Masayoshi Son is seeking up to $100 billion from Middle Eastern investors, including senior UAE figures, to launch a fund that would acquire established companies and upgrade them with AI and robotics, the Financial Times reports. The fund would differ from SoftBank's prior vehicles by buying operating businesses rather than funding tech startups, with SoftBank's Roze robotics division expected to play a role, though neither the fund's formation nor its financing is confirmed.
A blog post examines C17 section 7.25.2.6, which governs error handling for strtod, strtof, strtold and related string-to-float conversion functions. It explains that these functions' ability to report overflow or underflow via errno depends on the math_errhandling macro, and that on libraries like musl where MATH_ERRNO is not advertised, there is no standard-compliant way to detect these conversion errors. The author notes that Linux man pages for these functions omit this detail entirely.
Ting-Wei 'Willy' Sun, a third-party broker charged alongside Super Micro co-founder Yih-Shyan Liaw and sales manager Ruei-Tsang Chang, has pleaded guilty to conspiring to illegally reroute Nvidia AI chips to China. Sun's plea is tied to an agreement with prosecutors whose cooperation terms haven't been disclosed, and he's scheduled for sentencing on September 8, 2027. Investigators allege the group disguised real Super Micro servers as dummy units to deceive export inspectors before routing them through Thailand to Alibaba.
Major indexes hit fresh records before a sharp tech selloff on Thursday, with the S&P 500 still finishing the week up 1.2% and the Nasdaq up 0.6% after Friday's rebound. Separately, SpaceX reportedly seeks to raise $40 billion to expand its Nvidia-powered AI compute business and announced a deal to acquire a nationwide wireless spectrum portfolio for Starlink.
Apple's first foldable iPhone, the iPhone Duo, is set to go on sale October 23 with pre-orders starting a week earlier, following the already-available iPhone 18 Pro. Competitors including Xiaomi, Oppo, Motorola and Samsung have been developing foldable phones in a similar compact 'passport' format, positioning themselves ahead of Apple's entry into the category.
Developer Sword has released PS5SX2, a port of the PCSX2 emulator that runs natively on jailbroken PlayStation 5 hardware. The software supports physical PS2 discs via internal or USB optical drives, plus common disc image formats like ISO, CHD, CSO and ZSO, though it can only read PS2 titles on DVDs due to the PS5 drive's lack of a CD laser. It uses a modified Vulkan translation layer, ps5vk, built by coder Mihawk-99, since the PS5 has no official Vulkan driver support.
PopVax dosed the first participants in a Phase 1 trial of PVX-001, a broadly protective COVID-19 vaccine candidate, in Melbourne on 31 August 2026. The trial will enroll 36 healthy adults to test safety and immune response breadth; as of 6 October, 14 participants had been dosed with no serious adverse events reported. The vaccine uses PopVax's own protein design, mRNA-VLP architecture, and fridge-stable lipid nanoparticle delivery, built in-house over 4.5 years, and will be open-sourced once the trial concludes.
The FDA has proposed expanding its 'threshold of regulation' exemption, which currently applies only to food-contact materials like packaging, to allow chemicals to be added directly to food as flavorings, preservatives, emulsifiers and other additives without safety review, provided they fall below 0.5 parts per billion. The expansion was included in a Federal Register filing tied to the agency's recent move to close the separate 'generally regarded as safe' loophole, which Robert F Kennedy Jr and the FDA publicly touted as a win for food safety.
According to this week's Tom's Hardware Premium roundup, Tencent has signed a five-year, $7 billion deal to lease high-performance AI chips from Oracle, with the per-hour rate roughly 43% cheaper than leasing an Nvidia H100 on a one-year contract. No specific chip model was confirmed, though the deal's scale and pricing suggest Hopper-class GPUs. Separately, Synopsys and OpenAI unveiled 'GPT-Synopsys,' an AI model combining Synopsys' chip design IP and EDA tools with OpenAI's LLM capabilities.
Samsung's One UI 9 update, introduced alongside its August foldable launches, is now widely rolling out to recent Galaxy flagship devices. The update is the first version of Samsung's interface built on Android 17 and includes several new features, including AI tools and a contextual-information feature called Now Nudge.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 begins on October 13 at 8 a.m. PT at Moscone West in San Francisco, featuring more than 300 startups in the Expo Hall and 20 Startup Battlefield 200 finalists competing for a $100,000 prize and the Disrupt Cup. The event will also host over 200 sessions with more than 250 tech leaders discussing AI, fundraising, go-to-market strategy, and scaling. Attendees can still save up to $100 on passes, with discounts for groups and a 50% off second ticket offer.
Rust's SIMD abstractions previously required wrapping raw intrinsic calls in unsafe blocks because the compiler couldn't verify at compile time whether the CPU running the code actually supported the needed instruction set. As of Rust 1.87, the compiler itself tracks which instruction sets are available, letting developers call SIMD intrinsics without manually marking them unsafe or writing complex cross-referencing logic.
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