General Motors is building out a half-million-square-foot Battery Cell Development Center at its Warren, Michigan campus, where engineers are prototyping new battery cell chemistries and manufacturing processes. The facility houses equipment like slurry-mixing vats and electrode-coating machines, and is designed as a low-volume testbed ahead of larger production plants. GM says the goal is to lower battery costs, which currently account for 30 to 40 percent of an EV's price.
A new open-source project, PS2 Web Recomp, statically translates PlayStation 2 Emotion Engine machine code into C++ and compiles it to WebAssembly, pairing it with a reimplemented PS2 OS and WebGPU-based graphics to run games directly in a browser without an emulator. The project, a sibling to an earlier PSP recompilation effort, has gotten Gran Turismo 4 and God of War II playable from boot through gameplay, with saves stored in the browser; users must supply their own disc images since no game data is distributed.
At POSETTE 2026, Sai Srirampur presented a benchmark comparing a 3.3-billion-row PostgreSQL workload running on baseline gp3 EBS storage versus local NVMe storage. The talk argued that common scaling symptoms—slow ingestion, inconsistent read latency, autovacuum falling behind, and slower checkpoints—often trace back to storage performance rather than Postgres itself, and proposed architecture patterns for running Postgres on local NVMe in production.
A growing number of AI-assisted software projects are attempting to recreate Adobe's applications, with one effort reportedly involving over 165 contributors submitting hundreds of pull requests daily using Claude. The author estimates spending on AI API tokens for the largest such project has exceeded $50,000 in two weeks, while noting none of these clones can yet match Photoshop's brush engine performance on large canvases.
The FCC will vote October 29 on rules barring device certification testing performed in mainland China, with a transition period ending December 1, 2028. Currently 82% of electronics authorized last year were tested in China, versus under 4% in US labs, according to Chairman Brendan Carr. The rules would limit recognized labs to the US or countries offering reciprocal recognition, with Hong Kong and Taiwan reportedly included but mainland China excluded.
Google is said to be working on a successor to its Google TV Streamer device that would add hands-free voice control, similar to features found on Apple's streaming hardware. Details on timing, pricing and full specifications have not been disclosed.
The Museo de Historia de la Computación spent 18 months building a full-size replica of the 1976 Cray-1 supercomputer that houses a working cluster of 30 Mac minis, mostly from 2012. Using a custom Python matrix-multiplication script, the cluster reportedly hit 1.3 teraflops on 64 active cores, down from a previous 1.5 teraflops run with all 70 cores online. The exhibit, built to mark the 50th anniversaries of the Cray-1 and Apple, lets visitors watch a calculation run on one core before seeing it spread across the cluster.
A developer who has worked across PHP, Python and Perl web stacks describes building a templating system for the Zig programming language, aimed at generating HTML without runtime errors or memory leaks. The approach uses Zig's compile-time features and arena allocators to check template inputs at compile time, auto-escape output to prevent XSS, and write directly to a writer without extra allocations. The project follows the author's earlier Zig libraries zio and Dusty, and was inspired after encountering an existing project called Ziex.
Research cited shows 38% of employees went through multiple RTO policy changes in 2024, with 6% experiencing more than five. One large retail company first required three in-office days, fell short, then mandated four days to force compliance toward three — a tactic that ultimately achieved the target attendance level.
In a new essay, Amos Batto argues that the Linux phone market, which stalled after the 2020 launches of the Purism Librem 5 and PINE64 PinePhone, is now positioned for renewed growth. He points to improvements in mobile Linux interfaces like Plasma Mobile and Phosh, plus better distro support for Android-kernel hardware, as key changes since the earlier stagnation.
Smartphone users can significantly reduce spam calls and scam texts using existing settings on iPhone and Android devices, rather than paying for third-party apps. The techniques target common scammer tactics like neighborhood spoofing, where callers fake local area codes, and bulk automated text messaging.
Speaking at the DBS Asia Future Forward Conference in Singapore, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said AI could enable significant breakthroughs in physics, biotech, chemistry and materials science within two to three years. He cited ByteDance's Seed research team, which released Protenix-v2 in April, a model aimed at predicting biomolecular structures for potential use in drug discovery.
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