own predictions.

Tegan and Sara have been queer icons in the music industry for over 2 decades. So when Jojo Siwa claimed to be inventing 'Gay Pop' they responded.

Mr. Singh, who was a top executive in Sam Bankman-Fried’s business empire, had pleaded guilty to fraud and campaign finance violations that contributed to the collapse of FTX.

In recent years, whenever Apple launched base configurations of Mac devices with 8GB of RAM, the Cupertino-based tech giant faced backlash from consumers arguing that 8GB of memory is simply insufficient for today’s demands.

For example, when Apple outfitted last year's MacBook Pro models with the M3 chip, critics expressed disappointment that the entry-level configuration only offered 8GB of RAM.

"Apple has lost its mind," one Reddit user said.

When Apple dropped the M3 MacBook Air earlier this year with the same base configuration, it also sparked a spirited discussion on social media about whether 8GB of RAM is enough.

It's the end of the 8GB of RAM Macs. Credit: Razulation / Shutterstock.com / Canva

Whether Apple is concerned about support for Apple Intelligence (the new AI suite requires more memory bandwidth) or has actually been listening to critical feedback, it looks like the new batch of M4 MacBook Pro models now start with 16GB of RAM. The same can be said for the new M4 iMac and M4 Mac mini models that dropped this week, too.

The death of Macs with 8GB of RAM

Apple released the new M4 MacBook Pro models on Wednesday, and they all start with a minimum of 16GB of RAM. As mentioned, the recently dropped iMac and Mac mini also start with 16GB of RAM.

M4 MacBook Pro promo image on Apple's website Credit: Apple

Even the MacBook Air family now starts at 16GB of RAM, at no additional cost to consumers.

You know what that means? It's the end of an era.

Last year, Apple’s VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Bob Borchers claimed that “8GB [of RAM] on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems” because its machines make more efficient use of memory through advanced memory compression and a unified memory architecture. 

This comment didn't sit well with consumers.

"There is no way that having 8GB RAM will enable you to have the same performance as a machine with 16," Jordan Jackson said in a Reddit thread on the subject.

"8 gigs is an absolute joke if you ever consider doing something harder that a few Chrome tabs," another Redditor added.

As hinted earlier, we're not sure whether Apple Intelligence or customer listening has something to do with Apple's new 16GB of RAM standard, but we're not complaining.

Russia wants Google to pay an unfathomable amount of money in fines: $20 decillion, reportedly.
For the non-mathematicians out there, that is 2 followed by 34 zeroes.

The fine has been accruing and doubling weekly since 2020 after Kremlin-backed news services Tsargrad and RIA FAN won court cases over the blocking of their YouTube channels, wrote The Moscow Times, citing a report from the Russian news service RBC. The fine has also grown as 15 other channels have won cases against Google, bringing the total to — wait for it — 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, Gizmodo reported.

Google has reportedly not paid the fines, which has led to the astronomical figure. Even if it wanted to, the tech giant could not pay what it owes. Estimates vary on how much money exists in the world, but it doesn't even come close to $20 trillion.

SEE ALSO: How a Monday Night Football mishap may have exposed deep problems with Google Search

To be clear, the exact amount Google owes has varied a bit from news source to news source. That's honestly to be expected, considering we're dealing with a practically hypothetical number of rubles that are then converted to dollars. The point is clear, however: It's an impossible amount of money.

Perhaps Google will have to cut back on nights out and avocado toast for a bit.

Less than a week out from election day, as many around the country send in their mail-in ballots or stand in early voter lines, Americans are anxiously hoping to know who will be the next president ASAP. 

Many pundits anticipate a quicker turnaround than the last presidential election, perhaps as early as Wednesday morning, but election experts — noting ongoing outcome-driven attacks on the veracity of ballot counting — want to hedge such expectations. 

SEE ALSO: The truth about voting machine security in the 2024 election Closer the race, longer the count

"The public perceives election results coming out fairly quickly, on election night or in the days after, but it has always been true that it has taken days or weeks to get official election results," said Chris Mann, director of research for the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that works with election officials to build stronger confidence in elections. "In order to get the official results, we have to count every single ballot. Making sure that is done properly, correctly, thoroughly, completely, it takes a while, and states have different processes."

Mann and others urge the public to understand that no two elections are alike, and a lot has been invested into the 2024 election that wasn't integrated into the 2020 process — this will speed up the count in some states, but that doesn't mean results will come out immediately. There are three important factors to understanding election results, he explained: First, just how close the result margins turn out to be; second, the technological factors used to tabulate results; and third, the electoral policies in each state. 

Of the bunch, said Mann, close margins are the most important factor in establishing a result timeline. An election with close margins requires more ballots be counted before an outcome can confidently be called by media outlets, which is what led to the near 5-day wait in 2020. 

Polls, of course, are already making educated guesses about the closeness of results in both the presidential race and other offices across the 50 states. But polls aren't actually projections about the winners and shouldn't be taken as such, according to experts. Instead, they try to capture and estimate voter attitudes. Intention, however, is slippery to capture, and voter opinion can change in a matter of minutes. Closer margins obscure these results even further, and may result in even more dedicated ballot counting. 

Tech investments speed up counts, but have limits

State-specific technology will also play a key factor in calling a winner. Since 2020, election officials have invested heavily in expanding updated and faster ballot counting machines and processes to speed up the tech's use. Machine upgrades in states like Wisconsin, for instance, will speed up day-of counting compared to the last go-round. 

"A variety of states, swing states and non-swing states, have invested in technology," Mann said. "If you ask election officials, or folks who closely observe elections, this election will be the most secure and transparent and well-run because there has been this investment in technology… We will be able to count ballots much faster than we have in almost any previous election across the country."

Technological innovations are bolstered by human-monitored processes, which can simultaneously speed up and slow down the counting process. And counting can't begin until ballots are verified, the most time consuming part of the entire tabulation process. Mann points to two important state policies that will determine when counting can take place. The first is whether or not a state allows what is known as "pre-processing," in which officials validate absentee and mail-in ballots ahead of time to speed up counting. 

Earlier this month, the CEIR published a report on the state of early, mail-in voting policies per state, outlining a shift to allow more pre-processing efforts among 43 of the 50 states. Michigan and Nevada, for example, will now participate in pre-processing, with Michigan allowing early voting for the first time in order to speed its reporting up. Notably, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania do not allow pre-processing, and Pennsylvania is expected to lag behind other swing states in reporting an official count. 

"Counting ballots takes time, and confusion around perceived delays can open the door to misinformation and unfounded doubts about the integrity of the count," the organization wrote. "Pre-processing reinforces election integrity and improves administrative efficiency. Beginning to process mail or absentee ballots before election day gives election officials more time to detect, investigate, and address potential errors or irregularities before election day."

The second state policy at play is the window of acceptance a state has for receiving ballots. States like California, Oregon, and Washington accept ballots postmarked on election day, which means contentious seats down the ballot may not be called for weeks. Federal law gives overseas residents and military members the same allowance, established in the 1980s. Even swift pre-processing may be swamped by day-of or post-election day ballots. "Election officials get a lot of ballots, and you can't pre-process something you don't have," said Mann. "So when the mail truck pulls up to the election office and unloads bags and bags of mail ballots that have just arrived, they again have to go through that whole process, even if they were allowed to process the ones that they had gotten days before, in advance."

Early voting has become an essential part of the pre-election day build up. Independent organizations like VoteHub attempt to monitor and track the amount of absentee and mail-in voting requests and returns for the public using web data, offering a scope to early voting. 

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But even with policies that support human or machine help, and a host of data insights, official ballot counting takes time. That time opens up room for voter anxiety and misinformation. From attacks on mail-in ballots to false claims about election technology, voters can anticipate a swell of false partisan claims circulating election day about the veracity of the count. "One thing that's really important to watch out for is how much of this information is driven by outcome," said Mann. "These are not principled attacks, but opportunistic attacks driven by outcomes, not about the process." 

Conflicting information may also sow doubt among voters. Mann encourages individuals to visit Vote.gov to get the most accurate information about their state's electoral process and officials, including how it declares a winner — the website has been revamped since 2020 to include even more resources for voters. Mann also points to CEIR's interactive guides that explain just how your ballot becomes a vote, what happens after a vote is cast, and how the media covers an election. 

Election day will be a blur of unofficial calls based on early polls and conjecture by major political parties, with election officials reassuring the public as much as possible. Media outlets will try to beat each other to the most accurate call, based on a calculation of the gap between candidates and the number of uncounted ballots left. Simultaneously, political leaders on both sides may be eager to urge on more counting, ask to halt the count to call a winner, or participate in a confusing combination of both, as was seen with the 2020 Trump campaign's scattered ideological stance to mail-in ballot counting. 

But one thing is certain: Your vote is secure. "Our elections will not be perfect. There will be power outages, there will be poll workers [who] oversleep and don't open the polls on time, but they will be as close to perfect as they have ever been," said Mann. "I'm 100 percent confident that it will be the best election that we have ever had, but it's also the election that's been under the most attack."