A ZDNET contributor shares how they've been using ChatGPT Work, OpenAI's agentic AI tool, to handle five recurring small-business tasks, including sorting through PR email correspondence from OpenAI and other outlets. The writer describes connecting Gmail to the tool only temporarily for large tasks and disconnecting afterward as a security precaution, while noting prompts often need refinement to get useful results.
Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4, released over the weekend, introduces a new Settings menu option letting users control which icons appear in the status bar. The feature can be accessed via Settings > Notifications or Settings > System, offering separate toggles for notification icons and system icons like mute, vibration, and battery percentage.
Multiple U.S. military commissaries have reported near-simultaneous refrigeration failures over the past several days, spoiling frozen and refrigerated food at bases nationwide. The Pentagon has acknowledged a 'possible refrigeration disruption' affecting numerous Defense Commissary Agency stores, a pattern first flagged through scattered social media complaints before being independently confirmed by Stars and Stripes and Military Times/Navy Times.
The Debian Project has decided against banning AI-generated contributions to its Linux distribution, instead requiring that all submissions meet existing standards for quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance regardless of the tools used. Contributors must review, test, and modify AI-assisted output before submission, though disclosing AI involvement remains optional rather than mandatory.
At the AI Everything MEA conference in Cairo, a fintech operator shared a real-world example of how ambiguous data definitions can distort AI and analytics outcomes. Using SMS notification charges and interest postings as an example, they showed how automatically generated, non-customer-initiated transactions can inflate 'Monthly Active User' counts, leading marketing, product, and finance teams to draw three conflicting conclusions from the same dataset.
California's Assembly Bill 1856 has passed both chambers of the state legislature and now heads to Engrossing and Enrolling before reaching Governor Gavin Newsom's desk. The bill retains an amendment carving out open-source operating systems from its age-verification mandates, an exemption first added back in May. Covered operating systems will need to collect birth date or age information during account setup and share a coarse age-range signal with app stores and developers via API.
Sony has cut the price of its WH-1000XM5 over-ear headphones to $198 at both Amazon and Best Buy as part of week-long Labor Day discounts. That price matches the lowest they hit during Prime Day in late June, but this time shoppers don't need a Prime membership to access it. The headphones normally retail near $250 and launched in 2022 at $399.99.
During a routine ground taxi test to diagnose an electrical fault in English Electric Lightning XM135, pilot Taffy Holden unintentionally pushed the throttle past the afterburner gate. Unfamiliar with disengaging the afterburner, Holden found the aircraft accelerating rapidly, narrowly avoiding a fuel tanker crossing the runway before becoming airborne despite having no flight training clearance, helmet, or radio for the exercise.
A 12-terabyte archive of data from Valve's old Steam2 content servers, used between 2003 and 2013, has surfaced via BitTorrent in an incident dubbed the 'Teraleak.' The trove reportedly contains unreleased builds and prototypes from Valve and other developers, including early Portal 2 prototypes and a Sonic the Hedgehog 4 build, and appears to have been assembled from publicly accessible endpoints rather than a hack.
An essay compares the universe to a massive, minified software file with no comments or source history, arguing that physicists effectively act as reverse engineers probing a running system they cannot inspect directly. It traces how Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein each uncovered hidden unifying rules beneath seemingly separate phenomena, and notes that quantum mechanics then complicated the picture by making particles behave differently depending on how they are observed.
Eli Lilly has struck a cash deal worth as much as $2.875 billion to acquire Merida Biosciences, a biotechnology company. The acquisition is aimed at strengthening Lilly's immunology drug pipeline.
A developer critiques current AI agent memory systems, arguing most are either locked to a specific vendor's harness, overly complex (requiring vector databases, graph databases and extra LLM calls), or overly abstracted into disconnected fact lists. As an alternative, they propose 'Memoryfields', a much simpler approach that stores agent memory as a straightforward file format rather than a complicated database architecture.
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