A Reddit user on r/pcmasterrace posted photos of two abandoned crypto mining rigs found in a basement, containing a dozen Zotac RTX 3070 graphics cards along with DDR4 memory, SSDs, power supplies and MSI Z390 motherboards. The rigs had been used for Ethereum mining during the pandemic and sat unused after home mining stopped being profitable, with the owner giving them away once asked.
Microsoft released a preliminary set of rules governing how its AI models should behave, emphasizing that AI should support rather than replace human judgment and avoid fostering dependence or excessive agreeableness. The move follows public statements from Anthropic and OpenAI leadership favoring a more cautious pace of AI development, and comes after an Anthropic researcher publicly resigned over safety concerns.
Cutwater, a ready-to-drink spirits brand known for its higher-alcohol canned cocktails, is on track to hit $1 billion in yearly sales even as overall alcohol consumption falls to record lows. The brand's growth stands out sharply against a broader downturn affecting most of the drinks industry.
Dell has revived the XPS 13 line with a redesigned thin-and-light laptop starting at $699.99, positioning it as a lower-cost alternative to Apple's MacBook Neo. The tested units pair a six-core Intel Core 5 320 'Wildcat Lake' chip with 512GB storage, differing only in RAM—8GB in the base model and 16GB in the $999.99 version. Dell has since introduced a new $699.99 base configuration with just 256GB of storage while raising prices on the 512GB models by $100.
A new open-source software-defined radio project called sdr-- lets users build signal chains visually, linking devices, decoders, displays and recorders on a canvas. It runs a Rust-based server for radio and signal processing paired with a React-based interface that works in a browser or desktop app, and can operate locally or split across a network.
German Aerospace Center researchers report that Mercury's diameter has contracted by up to 14.5 miles since its formation, 10 to 30 percent more than earlier estimates suggested. The team says debris from impact craters had masked the true extent of this shrinkage, which stems from the planet gradually losing internal heat.
Saudi Arabia closed its East-West pipeline, which can carry 7 million barrels of oil per day and bypasses the Strait of Hormuz, after saying it was damaged by drones launched from Iraq. The closure pushed both U.S. West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude futures up more than 3%, and prompted the postponement of a planned diplomatic meeting between Iran and Gulf Arab states on Hormuz security. The disruption comes as U.S. crude prices had already topped $100 a barrel last week amid escalating Middle East fighting.
MIT Technology Review is holding a subscriber-only roundtable on September 15 with editors and an AI reporter to examine claims that artificial intelligence poses an extinction-level threat to humanity. Separately, the outlet profiles geneticist Yuancheng (Ryan) Lu, whose cellular reprogramming technique reversed blindness in mice by repairing optic nerves, and reports that a similar gene therapy has now moved into human clinical trials. Lu was also named to the publication's 2026 list of top young innovators in biotechnology and health.
Fired UK Rockstar employees have told a Glasgow employment tribunal that HR director Charlie Kinloch received regular reports from a junior staffer embedded in a union organising Discord server starting February 2024. The claimants say roughly 26 meetings or exchanges occurred over 21 months, many initiated by Kinloch himself, well before Rockstar dismissed 34 workers in October 2025 for alleged 'gross misconduct' tied to that same server.
An industry commentator argues that software engineers face far less accountability than structural engineers, despite code failures already causing mass casualties, citing examples like AI-driven military drones and safety-critical AI systems. The piece contrasts civil engineering's licensing system, born from disasters like the 1928 St Francis Dam collapse, with software's near-total lack of formal oversight. It also outlines why regulating code is structurally harder than regulating physical construction, including the sheer number of self-taught coders and software's borderless nature.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an open letter urging a slowdown in AI development over safety concerns, a stance OpenAI's Sam Altman and other industry leaders publicly backed over the weekend. The comments rattled markets Monday, sending shares of AMD, Nvidia, Intel and Sandisk lower in premarket trading and dragging down broader indices.
D-Matrix introduced Raptor, a new accelerator that stacks compute logic directly on top of DRAM dies to tackle memory bottlenecks in generative AI inference. The design aims to bridge the gap between SRAM's speed but tiny capacity and HBM's larger capacity but bandwidth and power limitations, following the company's earlier Corsair and JetStream products.