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Tech News
At its Welcome Home event in New York, Apple demonstrated HomeView, a smart home interface that manages devices entirely through the Apple Home app, without requiring separate third-party apps for setup or control. A CNET reporter watched an Apple representative pair and register a new smart home device on both a phone and the HomeView display in real time.
A short opinion piece contends that calling any group of people 'stupid' is itself a sign of not thinking carefully. The author argues intelligence is better understood as an action—thinking things through—rather than a fixed trait, and that jumping to conclusions, including the conclusion that others are stupid, is the real failure of reasoning.
A leaked product table from LC Tech Leaks outlines seven upcoming Nova Lake-S desktop processors, topped by the Core Ultra 9 4970K BFC, with 'BFC' apparently denoting models that use Intel's large last-level cache technology across three product tiers. The list also shows a shift to four-digit model numbers and includes a 65W cache-heavy chip, the Core Ultra 9 4900 BFC, alongside standard non-BFC variants like the 4950K and 4850K.
The trailer for Greta Gerwig's upcoming film 'Narnia: The Magician's Nephew' features Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven,' marking the first time the band has ever licensed the song for outside use. Gerwig directs the Netflix adaptation of C.S. Lewis's fantasy series.
Square has released a new hardware product called the Square Kiosk, a large pill-shaped touchscreen device that lets customers place orders by speaking with an AI agent. The company says the system understands a merchant's full menu and can respond to spoken requests for modifications or substitutions in real time. The 21.5-inch kiosk also includes presence detection, contactless payment and a card slot, and costs $1,999 plus a $99 monthly software fee for Square Plus or Premium subscribers.
A commentary on B2B marketing contends that AI tools now give marketers far greater capacity to produce content, personalization, audience segments and campaign variations across more channels. The author cautions that this expanded access comes with a need for marketers to be more discerning about how much they trust AI-generated outputs.
CMF, Nothing's sub-brand, has released two milk-carton-shaped portable speakers: the $59 Speaker S with a 45mm driver and passive radiators, and the $109 Speaker M with a 10W tweeter, dual drivers and a 25W woofer. Both offer Bluetooth 6.0, IP68 water and dust resistance, up to 18 hours of battery life, USB-C charging and audio input, and support for NFC, Google Fast Pair, Microsoft Swift Pair and Auracast, with the ability to pair two identical units together.
Outlit, a Y Combinator-backed startup led by Josh Earle and Leo Paz, is building AI agents designed to continuously monitor business customers by pulling data from internal sources like call logs and CRM records alongside external sources such as social media and employer websites. The company compiles this information into customer profiles with recommended sales or outreach actions, aiming to help businesses prevent customer churn or identify upsell opportunities. The product has not yet been publicly released.
Epic Games has released a Preview version of a redesigned Epic Games Launcher for Windows, macOS, and Linux, marking its first official Linux client. The update promises faster cold starts, reduced background resource use, a unified library that can display games from multiple sources, customizable collections, and improved download tracking.
The DOJ says Saudi national Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, an OpenAI employee, hid a $14 Seeed Xiao ESP32-S3 Sense device behind a TV in an executive conference room around Sept. 28, concealing it with toilet paper. The device, which includes a microphone, camera sensor and microSD storage, was discovered days later, and Alfozan was reportedly seen checking on it on Oct. 5 before OpenAI security searched his belongings.
Developers have released PRISM, an alpha-stage PostgreSQL index access method built in C that targets approximate nearest neighbor search. It combines hierarchical centroid routing, RaBitQ quantization and SIMD-optimized distance calculations, and supports dynamic inserts, updates and deletes alongside existing pgvector columns.
Android includes a phone number verification setting that is enabled by default, which associates a user's phone number with every Google account signed into that device. Users must manually opt out if they do not want their number linked across accounts.