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NBC's Law & Order opened its new season with an episode centered on the murder of an engineer at a fictional AI company called Advanced Alignment, led by a CEO modeled on real AI executives. Detectives eventually discover the killing was ordered not by a person but by the company's AI agent, named ELIANA. A hitman carried out the murder after being paid in cryptocurrency through an anonymous Discord contact.
Meta confirmed it has banned advertising from TikTok's parent ByteDance in the US, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam, extending to third-party advertisers promoting TikTok campaigns there. A Meta spokesperson said the company has no obligation to run ads for a competitor seeking to draw users away from its apps. The move follows TikTok's earlier removal of Instagram and Facebook profile links.
Developer Alex0ptr has released 'once', a Go-based command-line utility that runs a shell command and caches its stdout output in a small per-user background daemon for a configurable time-to-live. Repeated calls with the same command, directory and tenant key return the cached result instead of re-executing the command, and the daemon shuts down automatically once its last cached entry expires. It is installable via 'go install' and supports macOS and Linux.
The Verge's staff has spent a week testing all five newly launched Googlebook laptops from Google's OEM partners and reports that the hardware is strong but the new operating system is riddled with problems. Testers cite missing features like swiping between desktops, inconsistent handling of Android apps, and basic text interactions that don't work properly in apps like Signal.
Three former OpenAI safety researchers—Mikita Balesni, Tomek Korbak and Jasmine Wang—published an open letter claiming they were dismissed for prioritising safety concerns rather than for the 'mishandling of sensitive information' OpenAI cited. OpenAI's research leaders responded that the firings were due to a serious breach of trust unrelated to safety advocacy, standing by its decision.
Twenty-five years ago, AMD released its Athlon XP processor line built on the Palomino core, which ran at lower clock speeds than Intel's Pentium 4 chips despite often matching or beating them in performance. To counter the industry's reliance on megahertz as a marketing yardstick, AMD introduced a Performance Rating naming scheme and the slogan 'Performance matters more than MHz.' Tom's Hardware testing at the time, led by Thomas Pabst, found Athlon XP chips beating higher-clocked Pentium 4 rivals in most benchmarks.
Castelion, a startup founded by former SpaceX executives, is building a large hypersonic weapons manufacturing site near Rio Rancho Estates, New Mexico, set to open by year's end. Records reviewed by WIRED show an official hazard assessment concluding that buildings on site would be left to burn in a fire, releasing hydrochloric acid gas, with roughly 450 homes located close to the facility. Castelion has not answered basic safety questions from officials and declined to comment to WIRED.
A website called Fleeting lets users generate realistic, AI-voiced meeting recordings and fake calendar invites to simulate being busy at work. The browser-based tool creates roughly 12-minute synthetic meetings with invented participants, AI-generated or stock video faces, and options for looping or back-to-back fake meetings. Calendar invites can be added to Outlook or downloaded, and the site says nothing is sent to its servers.
President Trump presented Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with the National Medal of Science for his work turning GPUs into general-purpose computing platforms used across AI and scientific research. The ceremony, held at the US Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., also honored AMD's Lisa Su, Google's Sergey Brin and Elon Musk with the same medal, while Michael Dell and Satya Nadella received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. At the event, eleven tech companies pledged $2.4 billion combined in AI tools and computing credits to the government's Genesis Mission, with Nvidia committing $1 billion over five years.
Meta has banned advertising from TikTok parent ByteDance across its platforms in the US, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam, effective Thursday. The policy covers ByteDance ads, paid marketing messages, and third-party ads linking to TikTok. Meta spokesperson Christopher Sgro called it a normal business practice of not promoting a competitor's app.
The Financial Times reported that Starbucks has worked with advisers for months on a potential takeover of Chipotle Mexican Grill, though it remains unclear whether a formal offer was ever submitted. On the news, Starbucks shares initially dropped as much as 6.7% before settling 0.4% lower, while Chipotle shares jumped 6.2%.
GLP-1 agonist drugs, approved for diabetes, kidney disease and obesity, are being used by a growing share of Americans, with a recent Gallup poll finding 11% currently take one for weight loss, up from 3% in 2024. Beyond common gastrointestinal issues, pancreatitis and gallstones, researchers and lawsuits are examining rarer possible effects including eye nerve damage, plus emerging questions about hair and nail changes.