🇨🇳 China's Market for Renting Human Faces to AI

In China, people rent out their faces for AI ads, games, and microdramas, earning between $15 and $700. Producers select faces by age, gender, and type, from "ordinary neighbor" to "supermodel."

This trend follows a surge in AI content: over 95% of 128,000 Chinese microdramas in the first three months of the year used AI. Real faces help characters avoid looking identical.

Lawyers warn that sharing biometric data risks losing control over how one’s appearance is used later.

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💻 Pocketbyte: Modular Computer the Size of a Card

Pocketbyte is a tiny portable computer measuring about 75 × 55 mm, roughly the size of a credit card. It runs on an ESP32-S3 processor with 8 MB PSRAM, has a 2.8-inch IPS screen, 1500 mAh battery, microSD slot for up to 32 GB, a mono speaker, and a 3.5 mm jack.

Its key feature is a modular pin connector that lets you attach hardware like a gamepad for retro emulators, a BlackBerry-style QWERTY keyboard, or a development board to control other electronics. The software is open source, based on FreeRTOS, supports Arduino, and apps can be installed via Wi-Fi from a built-in store.

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Ⓜ️ Meta unveils Muse Code and Spark 1.2

Meta launched Muse Code for long tasks, able to work hours on large repos, edit many files, verify results, and run background subagents. It ran nonstop for 24 hours in tests, making 1000+ tool calls and optimizing NVIDIA Hopper GPU cores.

Muse Spark 1.2 has more compute and supports more dev environments. It improved code generation, debugging, repo handling, and autonomous exploration. Both models were trained together to boost synergy.

All actions are logged locally for exact reproduction and continuation after restarts. A multimodal mode lets users upload videos, which Muse Code converts into full websites with visuals and booking features.

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