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Apple’s refurbished store might seem like a good deal, but is that actually the case?

Apple has long offered a refurbished store on its website, where it sells recent generation products at a pretty sizable discount. Unlike other refurbished offerings, Apple guarantees a replaced outer shell, battery, and glass – ensuring no wear and tear. You also get a 1 year Apple warranty and the ability to add AppleCare if you’d like. That sounds great, but is it actually worth it? Well, it depends. We’ll be delving into Apple refurbished listings, and comparing it to other offerings on the

Mac mini vs Mac Studio: For under $900 right now, which one should you pick up?

Apple has three standalone Mac desktops – the Mac mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro. Mac Pro isn’t exactly worth talking about, so we’ll focus on the former two. While these computers are typically priced quite far apart ($599 vs $1999), the Mac Studio is a bit older – and Amazon has an incredible deal on the one generation old M2 Max model. We’ll be comparing the two, and showing you which computer is the best bang for your buck at this price point. Right now, Amazon has the M2 Max Mac Studio on

Topics: m4 mac max mini studio

AirPods Max in 2025? Same drawbacks, now ready for pros, and one killer feature

Jason Hiner/ZDNET Key takeaways The ability to switch quickly and seamlessly across an unlimited number of Apple devices is still the best feature of the AirPods Max. The low-latency upgrade in iOS 18.4 makes the AirPods Max a lot more viable for professional multimedia producers (and gamers) when using a wired connection. Comfort, battery life, and audio quality match high-end competitors from Sony, Bose, and others. Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. Even with their im

Busy beaver hunters reach numbers that overwhelm ordinary math

But just how much harder? In 1962, the mathematician Tibor Radó invented a new way to explore this question through what he called the busy beaver game. To play, start by choosing a specific number of rules — call that number n. Your goal is to find the n-rule Turing machine that runs the longest before eventually halting. This machine is called the busy beaver, and the corresponding busy beaver number, BB(n), is the number of steps that it takes. In principle, if you want to find the busy beav

Will at centre of legal battle over Shakespeare’s home unearthed after 150 years

A will that has been lost for more than 150 years and was at the centre of a bitter legal battle by William Shakespeare’s family over who owned the playwright’s final home has been unearthed in an unlabelled box at the National Archives. The original 1642 document was made by Thomas Nash, who was married to Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth Hall. In it, he bequeathed New Place, reputedly the second grandest house in Stratford-upon-Avon, to his own cousin Edward Nash. However, on Thomas’s d

The two versions of Parquet

A few days ago, the creators of DuckDB wrote the article: Query Engines: Gatekeepers of the Parquet File Format, which explained how the engines that process Parquet files as SQL tables are blocking the evolution of the format. This is because those engines are not fully supporting the latest specification, and without this support, the rest of the ecosystem has no incentive to adopt it. In my experience, this issue is not limited to Query Engines but extends to the tools within the ecosystem.

The Final ‘Toxic Avenger’ Trailer Is a Goofy, Retro Call to Arms

After two years of uncertainty whether it’d come out, the next Toxic Avenger movie is hitting theaters this upcoming week. But in case you’re not aware, the folks at BloodyDisgusting—a subsidiary of Cineverse, the film’s distributor—commissioned a trailer that it hopes will make you, in its own words, “show the fuck up.” This new “grindhouse” trailer comes courtesy of Wilson Cleveland, a producer and actor who’s previously made fan trailers for Weapons and other films. Cleveland’s approach for

Top Microsoft AI Boss Concerned AI Will Start to Demand Rights

In a blog post this week, Microsoft's head of AI Mustafa Suleyman responded to the drastic rise in mental health crises stemming from AI use, calling for caution "about what happens in the run up towards superintelligence." At the core of Suleyman's argument isn't the dystopian threat of AI gaining consciousness — an idea currently grounded more in fantasy than scientific evidence, according to many researchers — but the belief that it already is. "My central worry is that many people will sta

Harvard Startup Says Its Smart Glasses Will Do "Vibe Thinking" for You

We live in an age where the tech industry's core pitch is for you to outsource your brain's cognitive functions, be it to an AI chatbot or an app. The idea has now reached a new zenith. A startup called Halo is releasing a pair of smart glasses that will record and transcribe all your conversations and use it to beam you AI-powered insights. It'll remember details you forgot and recall what someone told you they like, the startup says, arming you with facts it looks up on the fly and answering

You likely shouldn’t hold your breath for a new pair of AirPods Max: report

AirPods Max have had a bit of a disappointing history. After much anticipation, they finally released at the tail end of 2020. Some fans were disappointed with the high price tag and rather heavy aluminum and steel design, and have been looking forward to a revamp ever since. Despite being refreshed last year, it was merely just a USB-C port swap and new colors. The headphones still lack in features compared to Apple’s newer AirPods Pro 2, and that likely won’t be changing. Per Mark Gurman’s P

These are the Apple products that students should start with – Back to School Guide

School is about to start back up for a lot of people, and with how integral technology is to the classroom, having a good computer is always important. If you’re looking to pick up a new Apple device for school or college, I’ll be going over the best picks right here. Obviously, when it comes to Apple gear for school, you have to go over the most important Apple debate: iPad or Mac. I won’t be giving advice in that regard, though I will say that iPadOS 26 makes using an iPad as your all-in-one

A short introduction to optimal transport and Wasserstein distance (2020)

A Short Introduction to Optimal Transport and Wasserstein Distance These notes provide a brief introduction to optimal transport theory, prioritizing intuition over mathematical rigor. A more rigorous presentation would require some additional background in measure theory. Other good introductory resources for optimal transport theory include: Why Optimal Transport Theory? A fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning is to come up with useful measures of “distance” between pairs o

A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website

My website: Publishing Germany's secret internet blocklist In Germany, we have the Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) - literally 'Copyright Clearinghouse for the Internet', a private organization that decides what websites to block, corporate interests rewriting our free internet. No judges, no transparency, just a bunch of ISPs and major copyright holders deciding what your eyes can see. I decided to create a website, cuiiliste.de, to find blocked domains, as the CUII refuses to

Show HN: Bicyclopedia

Welcome! This is an interactive exploration of the parts of a bicycle. If you're reading this message, the images may still be loading. If you are using a screen reader or have Javascript disabled, unfortunately you won't be able to see the images or animations of the parts, but you can still read the descriptions and source code here and read more about this project here. Thank you for visiting!

SQLite (with WAL) doesn't do `fsync` on each commit under default settings

SQLite (with WAL) doesn't do `fsync` on each commit under default settings SQLite has a WAL mode (the default is journal mode), but you’re likely using it if you want higher write throughput. SQLite also has a PRAGMA called synchronous which configures how fsync is called. The default is NORMAL . This is what the docs say: [..] but WAL mode does lose durability. A transaction committed in WAL mode with synchronous=NORMAL might roll back following a power loss or system crash. In WAL mode when

A Physicist Wants to Turn Jupiter’s Largest Moon Into a Gigantic Dark Matter Detector

When searching for the unknown, classic physics wisdom holds that a bigger detector boosts the chances of discovery. A physicist is taking that advice to heart, advancing a bold plan to use none other than Ganymede—Jupiter’s largest moon—as a dark matter detector on an astronomical scale. Dark matter refers to the “invisible” mass that supposedly constitutes 85% of the universe. There’s considerable evidence that dark matter exists, but it’s “dark,” meaning it doesn’t respond to light and very

Craig Mazin Talks Going Solo for ‘The Last of Us’ Season 3

Season two of The Last of Us came and went earlier this year, and we already know its third season is on the horizon. Whereas the first two seasons were a team effort between showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann and writer Hailey Gross, this next season will have Mazin as sole showrunner and writer—Druckmann, who also runs game developer Naughty Dog, is devoting his time to the studio’s next project, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. In a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Ma

Katee Sackhoff Talks ‘The Mandalorian’ and Acting Struggles

Battlestar Galacta alum Katee Sackhoff has been in genre TV for years. After voicing cultist turned mercenary/freedom fighter Bo-Katan Kryze for Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Rebels, she reprised the role in the live-action series The Mandalorian. She’s gotten to play Bo several times since then, but as the actor herself tells it, coming back to that role hasn’t been without its challenges. In the latest episode of her podcast, Sackhoff told her Battlestar co-worker Tahmoh Penikett how she lost

The Hidden Ingredients Behind AI’s Creativity

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. We were once promised self-driving cars and robot maids. Instead, we’ve seen the rise of artificial intelligence systems that can beat us in chess, analyze huge reams of text, and compose sonnets. This has been one of the great surprises of the modern era: physical tasks that are easy for humans turn out to be very difficult for robots, while algorithms are increasingly able to mimic our intellect. Another surprise that has long p

15 Best White Noise Machines (2025): Lectrofan, Snooz, Hatch, and More

The Best White noise machine isn't a complex device, even as companies constantly add more bells and whistles. Nowadays, they come in all shapes and sizes, outfitted with the capacity to play other noise frequencies and nature sounds while at home or in a more portable, on-the-go form. They're not just for kids anymore—if you are like us, trying to drown out your internal monologue so that you can finally drift off, this is the article for you. But if you're building up your arsenal of sleep ga

Best Heart Rate Monitors (2025), WIRED Tested and Reviewed

Compare Top 5 Heart Rate Monitors FAQS We tested and recommend all of the heart rate monitors below, which do a pretty impeccable job. But what do all these terms mean? Heart rate zones: If someone tells you they’ve been doing 80/20 training, they’ve been doing heart rate zone-based workouts. Heart rate zones are an easy way to break down your range of effort during exercise. Zones go from 1 to 5, with 5 indicating working at 90 to 100 percent of your maximum heart rate. Zone 2 represents tra

Marshal madness: A brief history of Ruby deserialization exploits

Documenting the evolution of exploitation techniques serves a crucial purpose in security engineering: it helps us understand not just individual vulnerabilities but the systemic patterns that resist conventional fixes. The story of deserialization exploits in Ruby’s Marshal module offers a uniquely well-documented case study of this phenomenon. That is, a decade-long cycle of patches and bypasses that reveals the futility of addressing symptoms rather than root causes. This history matters bec

How to Fix Your Context

Mitigating & Avoiding Context Failures Following up on our earlier post, “How Long Contexts Fail”, let’s run through the ways we can mitigate or avoid these failures entirely. But before we do, let’s briefly recap some of the ways long contexts can fail: Context Poisoning: When a hallucination or other error makes it into the context, where it is repeatedly referenced. When a hallucination or other error makes it into the context, where it is repeatedly referenced. Context Distraction: When

Equal Earth – Political Wall Map (2018)

A world map for everyone The Equal Earth Wall Map is for schools, organizations, or anyone who needs a map showing countries and continents at their true sizes relative to each other. Africa appears 14 times larger than Greenland as it actually is. And wherever you live, the map has you covered. Download a choice of three versions centered on these regions: Africa/Europe, the Americas, and East Asia/Australia. Other features include: • It’s free. Download the map and print as many copies as y

The AI vibe shift is upon us

AI Tech giants Tech news See all topics Follow A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. Rather suddenly, there’s been a vibe shift around artificial intelligence, the tech that’s hypnotized Wall Street and inspired cultish devotion across Silicon Valley over the past three years. And while it’s too soon to declare August 2025 the start of the AI winter, or the AI correction, or the AI bubble bursting, or whatever sl

A German ISP tampered with their DNS – specifically to sabotage my website

My website: Publishing Germany's secret internet blocklist In Germany, we have the Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) - literally 'Copyright Clearinghouse for the Internet', a private organization that decides what websites to block, corporate interests rewriting our free internet. No judges, no transparency, just a bunch of ISPs and major copyright holders deciding what your eyes can see. I decided to create a website, cuiiliste.de, to find blocked domains, as the CUII refuses to

'Peacemaker' Season 2 Release Schedule: Here's When You Can Watch Episode 2

John Cena may be on the verge of wrestling retirement, but that doesn't mean the man hasn't stayed busy. Case in point: Peacemaker has returned for new episodes. James Gunn's inaugural DC Universe original series first hit streaming in 2022, and season 2 is now upon us. Who says good things don't come to those who wait? Season 2 picks up where the DCU series left Cena's flawed hero: He's still working out his toxic past and trying to figure out where he fits in the present. Needless to say, it

What Is the Magnetic Constant and Why Does It Matter?

This means these three values can’t be independent; if you know two of them, you can derive the third. How do physicists deal with this? We define the speed of light as exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. (How do we know it’s exact? Because we define a meter as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second.) Then we measure the magnetic constant (μ 0 ) and use that value along with the speed of light to calculate the electric constant (ε 0 ). Maybe that seems like cheating, but to

Why was Apache Kafka created?

Reading Time: 13 minutes Intro - the Integration Problem We talk all the time about what Kafka is, but not so much about why it is the way it is. What better way than to dive into the original motivation for creating Kafka? Circa 2012, LinkedIn’s original intention with Kafka was to solve a data integration problem. LinkedIn used site activity data (e.g. someone liked this, someone posted this) for many things - tracking fraud/abuse, matching jobs to users, training ML models, basic feature

How to Fight Food Noise if It’s Taking Over Your Life, Both IRL and Online

If you’ve ever found your mind consumed with constant thoughts about food, chances are you have experienced food noise. It's usually brought on by conflicting messages about nutrition, either through everyday conversation or content online. It could be feeling guilty because you ate a cupcake when you promised yourself you weren’t going to touch sweets for a while, or maybe you’re trying to meet your protein quota and are obsessively keeping track of it. These thoughts are common, and in some ca