GoKawiil
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Apple unveiled the iPhone 18 Pro at its recent event, starting at $1,199 and adding a variable aperture camera and a faster A20 Pro chip. The comparison to the iPhone 14 Pro, released four years earlier, shows major shifts including the switch from Lightning to USB-C, a brighter display capable of 3,000 nits versus 1,000 nits, and an upgraded Dynamic Island that can display three activities simultaneously.
Screen defects that appear as small persistent dots generally fall into two categories: stuck pixels and dead pixels. Stuck pixels remain lit with a color that doesn't change, often appearing as red, green, or blue dots, while dead pixels stay completely dark because they receive no power at all. The two look similar but differ in cause and, crucially, in whether they can be repaired.
Apple's Control Center houses both Do Not Disturb and Focus modes, with Do Not Disturb actually functioning as one type of Focus alongside Personal, Work and Sleep options. Users can customize each Focus mode individually, choosing exactly which apps and contacts can send notifications while that mode is active. Setup happens through Settings > Focus, where filters, smart activation and time-sensitive notification exceptions can also be configured.
A new archaeological analysis of prehistoric bone remains suggests that cannibalism during the Neolithic period was not a uniform behavior but took different forms depending on time and place. Researchers found variation in butchering marks, burial context, and treatment of remains, indicating diverse motivations ranging from ritual to survival or warfare.
Amazon-owned Zoox is offering free rides in a fleet of about 100 purpose-built robotaxis in San Francisco, using a Rider Lounge and partnerships with local restaurants and landmarks to build public awareness. The company still lacks permission to charge passengers in California, so it's using free trips to establish a presence against Waymo, which operates nearly 4,000 vehicles in the city.
The Verge's Decoder podcast, hosted by Nilay Patel with producers Nick Statt and Greg Ott, released a mailbag episode responding to audience feedback gathered since April across email, YouTube, Spotify, Bluesky and Threads. The hosts singled out a prior video described as the 'software brain' segment as the most discussed piece of content on the show in the past six months.
Apple Wallet is the iPhone (and Apple Watch) app that stores digital cards, IDs, boarding passes, tickets and loyalty cards, while Apple Pay is the payment service that actually processes transactions using cards saved in Wallet. Making a purchase in-store involves tapping an NFC terminal and double-pressing the side button, then confirming identity via Face ID, Touch ID or a PIN, whereas online purchases work much like PayPal by selecting a stored card and authenticating.
Apple has launched the iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max, and its first foldable device, the iPhone Duo, alongside each other. The Duo offers a 5.4-inch outer display and a 7.6-inch inner folding screen with a nano-texture finish, letting users switch between phone and tablet-sized experiences, while the 18 Pro models stick to a traditional single-screen design in 6.3-inch and 6.9-inch sizes. Despite its slimmer profile, the Duo weighs more than even the largest Pro Max, and its camera setup lags behind the Pro line's newer 48MP hardware.
Apple introduced the Watch Series 12 alongside the Ultra 4, iPhone 18 lineup and a foldable iPhone Duo, keeping the smartwatch's exterior design unchanged while overhauling its internals. The update centers on a new S11 processor and redesigned health sensors that improve heart rate accuracy, add deeper recovery tracking, and enable an AI-powered Audio Intelligence feature for transcribing conversations. Despite the upgrades, pricing stays flat at $399 for the Series 12 and $799 for the Ultra 4, even as iPhone 18 Pro prices rose.
Apple introduced the Watch Series 12 at its September event, retaining last year's design but overhauling internals with a new S11 chip and upgraded health sensors. The device gains features like more accurate heart rate tracking, deeper recovery data, and an AI-powered Audio Intelligence tool that can record, transcribe and save conversations. Despite these upgrades and new colors, Apple held the starting price at $399, while the Watch Ultra 4 starts at $799.
Researchers describe a generative sampling approach that models transitions between molecular conformations using diffusion-based machine learning, bypassing the extremely long molecular dynamics runs traditionally needed to capture rare structural changes. The technique draws on diffusion probabilistic models and path-sampling theory to generate plausible transition pathways directly, rather than waiting for these events to occur naturally in simulation.
Inception has released Mercury 2.5, an update to its diffusion-based language model that the company says is 40% more intelligent than Mercury 2 while keeping the same low-latency, low-cost performance. The model runs at over 1,100 tokens per second on standard NVIDIA GPUs, supports a 260K-token context window, and launches at an 80% discount, priced at $0.04 per million input tokens and $0.15 per million output tokens.