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Tech News
A personal essay recounts a conversation between a PhD student stuck on a thesis introduction and an illustrator friend who sketches inspiration mid-walk. The writer initially envies the illustrator's seemingly spontaneous creative freedom, but the friend points out that her creative work is equally bound by client demands, printer constraints, and tedious preparation tasks.
A free Android utility called Action Notch converts a phone's front camera notch into an interactive shortcut, letting users tap, double-tap, or long-press it to trigger actions like screenshots, flashlight toggles, or automation scripts from Tasker and MacroDroid. The app supports more than 50 actions, and a paid pro tier adds extra gestures plus rule-based actions that let a single gesture behave differently depending on context.
New research led by USDA scientists shows that farmed salmon now contain significantly lower levels of heart-healthy Omega-3 fatty acids than in the past. The decline stems from producers replacing wild fish-based feed, once heavily depleted from overfishing, with land-based ingredients like soy and canola oil. The findings echo a similar 2016 study that flagged the same feed-driven nutritional drop.
A group called Build American AI, backed by venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, is launching a multimillion-dollar advertising push in states like Ohio, Wisconsin and Kansas to counter growing public opposition to AI data centers. Brockman's $100 million super PAC, Leading the Future, is reportedly financing the campaign, which frames pushback against data centers as a threat to jobs and American competitiveness.
A developer has launched Cloud in a Bottle, an open-source personal cloud platform that packages containerized apps with unified authentication and a simplified interface, aiming to let anyone run their own private cloud without sysadmin expertise. The creator argues existing self-hosting tools like Sandstorm, Nextcloud, YunoHost, and Coolify all fall short due to abandonment, poor security isolation, or fragmented app management. Cloud in a Bottle is positioned as an alternative that treats self-hosting like using a smartphone rather than managing a server.
The FSF announced it created a Bluesky account this week to reach a wider audience, even though it won't recommend others sign up for the platform. The organization cited Bluesky's registration page and web client relying on nonfree JavaScript as reasons it can't endorse the service the way it does Mastodon or PeerTube.
Thoughtworks' Europe CTO Giles described an internal experiment in Barcelona where 10 engineers used heavily agentic AI coding practices to build a simulated airline irregular-operations (IROps) system in just four days. Working in a single shared code repository, the team discovered that requiring agents to constantly commit and rebase against the main branch produced unexpected coordination effects, effectively turning the codebase into a shared communication point between agents.
The House of Representatives has trimmed its September calendar down to only four voting days, sharply reducing the window for lawmakers to act on pending legislation. Among the bills losing time is the CLARITY Act, considered the crypto industry's top remaining legislative priority in Congress.
A new study published in The Lancet Regional Health — Americas analyzed 33 years of US mortality data from the Global Burden of Disease Study and found that the share of cancer deaths attributable to alcohol rose more than 58% among adults 20 and older since 1990. Researchers found that even about one standard drink daily was enough to raise cancer risk, despite overall cancer mortality declining over the same period.
At PAX West in Seattle, Nvidia is offering its Founder's Edition RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 graphics cards at list price on-site, along with GeForce Trading Cards, while supplies last. GeForce Evangelist Jacob Freeman announced the in-person Verified Priority Access event on X, inviting attendees to find him for a chance at an MSRP card. This follows a similar giveaway at QuakeCon last month.
At IFA, Acer unveiled Project DualPlay Mini, a concept device that flips and swivels its eight-inch screen to switch between a handheld gaming console and a compact laptop. The prototype features an Xbox-style controller layout with dual-fan cooling but no trackpad, and Acer's own demo shows a mouse being used in laptop mode. Acer says it remains a concept with no confirmed plans for retail release.
A new UN Environment Programme report concedes that global warming will surpass the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold set by the Paris climate accord within the next few years, driven by continued burning of coal, oil and gas. Current temperatures already sit around 1.4°C above pre-industrial levels based on 20-year averages, and scientists say there is no longer a realistic path to staying under the limit.