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Copernicus reported that August 2023 statistically tied July 2023 as the hottest month ever measured, with global average temperatures reaching 16.96 degrees Celsius. Scientists attribute the extreme heat to a combination of long-term human-caused climate change and a strong El Nino weather pattern, noting the reading was 1.65 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
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.
Proxylity introduced DTLS Listeners, a new capability that adds TLS-style encryption and authentication to UDP-based applications without altering their datagram structure. The service handles DTLS 1.2 or 1.3 session negotiation, decrypts incoming data, and forwards plaintext to configured Destinations, encrypting responses before sending them back to the client. Each Listener automatically receives a Proxylity-managed server certificate accessible via a CloudFormation attribute.
Feyn launched MultiMatte, a background removal tool that lets users type a word or phrase to isolate a specific object in an image while removing everything else. The model fine-tunes Meta's SAM 3 using LoRA, adjusting only 19.49M of its 860M parameters (2.27%), and swaps SAM 3's binary masks for continuous alpha mattes that can render soft edges like hair or translucent objects. On DIS benchmarks, MultiMatte scores 0.893-0.923 compared to SAM 3's 0.649-0.703.
PlanetScale introduced Neki, a system that adds a router, sidecars, and control plane on top of standard Postgres to enable horizontal scaling across many real Postgres shards. It supports online resharding, shard splitting, high-availability clusters per shard, topology-aware connection pooling, and coordinated schema changes without downtime.
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.
Yoto has announced a fourth-generation Yoto Player and a refreshed Yoto Mini, both aimed at kids' audio listening without needing a smartphone. The new Player adds a green dial for quick access to up to 20 favorite tracks or stories without inserting a Yoto Card, plus 64GB storage, faster downloads and simplified routine settings. The redesigned Mini is now rugged and water/dust-resistant, holds up to 1,000 hours of audio, and also supports card-free playback via the same green button.
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.
PlanetScale unveiled Neki, a new distributed database built on real Postgres instances running across shards, now available as a platform preview. The company says it drew on eight years of experience running large sharded MySQL clusters to design a system that keeps standard Postgres semantics rather than mimicking compatibility. Neki uses a router that speaks the Postgres wire protocol to direct queries to the appropriate shard.
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.
GOG expanded its Preservation Program with five classic titles—Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Armikrog, Descent, Hitman: Codename 47, and Myst—each paired with interactive 3D box scans in GLB format. Through a new partnership with Big Box Collection, GOG is also offering printable, foldable templates so users can assemble physical replicas of the original packaging at home.