California climate measure fails after “green” governor opposed it

Enlarge (credit: Education Images/Getty) The only statewide climate measure on California’s ballot Tuesday failed, even though it would have raised billions to help meet the state’s ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets by subsidizing electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, among other things. Its downfall resulted largely from the high-profile opposition of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who…

Scene Report: Boston

What surprised me most on returning to Boston* for the first time since the onset of the pandemic was just how clustered things are. I’m not a great scheduler and I don’t know the city’s geography particularly well, but after two days spent meeting with more than a dozen startups, it slowly dawned on me…

Beam raises $6.4M to help citizens access safety net funds

Beam, a startup that helps citizens access government financial aid, has raised $6.4 million in Series A funding. The company, previously known as Edquity, helps deliver funds across a wide array of programs, like emergency cash assistance, rental relief and public utility benefits. “We fundamentally work to transmit critical services and resources to those in…

Meet Unstable Diffusion, the group trying to monetize AI porn generators

When Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI developed by startup Stability AI, was open sourced earlier this year, it didn’t take long for the internet to wield it for porn-creating purposes. Communities across Reddit and 4chan tapped the AI system to generate realistic and anime-style images of nude characters, mostly women, as well as non-consensual fake…

Can gaming resurrect the NFT market? OpenSea thinks so

Today at TechCrunch’s crypto-focused event in Miami, OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer discussed his business, and the future market for non-fungible tokens. The digital assets, better known by the acronym ‘NFT,’ saw their stock rise during the 2021-era crypto boom. NFTs became synonymous with neo-wealth bubbling up from the blockchain economy, as a number of image…