prakhar@affmantra.com

Slow Ventures holds a ‘finishing school’ to help founders learn to be fancy

Slow Ventures hosted a three-hour “Etiquette Finishing School” this week, covering topics like the perfect handshake, public speaking, and office decorum. There was even a fashion show with models showing off different looks for different occasions, and then a closing lesson about caviar and wine. The San Francisco Standard reports that a few hundred founders…

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OnePlus 15 Camera Samples

The OnePlus 15 is almost here – launching globally, including in India, on 13th November, and it’s shaping up to be OnePlus’s most powerful and camera-focused flagship yet. Alongside a new triple-chip architecture and a 7,300 mAh battery, OnePlus is putting serious emphasis on photography, thanks to its self-developed DetailMax Engine. Below are some early…

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Apple reportedly plans ambitious satellite-powered iPhone features

While Apple’s iPhone already supports texting, calling emergency services, and contacting roadside assistance via satellite connectivity, the company has many more satellite-powered features in the works, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. In-development features reportedly include an API allowing app makers to support satellite connections in their own apps, a version of Apple Maps that allows…

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StepFun AI Releases Step-Audio-EditX: A New Open-Source 3B LLM-Grade Audio Editing Model Excelling at Expressive and Iterative Audio Editing

How can speech editing become as direct and controllable as simply rewriting a line of text? StepFun AI has open sourced Step-Audio-EditX, a 3B parameter LLM based audio model that turns expressive speech editing into a token level text like operation, instead of a waveform level signal processing task. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03601 Why developers care about controllable…

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How to Build an Agentic Voice AI Assistant that Understands, Reasons, Plans, and Responds through Autonomous Multi-Step Intelligence

In this tutorial, we explore how to build an Agentic Voice AI Assistant capable of understanding, reasoning, and responding through natural speech in real time. We begin by setting up a self-contained voice intelligence pipeline that integrates speech recognition, intent detection, multi-step reasoning, and text-to-speech synthesis. Along the way, we design an agent that listens…

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Is Wall Street losing faith in AI?

A rough week for tech stocks might signal a loss of investor confidence in artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Nasdaq Composite Index was down 3% — making this its worst week since President Donald Trump announced his sweeping tariff plan in April. Tech companies that have otherwise performed well this year…

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Nested Learning: A New Machine Learning Approach for Continual Learning that Views Models as Nested Optimization Problems to Enhance Long Context Processing

How can we build AI systems that keep learning new information over time without forgetting what they learned before or retraining from scratch? Google Researchers has introduced Nested Learning, a machine learning approach that treats a model as a collection of smaller nested optimization problems, instead of a single network trained by one outer loop….

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