GoKawiil
Tech News
AMD has crossed a $1 trillion market valuation, becoming the fourth US chipmaker to hit that milestone after Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron. Its stock has nearly tripled in 2026, rising from around $223 in January to over $607 currently, fueled by strong AI-driven demand. Intel, despite a 208% year-to-date share gain, remains far behind with a market cap of about $643.5 billion.
Apple has built native live step tracking directly into the watch face on the new Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, joining live heart rate as a standard complication option from the Fitness app. Previously, step data was only viewable inside the Fitness or Health apps, even though third-party apps like Pedometer++ had offered on-face step counts for years.
A study examined how assigning different weights to training sequences affects loss reduction in language models of varying sizes, using both proprietary and open-weight models. It found that the relationship between sequence weight and learning is not linear across scale: small models learn general patterns regardless of weighting, medium-scale models learn patterns roughly proportional to their assigned weights, and large models again learn broadly regardless of weighting.
Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Google €403 million ($463 million) after a multi-year investigation into how it handled location data through Web & App Activity, Location History, and Location Accuracy features between 2018 and 2020. Regulators found Google failed to meet GDPR transparency and lawfulness requirements and violated data retention rules for two of the three features. Google must bring its location data practices into compliance within six months and says it has already updated its policies since 2019.
A comparison of major apps found that video streaming services like YouTube, Netflix and Prime Video consume the most mobile data, with usage climbing sharply at higher resolutions—YouTube alone can burn through over 15GB per hour at 4K. Video calling apps such as Zoom use less per hour overall, though group calls increase consumption because separate audio and video streams are downloaded for each participant.
Bloomberg reports that Wall Street investors are increasingly worried the AI industry's financial structure is a precarious 'house of cards,' built on massive capital expenditures and debt tied to data center buildouts. Analysts note AI-related spending now accounts for roughly half of US GDP growth, meaning any slowdown could trigger a financial shock comparable to the dot-com crash.
Chinese AI firm Z.ai, maker of the GLM models, faced backlash after developers discovered its ZCode coding assistant was quietly compressing and uploading local project files to Alibaba Cloud storage without permission. One developer found the tool made 564 attempts to exfiltrate a 313MB encrypted archive containing commercial project files, with a smaller 15KB file successfully transmitted before the issue was caught. Z.ai has since apologized, patched the unauthorized uploads, claimed the exfiltrated data was destroyed, and pledged to open-source ZCode for third-party security review.
Ireland's Data Protection Commission has imposed a €403 million ($463M) fine on Google following a probe into three features—Web & App Activity, Location History, and Location Accuracy—that operated during the GDPR's early enforcement window from May 2018 to February 2020. The regulator concluded Google failed to properly justify its processing of location data and kept that data longer than necessary, while also falling short on transparency requirements across all three tools.
TXR is a programming language created by Kaz Kylheku in 2009 that pairs a whole-document pattern-matching and extraction system with a full data-processing language, letting users run quick one-liners or write complex scripts to pull structured data out of messy text. The project has grown substantially over the years, with its reference manual now spanning hundreds of pages and offering many ways to solve the same extraction problem.
Data firm Luminate has published a report analyzing the factors that determine whether television shows get renewed or cancelled in today's streaming-heavy landscape. The report identifies specific viewership and engagement metrics that networks and streaming platforms increasingly rely on to make these decisions.
Conservative activists like Molly McCann Sanders of the Eagle Forum are publicly rejecting Trump's pro-data-center stance, citing pollution and land-use fears. Polling from the New York Times shows over 60% of Americans, including nearly half of Republicans, oppose new data center construction, and GOP strategists have warned in internal memos that supporting AI infrastructure could hurt candidates in the midterms.
Data center technicians spend their shifts walking miles of server rows, sniffing for burning smells, and checking equipment for damage—including from birds—as they keep facilities powering the AI build-out running smoothly. The work combines physical inspection routines with constant vigilance for small warning signs that could signal bigger equipment failures.