SpaceX's Starship completed its first orbital flight, deploying 26 operational Starlink V3 satellites despite an early shutdown of one Raptor 3 engine during ascent. After assessing the upper stage's condition at its first orbital checkpoint, SpaceX opted to cut the mission short, moving up the deorbit burn to about 11 a.m. EDT with splashdown planned in the Northern Pacific, rather than waiting out the full 7.5-hour orbital window.
404 Media reports that Microsoft hired hundreds of contractors to evaluate how well its Copilot AI executes image-editing prompts, including sexually explicit and nonconsensual requests involving real women, children's cartoon characters, and upskirt-style images. The contractors say Microsoft instructed them to judge output quality using their 'intuition,' not to assess the ethics of the prompts themselves, and faces in uploaded photos reportedly remain uncensored.
Leaker Roland Quandt published marketing images via WinFuture showing an unreleased Kindle e-reader in pastel colors including black, green, light blue, darker blue and lavender. The design drops Amazon's smile logo, adds flatter edges, rounded display corners, and moves the power button to the right edge, and appears in two slightly different variants with different front lips and display flushness. No pricing, release date, or spec details were included.
A wave of legal actions against companies like OpenAI are increasingly framing chatbots as defective products rather than just faulting their outputs. British Columbia's government recently sued OpenAI, claiming the company failed to alert police ahead of a mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in February.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and xAI all allow users to opt out of having their chat conversations used to train future models, a process that takes about a minute per service and doesn't affect personalization or memory features. Meta is the exception: US users cannot opt out of training on Meta AI chats, and since December the company has used those chats for ad targeting without any opt-out option.
The U.S. and China published reciprocal lists of products worth roughly $30 billion each that will receive tariff reductions, following a meeting between President Trump and President Xi Jinping in Washington. The items include nonsensitive goods such as fireworks and wooden Christmas ornaments. China's commerce ministry said the move would strengthen bilateral trade cooperation.
A software developer documents an experiment in robotics after nine months of intensive LLM-assisted coding, purchasing a preassembled SO-101 robot arm kit for $415 and adding a $50 webcam. He repurposed an eight-year-old Raspberry Pi 3 found in a drawer to help control the setup, aiming to give his children a tangible, hands-on project after failed attempts to interest them in building video games.
A software commentator examines why Lisp code, with its uniform prefix notation and heavy parenthesization, is widely perceived as harder to read than C-style languages like Python or Java. The piece rejects the common Lisp community explanation that unreadability is purely a matter of unfamiliarity, and instead draws on cognitive science to propose a deeper structural cause tied to parenthesis placement.
Dutch authorities this month arrested Pepijn van der Stap, 23, a previously convicted cybercriminal from Almere and Lelystad, on suspicion of assisting ShinyHunters with data thefts and extortion schemes. Van der Stap was convicted in 2023 for hacks under the alias 'Umbreon' that prosecutors said netted between €1.5 million and €2.7 million, and he served part of a four-year sentence before his release in December 2025. He had since presented himself publicly as reformed, working in offensive security at the Dutch firm Neo Security.
Researchers behind a new study report that frequent use of today's high-potency THC cannabis products appears linked to a heightened risk of severe seizures, including epilepsy-related episodes. The findings point to a correlation between cannabis potency and seizure incidence, though the exact biological mechanism remains under investigation.
An Entrepreneur opinion column argues that new CEOs should use their first 60 days to build relationships beyond the obvious stakeholders like the board and investors. It cites Equilar data showing 12-13% of CEOs are new each year, with about 28% hired externally, and recommends also speaking with predecessors, partners, recently departed clients and frontline staff. The piece offers tactics such as building a KPI-based scorecard, watching for cross-functional friction, and delaying restructuring.
Tom's Hardware tested two sub-$400 Thunderbolt 5 docks with built-in M.2 SSD slots: the $349 VectoTech V-Core and the $399 Orico TB5. Both include USB and Thunderbolt ports plus 2.5GbE Ethernet, but the review found the V-Core's mostly plastic build and flimsy top cover compared unfavorably to typical aluminum dock construction, with a single review ultimately favoring one product over the other.
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