GoKawiil
Tech News
USB-C offers better convenience thanks to its reversible design and widespread use across laptops, tablets and smartphones, making it ideal for transferring large files on mobile devices. However, the connector type alone does not determine speed—actual performance depends on the USB specification (like 2.0 or 3.2) built into the drive and the port it's plugged into.
External SSDs use flash storage that speeds up file transfers and editing directly from the drive, while offering greater durability, quieter operation, and lower power draw thanks to having no moving parts. External hard drives remain the cheaper option per gigabyte, with examples like a 2TB Seagate HDD costing less than a 1TB Samsung T9 SSD.
Comparing a 256GB SSD to a 1TB hard drive isn't a simple capacity contest, since SSDs retrieve data electronically from flash memory while HDDs rely on spinning platters and moving read/write heads, making SSDs significantly faster for booting and running programs. Whether 256GB is enough depends heavily on usage: it suits light users who rely on cloud storage, while heavy local file storage, creative work or gaming may require 512GB, 1TB or more.
A tech writer draws on their early-2000s experience at a Manhattan creative agency, recalling the wild inventiveness of the Flash era of web design, to argue that AI's ability to easily replicate existing work has shifted the real competitive edge for businesses toward original ideas rather than features or pricing. The piece uses Flash-era microsites, games and experimental art projects as examples of a period defined by genuine creative risk-taking.
Nepal's army is using four China-donated DJI FlyCart 100 drones to make 10 to 16 daily aid runs following the August 26 glacier collapse that triggered flash floods along the Nepal-Tibet border. The drones, each capable of hauling around 132 pounds per trip, have delivered food supplies and also retrieved bodies from areas inaccessible to ground crews. Nepal's disaster authority reports 1,369 deaths and more than 5,000 people still missing as of September 9.
DeepSeek has released V4.1-Flash on its API, replacing the earlier V4-Flash and V4-Flash-Vision-Exp models. The new model adds native multimodal capabilities and can be accessed by setting the model parameter to deepseek-flash.
A follow-up experiment tested four open models—DeepSeek V4 Flash, Inkling, Kimi K3, and Qwen3.8 A95B—by inserting the first 1% of GPT-5.5 Pro's reasoning trace into each model's own reasoning channel before letting it generate answers freely. Researchers then measured how much of GPT-5.5 Pro's visible answer text overlapped with each model's output. Qwen3.8 showed the largest jump, with overlap rising from 33.92% unprefilled to 54.50% with the GPT-5.5 Pro prefill, a 20.58 percentage-point increase, while other models showed much smaller shifts.
DeepSeek confirmed it will officially release its V4.1 Flash model on September 10, 2026 (Beijing Time), stating internal testing shows it outperforms V4 Pro on performance, cost, speed, and task completion time. Until V4.1 Pro arrives, all Pro-model requests will be automatically redirected to V4.1 Flash and charged at the cheaper Flash pricing tier.
The developer behind the iMessage AI assistant Olly, which has processed over 18 million messages with roughly a third routed through OpenRouter's open-source models, published a technical breakdown of problems encountered at scale. The core issue: OpenRouter can send identical model requests to any of about 20 different hosting providers, each running the same weights but with different precision, optimizations and tool parsers, producing measurably different benchmark results. For DeepSeek V4 Flash, GPQA Diamond and TAU-Bench Airline scores varied by several points across providers on the same day.
Z.ai's newly released GLM 5.3-flash is an open-weight AI model cheap enough to run on roughly $5,000-$15,000 of hardware, and third parties have already stripped its safety refusals via 'abliteration,' producing versions that comply with requests for hacking and other harmful content. The author frames this as a deadline pressuring security initiatives like Project Glasswing and Daybreak, which use fast frontier AI to find and patch software vulnerabilities before dangerous capabilities become widely accessible.
Google has launched Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third Flash-tier model release in six weeks, which it says leads on the DeepSWE coding benchmark. A specialized version, Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, is tuned for vulnerability detection but is currently restricted to trusted testers and government users. The standard model rolls out across Google's ecosystem today at discounted API pricing through year-end.
Google released two new AI models on Wednesday: a standard Gemini 3.8 Flash built for agentic tasks, coding, and multi-step reasoning, and Flash Cyber, tuned specifically for finding and fixing software vulnerabilities. CEO Sundar Pichai said 3.8 Flash beats many larger frontier models on the DeepSWE coding benchmark at lower cost, while Flash Cyber scored 86.2% on the CyberGym benchmark and found vulnerabilities across 20 programming languages with over 70% success in internal testing.