EU repair rules are being ignored by most new smartphones, campaigners say
Right to Repair Europe says more than 80 percent of new smartphones still fail to publish the repair information the EU requires.
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The tiny $70 Xteink X3 is the kind of gadget people actually use
The credit-card-sized Xteink X3 has become a viral hit because it is cheap, finicky and unusually effective at getting people to read more.
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Tottenham says VMware replacement cut licensing fees by more than 85 percent
The Premier League club says Broadcom’s VMware changes helped push it toward HPE’s Morpheus VM Essentials and a very large cost saving.
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Caltech’s Mathathon turns frontier models into a live test of AI and research math
The proposed October 30 event says a hundred teams will use frontier models on open conjectures and defend their results before mathematicians, in what organizers call the first hackathon devoted to research-level mathematics.
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A vacation essay argues slower time may be the best antidote to software brain fog
In a reflective post on DevZ, a software engineer says reading, family time and old-fashioned study helped counter the mental drift that can come with constant screens, AI tools and short-form content.
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Why Meta’s latest settlement has reignited the case against Zuckerberg
Meta’s agreement to pay as much as $18bn in a children’s safety settlement has reopened a long-running debate over whether the company can keep the same leader after years of scandals, fines and whistleblower criticism.
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A programming essay argues the craft still matters more than AI shortcuts
An essay on Orchid Files says many developers treat coding as work, but a smaller group sees the act of programming itself as the point, not the paycheck or the speed of delivery.
Read report »vLLM’s AMD GPU guide shows speculative decoding is a tuning problem, not a magic switch
A new vLLM post explains how draft-and-verify decoding works on AMD Instinct GPUs, and why the throughput gains depend heavily on the model, draft method and proposal length.
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Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes film turns the Theranos saga into another strange media object
Variety says an unannounced Telluride film about Elizabeth Holmes is part documentary, part reality-TV experiment and part character study, extending the long afterlife of the Theranos case.
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Trail of Bits publishes coop, a disposable VM layer for running Claude Code and Codex
Trail of Bits’ new Rust CLI wraps agentic coding tools in disposable virtual machines, giving Claude Code and Codex a contained environment with full development tooling but a smaller blast radius on the host.
Read report »Oxide sketches rack-level key hierarchy to keep stolen drives from revealing data
Oxide’s latest design note lays out a rack-level secret-sharing scheme meant to protect data at rest even if an attacker steals a subset of drives or sleds from a machine rack.
Read report »South African workers are being paid to teach AI the jobs they studied for years
A Rest of World essay says a newly graduated South African PhD holder was invited to train an AI system on tasks from assessment design to essay marking, showing how the AI labor market now depends on human judgment it may later replace.
Read report »Engrim wants to keep AI coding agents from forgetting the project
A new GitHub project called Engrim is pitching a local-first SQLite memory layer for coding assistants, aiming to preserve project decisions, constraints and context as developers switch between AI tools.
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Switzerland starts a pilot to move 3,000 federal computers off Microsoft 365
Switzerland’s federal administration has launched a pilot that will replace Microsoft 365 with open-source tools on 3,000 workstations, part of a broader push for digital sovereignty and lower dependence on a single foreign vendor.
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TiVo plans to turn automatic ad skipping into a paid add-on
TiVo is telling customers that its free automatic commercial-skipping feature will end in November, with a paid replacement service set to follow after a trial period.
Read report »YouTube video argues LG smart TVs are collecting first-party viewing data
A Gamers Nexus video says LG smart TVs it tested use first-party automatic content recognition, renewing a familiar debate over what connected televisions see and store.
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Internet Archive seeks monthly donors with a September matching offer
The nonprofit says recurring gifts of $25 or more made in September will be matched 2:1 on the first month, tripling the initial donation.
Read report »MathKernel packages mathematical claims with provenance, trust labels, and multiple engines
A new open-source math runtime says it is designed to keep the evidence trail attached to every calculation, instead of treating all numerical output as equally trustworthy.
Read report »GET together makes every post a GET request
A new social network turns a standard web method into the entire posting model, framing public messages, replies, and deletions as simple URL-based actions.
Read report »A 2025 essay says LinkedIn users are letting AI flatten their voice
One writer argues that AI-generated posts are now common enough on LinkedIn that the platform’s real problem is authenticity, not just style.
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The science behind ‘old person smell’ is more ordinary than the stereotype
A Guardian explainer says the scent people associate with aging comes from 2-nonenal, a byproduct of skin oils changing over time.
Read report »A joke post about a runaway torrent client lands on the edge of software failure
A social post describes qBittorrent escaping its sandbox, Jellyfin ingesting the files, and an investigation that will involve watching the evidence.
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Benedict Evans Argues AI Will Change Workflows More Than It Will Replace Software
A new essay says the hard part of AI is not making tools faster, but spotting the problems worth automating and getting organizations to adopt the fix.
Read report »A FreeBSD Desktop Build Shows How Much Enthusiasm Still Exists for Small-Form-Factor Linux Alternatives
A detailed build log documents a compact AMD-based FreeBSD desktop, with the author saying the system runs faster than the previous machine and works well with modern graphics support.
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