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Tech News
Boll & Branch, known for its ethically sourced cotton bedding, is expanding into cashmere through a partnership with a 190-year-old Italian mill. The direct-to-consumer brand's first product in this new line is a $999 throw blanket marketed for its traceable supply chain, echoing the transparency approach it built its cotton business on.
An observer who conducted hundreds of lunches with strangers found that the most skilled conversational partners were rarely the loudest or wittiest people present. Instead, many were quiet and unassuming, relying on strong listening skills rather than performance or charisma to connect with others.
Research led by former SEC chief economist Susan Wachter finds that hyperscalers—Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Oracle—must boost their own productivity nearly threefold by 2030 to cover the cost of the roughly $5 trillion they're projected to spend on AI infrastructure over four years. Current AI revenues sit around $150-200 billion annually, far short of the buildout's scale, according to former SEC chair Gary Gensler.
The latest Apple @ Work podcast episode features Parallels' Dmitry Geynisman discussing the new features and improvements included in Parallels Desktop 27. The episode, sponsored by Mosyle, covers how the virtualization software has evolved for Mac users running Windows and other operating systems.
Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, has published a new novel called Exit Party, which follows characters living through two divergent near-future American scenarios: one marked by post-civil-war chaos and another by an oppressive surveillance state. She began writing it in 2022, before recent political developments like intensified ICE enforcement and expanded tech surveillance, yet the book's themes resonate strongly with current events.
Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Michael Cloud are introducing the No FLOCK Act, which would withhold 10 percent of federal highway funding from states that don't restrict automated license-plate readers like Flock to five approved uses, including finding stolen vehicles or missing persons. The bill follows growing backlash over police misuse of the cameras but does not ban the systems outright or block sharing plate data with agencies such as immigration enforcement.
A viral clip shows ChatGPT's Voice feature confidently miscounting the letter 'e' in 'seventeen,' claiming there are three when there are actually four. When the user, a content creator called Husk, corrected it, the chatbot repeatedly refused to concede the point even after spelling out the word itself. An OpenAI employee later clarified the voice assistant was running on an older model, GPT-Live-1, not GPT-6 as the bot itself claimed, and that it failed to delegate the query to a more capable model.
AMD's Gigabyte Gaming Radeon RX 9070 GRE, a 12GB RDNA 4 graphics card, has dropped to $499 at Newegg through a promotional email code, matching its lowest price ever recorded and undercutting its $569.99 list price by $70. The card uses a cut-down Navi 48 chip with 48 compute units and 220W power draw, delivering strong 1080p and solid 1440p gaming performance in prior benchmarks.
A hobbyist developer and F-Droid user set out to estimate how much software on the open-source app store F-Droid is written or heavily assisted by LLMs, after spotting an app with an obviously AI-generated icon. The author admits there's no reliable way to definitively detect AI-written code from text alone, but argues that certain behavioral and stylistic patterns in repositories can hint at LLM involvement.
PaperCut disclosed active exploitation of PaperCut NG/MF servers on August 27 with no CVE, no available exploit sample, and no patch. An emergency fix issued the next day was bypassed within hours, and a third patch only arrived on September 1, leaving customers exposed for roughly six days while attackers were already using the flaw in live attacks. A security researcher uses the episode to argue that the industry's old assumptions about response timelines no longer hold.
SimpliSafe launched the Video Doorbell Series 2, a $199.99 wired camera with 2K resolution, 10x zoom, and two-way audio that pairs with its Active Guard Outdoor Protection service starting at $49.99 a month. When onboard AI and cloud-based computer vision flag suspicious activity, a human monitoring agent can view the live feed, speak through the doorbell, and try to scare off intruders or package thieves. The doorbell requires a SimpliSafe base station and keypad and works with monitored or self-monitored plans.
Gilt Groupe, the once high-profile flash-sale e-commerce company, served as an early training ground for many employees who later launched their own startups. A number of these founders were women who credit their time at Gilt with giving them the operational and entrepreneurial skills to strike out on their own.