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Tech News
A collaborative team led by an independent developer completed a 100% decompilation of the original Snowboard Kids for Nintendo 64, meaning every function now has matching C code that compiles to identical machine code as the original. The project took 84 days, compared with 596 days for a prior effort on Snowboard Kids 2, with contributors including inspectredc, Bl00D4NGEL, and queueRAM providing key expert work alongside AI assistance.
Britain's government has moved to permit plug-in solar kits, but the Institution of Engineering and Technology says the country's electrical infrastructure wasn't built for it. IET technical regulations head Mark Coles says many homes still use older Residual Current Devices designed only for one-way power flow, which can fail or burn out when solar feeds electricity back through them. The IET issued its own warning the same day as the government's announcement, urging homeowners to get professional wiring checks before installing any system.
Indie publisher Panic is returning the tariff fees it had charged Playdate buyers, after a court ruling deemed the Trump administration's import taxes illegal and ordered refunds to affected companies. Panic said it has now received its own tariff refunds and passed that money back to customers who had paid the added charge as a line item on their orders.
Nvidia announced hardware optimizations for popular Chinese open-source AI models, including DeepSeek's V4 Flash and Alibaba's Qwen 3.8, as part of a broader push to support open-weight systems. Alongside the announcement, an SEC filing tied to its quarterly earnings warned that potential White House restrictions on Chinese-origin AI could hurt its business by limiting its ability to support apps built on those models.
Google published a memo detailing enforcement of new per-app memory limits introduced with Android 17, first rolling out on Pixel devices. Apps that exceed the thresholds will be slowed down or terminated, and starting in February 2027, non-compliant apps could face reduced visibility and publishing restrictions on the Play Store.
A software engineering commentary distinguishes between writing code—translating ideas into executable instructions, a task AI handles well—and building software, which involves deciding what instructions should exist, how systems interact, and which tradeoffs and constraints matter. The piece uses an example of processing incoming events to show that architectural decisions like consistency, retries, and ordering have little to do with syntax or programming language choice.
Shohei Imamura's first feature, Nusumareta Yokujo (Stolen Desire, 1958), follows a struggling traveling theater troupe and their shifting fortunes, centering on stage manager Shinichi Kunida, a college graduate whose creative ideas are dismissed by the troupe's working-class performers. Made for Nikkatsu Studios, the film is an episodic, sensual comedy-drama notably more lighthearted than Imamura's later, darker work.
A software engineer describes a personal experiment begun in February where they stopped writing code manually and instead relied entirely on AI coding agents like Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code to implement changes. The account traces how tooling evolved from simple autocomplete suggestions to agents capable of editing multiple files from a single natural-language description, sharply reducing the amount of typing required.
Google has built Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) directly into Android 17, making it the first major mobile operating system to support the standard at the platform level and turning it on by default. ECH hides the specific website or domain a device is connecting to, so internet providers can only see the content delivery network being used, not the actual destination. Alphabet's Jigsaw division, which developed the feature, says it addresses a long-standing gap in HTTPS privacy protections.
On August 26, 2026, the US government added the volunteer-run Italian collective Autistici/Inventati—operator of the noblogs.org hosting platform—to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, citing its 'far-left' political orientation. The same announcement designated the UK group Palestine Action and the Palestinian movement Masar Badil. Autistici/Inventati, founded in 2001, provides free email, blogs, mailing lists and websites to roughly 16,000 mailboxes and thousands of independent projects, including anti-fascist researchers and cultural organizations.
NASA's Starling mission tested FALCON, a navigation system built with startup EraDrive that lets a spacecraft determine its own orbital position by observing nearby satellites and debris rather than relying on GPS signals. The system pairs EraDrive's Era-Core software with Starling's existing star tracker cameras and a catalog of known orbiting objects to calculate location autonomously.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, former OpenAI researcher and hedge fund founder Leopold Aschenbrenner told people at San Francisco gatherings that he intended to save money to eventually purchase entire galaxies, believing AI would unlock unlimited resources and space colonization. He reportedly even promised to buy one for his wife, Anthropic chief of staff Avital Balwit. His fund, Situational Awareness, has since lost over two-thirds of its value amid a tech sell-off and is now under SEC investigation.