A Reddit user known as ActualAerie1011 says they used a custom trainer algorithm alongside Google's recently released fruit fly connectome to play the card game Balatro on its easiest settings. The setup pits the simulated brain against an algorithm that hunts for favorable game seeds, comparing outcomes and reinforcing the brain's decisions through repeated trials. The creator reports a current 20% success rate and says training is ongoing, though no code or detailed methodology has been shared publicly.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-17
Amazon is currently selling the Google Pixel 10a for $424, a 15% markdown from its $499 list price. The mid-range 2026 Pixel features a 6.3-inch Actua display, Tensor G4 chip, 8GB of RAM, up to 256GB of storage, a 5,100mAh battery, and a 48MP main camera. This is the lowest price outside of the earlier Prime Day sale.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-09-17
Emerald AI has launched the AI Energy Management Alliance with Google, Nvidia and Anthropic, alongside utilities like AES, Constellation, National Grid and NRG Energy. The coalition aims to use demand-response software that lets data centers pause noncritical tasks or shift compute loads during peak grid stress, potentially enabling 100 additional gigawatts of data center capacity to connect to the grid.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-17
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema issued a remedies order requiring Google to make its ad-tech products interoperable with rival platforms, share more auction data with publishers, and accept an internal compliance monitor. The ruling stops short of the Justice Department's push to force Google to sell off parts of its advertising technology business, despite Brinkema's earlier finding that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in the ad-tech market.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-17
NVIDIA, Google, and startup Emerald AI have created the AI Energy Management Alliance (AEMA), a coalition aimed at making AI data centers more flexible in their power consumption. The group wants facilities to be able to shift workloads, tap batteries, and cut usage during peak demand, in exchange for utilities granting faster grid connections and potentially sharing infrastructure costs.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-17
Brown Brothers Media, run by Justin, Lachlan and Brendan Brown, has been acquiring established online publications covering topics like space travel, parenting and business, then laying off much of their writing staff and replacing them with mass-produced AI-generated articles. The company says its network now draws over 50 million page views monthly, a figure roughly corroborated by third-party analytics firm Similarweb, which estimates about 64.7 million average monthly visitors — putting BBM's reach ahead of outlets like CBS News and Forbes.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-17
Google's Threat Intelligence Group disclosed a credential-harvesting operation where attackers compromised cloud infrastructure and deployed a multi-agent AI framework that scanned for vulnerabilities, fixed its own errors, and rotated IP addresses largely without human input. The entire campaign, which compromised thousands of third-party credentials, took less than six hours to execute. Separately, Microsoft found AI-assisted phishing messages reaching click-through rates of 54%, compared to roughly 12% for conventional campaigns.
bleepingcomputer.com
· 2026-09-17
TypeSafe has open-sourced Jev Ultrafast, a browser automation agent that reads a page's elements as an indexed table and picks an operation-target pair in a single network round trip, calling a small language model only when text needs to be generated. In a demo, it booked a Zürich-to-London flight search on Google Flights from a single natural-language goal in 7.1 seconds, including page load waits. The code, along with a local inspector interface for watching element probabilities and executed actions, is available on GitHub.
github.com
· 2026-09-17
Google announced that Google Home will now support third-party AI agents beyond its own Gemini, using Model Context Protocol technology. Anthropic's Claude, open-source agents OpenClaw and Hermes, and Google's Antigravity coding platform were named as early integrations, letting these AIs control devices and access event history within the Google Home ecosystem. The feature is rolling out in early access to US Google Home Premium subscribers, who pay $20 for the tier.
cnet.com
· 2026-09-17
Cloud gaming platforms from Nvidia, Microsoft, Sony and Amazon have survived a decade of tepid adoption since Google's Stadia collapsed in 2023, but rising demand for AI computing power is now driving up data center costs sharply. That surge is undermining the original pitch of cloud gaming: cheap, leased compute that let players skip expensive consoles or PCs.
cnet.com
· 2026-09-16
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.
wired.com
· 2026-09-16
Google has released a new sorting algorithm that reimagines the classic Quicksort using vectorized, SIMD-based operations to speed up processing on modern CPUs. The project applies hardware-level parallelism to a decades-old algorithm, aiming to boost performance for large-scale sorting tasks.
opensource.googleblog.com
· 2026-09-16
GoKawiil