Tech
I replaced my space heater and ceiling fan with one Dyson appliance
The Dyson Hot+Cool HF1 is a sleek 2-in-1 smart appliance that provides heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. Designed for year-round comfort, the $499 unit combines quiet operation and smart controls with Dyson’s signature bladeless design.
I typically use a ceiling fan for the summer and a space heater for the winter. After three months of testing, the HF1 was a game changer for me, and not just because it replaced two appliances. It was HF1’s smart features that made this appliance particularly handy. Dyson provided the HF1 unit, which will be returned to the manufacturer.
Although you can control the HF1 using the onboard controls or the included remote, you can also operate it from your smartphone with the MyDyson app. I found it especially convenient to turn the HF1 on or off from my phone — even when I wasn’t in the room — as well as set timers, adjust the oscillation, and create schedules so it would automatically turn on whenever I wanted.
The HF1 is quiet enough for bedrooms and home offices. In Sleep mode, it operates at just 26 decibels and automatically dims its display. I’m a light sleeper who prefers complete silence at night, and I was able to adjust the fan noise quickly.
The HF1 features an adjustable tilt that lets you direct airflow where you need it. For wider coverage, it can be adjusted to oscillate at 15, 40, or 70 degrees.
The HF1’s intelligent thermostat continuously monitors the room and automatically adjusts its heating output to reach and maintain your chosen temperature. One important caveat: The HF1’s cooling mode is essentially a high-powered fan, not an air conditioner, so it circulates air rather than lowering the room’s temperature.
One of my favorite features about the HF1 is its bladeless design, which makes it incredibly easy to clean. A quick wipe with a cloth is all it takes to remove dust, and unlike traditional fans and heaters, you don’t have to clean any grilles or blades.
The bladeless design also makes it a safer choice for homes with pets and children, as there are no exposed blades for curious hands or paws to get caught in. However, the metal casing around the front of the HF1 can get slightly hot to the touch while it’s in the heating mode.
Another nice safety feature is that the fan automatically shuts off if it’s tipped over.
In terms of size, the HF1 is compact and light, weighing just under six pounds and standing 23 inches tall. Its slim design made it easy to move from room to room without taking up too much space or looking out of place.
While the HF1 comes with a premium price tag, it’s a worthwhile investment if you want a single appliance for year-round use. Its combination of heating, cooling, smart features, quiet operation, and easy maintenance makes it a compelling upgrade over a standard space heater or fan.
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Tech
Patreon stops asking AI bots not to scrape — and starts blocking them
Patreon, the membership platform for creators, is cracking down on AI scraping its content for training purposes. On Thursday, the company shared that it’s working with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to directly block access to AI bots designed to train their AI models on creators’ work without permission.
The strengthened measures were necessary because AI scraping has become more sophisticated since it first put measures in place to deter AI crawlers in 2023, the company says. In addition, Patreon’s paywall has long locked much of creators’ content out of reach of crawlers. But more recently, the company introduced new discovery tools like a redesigned Home Feed and its tweet-like Quips, which could expose more content to crawlers.
The changes come about as more online publishers and content creators are coming to grips with how AI is ingesting their work for the purpose of making their AI models smarter. To combat this, Cloudflare now offers tools that allow website publishers to restrict AI bots, including a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping, dubbed Pay Per Crawl. Earlier this month, it changed its policies so that “mixed-use” crawlers, meaning those that both index and train on a website’s content, are blocked by default on any pages that host ads.
Patreon says that it’s extending its existing work with Cloudflare to use the company’s AI Crawl Control technology to update its AI policies and enforcement tools. The difference here is that instead of simply asking AI crawlers not to scrape content using the robots.txt files — a standard way to provide bots with instructions on how they can use its site — Patreon is now actively blocking AI training bots.
“Consent shouldn’t depend on whether a scraper chooses to behave,” a Patreon blog post explains, referencing the stricter measures.
When testing the features, individual AI training crawlers’ weekly attempts to access Patreon went from “thousands of attempts to zero,” the post noted. That indicates that the AI scrapers were ignoring Patreon’s robots.txt file and scraping the site anyway, despite its requests.
However, the company said that it will allow bots that index pages and organize information that can be used to send users back to Patreon.
“As AI agents become increasingly powerful and popular, creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies,” remarked Patreon’s product chief Drew Rowny in the announcement. “On most of the Internet, creators have to accept AI training on their work just to reach and grow an audience. Patreon has a different vision: creators should be able to grow their audience and control how their work is used.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Amazon fixing bug that billed some AWS customers billions of dollars
Some Amazon cloud customers woke up on Friday to a surprise bill estimate that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used.
Amazon confirmed on Friday that it’s trying to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs.
In an update on its status page, Amazon said it began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. But by Friday morning, the company conceded that the “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem.
The good news for the customers who were told they “owe” millions or billions to Amazon is they are likely off the hook. The billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.
According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.
When reached by email, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred TechCrunch to the company’s status page and did not comment further, or answer questions about the bug. The company would not say, when asked, if any AWS accounts had been suspended or paused as a result of the issue.
The issue is expected to last several more hours, per Amazon’s status page.
Updated with a response from Amazon.
Tech
Amazon fixing bug that billed some AWS customers billions of dollars
Some Amazon cloud customers woke up on Friday to a surprise bill estimate that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used.
Amazon confirmed on Friday that it’s trying to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs.
In an update on its status page, Amazon said it began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. But by Friday morning, the company conceded that the “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem.
The good news for the customers who were told they “owe” millions or billions to Amazon is they are likely off the hook. The billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.
According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.
When reached by email, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred TechCrunch to the company’s status page and did not comment further, or answer questions about the bug. The company would not say, when asked, if any AWS accounts had been suspended or paused as a result of the issue.
The issue is expected to last several more hours, per Amazon’s status page.
Updated with a response from Amazon.
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