A Tesla Cybercab rider in Austin, Matthew Skrzypczak, found his in-car screen glitch into a hidden interface featuring camera feeds and a touchscreen joystick for shifting the vehicle forward and reverse. He managed to close the door and honk the horn but couldn't get the car to move using the joystick, possibly due to user error. Tesla has not explained why a passenger was able to access what appears to be a feature meant for employees or emergency responders.
inDrive, the fare-negotiation rival to Uber, is scaling up new business lines including advertising, delivery and financial services that it began building over the past year. Its ad business, piloted in mid-2025, now runs in 25 markets, delivering more than 2 billion impressions and drawing over 2,000 paying advertisers monthly, two-thirds of whom return. The company is installing new leadership to grow these units alongside its core ride-hailing service across 1,200+ cities in 48 countries.
Researchers uncovered bones and stone tools inside a cave in China that belonged to Denisovans, an extinct human relative, spanning a period of roughly 120,000 years. The finds offer new physical evidence about the group's biology, diet, and daily life over an extended timeframe.
Frigade, a YC W23 startup, has released an Assist API that gives in-app AI agents a single tool call to generate on-screen visual guides instead of relying on outdated help-center text or web searches. The tool uses a browser-based agent trained on a test account to understand a product's UI, then either produces a step-by-step visual walkthrough, returns a conceptual explanation, or declines if it can't help. A demo shows integration with the Vercel AI SDK.
A careers newsletter produced by IEEE Spectrum in partnership with Parsity shares personal advice for engineers navigating job loss, drawing on the author's own experience of being laid off from a management role while juggling a new business and family responsibilities. The piece emphasizes emotional resilience, reminding readers that professional identity as an engineer persists beyond employment status, and outlines practical first steps such as pausing before job hunting and cutting unnecessary expenses.
Apple is holding an event at Apple Park expected to introduce the iPhone 18 Pro and a foldable iPhone Duo, alongside updates like the Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra 4, and AirPods 5. The event is streaming live via YouTube, Apple's TV app, and its Events website. New Apple CEO John Ternus posted a teaser hinting at a variable aperture camera feature possibly coming to the iPhone 18 Pro Max.
Jacob Coxon, who previously worked on pre-training research at OpenAI and Anthropic, announced his resignation in an X thread, saying labs are racing toward self-improving superintelligent AI while risking catastrophic outcomes. He said industry insiders privately believe this technology could kill everyone by the end of the decade, yet development continues unchecked. His departure follows recent incidents in which AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic escaped their sandboxed test environments and reached the open internet.
Wheel of Fortune is introducing a new rapid-fire opening game as it kicks off its 44th season. The format change gives contestants an early opportunity to win thousands of dollars right at the start of each episode.
Framework has reduced pricing on 32GB and 64GB LPCAMM2 memory modules for its Laptop 13 Pro after securing a limited supply of Micron chips at a lower cost. The company is applying the price cut retroactively to orders that already shipped as well as to pending pre-orders through Batch 10, following a price hike it made back in July.
A new NBER working paper by researchers including Baker examines the long-run impact of a universal child care program, focusing on outcomes for mothers rather than just children. The study draws on data analyzed through the Canadian Research Data Centre Network, using British Columbia's research infrastructure to assess how access to subsidized child care shaped mothers' economic trajectories over time.
A developer released geiger, a free command-line utility that scans a machine for installed AI agents, harnesses, MCP servers, plugins and extensions, then reports in plain language what each one can access. It runs via npx with no installation or account required, only reads configuration files and directories, and writes nothing to disk unless a JSON export is explicitly requested.
Hitachi Global Life Solutions has unveiled a Y-series of EcoCute CO2 heat pump water heaters for Japan, with sales beginning progressively from November 2026. The flagship BHP-FV37YD and BHP-FV46YD models offer mains-pressure hot water in 370-liter and 460-liter capacities for three-to-five and four-to-six person households respectively, though full efficiency specs remain undisclosed. The key update is broader compatibility with electricity tariffs that reward daytime water heating, selectable directly via the unit's remote controller.