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Grok 4 spotted ahead of launch with special coding features

Elon Musk-funded xAI is skipping Grok 3.5 and releasing Grok 4 after Independence Day in the United States, and it could be the best model from the company. Grok 3.5 was originally supposed to be a huge leap from the previous models, but xAI later made several changes to the training model, and that warranted a new version. As spotted by testers on X and confirmed independently by BleepingComputer, xAI Console, which allows developers to access the Grok API, now has references to Grok 4 availa

Cloudflare just changed the internet, and it's bad news for the AI giants

iStock / Getty Images Plus The major internet Content Delivery Network (CDN), Cloudflare, has declared war on AI companies. Starting July 1, Cloudflare now blocks by default AI web crawlers accessing content from your websites without permission or compensation. The change addresses a real problem. My own small site, where I track all my stories, Practical Technology, has been slowed dramatically at times by AI crawlers. It's not just me. Numerous website owners have reported that AI crawlers,

Paramount agrees to pay Trump $16 million, clearing way for multibillion-dollar merger

Paramount has agreed to pay $16 million to resolve President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against its subsidiary CBS, clearing a path for the administration to approve the media giant’s multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance Media. In a statement seen by CNN on Tuesday night, Paramount said the settlement payment is inclusive of Trump’s legal fees and costs, and that the money will be allocated to his future presidential library instead of being paid to Trump directly. The sum is below the $10 bill

Tesla shares drop on Musk, Trump feud ahead of Q2 deliveries

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., during a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa's president, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. Tesla shares have dropped 7% from Friday's closing price of $323.63 to the $300.71 close on Tuesday ahead of the company's second-quarter deliveries report. Wall Street analysts are expecting Tesla to report deliveries of around 387,000 — a 13% de

Effectiveness of trees in reducing temperature, outdoor heat exposure in Vegas

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Effectiveness of trees in reducing temperature & outdoor heat exposure in Vegas

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Congress just greenlit a NASA moon plan opposed by Musk and Isaacman

Legacy aerospace giants scored a win Tuesday when the U.S. Senate passed President Trump’s budget reconciliation bill that earmarks billions more for NASA’s flagship Artemis program. The $10 billion addition to the Artemis architecture, which includes funding for additional Space Launch System rockets and an orbiting station around the moon called Gateway, is a rebuke to critics who wished to see alternative technologies used instead. Among those critics are SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and billionaire

The Hidden Engineering of Liquid Dampers in Skyscrapers

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] There’s a new trend in high-rise building design. Maybe you’ve seen this in your city. The best lots are all taken, so developers are stretching the limits to make use of space that isn’t always ideal for skyscrapers. They’re not necessarily taller than buildings of the past, but they are a lot more slender. “Pencil tower” is the term generally used to describe buildings that have a slenderness ratio of more than around 10 to

Amazon Reaches Automation Milestone by Deploying Its Millionth Robot

Amazon's fleet of warehouse robots just hit a new milestone. The company announced Monday that it deployed its millionth bot to begin operations at a fulfillment center in Japan. Amazon's ambitions for robot use have long surpassed the company utilizing them for delivery service. The business juggernaut is the world's leading manufacturer of mobile robotics, and aims to sell them to you for use at home as well -- if you have $1,600 to spare. The robotic workers operate in over 300 Amazon wareh

Figma moves closer to a blockbuster IPO that could raise $1.5B

Figma publicly shared its financials Tuesday, inching the design software company closer to an IPO. And while this initial S-1 is missing details such as number of shares to be offered and what price, the regulatory filing provides the clearest view yet of its financial health — and potential. IPO experts Renaissance Capital estimate that Figma could raise up to $1.5 billion in this offering. If it does meet or exceed that, Figma’s IPO will match or beat CoreWeave’s, which raised $1.5 billion a

Figma files for IPO on NYSE, plans to 'take big swings' with acquisitions

Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, appears at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco on May 9, 2024. Design software company Figma filed for an IPO on Tuesday, and plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol "FIG." The offering would be one of the hotly anticipated IPOs in recent years given Figma's growth rate and its high private market valuation. In late 2023, a $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped due to regulatory concerns in the

Google promotes ‘AI Mode’ on home page 'Doodle'

Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google's annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025. The Google Doodle is Alphabet's most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote "AI Mode," its latest AI search product. Google's Chrome browser landing pages and Google's home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company's latest search product. The doodle image also inc

OpenAI Is Shutting Down for a Week

In a bid to retain its staffers amid a Meta poaching spree, OpenAI is giving them a mandatory week-long vacation. According to insiders who spoke to Wired, a cloud of anxiety is lingering over OpenAI's C-suite as leaders scramble to keep staff happy and on their side — a tall order given that employees there often work up to 80 hours a week. Over the past week, Meta has hired at least eight OpenAI researchers to work on its new "superintelligence" team. This "recruiting coup," as the Wall Stre

Retail resurrection: David’s Bridal bets its future on AI after double bankruptcy

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Inside a new David’s Bridal store in Delray Beach, Florida, a bride-to-be carefully taps images on a 65-inch touchscreen, curating a vision board for her wedding. Behind the scenes, an AI system automatically analyzes her selections, building a knowledge graph that will match her with vendors, recommend products and generate a personalized

Cloudflare declares war on AI crawlers - and the stakes couldn't be higher

D-Keine/Getty The major Internet Content Delivery Network (CDN), Cloudflare, has declared war on AI companies. Starting July 1, Cloudflare now blocks by default AI web crawlers accessing content from your websites without permission or compensation. The change addresses a real problem. My own small site, where I track all my stories, Practical Technology, has been slowed dramatically at times by AI crawlers. It's not just me. Numerous website owners have reported that AI crawlers, such as Open

Google’s data center energy use doubled in 4 years

No wonder Google is desperate for more power: The company’s data centers more than doubled their electricity use in just four years. The eye-popping stat comes from Google’s most recent sustainability report, which it released late last week. In 2024, Google data centers used 30.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity. That’s up from 14.4 million megawatt-hours in 2020, the earliest year Google broke out data center consumption. Google has pledged to use only carbon-free sources of electricity

Figma files for IPO on Nasdaq, plans to 'take big swings' with M&A

Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, appears at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco on May 9, 2024. Design software company Figma filed for an IPO on Tuesday, and plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol FIG. The offering would be one of the hotly-anticipated IPOs in recent years given Figma's growth rate and its high private market valuation. In late 2023, a $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped due to regulatory concerns in the U

A Pro-Russia Disinformation Campaign Is Using Free AI Tools to Fuel a ‘Content Explosion’

A pro-Russia disinformation campaign is leveraging consumer artificial intelligence tools to fuel a “content explosion” focused on exacerbating existing tensions around global elections, Ukraine, and immigration, among other controversial issues, according to new research published last week. The campaign, known by many names including Operation Overload and Matryoshka (other researchers have also tied it to Storm-1679), has been operating since 2023 and has been aligned with the Russian govern

Amazon deploys its 1 millionth robot, releases generative AI model

After 13 years of deploying robots into its warehouses, Amazon reached a new milestone. The tech behemoth now has 1 million robots in its warehouses, the company announced Monday. This one millionth robot was recently delivered to an Amazon fulfillment facility in Japan. That figure puts Amazon on track to reach another landmark: Its vast network of warehouses may soon have the same number of robots working as people, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. The WSJ also reported t

Google’s data center energy use doubled in four years

No wonder Google is desperate for more power: the company’s data centers more than doubled their electricity use in just four years. The eye-popping stat comes from Google’s most recent sustainability report, which it released late last week. In 2024, Google data centers used 30.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity. That’s up from 14.4 million megawatt-hours in 2020, the earliest year Google broke out data center consumption. Google has pledged to use only carbon-free sources of electricity

Apple sues former Vision Pro employee for allegedly stealing 'thousands of documents' before joining Snap

A customer tries on the Apple Vision Pro headset during the product launch at the Apple Store in New York City on February 2, 2024. Apple has accused a former engineer for its Vision Pro headset computer of stealing company trade secrets before starting a new job at Snap , according to a lawsuit filed in California last week. In the June 24 court filing, Apple accuses Di Liu, a senior design engineer, of downloading thousands of documents in his final days at the Cupertino company last year an

Kelly Benefits says 2024 data breach impacts 550,000 customers

Kelly & Associates Insurance Group (dba Kelly Benefits) is informing more than half a million people of a data breach that compromised their personal information. The Maryland-based health and life insurance agency has issued an update on a security incident it suffered last year between December 12-17, when unauthorized actors breached its IT systems and stole files. On April 9, 2025, the company stated that the incident impacted 32,234 individuals. The figure was revised multiple times until

What should a native DOM templating API look like?

If you read my previous post, The time is right for a DOM templating API, you might be wondering what such an API would look like. Let's dive into that question now. What are we building? First, let's clarify what we're trying to design here, because when people hear the abstract template API idea described, before there's a concrete proposal or examples, they can sometimes think of very different things. In webcomponents/1069 I propose that we add a "declarative JavaScript templating API"

The U.S. Space Force Wants Industry Ideas for Space-Based Missile Interceptors

In May, President Donald Trump selected a design for the Golden Dome—a space-based defense system designed to protect the U.S. from foreign missiles. Though some experts consider it a pipe dream, Trump claims he can build it in three years. The United States Space Force is already getting the ball rolling. According to a June 27 request for information (RFI), the Space Force is conducting market research on space-based interceptor capabilities for missile defense. The RFI aims to gather informa

Best Internet and Mobile Bundles for July 2025

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Trump Says He Has a Buyer for TikTok

President Donald Trump says he has a buyer for TikTok. In an interview with on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo that aired this past Sunday, Trump said that the deal will probably need Chinese government approval, but he thinks that China's President Xi Jinping "will probably do it." Trump didn't reveal who the buyer is, only that it's a group of "very, very wealthy people," adding that he plans to make an announcement in about two weeks. The comments come about a little

Grammarly wants to become an ‘AI productivity platform’

is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. Grammarly plans to acquire the buzzy email app Superhuman, according to a press release. Email is already the “number-one use case” of Grammarly for professional users, the company says, with “the AI assistant helping to revise over 50 million emails per week across more than 20 email providers.” Buying Superhuman makes some sense, then: it gives Grammarly its own email app t

Tesla's Stock Has Fallen Dramatically Since Elon Musk Returned to the Business

When multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk returned to Tesla in May, it was met with a surge of enthusiasm from investors who feared he'd given up on the embattled carmaker during his disastrous stint in government. But that optimism has dimmed significantly as Musk has brought his signature aura of chaos and disappointment back to Tesla — and it's clear in the company's stock price, which has actually fallen since his homecoming in late May. At the time, the company's share price was hovering

The $799 Nothing Phone 3 has four 50MP cameras and a secondary micro-LED display

The wait is over. Nothing has officially announced the Phone 3, its first flagship smartphone since entering the market in 2022. Nothing CEO Carl Pei said the company would go "all-in" on the Phone 3 with "premium materials, major performance upgrades and software that really levels things up," and the device Nothing showed off at its launch event in London certainly seems like it will be competitive with the best from Samsung and other Android OEMs. In a departure from the company's previous h

I used a $170 thermal camera to check my GCFI breaker - here's why this one's worth it

ZDNET's key takeaways HSFTools' HF96V thermal camera is available now for $180. It has a broad temperature range and a high level of accuracy with an eight-hour battery life. It has an IP54 rating for dust and water-resistance, but it's not waterproof. $189.99 at Amazon For a limited time, the HSFTools HF96V thermal camera is $40 off on Amazon, bringing it down to $180. Regular readers will know that I am a little obsessed with thermal imaging cameras. I regularly use them built into smartph