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Browse tech news organized by topic. Topics are automatically detected and ranked by activity.
Rob Grant, the comedy writer best known as the co-creator of the long-running BBC sci‑fi sitcom Red Dwarf, has died, according to a report published Feb. 26, 2026 by Beyond The Joke. The news was first shared by fan site Ganymede and Titan, which reportedly went offline amid heavy traffic. Grant co-created and frequently wrote Red Dwarf with Doug Naylor, and also wrote for Spitting Image, including early sketches such as “The Chicken Song,” and worked on Carrott’s Lib. Cast and official channels
Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen team has open-sourced Qwen3-TTS, a new text-to-speech model family aimed at practical production use with stable, expressive output, low-latency streaming, and features like free-form voice design and vivid voice cloning. The release is quickly spawning an ecosystem: projects like Voicebox package Qwen3-TTS into a polished, browser-based “voice synthesis studio,” while other community apps focus specifically on voice cloning workflows. Together, the updates signal a broader trend toward accessible, end-to-end open-source voice generation stacks—models plus tooling—making advanced TTS and cloning easier to experiment with and deploy.
I have 2,600+ notes in Apple Notes and can barely find anything.<p>My kid just dumps everything into Telegram saved messages. Running a small research - curious what systems people actually use (not aspire to use).<p>Do you have a setup that works or is everything scattered across 5 apps like mine?
Two related posts highlight “What’s on HTTP?”, a web-based scanning project that inventories services still reachable over plain HTTP across the IPv4 internet. The tool (also surfaced via a “VibeScan Tuner” interface) emphasizes mapping “sites without HTTPS,” ranking top and worst results, and keeping an ongoing “census” running. The project underscores a broader infrastructure trend: despite years of HTTPS-by-default push, significant portions of the public internet remain accessible over unencrypted HTTP, and community-funded measurement efforts are emerging to quantify, monitor, and potentially nudge further migration toward secure transport.
AMD Announces the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2
Uber is positioning itself as the central marketplace for robotaxis, stitching together multiple autonomous-vehicle partners rather than building a full stack itself. New deals include a major Rivian partnership targeting up to 50,000 Level 4 EV robotaxis, backed by as much as $1.25 billion in milestone-based Uber investment, plus expansions with Motional in Las Vegas and planned launches with Wayve and Nissan in Tokyo. Amazon’s Zoox is also set to offer rides via the Uber app, starting in Las Vegas and later Los Angeles, as regulatory approvals progress. The broader trend: autonomy vendors, EV makers, and chip platforms (notably Nvidia) are converging on Uber’s demand and distribution.
A user exploring options after Apple removed FireWire (IEEE 1394) support in macOS 26 tested using a Raspberry Pi to access legacy FireWire devices such as DV cameras and external drives. The article references older hardware — a Canon GL1 DV camera and Power Mac G4 MDD — and discusses why FireWire gear still matters for importing footage and preserving media workflows now that modern macOS dropped native support. It outlines practical motivation for hobbyists and professionals to bridge old AV
New research is linking employees’ susceptibility to jargon-heavy, semantically empty “corporate bullshit” with weaker on-the-job performance. A Cornell-led study in Personality and Individual Differences used a “corporate bullshit generator” to test whether workers could distinguish buzzword-laden management statements from meaningful claims. Those more impressed by vague corporate language tended to score lower on objective measures such as reasoning, honesty, practical business decision-making, and task outcomes. The findings suggest that cultures tolerating opaque communication can mask incompetence and enable dysfunctional leadership, raising risks for organizations. HR and managers are urged to prioritize clarity in hiring, training, and internal messaging.
Walmart, which acquired Vizio in December 2024, now requires a Walmart account to complete onboarding and access smart features on select newly purchased Vizio TVs, the company confirmed. Historically, Vizio TVs required a Vizio account to manage subscriptions, offers, and ad-driven personalization tied to Vizio OS; the switch to Walmart accounts signals tighter integration with Walmart’s advertising and user data strategy. The change affects only some new Vizio OS models but raises privacy and
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Meta is pulling Horizon Worlds from Quest headsets and shifting the product to its Meta Horizon mobile app, reflecting a broader retreat from its once-flagship VR “metaverse” push. Reports say the Quest app will be delisted at the end of March, with VR access ending June 15, 2026, alongside cuts to some Horizon-related perks and social features like Hyperscape Capture sharing. After backlash, CTO Andrew Bosworth signaled a partial reversal: existing VR worlds should keep working “for the foreseeable future,” but new content and development will prioritize mobile. The move underscores Meta’s reallocation toward AI and smart-glasses hardware amid Reality Labs cost pressures.
Samsung’s Galaxy S26 launch underscores a premium pivot: modest hardware tweaks paired with higher prices and a much bigger AI pitch. The S26 and S26+ rise by $100 (starting $899 and $1,099), while the Ultra sits around $1,300, framed as Samsung’s first “agentic AI” phones. Samsung is also expanding Galaxy AI via Perplexity integration (including “Hey Plex” and a dedicated helper button) and refining practical features like improved thermals, easier NFC payments, and broader satellite connectivity through carrier partners. Meanwhile, Samsung appears to be dialing back costly experiments, winding down the $2,899 TriFold after just months.
Pebble Time 2 Is In Mass Production! Takashi Mochizuki / Bloomberg : Sources: Nintendo plans to cut Switch 2 production this quarter to 4M units, down ~33% from 6M, after weaker-than-expected holiday demand, especially in the US — Nintendo Co. is cutting back the production of Switch 2 after demand for the $450 gaming console trailed the company's expectations during …
Multiple reports confirm a supply-chain attack targeting the popular Python AI library LiteLLM on PyPI, specifically versions 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 published March 24, 2026. The trojanized releases added a malicious .pth launcher (and other encoded payloads) that executes on every Python startup—without importing litellm—harvesting SSH keys, cloud and CI/CD credentials, kubeconfigs, env files, and crypto wallets. Researchers say data was encrypted and exfiltrated to models.litellm.cloud, with attempted Kubernetes lateral movement and persistence via backdoors and systemd user services. PyPI quarantined affected files, and users are urged to uninstall, purge caches, hunt for persistence, and rotate all secrets.
Mozilla’s Firefox 149 rollout (starting March 24, 2026) signals a push to bundle everyday productivity and privacy tools directly into the browser. The headline addition is a free, built-in VPN tier offering 50GB per month in an initial US/France/Germany/UK rollout, positioning Firefox as a privacy-first alternative to extensions and third-party services—while also raising questions about infrastructure partners, performance, and enterprise manageability. Firefox 149 also adds Split View for side-by-side tabs and introduces experimental Tab Notes for local-only, URL-tied reminders. Optional AI side windows remain opt-in, reflecting a cautious approach to generative features.
Apple is expanding its in-house advertising business by bringing paid placements to Apple Maps in the U.S. and Canada later this summer. The format will mirror App Store Search Ads: clearly labeled promoted pins and suggested-place listings, limited to one ad per search result, sold via an auction with budget and scheduling controls. Apple is positioning the move as privacy-preserving, saying ad interactions won’t be tied to Apple IDs and targeting is processed on-device. The Maps rollout also aligns with a revamped “Apple Business” suite that bundles listings, device management, and productivity tools, signaling a broader services-driven monetization push.
Epic Games is laying off more than 1,000 employees as Fortnite engagement declines and the company moves to rein in spending after years of aggressive expansion. CEO Tim Sweeney said Epic has been “spending significantly more than we’re making,” framing the cuts—its second major round since September 2023—as necessary to keep the business funded in a tougher games market. Alongside the layoffs, Epic expects over $500 million in savings from reduced contracting, marketing, and unfilled roles. The move highlights broader industry pressure on live-service economics and rising costs, even for top platform and engine providers.
Nearly two decades after it was proposed to replace X11, Wayland remains a contentious transition for Linux desktops. Recent commentary argues that Wayland’s slower-than-expected rollout—now roughly 40–60% adoption—has diverted engineering effort while its stricter security model disrupted long-standing workflows such as screen recording, clipboard access, and window introspection. The critique frames the shift as a lesson in the risks of greenfield rewrites that underestimate compatibility needs, ecosystem expectations, and deployment realities. By contrast, PipeWire is cited as a faster, more broadly accepted modernization path, highlighting how replacement infrastructure succeeds when it delivers clear wins without breaking user and developer tools.
A guilty plea in an $8 million streaming-royalties fraud case is sharpening scrutiny on how AI-generated music can be weaponized to game platform payouts. Prosecutors say a North Carolina man coordinated the upload of hundreds of thousands of synthetic tracks and used automated bot farms—up to 10,000 fake accounts, plus VPNs and falsified records—to generate massive play counts across major services including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. The case underscores an escalating integrity battle for streamers as AI lowers the cost of content at scale, and raises questions about where terms-of-service violations end and federal criminal fraud begins.
systemd maintainers reverted a recent change that added a birthDate field to JSON user records after heated community debate, legal review and privacy concerns. The revert argues that storing birth dates creates sensitive OS-level data, risks normalizing permission checks, conflicts with open-source distro philosophies that avoid identity authorities, and raises enforcement and jurisdictional legal problems. Major distributions and freedesktop.org expressed pushback or non-commitment, and volunt
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is using his annual investor messaging to warn that the AI boom could deepen wealth inequality as ownership of data, compute infrastructure, and capital concentrates gains among a small set of dominant firms and investors. He points to soaring valuations—such as Nvidia’s surge—as evidence of increasingly concentrated market capitalization and flags bubble risks reminiscent of the dotcom era, alongside growing scrutiny of large, circular AI financing deals. Fink also frames AI as a geopolitical battleground, particularly between the US and China, and argues broader stock ownership could help spread benefits, though he offers few concrete policy prescriptions.
The Government Wants to Scan Your Face. It’s Not Waiting for Permission. The US DHS is building a surveillance system vast enough to identify anyone on any street and is doing so without a legal framework to govern when, why, or whether it should.
Recent coverage is resurfacing RollerCoaster Tycoon as a lasting case study in performance engineering, spotlighting how Chris Sawyer’s near-all-Assembly code and tightly tuned data structures enabled large-scale park simulation on late-1990s PCs. The deep-dive catalogs micro-optimizations—careful type sizing for money, bit-shift math substitutions, and aggressive space/time trade-offs—while using the fan-led OpenRCT2 reverse-engineering effort to validate and document how the original worked. The broader trend is renewed interest in preservation-minded forks and in extracting evergreen lessons: know your constraints, choose efficient algorithms and representations, and optimize where it measurably matters, even as modern hardware reduces the need for hand-tuned Assembly.
hesreallyhim / awesome-claude-code GitHub experienced repeated service disruptions in early February 2026, affecting Actions, pull requests, notifications and Copilot, with incident timelines showing notification delays of up to ~50 minutes and Copilot policy propagation problems lasting from Feb 9 into Feb 10. Observers note GitHub’s status page changes make it harder to view 90-day historical uptime, and reconstructed public feeds suggest stability has been poor, with uptime dipping below
Ubuntu Looks To Strip GRUB To The Bare Minimum For Better Security