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Tech News
Employers are automating and restructuring routine entry-level tasks with AI tools, cutting down on the tedious 'busy work' junior employees once performed. Managers report that this efficiency comes at a cost: those repetitive tasks had served as practical training grounds for building skills and judgment.
A technical essay examines how Amazon S3 and similar cloud object stores, built around spinning-disk economics from two decades ago, now underpin most modern data architectures including data lakes, Kafka alternatives, and vector databases. The author notes S3's per-request throughput and latency limits stem from disk physics, forcing developers to add caching layers, batch writes, and separate metadata stores to work around them. The piece highlights that SSD prices have fallen steadily since S3's 2005 launch, narrowing the cost gap with hard disks to about 3x.
Glasgow-based studio Screen Burn is developing Silent Hill: Townfall, a new entry in the long-running Japanese horror franchise that is set on a fictional Scottish island rather than the series' traditional American settings. Director Jon McKellan said taking on the well-known brand felt "absolutely terrifying" for his relatively small team. The game features familiar British details, such as signage for a Sunday roast, woven into its horror setting.
Apple has publicly released macOS 27 Golden Gate, following months of beta testing, adding Apple Intelligence features throughout its built-in Mac apps. Photos gains Spatial Reframing, Extend, and an improved Clean Up tool, Safari adds tab grouping, a Notify Me alert feature, and a natural-language extension builder, and Shortcuts now lets users create and refine automations using plain language descriptions.
Crusoe has ended its agreement to buy 29 of Boom Supersonic's 42-megawatt Superpower gas turbines, a deal worth $1.25 billion with deliveries originally set to start in 2027. Boom CEO Blake Scholl confirmed the split on X, saying turbines are no longer part of Crusoe's near-term power plans for sites like its Abilene, Texas campus. Crusoe confirmed to TechCrunch it is no longer working with Boom.
Apple maintains a Dimensional Drawings section within the Accessories area of its developer website, offering precise technical schematics for 96 devices. The library covers current and recent hardware including iPhones, Apple Watch models, AirPods, MacBooks, the Siri Remote, AirTag, and Vision Pro accessories like its ZEISS Optical Inserts. Each drawing details exact measurements for buttons, cameras, sensors, speakers, connectors, and keepout zones where certain materials must be avoided.
A hacking group calling itself ShinyHunters says it stole data from FBI systems on Monday, later posting details on a darknet site along with an extortion demand. Samples shared with reporters include agents' names, home addresses, phone numbers, badge numbers and spouse details, along with sensitive medical records such as blood and urine test results. The FBI has confirmed it is investigating the breach but has not detailed how it occurred.
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has assembled a new board, informing staff via Slack on Friday. The lineup includes author Hugh Howey, 'Breakup Bootcamp' writer Amy Chan, and IRL co-founders Henry Khatachryan and Krutal Desai, along with several new advisers. This follows an episode earlier this month in which the prior board briefly placed Mullenweg on leave before he regained control and removed or accepted resignations from those directors.
OpenAI's status page reported a full outage of its Codex service, with the issue identified by the company. Availability figures were described as aggregated across all subscription tiers, models and error types, meaning individual customers' experience of the outage could differ.
Heidi Overton, Trump's nominee to lead the FDA, testified before the Senate health committee and repeatedly stated the MMR vaccine is safe and effective, directly contradicting Trump's earlier claim that it was 'quite lethal.' When Sen. Maggie Hassan pressed her on whether the president could ever be wrong, Overton avoided answering directly.
Jaan Tallinn, one of Anthropic's earliest investors, says he is deeply worried about the risks posed by advanced artificial intelligence, describing the industry as 'racing to build a technology that could end humanity.' Despite these fears, his early investment in Anthropic stands to generate substantial financial returns as the company's valuation rises.
A technical post outlines a statistical challenge in machine learning: estimating log-sum-exp functions, which are widely used for normalizing probabilistic models and in reinforcement learning, becomes highly unreliable when the underlying potential function takes large values, causing estimation variance to grow exponentially. The author proposes using least-squares techniques to address this exploding variance problem, offering a way to stabilize these estimates even as the scale of the values involved increases.