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Affirm Holdings' stock rose 7% Friday after the buy now, pay later company posted better-than-expected fiscal fourth-quarter results. CEO Max Levchin told CNBC that elevated gasoline prices are straining household budgets, pushing more shoppers toward installment payment plans to manage costs.
A developer investigating containerized Rust performance found that musl's default memory allocator is significantly slower than glibc's, not just under high concurrency but even on modest 4-core EC2 instances. Swapping in mimalloc or jemalloc narrows the gap but doesn't close it—one workload remained 26% slower—because several of musl's core memory routines are themselves inefficient, not just its allocator.
A LendingTree survey of over 1,500 credit cardholders found that 41% typically pay only the minimum due on at least one card, a habit that jumps to 58% among Gen Z but falls to 19% among Baby Boomers. The average indebted U.S. cardholder carries a balance of $7,756, and 44% of respondents said they don't know the interest rate on their cards.
At the World Robotics Conference in Beijing, Oak Deer Robotics unveiled a suite of automated kitchen tools including a multimodal AI cooking model called CookingMuse and a humanoid food-cart chef named RobotCook, demonstrating stir-fried tofu and pork with peppers using a 300-degree robotic wok. Separately, Hikrobots showed humanoid robots performing basic fast-food prep, while a robot-run noodle shop opened for trial operation elsewhere in Beijing.
PaperCut released a follow-up emergency update for PaperCut NG and MF after researchers found ways around its initial patch for actively exploited vulnerabilities. The company disclosed CVE-2026-82078, a critical unsafe dynamic class-loading bug, and CVE-2026-81578, a high-severity authentication bypass, which can be chained to let unauthenticated attackers execute code on vulnerable servers.
Apple introduced the M6 chip, launching first in a new Mac mini, alongside the M5 Ultra. The M6 marks the first base-tier Apple silicon chip built on a 2-nanometer process and the first to combine three core types—two super cores, four performance cores, and six efficiency cores—a mix previously limited to the pricier M5 Pro and M5 Max.
Amazon has discounted the GPS 44mm Apple Watch SE 3 to $199.99, down $79 from its $279 list price. That marks the lowest price yet recorded for this model. The watch includes an always-on display, faster charging, and up to 18 hours of battery life.
After a family in Chennai received what they felt was an insensitive response from a well-known guru following a relative's death, they turned to AI chatbots like ChatGPT for comfort and guidance. Yoga instructor Kripa Vaidyanathan said the AI offered nonjudgmental, round-the-clock support that was easier to access than a human spiritual advisor's limited time.
The Trump administration is weighing new tariffs on semiconductors, prompting pushback from tech lobbyists who say the move would raise chip costs and slow data-center construction. Industry representatives argue that domestic chip manufacturing capacity is years away from meeting soaring demand, making the tariffs impractical. The Computer and Communications Industry Association warned that the resulting cost increases and uncertainty could jeopardize the ongoing data-center expansion.
An entrepreneur in a heavily regulated industry describes ending a working relationship with a co-manufacturer whose product quality was fine but whose process records were inconsistent depending on who compiled them. Replacing the supplier took weeks and unbudgeted funds, but the founder argues the real lesson was building a habit of decisions that survive outside scrutiny, not just internal convenience.
A new JAMA article co-authored by oncologist Ezekiel Emanuel and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla argues that autonomous AI systems are approaching, or have already reached, the point where they outperform both human physicians and doctor-AI hybrid teams on core clinical tasks. Those tasks include taking patient histories, diagnosing illness, choosing tests, prescribing treatment, and managing chronic disease. The authors claim that human oversight can actually degrade AI's performance rather than improve it, based on their review of AI medical research published since January 2024.
A hobbyist programmer describes replacing a six-year habit of looping a YouTube recording of Final Fantasy XIV's aetheryte crystal sound with a self-built solution. Frustrated by YouTube's unreliable loop function and the recording's audible seam, they set out to extract the original in-game audio files directly from the game so the ambience could be replayed cleanly without needing FFXIV running.