GoKawiil
Tech News
Amazon is reintroducing physical page-turn buttons for its Kindle lineup, but not built into the devices themselves. Instead, the feature arrives as an $80 add-on accessory compatible only with its pricier models, such as the Scribe and Colorsoft.
OpenAI publicly defended its decision to fire researchers Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni, stating the move was due to a significant breach of trust rather than their raising of safety concerns. The three had co-signed a letter to OpenAI's board and safety committees urging a pause on developing models that would reduce the ability to monitor AI, posting it publicly a day before the company's statement.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple is planning a late-October hardware event, separate from its October 13 HomeKit launch, that could introduce its first touchscreen MacBook. The event may also bring an OLED iPad mini and M6 updates to the iMac and 14-inch MacBook Pro.
A blog post titled 'Programming Isn't Special' contrasts the creative industry's broad pushback against AI—writers' strikes, artist open letters, musician lawsuits—with many programmers' continued use of AI coding tools despite disliking them. The author contends this double standard rests on a false distinction, arguing that programming is itself a form of Art and citing John Berger's concept of 'mystification' from 'Ways of Seeing' to challenge the idea that functional work can't be artistic.
A developer has extended Rewind VM, a deterministic virtual machine that replays Nix builds including thread scheduling, adding a source panel, stack frames, bookmarks, a comparison view, expanded gdb support, thread lanes showing CPU ownership, and a 'Check from here' feature to pinpoint race conditions. The author demonstrates the tool on a classic bank-account race condition, showing deposits lost in 396 of 1,000 runs on a multi-core machine versus none when pinned to a single core.
Australian cloud-computing company Firmus Grid, backed by Nvidia, withdrew plans for an initial public offering that had aimed for a $30 billion valuation. The company currently operates only two data centers.
Oleg Korniev, a 42-year-old Ukrainian-Russian dual citizen, pleaded guilty to running Your Mule Cashout (YMCO), a money laundering operation active since 2007 that recruited over 15,000 U.S. money mules. He admitted to money laundering, aggravated identity theft, and multiple conspiracy charges tied to processing more than $10 million stolen from over 750 U.S. bank accounts across 35 banks. Four other YMCO members were previously extradited and sentenced to 37-63 months in prison, each ordered to pay over $9.1 million in restitution.
Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, said in a BBC Global Women interview that fears of AI turning on humanity are overstated and not scientifically grounded. She pointed instead to the risk of careless real-world deployment, citing a CNN-reported incident in which a US intelligence chatbot allegedly fabricated details about a Chinese vessel carrying nuclear material, nearly prompting a military response.
Frederick County's school board voted 6-1 to prohibit AI tools from pre-K through 12th grade, reversing its earlier decision to let middle and high school students use Google Gemini with teacher permission. Exceptions remain for lessons teaching about AI and for accommodations for students with disabilities. The reversal comes just weeks after Gemini was introduced to older students this school year.
Margaret Hamilton, who led the team writing onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo lunar missions and helped establish software engineering as a discipline, has died at 90. She worked at MIT from 1959 into the mid-1970s before founding her own software companies, and authored more than 130 publications over her career.
A technical blog post, with input from New Relic's Dan Gomez Blanco, lays out methods for designing self-hosted or SaaS products so users can export logs, traces, and metrics to any OpenTelemetry-compatible observability backend. It covers the three established OTel signal types—logs, traces, and metrics—carried via the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), and notes that a fourth signal, profiles, entered public alpha on March 26, 2026.
Microsoft has made Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC) generally available, a Windows platform feature that lets developers and IT admins restrict which files, applications and network destinations an AI agent can access at runtime. The company says MXC is the first piece of a broader security framework that will also include Entra-based identity separation for agent versus user activity, and Agent 365 controls for managing on-device agents.