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Robert X. Cringely, the technology journalist known for the PBS documentary series Triumph of the Nerds, has died. He was widely remembered for his 1995 interview with Steve Jobs, conducted while Jobs was at NeXT, of which only 10 minutes aired originally before the full 70-minute recording surfaced later.
Industrial Next, a San Francisco startup presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, unveiled self-contained robotic stations that use proprietary AI foundation models to combine vision, task context and motion, allowing production lines to be retooled in minutes instead of weeks without manual reprogramming. The company also announced a partnership with BMW Group Technology Office to evaluate its dexterous manipulation technology for manufacturing use.
A project called Janas-LLM has published benchmarks showing it can run large mixture-of-experts models, including a 48GB Qwen3-Next-80B model, on a 32GB laptop by streaming model 'experts' from an NVMe SSD rather than keeping everything in RAM. Tests on an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H laptop with its integrated Arc GPU showed Janas-LLM generating text at 24 tokens/sec versus llama.cpp's 2.8 tokens/sec on that model, with similar gains across a dozen other open models from Qwen and Gemma families. The developers released a benchmarking tool, janas-bench, and installation instructions for Linux x86-64 so others can reproduce results on their own hardware.
Gigabyte announced a BIOS update extending support for upcoming Intel processors to its full lineup of B760 and H610 motherboards, covering both DDR4 and DDR5 variants, with the chips expected in early 2027. The update excludes other LGA 1700 boards like Z690, Z790, and B660, and Gigabyte has not revealed SKUs, specs, or pricing for the new CPUs.
Dr. Darshan Shah, a surgeon turned wellness entrepreneur, identified common frustrations with traditional healthcare settings and created Next Health, a clinic chain emphasizing comfort and advanced treatments. The company now operates over 25 locations worldwide, offering services from health testing to hormone therapy.
A free, open-source tool called Strata enables the 125-billion-parameter Qwen3.8-Flash-Next AI model to run locally on consumer gaming PCs with 12GB+ VRAM, rather than requiring server hardware. Testing on an RTX 5070 and RX 9070 XT showed response speeds ranging from roughly 44 to 94 tokens per second depending on model compression level, with all processing staying on the local machine.
A new open-weight AI model called Kolibri has been released, positioned as a 'sovereign' alternative to existing large language models. The release includes benchmark comparisons against models such as Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B, Nemotron 3 Super 120B-A12B and Mistral Small 4 119B-A6B, with metrics focused on non-hallucination rates and grounding accuracy when source documents lack answers.
iOS 27.2 updates Apple Podcasts by replacing the single Up Next queue with two separate sections: New Episodes, showing the latest episode for each followed show, and Continue Playing, which tracks episodes a listener has started but not finished. The redesign directly targets long-standing complaints about episodes getting buried or lost in the old combined queue.
Georg Zoeller describes using an AI model, Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next, to reverse engineer the 1989 game War of the Lance and port it to a Three.js browser engine over about a week, limited by running a single lane due to VRAM constraints. He is now further modernising the port into a Total War/Heroes of Might and Magic-style game while retaining the original game's underlying logic, and separately tested Fable 5.1 for generating Blender models via Python scripts, producing roughly 80-100 usable models per week of subscription.
An opinion piece argues that tech commentary repeatedly overstates new gadgets and technologies as poised to replace or 'kill' smartphones. The author contends this framing has become excessive and calls for more measured coverage of emerging devices.
A visual explainer tool called Transformer Explainer illustrates how Transformer-based neural networks work, using the 124-million-parameter GPT-2 (small) model as its example. It walks through core components like tokenization, embeddings, attention mechanisms, and Transformer blocks to show how these models predict the next word in a sequence.
Amazon has discounted the HyperDrive Next Thunderbolt 5 Dock to $319.99, an $80 cut from its $399.99 list price, matching its lowest price to date. The dock combines a Thunderbolt 5 hub with a built-in M.2 NVMe SSD enclosure, letting users store files directly inside the unit rather than using a separate external drive.