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Tech News
Apple has opened trade-in credit for iPhone Air and iPhone 17 ahead of new successor models, offering up to $585 for either device despite the iPhone Air costing $200 more at retail after this week's price hikes. The iPhone 17 now starts at $899 and the iPhone Air at $1099, yet both receive identical trade-in valuations.
Instagram has launched a feature allowing users to add posts they're tagged in directly onto their main profile grid, without reposting or duplicating the content. Users can add these posts from tag notifications, the post itself, or the Tagged tab, and can remove them from their grid at any time without affecting the original post or their Tagged tab.
Speakers at the Innovation Festival offered a set of 12 guiding principles meant to clarify what genuine innovation looks like, distinguishing it from the overused corporate buzzword it has become. The rules draw on their firsthand experience building and scaling new ideas across industries.
An essayist contends that software projects, despite being fundamentally simple systems of forms, databases and workflows, tend to make otherwise rational people behave erratically. The piece attributes this to the unique combination of speed, cost, complexity and near-limitless ability to change direction that software allows, unlike physical construction where changes have visible, immediate costs.
A researcher named Jacob Coxon posted a resignation thread citing AI safety concerns, and the announcement unexpectedly spread far beyond the usual AI safety community. The post amplified earlier claims, including one from Evan Hubinger citing a greater than 10% probability of human extinction from AI, pushing extreme risk estimates into mainstream conversation. Commentators argue that rising AI capabilities and recent incidents made the public far more receptive to such warnings than in past years.
A Geekbench 6 benchmark result attributed to Apple's unreleased A20 Pro chip has surfaced online, showing single-core and multi-core scores roughly 25% higher than the current A19 Pro. The chip, built on a 2nm process, is expected to power the upcoming iPhone Duo foldable and iPhone 18 Pro models, with clock speeds nearing 5 GHz.
A new clip from the third episode of 'Dark Matter' season two, titled 'Everything Beautiful, Everything Terrible,' shows the series confronting a major plot complication that arose from its multiverse premise. The action-heavy preview suggests the show is directly grappling with the ripple effects of its characters' choices across parallel realities rather than glossing over them.
Warner Bros. purchased the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick's, written by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, immediately following the Pearl Harbor attack and America's subsequent entry into World War II. The studio rushed it into production during summer 1942, casting Humphrey Bogart, previously known for gangster roles, in the lead alongside Ingrid Bergman. The film premiered in New York that November and went on to win three Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
A new analysis finds Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet collected roughly $28 billion in federal contracts between 2018 and 2022, with the five largest tech contracts from 2019-2022 carrying combined ceilings of at least $53 billion. Separately, venture capital poured nearly $100 billion into defense tech startups from 2021 to 2023, a 40 percent jump over the prior seven years combined.
At Goldman Sachs' Communacopia + Technology Conference, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told CNBC's David Faber that AI is neither good nor bad by nature, comparing it to nuclear power that can either power a city or destroy one. He framed AI's rise as a 'cognitive revolution' that could make humans smarter rather than replace them, urging people to ride the technological shift instead of being overwhelmed by it.
In her new book, New York Times reporter Natasha Singer documents how Apple, Microsoft and other tech companies embedded themselves in K-12 education over the past 15 years, supplying free coding curricula and tools like Swift and Minecraft to promote computer science as a path to jobs. She argues AI companies are now pitching schools with a nearly identical playbook, offering free resources while cultivating future customers and workers.
A new open-source project called EterDB extends PostgreSQL with the ability to reverse individual transactions, including updates, deletes, or entire batches, even after they have been committed. It tracks dependencies between reads and writes so that changes relying on a bad transaction are also caught, and it retains an append-only history that allows recovery of data from weeks or months earlier.