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Android's Big UI Makeover Is Official for Older Pixels in September Update

Android's big UI overhaul, Material 3 Expressive, was announced earlier this year and is preinstalled on the new Pixel 10 series of smartphones. Now it's time for older Pixel devices to get the makeover treatment, thanks to the September Pixel Drop. Material 3 Expressive is now coming to Pixel 6 devices and up, including the Pixel tablet. Google's focus with the UI overhaul is to make Android more personalized, colorful and livelier overall. It's easier to identify actions you want to take with

World Cup 2026 Qualifier Soccer: Stream Argentina vs. Venezuela Live From Anywhere for Free

Already qualified Argentina could deliver a hammer blow to Venezuela's World Cup 2-26 qualification hopes as these two team's meet on Thursday in Buenos Aires. Below, we'll outline the best live TV streaming services to use to watch the game as it happens, wherever you are in the world and how to use a VPN if the match isn't available where you are. Lionel Scaloni's defending world champs sealed their place in next summer's tournament back in March, but today's nevertheless remains significant

Rivian makes its second small workforce cut of the year ahead of R2 SUV launch

In Brief Rivian is laying off around 150 workers — its second small staff cut in a matter of months — as the company readies itself for the all-important launch of its more-affordable R2 SUV next year. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that the new cuts were mostly to its “commercial” team, which deals with sales and service operations, and that affected employees will be eligible for rehire and encouraged to apply for other open positions. The Wall Street Journal first reported the layoffs

Bret Taylor’s Sierra raises $350M at a $10B valuation

Investors are clearly bullish about former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor’s AI agent startup Sierra. Sierra, which helps enterprises build customer service AI agents, announced it raised a $350 million funding round on Thursday. The round, led by earlier investor Greenoaks Capital, values the startup at $10 billion, according to a company blog post that confirmed an earlier report from Axios on Wednesday. Sierra was founded in early 2024 by Taylor and longtime Google alum Clay Bavor. The compan

Adapting to Industry Changes in an AI-Driven Future

“AI won’t take your job; someone using AI will,” according to Forbes . It’s hard to open LinkedIn or a news app without being inundated with artificial intelligence (AI) upheaval. From new large language models (LLMs) to consumer apps to flashy agents, it’s impossible to ignore that AI is drastically changing the modern workforce. Whether it’s a mid-career professional watching peers get laid off or a new graduate navigating a tough job market amid AI changes, everyone is adapting to the new pa

Broadcom’s stock pops on mystery $10 billion AI customer

Broadcom reported fiscal third-quarter earnings that beat expectations and provided robust guidance for the current quarter. The stock rose in extended trading after the company said it had secured $10 billion in orders from a new client for custom chips. Here's how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates: Earnings per share: $1.69 adjusted vs. $1.65 expected $1.69 adjusted vs. $1.65 expected Revenue: $15.96 billion vs. $15.83 billion expected Broadcom said it expects $17.4 billion

Desperate Companies Now Hiring Humans to Fix What AI Botched

For a while now, we've been seeing companies that fired a bunch of their human workers in favor of artificial intelligence move to recoup some of that flesh-and-blood labor. Now, that push has resulted in a new line of gig work: slop fixer-uppers, who get paid to improve AI-generated art, writing, and code — by making it less, well, sloppy. In an interview with NBC News, longtime freelance illustrator Lisa Carstens said fixing AI-generated logos, many of which have fuzzy lines and garbled text

Elon Musk's New Robot Demo Is Astonishingly Bad

Hot off of proudly announcing that he had replaced 4,000 people with AI at his company, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff posted a video of Tesla's humanoid robot, Optimus, calling it a "productivity game-changer." However, going by the 52-second clip, the carmaker has a long way to go until it can successfully have AI-powered bipedal robots replace human jobs. Is this really what will make up a whopping 80 percent of Tesla's value, as Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised in a tweet earlier this week? In an

Strava updates Apple Watch app, introduces Live Segments

If you’re a Strava user, you know this has been a long time coming. The company has completely redesigned its Apple Watch app, in an update that introduces Live Segments. Here’s how it works. Every time Tim Cook discusses the Apple Watch during Apple’s quarterly earnings conference call, he says something like, “over half of Apple Watch sales were to new customers,” which is Apple’s way of saying that its user base keeps growing. Strava, for its part, is also seeing that. In a blog post detail

Civilization developer Firaxis is laying off staff

Firaxis, longtime developer of the strategy series Civilization, is laying off an undisclosed number of staff, Game Developer reports . The studio's publisher and owner 2K confirmed that the layoffs were happening as Firaxis "restructures and optimizes" for "adaptability, collaboration, and creativity." The layoffs follow turmoil at another 2K studio , Cloud Chamber, which is supposed to be developing the next Bioshock game. Since the restructuring has yet to be publicly disclosed, it's hard to

The new Street Fighter movie lands in theaters next October

The new Street Fighter movie has been given a release date of October 16, 2026. Kitao Sakurai is directing the project and a few generic plot details have been disclosed. The story will be set in 1993, a nod to the year Street Fighter II was released in arcades, and will have familiar characters from the game uncovering "a deadly conspiracy" in the midst of all their street fighting. It seems safe to expect a fair bit of camp in a Street Fighter project, and that bears out in some of the castin

Memory is slow, Disk is fast – Part 2

TL;DR Sourcing data directly from disk IS faster than caching in memory. I brought receipts. Because hardware got wider but not faster, the old methods don't get you there. You need new tools to use what is scaling and avoid what isn't. Introduction In part 1 I showed how some computer performance factors are scaling exponentially while others have been stagnant for decades. I then asserted, without proof, that sourcing data from disk can be faster than from memory. What follows is the proof.

What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?

Small. Fast. Reliable. Choose any three. Home Menu About Documentation Download License Support Purchase Search About Documentation Download Support Purchase Search Documentation Search Changelog What If OpenDocument Used SQLite? Introduction Suppose the OpenDocument file format, and specifically the "ODP" OpenDocument Presentation format, were built around SQLite. Benefits would include: Smaller documents Faster File/Save times Faster startup times Less memory used Document

Rocketships and Slingshots

The dominant metaphor for a successful startup these days is the rocketship. The not so humble brags are all over x and the press, founders and VCs saying - “0-100m in ARR faster than any company in history” and “idea to $1m in revenue in a month.” I get why these are exciting. The stories are simple, the progress is amazing, the pull of the market is irresistible. Sometimes these will be the biggest and most interesting companies of the future. Then again, as with most stories, the realities o

What Is the Fourier Transform?

As we listen to a piece of music, our ears perform a calculation. The high-pitched flutter of the flute, the middle tones of the violin, and the low hum of the double bass fill the air with pressure waves of many different frequencies. When the combined sound wave descends through the ear canal and into the spiral-shaped cochlea, hairs of different lengths resonate to the different pitches, separating the messy signal into buckets of elemental sounds. It took mathematicians until the 19th centu

If You’re Not Already Planning Your Halloween Costume, You’re Falling Behind

There’s no reason to delay getting in the spirit of Halloween as popular costume retailers begin to release this year’s slate of pop culture-inspired looks. From Spirit Halloween to BoxLunch to PetSmart, there are a ton of fandom fits across stores and online for the while family. For Squid Game fans we’re excited about the official collaboration between Spirit Halloween and the Netflix hit show. Fans can dress up as players, guards, and the Front Man and there’s an update for the Young-hee dol

The number of mis-issued 1.1.1.1 certificates grows. Here’s the latest.

Wednesday’s discovery of three mis-issued TLS certificates for Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 encrypted DNS lookup service generated intense interest and concern among Internet security practitioners. The revelation raised the possibility that an unknown entity had obtained the cryptographic equivalent of a skeleton key that could be used to surreptitiously decrypt millions of users’ DNS queries that were encrypted through DNS over TLS or DNS over HTTPS. From there, the scammers could have read queries or

The September Pixel Drop is here with Material 3 Expressive for all!

Google TL;DR The September Pixel Drop is here with fresh features for Pixel phones, the Pixel Watch, Pixel Buds Pro 2, and the Pixel Tablet. The update brings the Material 3 Expressive redesign of older Pixel phones and the Pixel Tablet. The Pixel Watch is getting a handy Google Maps feature, while the Pixel Buds Pro 2 are being updated with Adaptive Audio and more. It’s time to hit update on your Pixel devices again as Google offloads a bunch of new features and capabilities in its latest P

Tim Cook expected back at the White House for Trump AI event

Where will Tim Cook be on the Thursday before the iPhone 17 event? Back at the White House, it seems. The Apple CEO gifted President Trump a big chunk of 24k gold with a piece of glass in August after announcing plans to make all iPhone glass in Kentucky. 29 days later, their next meeting will focus on AI, according to The Hill: President Trump on Thursday will host two dozen high-profile tech and business leaders for the first event in the newly renovated White House Rose Garden, including M

Threads is testing long-form posts with support for formatted text [U: Launched]

Update, Sep 4: The feature is now live. Find the new details below. While Threads already allows up to 500 characters per post (which is more than enough for casual users used to the microblogging format), it is now testing support for long-form posts through “text attachments”. Here’s how it works. Meta has confirmed the test, but has no ETA for the feature As spotted by app researcher Radu Oncescu (via TechCrunch), Threads is testing a new “text attachment” feature on iOS, which could repla

Big tech signs on to White House plan for AI education in US schools

The White House hosted several tech and AI leaders at an event today centered on teaching artificial intelligence in US schools. Many of the big tech companies — including Amazon , Google , Microsoft , OpenAI and Anthropic — have already issued press releases with their commitments to a pledge from the White House to help "foster early interest in Al technology, promote Al literacy and proficiency, and enable comprehensive Al training for parents and educators." The business commitments include

Apple's AI search engine could be driven by Google and help revive Siri, report says

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Apple plans to launch an AI search engine, reportedly. The AI search experience would power the Siri voice assistant. The expected launch is in the spring as part of the Siri overhaul. Though Apple offers useful AI features through its Apple Intelligence suite, discussion of the company's AI efforts usually returns to one main sticking point: the delay of a revamped Siri. That launch has been highly anticipated, as it is supposed to push Siri's cap

I should have loved electrical engineering

Author’s note: Drafted in 2022, lightly edited and finished on Sep 1, 2025 for clarity. Substance unchanged. I tried to not glamorize my undergraduate experience but I could be hallucinating. “Hardware invention enabled the information revolution. The internet and all the fancy applications are nothing but some byproduct of the advancement in computer chips and fiber optic cables”, 18-year-old me thought wishfully, concluding that the next natural sequence in the major global transformation mus

The Paradigm

Over the past decade, some of the most remarkable AI breakthroughs—AlphaGo, AlphaStar, AlphaFold1, VPT, OpenAI Five, ChatGPT—have all shared a common thread: they start with large-scale data gathering (self-supervised or imitation learning, or SSL) and then use reinforcement learning to refine their performance toward a specific goal. This marriage of general knowledge acquisition and focused, reward-driven specialization has emerged as a the paradigm by which we can reliably train AI systems to

Non-Obviously Great Startups

The dominant metaphor for a successful startup these days is the rocketship. The not so humble brags are all over x and the press, founders and VCs saying - “0-100m in ARR faster than any company in history” and “idea to $1m in revenue in a month.” I get why these are exciting. The stories are simple, the progress is amazing, the pull of the market is irresistible. Sometimes these will be the biggest and most interesting companies of the future. Then again, as with most stories, the realities o

Classic 8×8-pixel B&W Mac patterns

TL;DR: I made a website for the original classic Mac patterns I was working on something and thought it would be fun to use one of the classic Mac black-and-white patterns in the project. I'm talking about the original 8×8-pixel ones that were in the original Control Panel for setting the desktop background and in MacPaint as fill patterns. Screenshots via to Marcin's awesome interactive history I figured there'd must be clean, pixel-perfect GIFs or PNGs of them somewhere on the web. And perh

Who Have Marvel’s Avengers Become?

Every mainstream comic book character is defined by their pre- and post-adaptation life. After they’re brought to life in film or TV, the change becomes notable, and nowhere is it more apparent than with the Avengers. They’ve always been a key superhero team, but they were elevated to a higher position thanks to the MCU and Marvel not owning fellow high-profile teams, the X-Men and Fantastic Four, and actively working to downplay them throughout comics and other media. With four movies under th

Who Owns ‘Telepathy’?

Elon Musk’s neural implant startup Neuralink has been trying to trademark two product names: Telepathy and Telekinesis. Musk has previously claimed that his company will be able to give people “superpowers,” so the desire to take ownership over these special abilities makes sense. Unfortunately for Neuralink, patent applications for Telepathy and Telekinesis have already been filed by a different business. Wired reports that a lucid dreaming startup (who knew there was such a thing?) called Pro

Finally, You Can Cuddle With a Cute Camera-Clad AI Robot That Feels Jealousy

Lots of people had stuffed animals when they were little. My personal favorite was a teddy bear in army fatigues, named—you guessed it—Army Bear. Fidel Castro was already taken, unfortunately. As much as I loved Army Bear, I remember thinking, “This would be so much more adorable with an on-device LLM designed to understand cloud-free natural language prompts and enable object recognition via computer vision.” And finally, almost 30 years later, SwitchBot has answered my very real and not-at-all