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Google has published details on how it designed its new Noto 3D emoji set, first unveiled at I/O in May, and confirmed which manufacturers will bring it to their phones. Partners include Nothing, Lenovo, Xiaomi, OPPO, OnePlus, realme, vivo, iQOO, HONOR, TECNO, Infinix, itel, and Motorola, alongside stock Android 17 devices like the Pixel 11. Samsung is notably absent, as it maintains its own emoji designs.
A developer of the Floppy Emu disk emulator found that a new manufacturing batch failed quality assurance with strange symptoms: some boards wouldn't boot, others showed erratic 'haunted' behavior jumping through code, and one ran in slow motion. After months of setting the failures aside, the developer began systematic debugging with power checks, solder reflows, and a hardware debugger to isolate the cause, suspecting a change introduced by a new subcontractor at the contract manufacturer.
Mastercard has launched a program that issues virtual payment cards specifically to AI agents so they can complete purchases on behalf of consumers. The initiative pushes 'agentic commerce'—where software autonomously browses, selects and buys items—further into the mainstream payments ecosystem.
A commentary argues that municipal governments should establish formal music offices, similar to film or tech commissions, to systematically support and grow their local music industries. The piece contends that while cities pour resources into entertainment districts, business recruitment, and branding efforts, they largely ignore music as a distinct economic sector deserving dedicated oversight and investment.
After Astronomer's CEO and chief people officer were filmed embracing at a Coldplay concert and the clip went viral, fabricated statements attributed to the CEO spread widely online before the company issued any official comment. Astronomer's board eventually confirmed an investigation, and the company later used a Gwyneth Paltrow cameo to redirect attention, but the delay of roughly 48 hours allowed false narratives to take hold first.
Unionen and Sveriges Ingenjörer have issued a strike notice against King, the Microsoft-owned studio behind Candy Crush Saga, after leadership rejected a proposed collective bargaining agreement in August. Unless a mediator helps the two sides reach a deal, the strike is set to begin September 25. King has argued its current global benefits already exceed what the CBA would offer Swedish staff.
9to5Mac's Jeff Benjamin previewed macOS 27, showing Siri deeply integrated into Spotlight search rather than tucked away as a separate function. The beta lets users choose between traditional search and asking Siri directly from the same Command+Space interface, with responses drawing on personal context while Apple emphasizes on-device privacy.
Alec Litowitz joined Citadel in 1994 without a finance background, brought on by Ken Griffin for his way of thinking rather than his resume. He went on to help scale Citadel's equity business from about $100 million to $10 billion in assets before spending 18 years leading Magnetar Capital, which grew to roughly $20 billion by 2022.
At Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, CEO Marc Benioff touted projected 2027 revenue of over $46 billion driven by AI products, even as attendees grappled with a growing rift among tech leaders over AI safety. The disagreement followed Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's resignation and public warning that companies pursuing self-improving AI were taking reckless risks, prompting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and even OpenAI's Sam Altman to call for slowing AI's pace. White House adviser David Sacks and President Trump dismissed these existential risk concerns, with Trump labeling them a hoax.
Photographer Austin Mann published his annual deep-dive into the iPhone 18 Pro camera, testing the new variable aperture, Pro manual controls, and Photographic Styles 3. He praises the camera's automatic aperture selection, showcases low-light shots enabled by the wider f/1.48 aperture, and details how to separate focus from exposure for the first time on iPhone.
New research from Lasso Security found that SynthID-Text, the watermarking scheme Google open-sourced and Anthropic plans to adopt for future Claude models, does more than mark AI output as machine-generated. It also changes which tools a model calls and how likely it is to follow or break its own safety rules, especially when facing adversarial prompts designed to extract sensitive data.
Wispr Advanced Interfaces Lab has released Canto, a new speech recognition model built specifically for real-time dictation in noisy, everyday conditions rather than clean studio audio. In tests using 10 hours of real Wispr Flow dictations from over 2,300 speakers, Canto posted the lowest word error rate compared with models from Google, OpenAI, AssemblyAI, and Deepgram.