Y Combinator's newest Demo Day featured a batch skewed heavily toward deep tech, with startups like Atomarine pitching nuclear-powered floating data centers and Dipole Labs building optical networking hardware to cut power waste in AI clusters. TechCrunch surveyed early-stage investors who named nine companies that got flagged repeatedly as the standouts of the cohort. Investors noted the technology felt futuristic, but valuations across the batch were more restrained compared to recent quarters.
A widely circulated quote attributed to Mark Zuckerberg suggests he characterized Cambridge Analytica's data practices as nothing unusual, implying similar data harvesting was common industry practice rather than a unique violation. The remark, dated to 2017, has resurfaced without full context around the original scandal that saw millions of Facebook users' data improperly obtained.
A new evaluation of AI research agents, described by researcher Sayash Kapoor, found the systems performed strong engineering tasks but produced papers far below top AI conference standards. The agents ran flawed experiments, struggled to explain their findings clearly, abandoned promising hypotheses too early, and failed to meaningfully use feedback, time, or compute resources.
Multiple AI companies are now accusing each other of stealing proprietary technology, models, or data, even as the broader industry itself has built its foundation on scraping internet content without explicit consent from original creators. This dynamic has created a contradictory landscape where firms decry theft while relying on similarly extractive practices for their own products.
External SSDs use flash storage that speeds up file transfers and editing directly from the drive, while offering greater durability, quieter operation, and lower power draw thanks to having no moving parts. External hard drives remain the cheaper option per gigabyte, with examples like a 2TB Seagate HDD costing less than a 1TB Samsung T9 SSD.
AI companies are pouring billions into massive data centers and power plants to support 'agents'—AI systems that autonomously execute multi-step tasks rather than simply answering questions. Unlike a single chatbot query, an agent can generate hundreds of self-prompts to complete complex jobs, such as building an entire website over several hours. OpenAI recently touted a swarm of over 10,000 agents exchanging 2.7 million messages to tackle a longstanding math problem, though mathematicians have disputed the significance of that result.
The FTC banned General Motors for five years from selling customer driving data to consumer reporting agencies after finding the automaker had collected details like speeding and nighttime driving through its OnStar Smart Driver feature and passed them to data brokers LexisNexis and Verisk, which serve insurers. Many drivers say they didn't realize they had consented to this tracking, and some reported their insurance rates rose as a result. Research from the Mozilla Foundation found nearly every major automaker has similarly weak privacy protections and overlapping, confusing consent policies for vehicle data.
An in-depth technical analysis examines how ThreadSanitizer, the race detector underlying Clang, GCC, Go, and Swift, actually works internally by walking through data race fundamentals and building a Python-based FastTrack-style vector clock simulation. The piece then demonstrates concrete scenarios where TSan's architecture causes it to miss genuine data races, including a documented failure once a program crosses 255 total threads.
Modern Wi-Fi routers often ship with multiple antennas—sometimes up to eight—because of a technology called MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output), which allows several data streams to be handled simultaneously rather than one at a time. This shift away from single-antenna designs was driven by the explosion of internet-connected devices in homes and the growing demand for faster, more reliable connections.
LG issued a detailed statement pushing back on a Gamers Nexus investigation alleging its smart TVs capture audio and network data even while asleep or offline. The company said voice processing only activates via a wake word or remote button press, and that features like Automatic Content Recognition and ad targeting are opt-in, not default.
Meta says it has fixed a Meta AI feature that generated invasive automatic prompts on Instagram posts, such as questions identifying a poster's child or home location, after parenting blogger Kalie Robins showed the tool piecing together private details from years of old photos and family accounts. Meta confirmed the feature missed its intended purpose and will no longer surface such personal suggestions, though it gave few specifics on what exactly was changed.
A how-to guide walks readers through setting up an OpenStreetMap account, installing the JOSM editor, downloading local map data, and filtering it to find shops or amenities missing a website tag. The process guides contributors to add that missing link, a change that then propagates into the many free services built on OSM data.
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