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4 apps you should use instead of Google Tasks

Andy Walker / Android Authority Google Tasks is, without a doubt, one of the company’s worst apps. While its barebones nature might appeal to some, its lack of basic features — like natural language processing — makes it feel well behind the times compared to its rivals. Personally, I’m not a fan. I’ve tried countless competing apps in my quest for a better solution, and found four that stand out from the crowd. The first is my personal favorite and the one I’ve been using for years, but the o

Fix damaged art in hours with AI

In his study, Alex Kachkine, SM ’23, presents a new method he’s developed that involves printing the restoration on a very thin polymer film that can be carefully aligned with a painting and adhered to it or easily removed. As a demonstration, he used the method to repair a highly damaged 15th-century oil painting he owned. First he used traditional techniques to clean the painting and remove any past restoration efforts. Then he scanned the painting, including the many regions where paint had f

Show HN: Async – Claude code and Linear and GitHub PRs in one opinionated tool

An open-source developer tool that combines AI coding with task management and code review. Async integrates Claude Code + Linear + GitHub PRs into one opinionated workflow. async-demo.mp4 https://www.async.build/ What Async Does Automatically researches coding tasks - analyzes your codebase and asks clarifying questions before execution - analyzes your codebase and asks clarifying questions before execution Executes code changes in the cloud - runs in isolated environments without touching

Materialized views are obviously useful

August 22, 2025 As programmers we spend a lot of time shuttling data back and forth between different systems and transforming it from one format to another. Sometimes it gets pretty miserable! Let’s say you’re making a fancy task tracking app. Tasks belong to projects, and on the projects page, you want to show how many tasks are in each project. Maybe you start with a little SQL that you call from your “get info about project” view model code: async function getTaskCountForProject ( project

MCP-Universe benchmark shows GPT-5 fails more than half of real-world orchestration tasks

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now The adoption of interoperability standards, such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), can provide enterprises with insights into how agents and models function outside their walled confines. However, many benchmarks fail to capture real-life interactions with MCP. Salesforce AI Research developed a new open-source benchmark it calls MCP-Un

Nvidia looking to halt H20 chip production after China cracks down on purchases, reports say

An Nvidia chip is seen through a magnifying glass in Beijing, China, on August 1, 2025. Nvidia has asked some of its component suppliers to stop production related to its made-for-China H20 general processing units, as Beijing cracks down on the American chip darling, The Information reported Friday. The directive comes weeks after the Chinese government told local tech companies to stop buying the chips due to alleged security concerns, the report said, citing people with knowledge of the mat

A summary of recent AI research (2016)

Story comprehension The robots of Westworld are not programmed solely by software developers. The bulk of the work is done by professional writers, who give each character a unique backstory. These stories give them the memories and depth they need to seem real to the park guests. When asked who they are, what they’ve done or why they feel a certain way, they can consult their backstory to find out the answer. Being able to answer questions about stories is a fundamental requirement for being

95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

Over the last three years, companies worldwide have invested between 30 and 40 billion dollars into generative artificial intelligence projects. Yet most of these efforts have brought no real business return. A new study from MIT found that 95 percent of enterprise organizations report zero measurable gains from the adoption of AI tools. Only a small group has seen strong benefits. “Just five percent of integrated AI pilots are extracting millions in value,” the report said. In contrast, the v

Alaska Air will offer Starlink in-flight internet starting next year

In-flight internet is crappy, but more and more airlines think that Starlink is the solution. The latest company to sign with the SpaceX affiliate is Alaska Air Group, which announced that it will start offering Starlink Wi-Fi next year and expand the service to its entire fleet by 2027. "With Starlink already live on [Alaska Air Group subsidiary] Hawaiian Airlines, we're proud that we'll offer... gate-to-gate connectivity on nearly every aircraft across both airlines," CEO Ben Minicucci said in

Understanding Moravec's Paradox

Understanding Moravec's Paradox Morevec's paradox is a little weird in a few ways. First it's not a paradox, and second it's widely miss-interpreted. At its core, Moravec's paradox is the observation that reasoning takes much less computation compared to sensorimotor and perception tasks. It's often (incorrectly) described as tasks that are easy for humans are difficult for machines and visa versa. The answer from the human's side is relatively simple to explain. As hypothesised by Morvec, hum

One of our favorite air fryers is on sale for $90

The COSORI 9-in-1 air fryer is on sale for $90, cutting 25 percent off the retail price. Whether you've stumbled upon air fryers for health reasons , convenience or you're already a card-carrying member of the air fryer clan, a sale is a great time to pick one up. We selected the COSORI as the runner-up for best air fryer overall , and were impressed with its six-quart capacity despite its relatively small footprint on the kitchen counter. Our reviewers found the basket was super roomy enough t

Google says Steph Curry will use its AI to get better at basketball

Google has announced a multi-year partnership with Steph Curry at its Made by Google event, and as part of that team-up, it says the NBA superstar will use AI from Google Cloud to improve his performance on the court. Yep, the company is claiming that Google Cloud AI can help the four-time NBA champ, two-time MVP and two-time scoring champion get even better at basketball. According to the company, AI insights can analyze his shot quality as well as sharpen his workout plans. Google's AI Basketb

5 ways automation can speed up your daily workflow - and implementation is easy

Yuichiro Chino/Moment via Getty ZDNET's key takeaways Automation can help ease the strain of a busy day. There are specific tools and features available for automation. Some tools do have a steep learning curve. Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. Every day, you perform repetitive tasks that can often take more of your precious time than you want. This has become especially important as our days get filled with more an

OpenAI Progress

As an AI language model, I can't express personal desires, emotions, or thoughts like a human would. However, in the spirit of your question, I can suggest some interesting questions or topics that a conversation with a future AI model might encompass: New advances and capabilities: I might ask about any major leaps in AI technology since my training data, such as groundbreaking developments in natural language processing, computer vision, or reinforcement learning. Addressing the AI alignment

Best Practices for Building Agentic AI Systems

I’ve been experimenting with adding AI agents to UserJot, our feedback, roadmap, and changelog platform. Not the simple “one prompt, one response” stuff. Real agent systems where multiple specialized agents communicate, delegate tasks, and somehow don’t crash into each other. The goal was to analyze customer feedback at scale. Find patterns across hundreds of posts. Auto-generate changelog entries. Things that were basically impossible to do manually. I spent weeks reverse engineering tools lik

Model intelligence is no longer the constraint for automation

The perception is that model improvement seems to be stagnating. GPT-5 wasn’t the step change that people were expecting. Yet, models continue to improve on reasoning benchmarks. Recently, both OpenAI and Google models were on par with gold medallists in the International Mathematical Olympiad 2025 (IMO). At the same time it’s still difficult to make AI agents work for relatively simple enterprise use cases. Why is there such a disparity in model performance between problem domains? Why are mode

Scientists Identify a New Glitch in Human Thinking

Good news, everyone! Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have coined a new term to describe our brains being dumb. In a recent study, they provide evidence for a distinct but common kind of cognitive bias—one that makes us reluctant to take the easier path in life if it means retracing our steps. The researchers have named the bias the “doubling-back aversion.” In several experiments, they found that people often refuse to choose a more efficient solution or route if it requir

Reminders in iOS 26 has a powerful new tool for organizing tasks

Apple’s Reminders app is one of many system apps getting new features in iOS 26. Among the handful of improvements coming to Reminders, there’s a powerful new tool for organizing your tasks. iOS 26’s Reminders app can now sort your tasks into sections automatically When it comes to task management, apps can sometimes get a little carried away with the number of features and settings they offer. Having a feature-rich app is great, but task managers can err in requiring too much time to organiz

Google just gave the Gemini Live app its biggest update yet - Android and iOS versions included

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ZDNET's takeaways Gemini Live now works with Calendar, Maps, Keep, and Tasks. Update is rolling out to most Android and iOS users. It can add events, guide routes, and manage lists or notes. In May of this year, Google debuted Gemini Live with screen sharing and camera access for Android. Google has been slowly integrating the feature, which lets you ask Gemini about anything on your screen (or that you can see with your camera), into its suite of apps since Jun

What happens the day after superintelligence?

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now With the release OpenAI’s Chat GPT-5, the world is one step closer to unleashing a general-purpose superintelligence that can cognitively outperform each of us by a wide margin. As this day nears, I am increasingly worried that we are woefully unprepared for the shockwaves this will send through society — and it’s probably not for the reaso

Leaky Ice Dam Prompts Evacuations in Alaska as Record Floods Loom

A water basin in Alaska is overflowing its ice dam, the Mendenhall Glacier, and flooding the state capital, Juneau. Experts expect the likely record-breaking event to peak today, and officials have asked residents in parts of the city and borough to evacuate. The flood doesn’t come as a surprise. Years ago, a small glacier on the other side of Mendenhall Glacier—which is just 12 miles (19 kilometers) from Juneau—receded and left a basin in its wake, according to the Associated Press. Since then

Why it’s a mistake to ask chatbots about their mistakes

When something goes wrong with an AI assistant, our instinct is to ask it directly: "What happened?" or "Why did you do that?" It's a natural impulse—after all, if a human makes a mistake, we ask them to explain. But with AI models, this approach rarely works, and the urge to ask reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what these systems are and how they operate. A recent incident with Replit's AI coding assistant perfectly illustrates this problem. When the AI tool deleted a production datab

Salesforce’s new CoAct-1 agents don’t just point and click — they write code to accomplish tasks faster and with greater success rates

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Researchers at Salesforce and the University of Southern California have developed a new technique that gives computer-use agents the ability to execute code while navigating graphical user interfaces (GUIs), that is, writing scripts while also moving a cursor and/or clicking buttons on an application, combining the best of both approaches

New data shows AI agents invading the workplace, with mixed results

imaginima ZDNET's key takeaways: Employee trust in AI agents is growing, but only for some tasks. Research found that trust increases the more people use agents. The rapid embrace of agents is rewriting some workplace norms. AI agents are becoming a common fixture in the workplace as businesses look to automate a variety of routine, time-consuming tasks. A growing body of research, however, is revealing the boundaries of the degree of control that employees are willing to hand over to these

Microsoft releases lightweight Office taskbar apps for Windows 11

is a senior editor and author of Notepad , who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Microsoft is starting to roll out lightweight taskbar apps for Microsoft 365 users on Windows 11. These taskbar apps will automatically launch at startup and provide quick access to contacts, file search, and calendar straight from the Windows taskbar. The Microsoft 365 companion apps, as

Study warns of security risks as ‘OS agents’ gain control of computers and phones

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Researchers have published the most comprehensive survey to date of so-called “OS Agents” — artificial intelligence systems that can autonomously control computers, mobile phones and web browsers by directly interacting with their interfaces. The 30-page academic review, accepted for publication at the prestigious Association for Computatio

You can try Gemini Live in your favorite Google apps now, and it blew me away

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ZDNET's takeaways Gemini Live now works with Calendar, Maps, Keep, and Tasks. Update is rolling out to most Android and iOS users. It can add events, guide routes, and manage lists or notes. In May of this year, Google debuted Gemini Live with screen sharing and camera access for Android. Google has been slowly integrating the feature, which lets you ask Gemini about anything on your screen (or that you can see with your camera), into its suite of apps since Jun

ECScape: Understanding IAM Privilege Boundaries in Amazon ECS

This post is Part 2 of our educational series on Amazon ECS security. In Part 1 – Under the Hood of Amazon ECS on EC2, we explored how the ECS agent, IAM roles and the ECS control plane provide credentials to tasks. Here we’ll demonstrate how those mechanisms can lead to a known risk when tasks with different privilege levels share the same EC2 host. This cross-task credential exposure highlights the inherent risks of relying on per-task IAM scoping and task execution boundaries when workloads s

Accessibility and the Agentic Web

Accessibility and the agentic web Posted on Friday, 8 August 2025 by Léonie Watson in Strategy, User experience Imagine being in a department store that sells clothes from multiple brands and having a personal shopping assistant to help you select the clothes you want to buy. As a blind person, that's about the only way it's possible to go clothes shopping, independently at least, but few stores offer such a service, so you resort to shopping online. Except that retail websites are rarely acce

Open SWE: An open-source asynchronous coding agent

The use of AI in software engineering has evolved over the past two years. It started as autocomplete, then went to a copilot in an IDE, and in the fast few months has evolved to be a long running, more end-to-end agent that run asynchronously in the cloud. We believe that all agents will long more like this in the future - long running, asynchronous, more autonomous. Specifically, we think that they will: Run asynchronously in the cloud Integrate directly with your tooling Have enough conte