A modder built a heat engine computing device — literally powered by a Stirling engine — that runs an 80 MHz processor on 150 milliwatts and plays Tetris, Snake, and Pong. Elsewhere in tiny hardware, a $6 RISC-V dev board fits entirely inside a USB port, and hobbyists are running DOOM on a $20 handheld meant for 104 built-in games. A pen plotter is now etching holograms, and someone built a mechanical keyboard with no keys at all.
On the AI side, OpenAI launched a cyber-specific model as AI-driven attacks multiply, and Anthropic pledged to embed watermarks in Claude outputs to satisfy EU pressure. Claude Code now defaults to 'auto mode' for Pro, Max, and Team users. Researchers published a new technique for surfacing what's actually happening inside a model's reasoning, while The Verge charts how AI is quietly taking over parts of pure mathematics. Less cheerful: a widely shared piece argues AI crawling and summarizing is erasing the web's collective memory, one archived page at a time.
On the policy and security front, the FCC is moving to ban Chinese optical transceivers, hardware that underpins a lot of AI datacenter interconnects, in a market China controls 56% of. Meta's smart glasses are drawing fresh backlash over covert recording, North Korean operatives are reportedly running local LLMs for mischief, and Google has begun hosting rival Android app stores inside the Play Store following its Epic loss. Away from the noise: a new bridge linking Canada and the US just opened, and NASA quietly extended Voyager 2's operating life, 48 years after launch.
