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Tech News
Bill Gates addressed the Telluride Film Festival this past weekend, following the release of a 6,000-word essay outlining concerns about artificial intelligence's potential dangers. The Microsoft co-founder used the appearance to reinforce his cautionary message about the technology's societal impact.
Minded is a new free app designed to interrupt habitual doomscrolling by prompting users to pause before opening time-wasting apps or sites. Rather than blocking access outright, it nudges users toward intentional decisions about how they spend their attention.
Following an August incident where a burst water line at an Athlon BT-operated Bitcoin-mining facility in El Reno, Oklahoma spilled nearly four million gallons of water, a subsequent fire marshal inspection uncovered a string of serious safety violations. Investigators found flammable liquids stored near combustible materials, poorly maintained fire extinguishers, damaged electrical wiring, an empty emergency lockbox, and code-violating vegetation, prompting the city to issue the facility a failing safety grade.
Hideo Kojima confirmed that Sony's PlayStation Studios canceled its involvement in his action-espionage game Physint back in June, prompting a three-month search for a new publisher. Xbox has now stepped in to publish the title, with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma calling it a major moment for the platform and referencing another Kojima collaboration, OD.
On 10 September 1897, London cab driver George Smith crashed his Bersey electric taxi into a building on New Bond Street after it swerved and mounted the pavement while he was drunk. He was arrested, examined by a police surgeon, and the next day pleaded guilty at Marlborough Street Police Court to being drunk in charge of a vehicle, receiving a 20-shilling fine.
Advocacy group Democratism organized a demonstration outside Poland's digital affairs ministry using about 30 humanoid and quadrupedal robots that marched, held signs, and played pre-recorded chants calling for stricter rules on AI and automation. Organizer Grzegorz Kuliś said the goal was to spotlight how robotics and AI increasingly threaten human jobs, including cognitive work, and to push lawmakers to act before displacement worsens.
Mathematician Andreas Thom says his prior ChatGPT conversations may have fed into OpenAI's recent non-sofic groups breakthrough, echoing a similar complaint from NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster about undisclosed use of his Codex interactions. Thom noted OpenAI's unusually detailed grasp of niche techniques and has asked researchers Sébastien Bubeck and Mark Sellke whether his exchanges with ChatGPT were used as training data.
Researchers propose that the apparent acceleration of the universe's expansion, long attributed to dark energy, could instead be an illusion caused by uneven distribution of matter across the cosmos. Their model suggests that variations in cosmic density affect how we measure distances and light from distant supernovae, mimicking the signature of accelerated expansion without requiring a mysterious energy field.
At a Republican midterm convention in Texas, President Trump promised a $5,000 'dividend' to every adult American citizen if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate this November. He framed the pledge as a turnout booster, saying it alone should secure the midterms for his party.
Omarchy is a Linux distribution built on Arch that automates installation and configuration while integrating multiple AI coding agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Grok CLI directly into the desktop. Users can pick a default agent to debug system issues, tweak settings, or build apps and themes, and can also run local models via LM Studio or Ollama. It targets developers on modern x86-64 hardware, though it can run on older machines too.
Google has removed the Pixel Tablet from its online store and dropped the 'Tablet' category from its site navigation, following earlier reports that the device was marked out of stock. Most Pixel Tablet accessories, including the case and charging speaker dock, are also unavailable, with only a third-party speaker stand still purchasable. The tablet has similarly vanished from Amazon, and Best Buy lists it as no longer available in new condition.
DeepSeek has released V4.1-Flash on its API, replacing the earlier V4-Flash and V4-Flash-Vision-Exp models. The new model adds native multimodal capabilities and can be accessed by setting the model parameter to deepseek-flash.