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"Early Sunday morning, a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI's CEO," reportsThe San Francisco Standard, citing reports from the local police department: The San Francisco Police Department announced the arrest of two suspects, Amanda Tom, 25, and Muhamad Tarik Hussein, 23, who were booked for negligent discharge... [The person in the passenger seat] put their hand out the window and appeared to fire a round on the Lombard side of the property, accordin…

"Robotic bird decoys are being deployed at Grand Teton National Park," reports Interesting Engineering, "to influence the behavior of real sage grouse and help restore a declining population.". Robotics mentor Gary Duquette describes the machines as "kind of a Frankenbird." (SFGate shows one of the robot birds charging up with a solar panel... "Recorded breeding calls are played at the scene, with clucking and cooing beginning at 5 a.m. each day.") Duquette builds the birds with a team of high …

"Rust's rise shows signs of slowing," argues the CEO of TIOBE. Back in 2020 Rust first entered the top 20 of his "TIOBE Index," which ranks programming language popularity using search engine results. Rust "was widely expected to break into the top 10," he remembers today. But it never happened, and "That was nearly six years ago...." Since then, Rust has steadily improved its ranking, even reaching its highest position ever (#13) at the beginning of this year. However, just three months later,…

A new powerful chipset has arrived to take on x86 CPUs and Apple's M5, writes Wccftech. The blog Windows Central writes that "Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 processors are here" — and they run Windows: Microsoft has done a massive amount of work to improve compatibility and has also convinced developers to embrace Windows 11 on Arm. Users of Windows 11 on Arm PCs spend 90% of their time on Arm-based apps that run natively. Additionally, apps that do not run natively can often run through Prism emulat…

Bloomberg describes him as a "former Harvard Medical School professor whose research has focused on the intersection of AI and neuroscience." "For the past 20 years, I studied how the human brain stores and retrieves memories," Kreiman writes on LinkedIn. And now "My co-founder Spandan Madan and I built a new algorithm to endow humans with perfect and infinite memory." Engramme connects to your **memorome**, i.e., entire digital life. Large Memory Models work in the same way that your brain enc…

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie "is officially the year's highest-grossing film to date with $629 million at the global box office," reports Variety — and it will likely earn over $1 billion. Project Hail Mary now becomes the year's second highest-grossing movie, with four-week ticket sales over $510, notes The Hollywood Reporter: The two films have helped propel year-to-date revenue to $2.113 billion — the best showing for the first part of the year since before the pandemic in 2019 ($2.619 billi…

"RGB LED TVs have been the talk of the TV world this year," argues The Verge, with models coming from all the manufacturers." And the first one of 2026 is here — the UR9 from China's Hisense — "the first look at the viability of the new backlight technology outside of demo rooms." They call it "a step above the traditional mini-LED TVs of years past." and "a great first shot against OLED's bow." HDR is colorful and accurate, it has great brightness, and it is capable of showing colors beyond th…

Mississippi has one warehouse — run by a contractor — that sells all the liquor for the entire state of 2.9 million people. "If a restaurant or store anywhere in Mississippi wanted a bottle of Jim Beam, they had to order it from the wholesale warehouse," reports the Washington Post. But then Mississippi's warehouse-managing contractor implemented a new computer system that wasn't compatible with the state's delivery system (like they'd promised it would be back in 2023). And then things got eve…

The biotech industry's engineered cells could become an $8 trillion market by 2035, notes Phys.org. But how do you keep them from being stolen? Their article notes "an uptick in the theft and smuggling of high-value biological materials, including specially engineered cells." In Science Advances, a team of U.S. researchers present a new approach to genetically securing precious biological material. They created a genetic combination lock in which the locking or encryption process scrambled the …

The word clanker — a disparaging term for AI and robots — "has made its way into the Linux kernel," reports the blog It's FOSS "thanks to Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux stable kernel maintainer and the closest thing the project has to a second-in-command." He's been quietly running what looks like an AI-assisted fuzzing tool on the kernel that lives in a branch called "clanker" on his working kernel tree. It began with the ksmbd and SMB code. Kroah-Hartman filed a three-patch series after runnin…

Forbes estimates he's worth roughly $110 billion, "placing him ahead of Bill Gates." And now Changpeng Zhao, the 49-year-old billionaire founder of Binance, "has written a memoir..." It arrives with the unmistakable timing of a man determined to tell the world his version of his meteoric crypto rise and fall, and foreshadow his comeback. The book, Freedom of Money: A Memoir of Protecting Users, Resilience, and the Founding of Binance, runs 364 pages, self-published in English and Chinese.... Zh…

Remember that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free"? It was Anthropic's experiment, with setup handled by a startup named Andon Labs (which also built the hardware and software integration). But for their latest experiment, Andon Labs co-founders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," reports Business Insider, "and gave a…

175 million people in Brazil now use its instant-payment system "Pix", developed by the country's central bank for real-time payments using QR codes or keys, and American Banker notes that the central banks of Argentina and Costa Rica also have developed their own widely used digital systems for instant payments. Latin America has been able to build up sleek and effective payment systems in record time because it is not held back by legacy payment technology that isn't built for instant money m…

Arizona state prosecutors allege Kalshi is running an illegal gambling operation, charging the prediction market with 20 "wagering" misdemeanors. But Friday a federal judge "temporarily barred Arizona from enforcing its gambling laws against predictive market operators," reports the Associated Press, "and put the brakes on a criminal wagering case that the state has filed against Kalshi. "U.S. District Judge Michael Liburdi's ruling means a Monday arraignment hearing for Kalshi has been called …

"Breathable oxygen has been created from Moon dust," reports the Telegraph, "in a world first that paves the way for a lunar base." Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin ""announced this week that it had developed a reactor that could successfully release oxygen from lunar soil by using an electric current." Almost half of Moon dust — the thin layer of rock that blankets the lunar surface — is oxygen, but it is bound to metals such as iron and titanium... Previous work to isolate oxygen has been lab-based, …