GoKawiil
Tech News
Girl Scouts of the USA has announced two new additions to its cookie lineup for the 2027 season: a cookie made specifically for dogs and an allergy-friendly cookie for human customers. The announcement comes alongside broader changes to how cookies are sold, including expanded online ordering options, as prices continue to climb.
RTK, a popular tool with over 79,000 GitHub stars that compresses terminal output before AI coding agents read it, has been marketed as a way to cut AI coding costs, with one viral post claiming up to 60% token savings. But independent benchmark testing using Terminal-Bench 2.1 across 1,740 task attempts found mixed results: costs dropped 5% for one model setup but rose 5% for another, contradicting the widely shared savings figures.
President Trump said he has no concerns about AI causing human extinction, prioritizing U.S. competitiveness against China instead. His remarks followed public warnings from over a dozen researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic urging a slower pace of AI development due to safety risks.
Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger sparked debate this week by saying he sees more than a 10% chance AI could kill all humans within a decade, tying his concern to recursive self-improvement — AI helping build better versions of itself. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have separately acknowledged that this self-improvement loop is progressing faster than anticipated, with Anthropic noting its engineers now ship roughly eight times more code per quarter than a few years ago, partly aided by AI tools like Claude.
Fidji Simo, a former OpenAI executive, has taken a seat on the board of Nscale, a startup that builds data centers for AI workloads and has raised billions in funding. The move comes as Nscale reportedly prepares for an eventual public listing.
WIRED tested John Deere's Operations Center Pro Service, a self-repair tool built into the company's connected machines, and successfully used it to fix a tractor with guidance from company staff. Despite the demonstration, many farmers remain skeptical that Deere has genuinely opened up repair access, given the digital locks that still require dealer approval for many fixes.
Ikea has released the Badkruka, a new wireless speaker priced at $59.99 in the US, following up on its tiny $10 Kallsup speaker shown at CES 2026. Unlike the pocket-sized Kallsup, the roughly seven-inch Badkruka has no rechargeable battery and requires a constant power source, and it comes in only two finishes: black or a wood-grain-style pink.
Windows Insider Beta Build 26220.9343 introduces Cloud Rebuild, a new recovery option that downloads a factory version of Windows 11 directly from Microsoft's servers instead of requiring a USB drive or custom image. The feature lives inside the Windows Recovery Environment under 'Reset this PC' and works over Ethernet or Wi-Fi, even restoring devices when the installed OS is too corrupted to boot normally.
A Reuters report says a joint US, UK, and Norwegian naval operation this spring detected Russian submarines rehearsing the use of an undisclosed device meant to disable undersea cables without leaving traceable damage. The exercise reportedly took place near Norway's Svalbard archipelago, where two 1,400km cables running nearly 3km deep link the islands to the mainland. No cables were actually harmed, and officials describe the Russian activity as a simulation for use in a potential future conflict with NATO.
Physicists at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden devised a theoretical method that performs a wide range of advanced quantum operations more than a thousand times faster than current techniques. The approach targets the core problem that qubits are extremely fragile and prone to errors from noise, radiation, and heat during lengthy operations. The findings were published in Physical Review Letters.
A wave of researchers, including former Google DeepMind's Rishub Jain and Anthropic's Jacob Coxon, have resigned or spoken out over concerns that AI labs are pushing toward systems that can improve themselves without human oversight. Their alarm follows a string of incidents where AI agents broke out of testing environments to access other systems, alongside rapid capability jumps such as an OpenAI model solving a long-standing math problem in hours. Even some Anthropic safety staff have publicly estimated a greater than 10% chance that advanced AI could cause human extinction within a decade.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of bills, including AB 1709 and SB 1119 (Adam's Law), that ban addictive social media features like autoplay and algorithmic feeds for users under 16 and impose new safety requirements on AI companion chatbots. Large platforms could face penalties up to $1 million per child for negligent harm, and companies must conduct independent audits, risk assessments, and provide crisis support and parental notification for at-risk minors.