The ASRock Phantom Gaming PG27FFT1B, a 27-inch 1080p IPS monitor with a 180Hz refresh rate, is currently listed at $96.77, down from $159.99, marking its lowest price yet. The panel supports HDR400, AMD FreeSync, a 1ms response time, and covers 94% of the DCI-P3 color space.
Microsoft has released fixes for a bug that silently broke copy-and-paste, autofill, and formula dragging in Excel after installing this month's security updates, including KB5002914. Users of Excel 2016, Office LTSC 2019, 2021, and 2024 must manually install specific updates to resolve the issue, which had been widely reported on Reddit and Microsoft's Q&A forums.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said US and Chinese officials have begun talks on a US China AI Dialogue framework, under which the two nations would notify each other of AI incidents posing national security risks. The initiative revives discussions from Trump's May visit to Beijing and would include recurring meetings to align on shared AI threats and goals.
A profile piece follows Thinking Machines Lab founder Mira Murati at a black-tie AI-industry gala in San Francisco, where she struggled to be heard over a chattering crowd despite her prominent status as a former OpenAI CTO who now runs a $12 billion startup. The writer uses the scene to explore why, unlike male tech leaders such as Elon Musk, Jensen Huang or Sam Altman, no single woman comes quickly to mind when people are asked who holds the most power in Silicon Valley.
Dartmouth College is developing its own AI-based systems, modeled partly on approaches used by companies like Google, to help students and alumni navigate career decisions as artificial intelligence reshapes hiring. The tools are meant to help people identify suitable career paths and job opportunities amid growing uncertainty in the entry-level labor market caused by automation and AI-driven recruiting.
Disney+ amended its Subscriber Agreement in January 2025 to allow advertisements to appear even on plans marketed as "no ads" or "ad-free." Section 2(k) of the new agreement carves out exceptions where ads can run due to streaming rights restrictions, live events, or other limitations, despite the premium tier's original all-ad-free marketing.
Researchers have formally described Leopardus tilcayo, a small spotted feline native to South America, marking the first new cat species identified by science in over a century. Genetic analysis places it within the tiger cat lineage, distinguishing it from previously known relatives despite its similar leopard-like markings.
Researchers introduce RetroChimera, a retrosynthesis model that combines two neural architectures with different inductive biases through a learned ensembling method. It outperforms existing baseline models across varying data scales and generalizes well even with limited examples per reaction type. In blind evaluations, professional chemists preferred RetroChimera's suggested synthesis routes over both published reference reactions and predictions from other AI systems.
A developer who attended an MCP-focused industry event says the Model Context Protocol, released by Anthropic in November 2024 and later handed to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, was designed for weaker, less agentic models than exist today. As adoption exploded, users began overloading context windows by connecting many MCP servers at once, prompting platforms like Composio, MintMCP, and Pipedream to build workaround tools that centralize credentials and trim tool lists.
Solar panel prices have plunged from roughly $5-6 per watt 26 years ago to about 12 cents per watt today, according to Ember co-founder Dave Jones cited in a Financial Times report. The report attributes this steep decline almost entirely to a massive expansion in Chinese solar manufacturing, which has made panels affordable for both wealthy and developing nations.
A hobby project called jevchat turns a model referred to as Jev into a chat interface by asking it, one symbol at a time, to predict the next character of its reply given the conversation so far. The tool samples from a probability distribution over a chosen alphabet (letters, truncated tokens, etc.) using configurable sampling strategies, displaying live generation stats and the top candidate symbols as it works. The creator built it with Claude's help by describing the sampling algorithms and having the AI implement them.
A developer launched Radius on Hacker News, a hyper-local app for organizing informal meetups around shared interests like coffee, running, or biking. Users post an activity with a time and place, and nearby people interested in the same thing can join, positioning it as a lighter-weight alternative to Meetup.com's group-based model.