During a 33-hour period when Matt Mullenweg was placed on leave by Automattic's board, interim CEO Mark Davies and Chief Legal Officer Andy Missan each approved the other's exit agreement. The deals grant both executives a year of salary, accelerated equity vesting, stock option exercise rights, and extended health coverage, totaling roughly $8.15 million combined. Mullenweg fired both men upon reclaiming his role, and Automattic is now weighing whether to honor or legally contest the payouts.
Meta is reportedly developing a new line of smart glasses, dubbed Luna, that will not include cameras, according to The Information. The devices, expected to launch in October in Clubmaster and Burbank styles, will feature six microphones and ear-facing speakers so users can talk to Meta's AI assistant via a side button, but will lack the recording capability found in Meta's Ray-Ban glasses.
Apple announced that iOS 27.2 will give developers the choice to display an alternative version of its App Tracking Transparency prompt in the European Union, with modified wording and formatting plus an optional 'Additional Information' button. In Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Romania, this alternative prompt will be mandatory rather than optional due to local legal requirements. The change stems from Apple's recent settlement with German antitrust regulators over its ATT rules.
A Stanford research team removed a large section of a mouse's brain and replaced it with tissue grown from human stem cells known as brain organoids. The goal was to give these lab-grown clusters of neurons a living, connected environment closer to an actual brain than a petri dish can offer.
Wayve, the self-driving software startup valued at roughly $8.5 billion, has named Elisa de Martel as its new chief financial officer. De Martel spent 2022 to January 2026 as Waymo's CFO, overseeing a period when the Alphabet unit expanded commercial operations and raised $5.6 billion at a $45 billion-plus valuation. She replaces Max Warburton, who is shifting to a strategic advisory role at Wayve.
A technical guide details Cyclomatic Complexity (CC), a decades-old code metric originated by Thomas McCabe in 1976 that counts independent execution paths through a method by tallying branching constructs like if, while, for, case, and logical operators. It outlines the scoring scale—1 for a single path, roughly 10 as McCabe's recommended ceiling, and above 25 flagged as excessive by Microsoft's CA1502 analyzer—and shows how to compute, visualize, and interpret it in .NET codebases alongside test coverage and IL-level analysis.
Netflix has released a trailer for 'Sacrifice,' a dark comedy directed by Romain Gavras starring Chris Evans and Anya Taylor-Joy. The film follows a cult leader, played by Taylor-Joy, who resorts to extreme measures involving an erupting volcano to try to save the world.
Speaking at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, RuPaul's Drag Race winner Bob the Drag Queen described how comfort with improvisation and imperfection has shaped her approach to entrepreneurship. She shared a lesson tied to 'Top Gun: Maverick,' a film she admitted she has never seen, to illustrate how confidence can outweigh flawless preparation.
A WIRED writer created a project called PitchFly using an open-source connectome mapping 165,112 neurons and 125 million synapses from a male fruit fly's brain. By feeding it hundreds of the outlet's top-performing headlines converted into numerical representations, the simulated neural circuitry began remixing patterns into new, often absurd story pitches. The system doesn't understand language—it's simply replicating firing patterns from real biological data to produce novel combinations.
Megi Endeladze, co-owner of Penny's Coffee Shop in Buffalo, New York, used ChatGPT to design a printed menu poster after the barista who usually hand-drew chalkboard signs moved away. She spent about $350 on printing and framing, then posted the result to Instagram, where customers quickly criticized the shop for relying on AI-generated artwork instead of human design.
Microsoft revealed its September Xbox Game Pass additions, headlined by prequel title Gears of War: E-Day and Minecraft Dungeons 2, arriving alongside titles like RuneScape: Dragonwilds and Kernel Hearts. The rollout comes as Microsoft faces scrutiny over the service's costs, having already announced it will cap cloud gaming hours by tier starting in November instead of offering unlimited access.
An independent researcher used supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning to train a small 4B-parameter open-weights language model to generate PostgreSQL execution plans. On a set of 113 join-heavy queries, the tuned model cut latency by 44.7% on average compared to Postgres's default planner, even though the base model initially failed to produce valid plans for 99 of those queries. The project also involved building a custom measurement rig to reduce caching noise and a modified GRPO reinforcement learning method for scoring plans in a noisy environment.
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