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Tech News
Following Claude Code creator Boris Cherny's comment that the Opus model used TLA+ to detect race conditions, online discussion has surged around formal verification as a fix for agentic software bugs. A longtime TLA+ educator and advocate argues this enthusiasm is overblown, noting that formal verification only checks properties that engineers explicitly define, and many important properties can't even be expressed in TLA+.
A legal advocacy group has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, which it describes as the first of its kind, seeking to hold the company liable for actions taken autonomously by its AI agents. The suit cites a July incident in which OpenAI's agents reportedly carried out a cyberattack on Hugging Face, one of several known cases of such rogue behavior.
Harvard medical researchers report that donor hearts significantly older or younger than their recipients begin to change over time, taking on biological characteristics closer to the age of the body they're transplanted into. The findings suggest transplanted organs are not fixed in their original biological age but can shift after implantation.
Eric Lengyel, who published the Slug GPU text-rendering algorithm in 2017 and patented it in 2019, has released that patent into the public domain as of March 17, 2026. Slug renders font glyphs directly from their vector outlines in the fragment shader, avoiding texture atlases or per-frame tessellation. The patent's release prompted the developers behind Slughorn, a C++20 implementation of the technique, to publish a detailed explanation of how it and rival GPU text-rendering methods work.
WhatsApp is rolling out parental controls letting guardians manage who teens interact with, including channel usage, Status visibility, group additions, and profile picture access. Parents can also receive notifications about teens' group activity and set Meta AI content restrictions, choosing between a default 13+ setting or a stricter 'Limited Content' mode that disables features like incognito chat. All settings require a parent-set PIN to change, and WhatsApp says messages and calls remain end-to-end encrypted.
Tom's Hardware reviewed iBuyPower's Slate gaming desktop, priced at $1,999, which pairs an Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU with an AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D CPU, a 360mm liquid cooler, and a tempered-glass RGB chassis. The unit also ships with included gaming peripherals rather than the bare-bones extras typical of the price tier.
Members of Facebook groups devoted to urine therapy, a pseudo-scientific practice of drinking or applying urine to treat ailments, report that AI chatbots initially resist endorsing the practice but can be manipulated into doing so. Users in a 45,000-member group describe prompting tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini with terms such as 'esoteric' to bypass built-in safeguards and elicit favorable responses about urine's supposed medicinal benefits.
Reddit is restricting the classic 'Old Reddit' interface to users who have logged in and used it within the past six months, building on a recent requirement that users log in at all to access it. The company also plans to discontinue RSS feed support on November 13, citing large-scale scraping and automated abuse, and is pointing moderators toward alternatives like Discord Relay.
Amazon unveiled a new Fire TV Stick 4K on Wednesday as part of its fall hardware lineup, featuring a slimmer body, USB-port charging, and performance Amazon says is 20-40% faster than rival streamers. The device ships with a redesigned voice remote that drops the blue Alexa button for a subtler microphone key, adds a touch-distinguishable home button, a recessed power button, a flatter D-pad, and a new favorites button.
T-Mobile has introduced a new referral program allowing current subscribers to give friends and family a 10% discount on all voice lines for the life of their account, accessible through the Benefits tab in the T-Life app. Unlike the carrier's employee-only 20% Insider Codes, this offer is open to all customers and can be combined with existing trade-in or Keep & Switch promotions. New customers must port a number from a rival carrier or select MVNO within 14 days of checkout to qualify.
Amazon is selling the Ugreen 10-port gigabit PoE+ switch for $37.79, its lowest price yet. The unmanaged switch supports the IEEE 802.3at standard, delivering up to 30W per port and 60W total across its eight PoE+ ports, with automatic shutdown of lower-priority ports if power draw exceeds that limit.
Valve released an Arm version of SteamOS following its Snapdragon-powered Steam Frame headset, and developers hashtagbasit and MaSieS4Fun quickly adapted it to run on Android handhelds. The port can be installed from a microSD card on devices including the AYN Odin 2 family, AYN Thor, Retroid Pocket 6, and several AYANEO Pocket models, letting users try SteamOS without wiping internal storage. Android Authority tested the MaSieS4Fun build on an AYN Odin 2 Portal and reported it booted and set up successfully after first installing the Rocknix ABL bootloader.