GoKawiil
Tech News
Amazon has discounted its 15.6-inch 2nd-generation Echo Show 15 smart display by $80, bringing the price down from $349.99 to $269.99, a 23% reduction. The deal matches the best pricing seen since Amazon's June Prime Day event.
Amazon announced it will permanently retire Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), the crowdsourced task platform it launched in 2005, effective September 30, 2026. The company cited its routine practice of evaluating tools and services, without giving a specific reason, though MTurk has reportedly been losing ground to newer AI-training platforms for years.
Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said on August 26, 2026 that the company expects 70% revenue growth in fiscal 2028, which would translate to roughly $673 billion in annual sales based on current fiscal 2027 consensus estimates. That figure would put Nvidia ahead of Apple and Alphabet, trailing only Amazon among major US tech firms. The outlook follows a fiscal 2027 second-quarter report showing $96.2 billion in revenue and 117% growth in data-center sales to $89 billion.
Peter Cullen, the Canadian voice actor who gave life to Optimus Prime across Transformers films, TV shows and games, has died at his Los Angeles home. He was also known for voicing Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh productions, King Kong in the 1976 remake, and the villainous K.A.R.R. on Knight Rider. His family confirmed he passed peacefully, surrounded by loved ones.
A collaborative team led by an independent developer completed a 100% decompilation of the original Snowboard Kids for Nintendo 64, meaning every function now has matching C code that compiles to identical machine code as the original. The project took 84 days, compared with 596 days for a prior effort on Snowboard Kids 2, with contributors including inspectredc, Bl00D4NGEL, and queueRAM providing key expert work alongside AI assistance.
Britain's government has moved to permit plug-in solar kits, but the Institution of Engineering and Technology says the country's electrical infrastructure wasn't built for it. IET technical regulations head Mark Coles says many homes still use older Residual Current Devices designed only for one-way power flow, which can fail or burn out when solar feeds electricity back through them. The IET issued its own warning the same day as the government's announcement, urging homeowners to get professional wiring checks before installing any system.
Josh Mackanic, a former Pacific Gas and Electric engineer, founded CivilGrid in 2020 after experiencing costly delays caused by unknown buried pipes during excavation projects. The startup aggregates data on utility lines, property ownership, and environmental regulations into a unified underground mapping platform, and has now raised a $26 million Series A led by Spark Capital, with participation from Afore, A*, Ford Street Ventures, SNR, and Energy Impact Partners.
Meta was granted a patent last week for a hardware-enforced privacy system that includes a 'mute or lock' switch capable of disabling sensors on devices like its Ray-Ban smart glasses. The filing, submitted in February, comes as the company's camera-equipped glasses have drawn widespread criticism and earned the nickname 'pervert glasses' due to misuse by harassers and voyeurs.
Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics released Microduck, a 25-centimeter open-source robot shaped like a duck that costs $399 and can walk, grip objects up to 800 grams, right itself after falling, and even roller skate. The robot uses a camera, lidar, and dual IMUs to sense its surroundings, and its behaviors are trained in simulation before being deployed and fine-tuned on the physical device.
Indie publisher Panic is returning the tariff fees it had charged Playdate buyers, after a court ruling deemed the Trump administration's import taxes illegal and ordered refunds to affected companies. Panic said it has now received its own tariff refunds and passed that money back to customers who had paid the added charge as a line item on their orders.
Hollywood is increasingly turning to video game properties for film and TV adaptations as superhero content declines, following the box-office success of Illumination's $1.3 billion Super Mario Bros. Movie and critically praised shows like The Last of Us and Fallout. This marks a dramatic turnaround from the disastrous 1993 Super Mario Bros. film, which flopped due to mismatched tonal choices and studio interference.
A maker documented building the Scanwheel, a small electromechanical television using a spinning 3D-printed drum instead of a traditional Nipkow disk, achieving an unusual 4,096-by-20-pixel widescreen resolution. The device is driven by a Raspberry Pi Pico controlling a motor driver board and LEDs mounted so the drum's perforations sweep past them to trace scan lines, recreating the persistence-of-vision effect pioneered by John Logie Baird in the 1920s.