The Supreme Court ruled on September 4 that broadcast TV stations must sell election ads to political parties and joint fundraising committees at the same lowest unit charge rates required for individual candidates. The order came after the National Republican Congressional and Senatorial Committees petitioned the court, overturning a Fourth Circuit ruling that had sided with Democratic candidates who challenged an FCC notice mandating the discount.
A technical deep-dive follows the STG.E instruction—the global memory store operation in a simple vector-add CUDA kernel—through an RTX 4090's pipeline, from register read through the load/store unit, coalescer, L1 cache, crossbar, and L2 slice, down to DRAM. The author benchmarks how frequently a single warp can issue store instructions, finding a new STG.E can be pushed through the register file, LSU, and coalescer roughly every 6.1 cycles (about 2.3 nanoseconds at 2.6 GHz).
Google's threat intelligence team says cybercriminals and state-backed actors from China, Iran, and Russia are increasingly adopting autonomous AI agent systems rather than relying on simple prompt-and-response chatbots. These agents can independently execute multi-step tasks, expanding what threat actors can automate in their operations.
Google is revising how its Search results appear across the European Union, following an €460 million fine from the European Commission for allegedly favoring its own services over competitors. Under the new format, one specialized comparison engine, such as Expedia or Hotels.com, will appear prominently at the top of results, with two others shown with fewer details, while a carousel for hotels, airlines and restaurants will be stripped of features like real-time pricing. Google's own algorithm will still determine the rankings of these vertical search services.
Counterpoint Research's Q2 2026 report found global smartwatch shipments fell 4% year over year, even as Apple, Huawei and Garmin posted gains. Apple grew 14% to capture a 20.1% share, trailing only Huawei's 21.8% share, with the Watch Series 11 and Watch SE 3 driving over 80% of Apple's volume. Huawei's growth was concentrated in China, which made up about 80% of its shipments.
Samsung reports that combined US purchases of the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Fold 8 Ultra are running 30% ahead of last year's Z Fold 7, which itself was the most pre-ordered Fold model ever. The two Fold devices now make up about 80% of total Galaxy Z8 series purchases, with the Z Flip 8 accounting for the rest. Samsung also says roughly 30% of Flip 8 buyers switched from rival brands, most of them first-time foldable owners.
Meta AI has released Muse, a new personal AI agent available as an iPhone app and through the web at muse.ai for Mac users. The app lets users customize their agent's name and avatar, and offers free access with weekly usage limits, while paid subscribers get expanded access. Muse is currently limited to the US, with plans to expand to more countries over time.
Google has updated Sheets to support its entire Google Fonts web library, extending font options to chart titles, axis labels, data labels, and legends. Users can access these fonts via a new 'More fonts' option in the chart editor sidebar. The change also improves how custom fonts are preserved when importing or exporting files between Sheets and Excel.
Samsung Electronics and TSMC have committed to deploying ASML's newest high-numerical-aperture EUV lithography systems, machines that can cost up to $400 million each. Both companies join Intel in adopting a related technical change expected to increase chip output on these machines by roughly 40 percent. Samsung plans to use the tools for memory chip production by 2028, while TSMC intends to apply the technology to its most advanced chips for customers like AMD, Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm.
Meta unveiled Muse, an AI assistant app built on its Muse Spark models, that can handle tasks such as booking appointments, filling out forms and watching home security feeds. The app, internally codenamed Hatch, offers a free tier alongside $20 and $100 monthly subscription options depending on usage, according to AI chief Alexandr Wang.
Panic will livestream its Playdate Update Showcase on Wednesday, September 9 at 12PM ET, just one hour before Apple's iPhone event, revealing Season 3's games and release date. The announcement came only 23 hours ahead of the stream, following the pattern of Season 2, which launched in May 2025 with six weeks of weekly game drops for $39 and sold over 15,000 copies.
A programming-theory essay pushes back on the claim that any threaded function argument, such as Go's context.Context, qualifies as a 'function color' like async/await. The author argues that if every parameter counted as a color, the concept wouldn't have needed inventing decades after functions themselves existed, and proposes analyzing coloring instead as a question of how a change to one function propagates through the call graph to its callers.