As tech billionaires pour record millions into Maine’s high-stakes Senate race, rural voters push back against the resource strain, rising utility costs, and phantom jobs of the AI data center boom.
Industry has drained the state’s water reserves for decades. Data centers are the breaking point.
Mr. Wonderful wanted to build the world’s largest data center. The neighbors had other ideas.
Some are even mad enough to vote for Democrats.
If you want to know what the data center occupation looks like, visit sleepy Loudoun County, Virginia.
Apple spent more than 15 years resisting a touchscreen MacBook, until now.
Along with a new touchscreen MacBook Pro, Apple also took the wraps off an OLED iPad Mini and M6-upgraded Macs this week.
We’ve gotten to play around with Apple’s next small tablet.
Resident Evil and Silent Hill are both thriving with new spins on survival horror.
You can watch Curry Barker’s ‘Mama Bear’ on YouTube right now.
The genre has become a tentpole across gaming, film, and television.
After inventing the modern zombie, Romero made a feminist film about a suffering house wife turning to witchcraft.
It’s Amazon’s most ambitious smart display to date, but has it priced itself out of the game?
Amazon’s $200 smart alarm clock is angling for a spot on your bedside table.
The company’s low-key product launch was designed to give each device more attention, according to Panos Panay.
It can animate an external view in real time and makes it easier to manage your smart home devices from one interface.
The KickerOctober 31
He edited the entire “Mama Bear” film while the laptop was unplugged, according to a behind-the-scenes video from Microsoft that also includes the claim that the computer sees a “less than 1% drop in performance when unplugged.”
That said, a footnote in the video says that the editing was “not performed on a single battery charge.”
MacRumors says that the instructions for technicians are straightforward, but “the fact that Apple issued an internal memo suggests the issue is widespread enough to warrant official guidance.”
Apple confirmed this week there is an “issue” affecting a “small number” of iPhone Duo units. iFixit told The Verge that cracks might be happening due to the flexible screen pushing up against a part of the hinge.
Apple is launching an iOS 27.3 beta next week that will bring some of the initial Apple Intelligence features to the Chinese market.
AwareCA provides emergency maps and alerts like Watch Duty, but directly from public safety agencies. The LA Times reports the app addresses fire officials’ “uneasiness” with Watch Duty, with Cal Fire’s David Acuña saying, with AwareCA “you’re not relying on, ‘Well, what did I hear on that really static-y radio?’”
[Los Angeles Times]
The company announced yesterday that search traffic was “down meaningfully,” with CEO Steve Huffman saying that Google’s AI-powered search modes don’t “drive traffic.” Today’s stock market fall was its worst since going public in 2024, CNBC reports.
Yesterday, Reddit also announced that the platform will soon start requiring users to log in.
We saw a post on Bluesky today about how Google is apparently now turning off AI Overviews “by default,” with one reply speculating that AI Overviews appeared if you phrased a query as a question.
But Google spokesperson Peter Schottenfels tells The Verge that “We haven’t reduced the triggering of AI Overviews, and we’ve always said that AI Overviews are dynamic and won’t show on every query.” Schottenfels also notes that keyword or navigational queries may not trigger AI responses.
Are you noticing anything different?
The open-source MPC Sample Key won’t be focused on chopping up drum breaks.
As OpenAI’s buying spree squeezes the world’s supply of RAM, its CEO explains why he needs so much.
The new control will allow publishers to apply their AI training preferences across multiple crawlers.
This week, 404 Media reported that Proton would be “re-interviewing” staff to ask about how they use AI at work and published an investigation into the company’s push into AI, driven in part by CEO Andy Yen.
But today, 404 Media reports that Yen is canceling the interviews. There will be a reorganization, but Yen said that “there will be no loss of jobs from AI.”
[404 Media]
Anthropic is renaming its Claude Max plans. The Max 5x plan is now just Max, while the Max 20x plan is Ultra. (Apple also does Max followed by Ultra for its most powerful chips.) The prices for the plans stay the same: $100 per month for Max, $200 per month for Ultra.
[X (formerly Twitter)]
The Project Suncatcher satellite generated a haiku about being in space.
The coffee chain aims to ‘recognize’ customers as they arrive.
The last time Changpeng Zhao got into a Twitter fight with a guy whose company he was an investor in, FTX went belly up. Anyway, here he is scolding Elon Musk about a grimace emoji in response to the enormous, record-breaking hack of Binance.
On The Vergecast: MacBooks, Duos, Instagram’s AI problem, and Brendan Carr’s war on the weather.
RJ Scaringe spent nearly half of Rivian’s earnings call hyping self-driving tech. But taking on Tesla’s FSD with custom chips and pricey lidar is an enormous gamble while the mass-market R2 is still scaling up.
Thanks to a widget launched with a new update announced today. I do like the mock trending topics in this image, though the “Bluesky users turn 39” entry hits a little close to home. Let me go stretch while I think about it.
If you prefer a dedicated streaming device or console, you can save some cash on an otherwise-modern television.
Meta settled the latest set of claims about how its design affected a teen’s mental health, the parties confirm. YouTube and TikTok previously settled, leaving Snap the last defendant standing. Meta spokesperson Liza Crenshaw says settlements like this are common in this process. There’s plenty more left to be tried.
[The New York Times]
We also found deals on Casio’s retro step-tracking watch and a four-pack of AirTags.
The electric motorcycle brand said issues like “recurring operating losses” and “negative cash flows” are raising concerns about its future, despite an increase in sales compared to last year. As Engadget reports, LiveWire said it “formed a special restructuring committee” to look into possible solutions, including a sale or restructuring.
UN member states should take steps to ban ‘lethal autonomous weapons,’ Pope Leo says.
The Arrowspace S1 can identify the bit and then show you where to find it in an optional smart case.
Toyota will assemble Waymo-equipped bZ4X electric SUVs directly on its factory line in Japan ahead of planned robotaxi rollouts in Tokyo and the UK.
The SpaceX-owned AI coding tool says the modified version of Claude Code appeared on its extension marketplace from 5:27AM ET and 4:35PM ET on Thursday. The extension contains malicious code that collects various information, including hostname, username, operating system, home directory path, public IP address, and more.
Cursor has since removed the malicious extension from its marketplace and verified that “no other extensions were tampered with.”
Android Authority spotted code in a beta version of the Android Google app (v17.71.17) referencing the new mode, with the tagline, “Use Gemini Live without an internet connection.” They say the code doesn’t hint at how the local-only Gemini Live mode would work, though, or whether it would support camera and screen-sharing features.
As part of the acquisition, which was disclosed under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Apple will “make employment offers to and hire certain employees” at Ascend.io, a startup that specializes in agentic data engineering. An update on Ascend.io’s website says the startup is “winding down operations as we prepare for our next great adventure.”
Anthropic’s S-1 is a new milestone in Big Tech’s sprawling and lofty promises to Wall Street.
The company already makes spatial reality displays for professional applications like medical imaging, but its new ELF-MN1 will target consumers when it launches in Japan on December 11th for around $343. Powered by a connected smartphone or PC, the 6-inch, 3,840 x 2,160-pixel display uses eye-tracking to create a convincing stereoscopic image that can be viewed at up to a 25-degree angle off the center of the screen.
Altman says OpenAI has spent hundreds of millions on math — and has more discoveries up its sleeve.
The music streaming platform is reportedly aiming to release the feature, which would allow users to prompt AI-generated remixes and covers of participating songs, in the first quarter of 2027. This is expected to be a paid add-on for Premium subscribers, with Spotify considering charging an additional $4 to $5 a month.
[Financial Times]
$3 billion of stolen assets have been frozen so far, and Binance has promised to ‘cover all losses.’
OpenAI’s latest claimed breakthrough, one of three major results announced Monday, refutes the long-held Exponential Time Hypothesis. Wired captures the excitement and uncertainty among researchers. It’s a familiar story in mathematics, where a barrage of AI-generated discoveries has left researchers scrambling to understand what’s actually been achieved.
That’s the logline for Death Stranding anime Isolations, which just dropped its first short teaser. Produced by Hideo Kojima, the series releases on Disney Plus and Hulu some time in 2027. It’s separate from the live-action Death Stranding film from A24, which is set to start filming next year.
The strange-looking Signature 27 — an Android flagship poised to rival the S26 Ultra, with a Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chip and Bang & Olufsen speakers — is nearly here. Motorola says it’ll reveal the rest of the phone next week. Will we find out Graphene’s software support plans then too?
The fanworks platform announced yesterday that it could be down for four weeks, and now we know why. Details about the security incident itself haven’t been shared, but no AO3 data has been deleted, and the site runners currently don’t believe that user account information was stolen, but are “unable to rule it out.”
“Earlier today, we detected evidence of a security incident on AO3. We are still in the early stages of response to this security incident and determining its scope. AO3 will remain down while we continue investigating and addressing what has been found so far.”
