GoKawiil
Tech News
The Supreme Court granted preliminary approval to President Trump's executive order restricting mail voting, allowing it to move forward even though it may not immediately alter any state's election procedures before November. The ruling has instead created widespread uncertainty for the roughly one-third of American voters who typically cast ballots by mail.
Google Play awards points for purchases like apps, in-app purchases, movies, books, and eligible subscriptions, but many users never spend them. Those points can be exchanged for gift cards from retailers including Amazon, Starbucks, Best Buy, DoorDash, Walmart, Target, and Uber, priced at $5 for 750 points, $10 for 1,500, and $20 for 3,000. Unused points expire 12 months after the last account activity, with that window resetting each time points are earned or spent.
A longtime T-Mobile customer who switched to Mint Mobile to save over $100 a month outlines three common tradeoffs of using smaller carriers, starting with data deprioritization in crowded areas. At a packed concert venue, the user experienced noticeably slower uploads compared to customers on premium plans from major carriers, illustrating how MVNO traffic gets lower priority during network congestion.
A ZDNET writer tested FydeOS, a free Linux-based operating system built to mimic ChromeOS, by installing it on an aging Windows laptop. The OS successfully replicated the Chromebook experience—fast boot times, background updates, and support for web, Android, and Linux apps—though selecting the correct build for the hardware proved confusing.
Apple has released the M5 Ultra chip for the new Mac Studio, built by fusing two dual-die M5 Max chips into a quad-die design, a first for the company's silicon lineup. The chip offers up to 36 CPU cores, a jump in inter-die connection speed to 4.4TB/s, and unified memory bandwidth of 1.2TB/s, both notable increases over the M3 Ultra.
Pacific Fusion has started construction on a new demonstration facility in Albuquerque designed to test whether its pulsed-power approach to fusion can achieve net facility gain, producing more energy than the entire facility consumes. The company says no other US facility under construction targets this milestone, and it aims to reach it by 2030 en route to a commercial plant in the mid-2030s.
Apple has introduced a new Mac Mini and Mac Studio lineup featuring the M6, M5 Max, and M5 Ultra chips, with the M5 Ultra standing as the company's most powerful processor to date. The chip offers an 80-core GPU, up to a 36-core CPU, up to 512GB of unified memory, and quadruple the LLM prompt performance of the previous M3 Ultra, built using a quad-die design that fuses two M5 Max chips. Prices have risen across the board, with the Mac Mini M6 now starting at $899 and the top Mac Studio configuration with M5 Ultra starting at $5,499.
Apple TV announced Brothers, a new comedy series starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as fictionalized versions of themselves who discover they may actually be siblings. The show, run by former Office writer-producer Lee Eisenberg, debuts September 23 with two episodes and continues weekly through November 4. Holland Taylor co-stars as McConaughey's mother, whose slip of the tongue sets off the plot.
A hobbyist built CarWatch, a system that puts a Raspberry Pi 5 in a car running a 35-billion-parameter Qwen model locally, no internet or subscription required. It joins chat rooms as an AI agent, sending trip summaries, dashcam clips, and answers sourced from the car's 745-page owner's manual, and also supports hands-free voice queries via on-device speech recognition.
Researchers analyzed Ox Alpha, a model that appeared on OpenRouter on August 20 without a disclosed developer, using their LineageEval censorship-detection tool. They found its tokenizer matches the GLM-5.x vocabulary exactly across 11 tests, confirming community suspicions that it belongs to the GLM family despite being listed as a third-party product.
Xiaomi introduced the Xring O3, a 3-nanometer system-on-chip built for its premium smartphones, marking its deepest push yet into flagship silicon design. The chip's 10-core CPU and new G2-Ultra NX GPU pushed its AnTuTu benchmark past 5 million for the first time among flagship processors, while a redesigned NPU delivers 200 TOPS for on-device AI tasks tied to Xiaomi's MiMo platform.
The Supreme Court's conservative majority paused a Boston federal judge's injunction that had blocked Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting in 23 states and DC, ruling the states lacked standing to sue because they couldn't prove concrete harm. The court did not rule on whether the order itself is legal, leaving that question for future litigation, while a separate nationwide injunction against the Postal Service implementing the order remains intact for now.