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Europe sets its sights on multi-billion-euro gigawatt factories as it plays catch-up on AI

Data storage tapes are stored at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which will house the U.S. supercomputer to be powered by Nvidia's forthcoming Vera Rubin chips, in Berkeley, California, U.S. May 29, 2025. Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters Europe is setting its sights on gigawatt factories in a bid to bolster its lagging artificial intelligence industry and meet the challenges of a rapidly-changing sector. Buzz aroun

Show HN: 433 – How to make a font that says nothing

433 is a font that masks visible text and replaces it with dots. I'm using it in the new version of Ensō along with Coffeeshop Mode. You can see it in action here: Beautiful. Why In short: because it's the simplest way to add Coffeeshop Mode to the app. (Also, because I was curious) (OK, mainly because I was curious, Dog mode) Longer version: The previous note on Ensō ended up on the front page of HN and gave us almost 400 TestFlight testers. This is way more than I had expected. In fact

Show HN: 433 - How to Make a Font That Says Nothing

433 is a font that masks visible text and replaces it with dots. I'm using it in the new version of Ensō along with Coffeeshop Mode. You can see it in action here: Beautiful. Why In short: because it's the simplest way to add Coffeeshop Mode to the app. (Also, because I was curious) (OK, mainly because I was curious, Dog mode) Longer version: The previous note on Ensō ended up on the front page of HN and gave us almost 400 TestFlight testers. This is way more than I had expected. In fact

Whistle pet trackers are shutting down next month

Whistle, a subsidiary of Mars that makes pet trackers, has announced that it's being acquired by Tractive. As part of the acquisition, Whistle trackers will stop working, but Tractive is offering to replace those trackers for free for a limited time. The official shutdown date for Whistle's pet trackers is August 31, 2025. Users will be able to request a replacement tracker until September 30, 2025 by providing their tracker's serial number and then choosing a new Tractive tracker. Tractive wil

This super simple Android Contacts update solves a problem we've all had

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET Google's new Android feature is focused on ensuring you have quick access to your communication history. It's called Contact History, and it's found within the Android Contacts app. The latest upgrade to Contacts now includes a section called "Recent activity" that lists the recent communication history with a contact. If you find an interaction (be it a phone call, text, or other form), you can tap the entry to open the associated app. Also: I changed 12 settings on my An

Superhero Movies Have Stopped Obsessing Over Origins

There’s a repeating theme across 2025’s major superhero movies—Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, Superman, and Fantastic Four: First Steps. All four have interesting, sometimes conflicting relationships with time and how far along their characters are into their superhero tenures, making these movies simultaneous continuations and introductions. Time has always been a key part of superhero movies, and it used to be that their starting points could be whenever a creative team chose

Your Whistle pet tracker will stop working next month

is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid. Tractive, an Austrian company that makes smart location and activity trackers for dogs and cats, is expanding its presence in the US by acquiring a competitor, Whistle, from Mars Petcare. As a result of the acquisition, the Whistle platform is being shut down and its pet tracking devices will stop working on August 31st, 2025. Existing Whistle cu

How much pollution does AI create? Mistral breaks it down

What just happened? Mistral AI, a Paris-based venture focused on developing open-weight, open-source large language models, is now contributing to the AI discourse with a comprehensive lifecycle analysis of one of its models – guided by the same principles of openness that define its work. Mistral recently published an analysis of the environmental impact of one of its large language models. As chatbots and other AI-powered technologies become increasingly embedded in the global economy, Mistra

Crypto Payments Are Coming to PayPal

PayPal will soon let businesses that use its digital payments platform accept more than 100 types of cryptocurrency. The fintech company announced today that it’s rolling out a new “Pay with Crypto” feature in the coming weeks, allowing merchants to accept popular digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP. The platform will support transactions from several major crypto wallets, including Coinbase, MetaMask, and Exodus. PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said the new feature will help businesses

Performance and telemetry analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode fork

Performance and Telemetry Analysis of Trae IDE: A Deep Dive into ByteDance's VSCode Fork Executive Summary This analysis examines concerning performance and privacy issues discovered in Trae IDE, ByteDance's fork of Visual Studio Code. Key findings include excessive resource consumption (33 processes vs 9 in VSCode), persistent telemetry transmission despite user settings, and concerning community management practices. 1. Background and Methodology During evaluation of development environmen

Performance and Telemetry Analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode Fork

Performance and Telemetry Analysis of Trae IDE: A Deep Dive into ByteDance's VSCode Fork Executive Summary This analysis examines concerning performance and privacy issues discovered in Trae IDE, ByteDance's fork of Visual Studio Code. Key findings include excessive resource consumption (33 processes vs 9 in VSCode), persistent telemetry transmission despite user settings, and concerning community management practices. 1. Background and Methodology During evaluation of development environmen

Prepare to Celebrate 60 Years of ‘Star Trek’ With Nacelle’s Nostalgic Figures

Star Trek turns 60 next year, and the franchise is preparing to celebrate in style, especially with a brand new show on the way in Starfleet Academy. But outside of streaming, you’ll be able to celebrate in style with Nacelle’s new line of Star Trek action figures, which will dedicate a whole wave to the original series next year—and io9 has your first up-close look at one of them. As previously (and exclusively) revealed by io9 this past Friday, the third wave of Nacelle’s Star Trek line is se

Dumb Pipe

Connect A to B. Send Data. In 2023 it's hard to connect two devices directly. Dumb pipe punches through NATs, using on-the-fly node identifiers. It even keeps your machines connected as network conditions change. What you actually do with that connection is up to you.

James Gunn’s ‘Superman’ Hall of Justice Murals are Filled With Deep-Cut DC History

If you saw the new Superman, chances are you caught that brief glimpse of the mural in the Hall of Justice honoring the 300 years of metahuman lore James Gunn’s new DC is founded on. While there’s been speculation about which characters were fleetingly depicted, Gunn has since shared the mural online for fans to pore over themselves and guess accordingly the who’s who of this new DCU. As these are, indeed, some deep-cut characters, we’ve analyzed the data and are at least 75% sure we’ve identif

Open Channel: What’d You Think ‘Fantastic Four: First Steps’?

Nearly five full years after Marvel Studios first planted its flag and announced it was coming, the Fantastic Four finally made their MCU debut this weekend. Given the last tries at bringing these heroes to the big screen, and how Marvel treated those characters back when it didn’t own them, it seemed there wasn’t really anywhere for the Four to go but up. But things have changed in the past five years, and now there’s more pressure than ever for them to stick the landing, particularly since thi

Cable Bacteria Are Living Batteries

Under a cloudless August sky, I sailed upon an InterCity train from København station to Aarhus, an 8th-century Viking settlement that is now the second largest city in Denmark. After disembarking, I trekked toward the local university to a door marked INSTITUT FOR BIOLOGI. Upon entering, I was greeted by Ian Marshall, a lanky Australian professor with graying hair, who ushered me into his first floor laboratory. Dimly lit, the room was thick with the scent of wet earth. Large plastic buckets l

‘Alien: Earth’ Crashes Into Comic-Con With a Massive Outdoor Experience

The USCSS Maginot, a Weyland Yutani research vessel, crashed into the large lawn next to Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend. Onlookers remarked they hoped there was nothing dangerous on board, as containers had spilled all over the surrounding area. That’s both the tease for a very cool activation put together by FX for its new show, Alien: Earth, as well as the setup for Alien: Earth itself. The show, which debuts August 12, centers on a crashed ship and all the horrors that it contain

The Rise of Shippable Microfactories

A shippable microfactory from AUAR Nick Durham is a General Partner at Shadow Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on investing in frontier technologies for the built world. Traditionally, prefabricated construction has meant large fixed factories churning out modules or panels that get shipped to building sites. The siren song is industrial-esque economies of scale in an industry that’s long evaded affordability and efficiency. But those centralized models, made infamous by companies like

Apple may be Intel’s last hope in the foundry business

In a new research note shared this week, analyst Jeff Pu said that Apple could be among the customers considering Intel’s upcoming 14A process for future M-series chips. Then, came Intel’s Q2 results, and some crucial information about the future of its business. Flat results, tanking stock To say that Intel has been going through a years-long rough patch would be an understatement. Just today, their stock tumbled 8.5% after a weak Q2 report, the first full quarter under the helm of their new

‘Invincible Vs.’ Will Occupy Its Own Unique Corner of the ‘Invincible’ Universe

After turning The Walking Dead into a multimedia empire, Robert Kirkman has been hard at work doing the same for Invincible. First there were, of course, the comics. Then the awesome Prime Video animated show. There have long been talks of a potential live-action movie. And, next year, the franchise’s first full-fledged video game is coming, called Invincible Vs. And while little is known about the game, set for release in 2026, Kirkman spoke to press about it at San Diego Comic-Con. What we pr

Mistral’s new “environmental audit” shows how much AI is hurting the planet

Despite concerns over the environmental impacts of AI models, it's surprisingly hard to find precise, reliable data on the CO 2 emissions and water use for many major large language models. French model-maker Mistral is seeking to fix that this week, releasing details from what it calls a first-of-its-kind environmental audit "to quantify the environmental impacts of our LLMs." The results, which are broadly in line with estimates from previous scholarly work, suggest the environmental harm of

Google Contacts Calling Cards sound more and more like iOS Contact Posters (APK teardown)

Adamya Sharma / Android Authority TL;DR Google Contacts has been working on a new “Calling Cards” feature for a few versions now. Earlier analysis has suggested that this could function very similarly to iOS Contact Posters. New text strings and a promo image add further support to that interpretation. What is it they say about mobile operating systems? Good platforms copy, but great platforms steal? Android and iOS have definitely traded ideas more than a few times over the years, and just

Trump's AI plan pushes AI upskilling instead of worker protections - and 4 other key takeaways

Douglas Rissing/Getty The Trump administration published its AI Action Plan, a 28-page document outlining proposed policies for everything from data center construction to how government agencies will use AI, Wednesday. As expected, the plan emphasizes deregulation, speed, and global dominance while largely avoiding many of the conflicts plaguing the AI space, including debates over copyright, environmental protections, and safety testing requirements. Also: How the Trump administration change

Is Trump Trying to Get Back in Elon Musk’s Good Graces?

Elon Musk and Donald Trump joined forces before the 2024 presidential election to help each other out. Trump needed Musk’s money to buy votes and Musk needed Trump to decimate the federal government while making sure contracts with his own companies remained untouched. But the two men had a very messy falling out back in late May, when Musk departed his government role with DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. But no matter how much the men may bicker in public, they keep trying to si

‘Invincible’ Season 4 Is Bringing in Matthew Rhys for a Major Role

Congo lining up off of Prime Video’s announcement that Invincible will have its fifth season queued up while its fourth season is waiting in the wings, Skybound Entertainment announced new casting for the adult animated series that’ll play a major role in its upcoming season at San Diego Comic-Con. During Invincible co-creator Robert Kirkman’s panel at San Diego Comic-Con, it was announced that actor Matthew Rhys (The Americans) will play the role of Dinosaurus. To all the folks who didn’t have

The POSIX specification of vi

Certain terminals do not have all the capabilities necessary to support the complete vi definition. When these commands cannot be supported on such terminals, this condition shall not produce an error message such as "not an editor command" or report a syntax error. The implementation may either accept the commands and produce results on the screen that are the result of an unsuccessful attempt to meet the requirements of this volume of POSIX.1-2024 or report an error describing the terminal-rel

AMD CEO says U.S.-made TSMC chips are 5%-20% more expensive, but worth it

AMD CEO Lia Su said that chips made in TSMC’s Arizona facility are more expensive than those made in a comparable facility in Taiwan. Dr. Su said that U.S.-made chips cost ‘more than 5% but less than 20%’ higher, and she added during an interview with Bloomberg that these are costs that the company must shoulder to have a more resilient supply chain. “I think the economics of it are we have to consider the resiliency of the supply chain, I think we learned that during the pandemic — the idea th

SoftBank-backed LegalOn lands $50M to streamline legal workflows with AI

Contract review remains a slow, manual process that strains legal teams, forcing lawyers to sift through dense language, flag risks, and translate legal terms. In fact, the problem is so prevalent that for the past several years, Tokyo-based LegalOn Technologies has had an open door to that market: its AI contract review software for legal teams is today used by 7,000 organizations across Japan, the U.S. and the U.K., the company claims, and it leads the Japanese market, with 25% of all public