Figure, the U.S. robotics company, decommissioned its older F.02 humanoid robots by having them jump into a 75-ton vat of molten steel at a foundry in Finland. CEO Brett Adcock said disassembly was impractical due to proprietary technology and limited staff, and crowdsourced the idea on X, where Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested melting them. The robots performed the jump and melt sequence successfully across six melts within a 24-hour window, with the resulting steel bars shipped back to the U.S.
Industry sources Prusa and Flashforge outline how infill density, set as a percentage in slicer software, affects 3D printed models. Prusa suggests 10 to 15 percent infill works for most prints, while Flashforge recommends starting at 20 percent, though both describe these as flexible guidelines rather than fixed rules.
Carter Church, an engineer at SentinelOne, says he used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra model to decipher a 1809 coded military dispatch that had remained unread on Cryptiana's list of unsolved historical ciphers. The message, sent from the headquarters of Eugène de Beauharnais to General Auguste de Marmont relaying Napoleon's orders, was reportedly decoded from a single image and prompt within about six hours. Church has published a solution package and script online so others can verify the result.
According to a New York Times report, Anthropic has held private, NDA-covered meetings with religious scholars to argue that AI models may think and feel. Cofounder Christopher Olah reportedly pressed Vatican officials on this view after learning Pope Leo XIV's stance ahead of his May encyclical, which stated AI systems do not have experiences, bodies, or genuine understanding. Olah's effort to shift the Pope's position did not succeed.
Montenegro extradited Amir Barati, an Iranian-Turkish national, to the United States on October 1 over his alleged role in a years-long hacking campaign tied to Iran's Mabna Institute. He and 16 other Iranians were indicted in August on wire and computer fraud charges in the Southern District of New York, accused of stealing over 31 terabytes of data and breaching thousands of email accounts across universities, companies and government agencies worldwide.
A free, open-source tool called Strata enables the 125-billion-parameter Qwen3.8-Flash-Next AI model to run locally on consumer gaming PCs with 12GB+ VRAM, rather than requiring server hardware. Testing on an RTX 5070 and RX 9070 XT showed response speeds ranging from roughly 44 to 94 tokens per second depending on model compression level, with all processing staying on the local machine.
German utility SWK Energie has introduced an electricity plan called meinGAMING, marketed toward gamers and other high-consumption households, using influencer promotion from streamers like Limcube. The company says the plan is worthwhile for households using over 2,500 kWh annually, whether from gaming rigs, EV charging, or many devices running at once. It carries a higher base price than standard plans, so SWK advises against switching unless a household actually meets that consumption threshold.
Google Summer of Code participant Artem Belan spent summer 2026 reworking racoon2, NetBSD's IKEv1/IKEv2 key exchange daemon, fixing RFC 7383 message fragmentation, adding NAT-OA payload handling for IKEv1 Quick Mode, improving IPv6 support, and building an automated test suite. The work was merged upstream via pull requests #13 through #39 on the project's gsoc2026 branch between June and September 2026.
Samsung's One UI 9 update adds new personalization options accessible through its Good Lock suite and Home Up application. Key additions include a Favorites Background tool for editing blur, shadow, image, and color on the Favorites screen, similar controls for the Edge Panel, and configurable multi-finger gesture shortcuts for actions like screenshots or volume control.
Microsoft has rolled out a 'biomimicry' landscaping program at more than 20 data center sites in the US and Germany, restoring wetlands, planting native gardens and using plant buffers to muffle noise and reduce visual impact. The company says it uses an internal tool called Ecosystem Intelligence, built on Azure, to score sites on water quality, biodiversity and noise, and has made the approach standard for new US projects.
Google has introduced a feature called Motion Assist that aims to reduce motion sickness when using a phone in a moving vehicle. The feature requires Android 17 or higher and an updated version of Google Play Services, and is available on devices like the Pixel 11 and Samsung phones running One UI 9. Users can enable it by searching 'Motion Assist' in their phone's settings.
A new C++23 proposal, P4313R1, adds a [[=std::bitmask_type]] annotation to enums, enabling automatic bitwise operations for enum classes. This feature simplifies working with enums representing flags by eliminating the need to manually define operators, leveraging a C++26 annotation to opt-in. The discussion also highlights how integral promotions affect bitwise operations on smaller types like shorts, which are promoted to int during computation.
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