A team tasked with speeding up ClickHouse for its largest customers found a critical dashboard query taking over 85 seconds and scanning nearly 2 billion rows across 198GB of data. Over four months, they applied a series of incremental, non-flashy optimizations—tackling issues like the overhead of ReplacingMergeTree's FINAL clause on mutable event data and an inefficient partition key—to bring the query down to sub-second response times.
Plaion Replai has pushed back the launch of its Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System+ remake from November 2025 to September 16, 2027. The company cites overwhelming demand plus a global memory chip shortage fueled by AI infrastructure investment as reasons for the delay. Pricing remains unchanged, with the standard edition at $250 and the 35th anniversary bundle at $350.
Steven Spielberg's new science-fiction film, titled 'Disclosure Day,' is heading to Peacock this October. The project stars Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colman Domingo, and Colin Firth in a story centered on an alien mystery.
Apple released a document detailing how its newly announced Audio Intelligence features—Siri Recap, Live Rewind, Sound Recognition, and Music Recognition—process audio without storing or exposing raw recordings. The company says these features rely on a hardware-isolated 'Secure Exclave' in the Apple Watch's S11 chip, which processes sound locally and never creates an accessible audio file. Any data transferred to iPhone is encrypted between Secure Exclaves, and users must manually activate features like Live Rewind and choose what text to retain.
Apple introduced the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 at its 'Surprise and shine' event, adding upgraded health sensors, audio transcription and summary features, and a new ceramic case option for the Series 12. Both models retain the same starting prices as their predecessors, with the Series 12 at $399 and the Ultra 4 at $799.
Prime Video has released the official trailer for Mike Flanagan's six-episode Carrie miniseries, based on Stephen King's novel. Flanagan says the series isn't a straight remake of the 1976 story or Brian De Palma's film, but instead expands the world of Carrie White and her tormentors for a modern audience. The cast includes Summer H. Howell as Carrie, Siena Agudong as Sue Snell, and Amber Midthunder as Miss Desjardin.
The Commodore 64, launched in 1982 for $595 with just 64 kilobytes of memory, went on to sell roughly 12.5 million units and become the best-selling desktop computer ever. Its combination of an inexpensive industrial CPU, a music-synthesizer sound chip, and a game-oriented graphics chip made it unusually capable for its price, despite being seen at the time as a mere 'game machine.' That gaming-friendly hardware ended up enabling some of the earliest persistent, open-ended online multiplayer worlds.
Google has released AlphaGenome Atlas, a tool that predicts the functional impact of swapping in any of the three alternative bases at every position across the roughly 3-billion-base human genome, amounting to 9 billion base substitutions analyzed. The system focuses heavily on non-coding DNA, which makes up over 97% of the genome and includes regulatory elements that control gene activity alongside leftover viral sequences with no clear function.
The United Nations passed a resolution, backed by the African Union, urging adoption of map projections that preserve the true relative size of continents instead of the 500-year-old Mercator projection. The vote passed 164 to 1, with the United States the lone dissenting country. Togo's foreign minister argued that maps shape how people understand the world's balance of power.
Artist Morry Kolman released a Grand Theft Auto V mod called Grand Theft Automated License Plate Reader, which scatters 235 replica Flock Safety cameras across Los Santos and rewards players $600 for each one they destroy. The mod also mimics real-world surveillance behavior, extending police chase cooldowns near cameras and occasionally triggering false police responses to mirror reported ALPR errors.
Golfer Shane Lowry has teamed up with medical technology company Stryker after caring for his father, Brendan, through hip and knee replacement surgeries using Stryker devices. The partnership aims to highlight the often-overlooked role of caregivers and support families navigating similar journeys, according to Stryker's Joint Replacement division president Katherine Truppi.
A consumer describes using Anthropic's Claude, including its Chrome extension, to file complaints, draft phone scripts, and pursue refunds across ten separate disputes ranging from a missing cheese packet to IRS penalties and a car warranty claim. The person reports winning every case attempted, some still pending, with total recoveries exceeding $12,000, including $6,813 in waived IRS penalties and a roughly $2,000 warranty repair.