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A user recounts their partner's layoff after 15 years at a major tech company, describing her as a high-performing manager who was cut due to last-minute budget revisions. They argue the real cause was mismanagement by a senior executive two levels above her, who has a track record of costly failures yet remains employed while her entire 30-person team was let go.
A daily tech digest covers a wave of regulatory and political pushback: both US parties are souring on AI data centers ahead of midterms, Dutch regulators fined Uber nearly $1 billion for automatically deactivating drivers without human review, and TikTok agreed to pay $400 million to settle a US case over collecting children's data. Separately, New Zealand is moving to ban under-16s from social media and Chinese humanoid robots reportedly broke Usain Bolt's 100-meter record at a robotics competition.
Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley used a Fox News interview to urge critics to find a middle ground between privacy and public safety, as opposition to his company's AI camera network intensifies. The remarks follow a Washington Post investigation that uncovered dozens of cases of police misusing Flock's surveillance tools, including to track women, prompting Langley to issue a public apology earlier this month.
Businesses adopting AI models are increasingly considering building or buying specialized 'harness' software that governs how AI tasks are executed and controls associated token consumption costs. This layer sits between raw AI models and end applications, managing workflows and spending.
A finalized feasibility study for Chilean telecom regulator Subtel, conducted by Salience Consulting and Pioneer Consulting and funded by CAF with partial backing from China's MCDF Finance Facility, concludes that a fiber-optic cable across the Drake Passage to Antarctica is technically achievable. The study proposes either a minimum build connecting three facility clusters near King George Island for about $370 million, or a nine-landing optimal build linking bases run by Chile, Argentina, Brazil, the US and the UK for roughly $620 million.
AI chatbots like Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude often store user conversations on company servers and use that data by default to train future AI models. Users can disable this training option and delete past activity, though turning off tracking does not automatically erase previously stored data. For Gemini specifically, users must disable both Google's Web & App Activity and Gemini's own Activity setting, then manually delete existing records.
OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT Work, a version of its assistant that goes beyond answering questions to actually performing multi-step tasks like browsing the web, managing files, and completing sequences of actions autonomously. The feature is available to both free and paid ChatGPT users, though paid tiers unlock greater capacity for agentic tasks.
CD Projekt Red joint CEO Michał Nowakowski said in a new video that the studio is aiming to release The Witcher 4 in 2028. Before that, the company plans a 2027 launch for Songs of the Past, an expansion for The Witcher 3, which will be featured at Gamescom's Opening Night Live this week.
Emerson's Test & Measurement business group president Ritu Favre argues that as chiplet-based designs and software-defined products grow more complex, verifying how combined components behave together has become far harder than testing them individually. She points to examples like cars and aircraft relying on thousands of interacting sensors and computer systems, where real-world behavior is increasingly difficult to predict.
Philips co-founded ASML in 1984 and was TSMC's largest shareholder through the late 1990s with roughly a quarter of each company. It also owned NXP outright as its internal chip division before selling it to a private-equity consortium in 2006. By the late 2000s Philips had exited its ASML and TSMC stakes entirely.
Physicists at the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II presented new analysis showing the particle X(2370) is likely a glueball, an exotic particle theorized nearly 50 years ago to be made entirely of gluons rather than quarks. The findings, detailed in a preprint shown at a physics conference in Brazil, build on 2024 work that measured the particle's mass and spin, now adding data on its decay modes and flavor-singlet structure.
Proofcraft has implemented and formally verified a new domain scheduling API for the seL4 microkernel, removing the requirement for a single fixed, compiled-in schedule to maintain information flow security proofs. The API lets systems load semi-static domain schedules that can change across runtime phases, such as longer time slices during boot and shorter ones during normal operation. This capability is now included and proven in seL4 15.0.0.