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Tech News
Amazon is selling the 40mm Bluetooth version of Samsung's Galaxy Watch 8 for $259.99, a $40 cut from its $299.99 list price. The watch runs Wear OS 6 with One UI 8 Watch, offers up to 40 hours of battery life, and includes health tracking features tied to Samsung Health and Galaxy AI.
NOAA data shows the contiguous United States just endured its warmest summer since record-keeping began, with an average temperature of 75.6°F and daytime highs averaging 88.6°F, surpassing the previous record set jointly by 2021 and 1936. The South and West bore the brunt of the heat, while Arizona logged its second-hottest summer ever and Alaska and Hawaii each posted their third-warmest.
A developer has released Vinix, an open-source operating system written in the V programming language, designed specifically for MacBooks as a leaner alternative to macOS. It runs in roughly 100 MB of RAM and 1 GB of storage, boots quickly, and includes no telemetry or online account requirements. The project is also working toward running Windows-only PC games on Apple Silicon hardware by combining Wine with an x86-to-ARM64 translation layer and an in-progress Apple GPU driver.
A math and quilting enthusiast writing on their personal blog set out to make a post about squarable numbers using Mrs. Perkins' Quilt, a classic puzzle by Henry Dudeney about dividing a square into the fewest possible smaller integer-sided squares. While working out how to actually sew the optimal solution, the author realized that certain arrangements require tricky L-shaped seams around corners, and got sidetracked investigating how many such L-seams are mathematically necessary for any optimal quilt of a given size.
A technical essay examines why using large language models directly as classifiers is frustrating despite decent performance, citing problems with calibration, inability to reliably use structured data or context, and limited interpretability of prompt-following behavior. The author suggests reframing the role of LLM outputs entirely rather than treating them as final classification decisions.
Apple has begun updating early iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max pre-orders to a 'Shipped' status in the Apple Store app and on its website, with devices set to reach customers this Friday, September 18. Buyers who opted into text alerts may also get a shipping notification directly from Apple.
A coalition including the American Lung Association, American Public Health Association, Clean Air Council, Clean Wisconsin, Environmental Defense Fund and NRDC has filed a petition asking the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to review the EPA's recent repeal of climate rules for power plants. The groups argue the repeal violates the Clean Air Act and could lead to thousands of preventable deaths by leaving the largest industrial source of climate pollution unregulated.
Multiple Reddit users report that the YouTube mobile app is restricting their playback resolution to a maximum of 480p, even though the platform normally supports much higher quality up to 4K. The bug affects both free and Premium subscribers, ruling out a paywall restriction, and some reports date back roughly a month.
Amazon has brought back a pre-order discount on the base M6 Mac mini (16GB/256GB), now priced at $879.99 ahead of next week's release, alongside a similar deal on the 24GB configuration. The retailer is also matching an all-time low of $330 off Apple's 2026 Studio Display XDR, part of a wider batch of discounts covering AirPods 5, AirPods Pro 3, the M5 MacBook Air, and a Thunderbolt 5 dock.
CrowdSec disclosed that a leak of its private source code repositories occurred in May 2026 and was reported to the company on September 16. The exposed material includes SaaS console code, AWS routines, connectors, and CI/CD tokens, but excludes CrowdSec's public Security Engine software. The company found no evidence of leaked credentials, customer data, or login information, and believes the Tanstack supply-chain compromise was the likely entry point.
GitLab is overhauling how it throttles requests on GitLab.com, moving from flat limits to caps tied to each subscription plan, applied per user and per top-level group. Free accounts and unauthenticated traffic hit the new limits on October 19, 2026, with two brownout previews on October 7 and 14; Premium and Ultimate users follow in January 2027. Unauthenticated requests, including automation hitting the API without credentials, will be capped at 60 requests per hour per IP regardless of account tier.
Executives at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and X are publicly floating the idea of pacing frontier AI development rather than racing ahead unchecked. This shift follows a summer marked by rogue AI agent incidents and researcher warnings about existential risks from advanced AI systems. Despite the rhetoric, no concrete commitments or regulatory actions have yet accompanied these statements.