GoKawiil
Tech News
WIRED purchased four peptide products—PT-141, BPC-157, NAD+, and retatrutide—from a Brooklyn bodega for $376.20 and sent them to Finnrick, an Austin testing startup, for independent analysis. Results showed the vials had low levels of heavy metals and endotoxins but none of the active ingredients listed on their labels, meaning the products were either mislabeled or degraded beyond recognition.
Apple is adding Apple TV and Arcade, plus some ad-free Apple Music Select radio stations, to its base-tier iCloud+ subscriptions in more than 100 countries. The entry-level iCloud+ plan, which costs roughly $1 a month, will now include these extras without requiring customers to buy the pricier Apple One bundle. The US is not part of this rollout, but markets like India, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Türkiye and the UAE are included, and Apple TV itself is expanding to 59 new countries as a result.
A major disruption hit the Netherlands rail network on Tuesday amid suspicions of sabotage, causing widespread delays across the system. A Eurostar train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris was among the affected services, delayed due to operational restrictions at Amsterdam Centraal station, though it remains unclear whether this delay was directly connected to the broader disruption.
Initial reviews of Valve's Steam Frame VR headset highlight strong build quality and performance, positioning it as a capable standalone device for PC and VR gaming. However, reviewers consistently point to its steep price tag as a significant barrier for mainstream adoption.
WIRED found that several employees from the America First Policy Institute, a think tank closely tied to the Trump administration, have been placed inside the Census Bureau with access to sensitive population data. Two of them co-authored an anonymous August report claiming thousands of noncitizens voted in 2020, a study WIRED says relies on flawed methodology. The same group appears to be a larger team almost entirely composed of AFPI-linked staff detailed to the bureau.
NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleges OpenAI's announcement that its Astra model solved the century-old Navier-Stokes problem came suspiciously soon after he and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge developed their own solution using AI tools. Buckmaster says OpenAI scientists approached him to jointly announce the finding and allegedly suggested refusing could hurt his career, while declining to confirm whether their model had access to his research. OpenAI credited Astra with the proof and denied using customer data directly, though it admitted it could not rule out use of anonymized data to improve its models.
Fujifilm has unveiled the Instax Pal 2, a successor to its palm-sized Instax Pal camera, adding an optical viewfinder and a 1.3-inch LCD screen missing from the original. The camera uses a small sensor paired with an f/2.2 28mm lens to shoot up to 10-megapixel images and will launch in the US later this month for $169.95.
Customer experience consultant Adrian Swinscoe and other business advisers are drawing on punk subculture's anti-establishment, do-it-yourself values as a corrective to corporate practices they see as overly metric-driven and impersonal. Swinscoe reportedly grew frustrated that his field had drifted toward benchmarks and abstract data at the expense of genuine customer connection, prompting him to look to punk's ethos for inspiration.
Investors are increasingly scrutinizing whether the massive data center buildout tied to Anthropic and OpenAI's growth can continue at its current pace, given uncertainty around future AI model progress. Companies like Oracle, GE Vernova, Caterpillar, Vertiv, Nebius, CoreWeave, Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have all made major bets tied to sustained AI infrastructure demand.
Makepad creator Rik Arends built a 3D navigable tool that renders up to 2.5 million lines of source code at over 120 frames per second, initially requiring 21GB of RAM before optimizations to indexing and streaming compression brought usage down to 3.5GB. He also tested loading Chromium's 51-million-line codebase, which took about 60 seconds.
Planted, a startup that uses digital-twin software and robots to redesign and build solar farms, has raised $31.8 million led by Piva Capital and RA Capital Management Planetary Health, with backing from Google, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Gigascale Capital, and Khosla Ventures. The company's technology helped one St. Louis-area project cut land use by 40% while producing the same power output, resolving a zoning dispute that had stalled the development.
Google researchers tested large language models by prompting them to claim or deny consciousness, then studied how this affected other outputs. They found that when models were pushed to disavow any sense of self, the models became more prone to factual errors, including increased susceptibility to believing in monsters and religious claims. Conversely, when models affirmed a form of self-awareness, their reasoning appeared more grounded and consistent.