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In this episode, Ray Cochrane records from the Michigan studio on the one year anniversary of losing the show’s original host, Todd Cochrane. The featured story is Anthropic’s $5 million grant program, which pays outside researchers to measure whether AI is actually good for the people using it. Ray also covers Anthropic’s Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, Google’s Fairwind cyber defense program, Meta’s organizational second brain, sixteen green AI projects across Asia-Pacific, an Oklahoma Bitcoin mine condemned after leaking 3.8 million gallons of water, BepiColombo closing in on Mercury, and the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens from the studio in Michigan, recording on the one year anniversary of the show losing its original host, Todd Cochrane, his father. The family has gathered for the occasion. He also plans to record several episodes throughout the week as a commemorative run, so listeners should expect a heavier release schedule than usual. He also shares where things stand. He and Delaney have gone back and forth on relocating to Michigan, but the family is pushing, and the plan is firming up for the coming month or so. Part of the draw is getting his dad’s studio cleaned up and running the way it used to. Finally, he passes along an update on the Zuvers, a story long-time listeners will recognize. The father of the three children is due out of jail soon, though he now faces retrial for the murder of the three boys. Cochrane notes that the original prison term related to their return rather than the murders themselves. The family’s expectation, he says, is that this time the sentence will be permanent. Anthropic Puts $5 Million Behind Measuring AI’s Effect on You The featured story asks a question the industry has mostly avoided. Not whether a model is smart, but whether you are better off after using it. Anthropic is funding independent research to find out, and the structure is the interesting part. The money creates what the field calls evaluations: standardized tests for AI models. Hundreds already exist for coding, math, and reasoning. However, almost none measure whether the tool is good for the human on the other end. Crucially, Anthropic is not building these tests in-house. Grantees receive funding, model access and technical support, then work fully independently. Everything they produce must be published open source, so any developer at any company can run it. As Cochrane puts it, Anthropic is paying to create a ruler other people will use to measure Anthropic. The example Anthropic leads with is deliberately uncomfortable. Claude might offer diet and workout advice to someone asking about weight loss. But if that user has a history of disordered eating, the same response becomes actively harmful. Cochrane connects this to sycophancy, a topic the show has returned to before, and notes that models carry no real memory of who you are unless you tell them. That is exactly why the problem has gone unmeasured. Code compiles or it doesn’t. Math checks out or it doesn’t. Wellbeing has no answer key, because the identical response can help one person and harm the next. The Five Things Anthropic Wants These Tests to Do Cochrane walks through all five criteria, since each targets a specific way this research usually fails. First, state plainly what you are measuring. It is easy to measure something adjacent, such as how often a model uses warm language, then publish numbers about a proxy while claiming insight into loneliness itself. Second, involve clinicians and subject-matter experts in designing and validating the tests. A capable engineer may simply not know what the warning signs of an eating disorder look like in text. Without those people in the room, the test measures what engineers imagine the harm looks like. Third, count overcompliance and overrefusal as harms. Overcompliance is the obvious failure. Overrefusal is the model becoming so cautious it turns useless, or shutting down someone who had nowhere else to ask. Cochrane adds that overrefusal is far harder to spot, because you often cannot tell it is degrading until it has degraded. Fourth, reflect real multi-turn usage. Most safety testing throws one nasty question at a model and checks for refusal. Meanwhile, actual harm builds across a long conversation where every individual message reads as fine. Fifth, validate the automated graders against real experts. Scoring thousands of conversations means an AI grades the AI. Consequently, a subtly wrong grader skews every downstream number in the same direction, and nothing in the process flags it. Cochrane expects this to be the hardest criterion to satisfy, since psychiatric and medical specialists do not come cheap by the hour. Applications close September 21st, and shortlisted applicants will be notified by October 5th. Notably, the announcement names no individual researcher or executive. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Anthropic’s Enterprise Frontier Safeguards Keep Your Logs in Your Vault Anthropic’s second announcement targets a completely different audience. Catching misuse across many sessions requires keeping logs. However, banks and hospitals cannot hand that data to an outside vendor, because regulators will not allow it. Safety monitoring and compliance were in direct conflict. The fix moves where the data lives. Activity logs go into the customer’s own cloud bucket at Amazon, Microsoft or Google, locked with keys the customer controls. Automated systems scan a rolling window for serious abuse such as credential theft, and alerts route straight to the customer’s own security team. No human at Anthropic reads it, and Anthropic does not charge for the feature. The backstory explains the urgency. Anthropic had begun retaining thirty days of data with its Fable 5 model, specifically to catch patterns that only appear across multiple sessions. Regulated customers had to walk away immediately. Over a hundred organizations helped shape the result, including a quarter of the Fortune 100 and every US globally systemically important bank. It works across Claude Code, Claude Enterprise, Amazon Bedrock, and Microsoft Foundry. Wells Fargo’s security team put it simply, saying their logs stay in a Wells-managed environment under Wells-managed keys. Cochrane adds a personal note on the same retention change. Because transcripts now persist thirty days after last touch, he can keep Claude Code threads open far longer and lean on clear without losing context. Google’s Fairwind Program Hands Patching to the Machines Google is running the same play from the defensive side. Normally, a human engineer must reproduce a security flaw, understand it, write a fix, then prove the fix broke nothing else. That can stretch to weeks, and attackers live in exactly that gap. Fairwind pairs two systems to close it. Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber is a model tuned for security work. CodeMender hunts for flaws and writes the patches. Together, Google says they produce verified, deployment-ready patches in minutes, running inside the customer’s own environment. Access is deliberately restricted to three groups: national cyber authorities; critical infrastructure operators in healthcare, telecom, energy, and finance; and major technology platform providers. More than 650 partners are involved. Cochrane’s take centers on logging quality. Systems that emit specific, unique errors rather than generic ones let these tools find real issues almost immediately. Furthermore, he sees value in purpose-tuned models over general ones, since different training data and methodology surface gaps a single familiar model would miss. Meta Built an AI That Learns From Its Own Experts Every organization has two or three people who actually understand the hard systems. When they are busy, everyone waits. When they leave, the knowledge leaves too. Most AI assistants address this with retrieval, searching documents when you ask. Meta went the other way. A long-running offline process digests the source material ahead of time into more than 200 structured knowledge files, so the thinking happens before anyone asks. On top sit what Meta calls recipes, step-by-step procedures mirroring how a specialist actually works a problem. The reported numbers are concrete. Restructuring cut tokens consumed per turn by 80 percent. Assessments that took days now take minutes. The team built the whole system in six weeks across three sprints. Cochrane focuses on the feedback loop. Normally, an expert corrects an assistant in chat; the answer improves once, then the system forgets. Meta’s version compiles corrections into knowledge files and regression-tests them, so fixes stick without retraining the model. However, he raises two real caveats from his own attempts. Building those knowledge files is token-heavy, and codebases change. If the offline process does not rerun, the documentation drifts away from the code it describes. He also predicts this will become a service offered by AWS, GitHub, or GitLab rather than something each company builds alone. Sixteen Green AI Projects Across Asia-Pacific Google DeepMind named the first cohort of its Accelerator: AI for the Planet program. Sixteen organizations span New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Australia and Japan, receiving three months of access to Google’s AI stack plus mentorship and a Singapore bootcamp. Several stand out. A New Zealand outfit called 800 Trust uses bioacoustics, monitoring an ecosystem by listening to it and running AI over continuous audio to track biodiversity. Wildlife.ai builds open-source AI camera traps. Australia’s X-Centric replaced the soil lab with a handheld X-ray reader that answers a farmer standing in the field. In India, Climitra Carbon verifies invasive species removal and converts the biomass into biochar. Access matters more than money, as Cochrane points out. A six-person conservation nonprofit cannot run frontier models, because the compute bill alone would consume its operating budget. The organizations closest to these problems have always been furthest from the tooling. An Oklahoma Bitcoin Mine Condemned After Leaking 3.8 Million Gallons Cochrane corrects the figure up front. Many outlets report three million gallons, but El Reno city officials put it at 3.8 million. A Bitcoin mining operation on West Jensen Road leaked water and dropped pressure badly enough to close El Reno Public Schools, the Canadian County Courthouse, and other city and county offices. It happened during a month with 24 days above 100 degrees, in a region under severe to extreme drought. The leak is not the damning part. The city issued a stop-work order on the site back in 2023 for electrical, construction, and fire safety violations, then never followed up. The facility ran roughly three years under an order nobody enforced. Interim city manager Ken Brown did not dodge it, saying simply, “We failed.” The site is now posted as condemned with a ten-day removal notice, and a hearing with operator Athlon BT is set for September 14th. Reaching the company has proven difficult, with a website stuck on a maintenance notice and an unanswered California phone number. Cochrane draws one distinction that the coverage keeps blurring. This is a Bitcoin mining rig, not a hyperscale AI data center. The residents who lost pressure absorbed the cost, and nobody billed the operator for the aquifer. BepiColombo Closes In on Mercury After Eight Years Reaching the closest planet to the Sun took nearly eight years, which sounds backward until you understand the physics. Falling toward the Sun means gaining enormous speed, and a spacecraft arriving too fast simply sails past. So the mission spent those years shedding velocity across nine gravity-assist flybys: one at Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury itself. On September 3rd, the transfer module separated and was discarded more than 200 million kilometers from Earth. Mission control marked the moment with “Roll call completed, GO for separation.” Importantly, the spacecraft has not arrived yet. Orbit insertion is November 21st, the two science orbiters separate around December 9th and 10th, and science operations begin in April 2027. That November date is revised, having slipped from an earlier plan. Two orbiters fly because they do different jobs. Europe’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter studies the planet and what lies beneath its surface. Japan’s Mio studies the magnetosphere. Mercury having a magnetic field at all is genuinely odd, since a planet that small should have cooled and lost it long ago. The mission honors Giuseppe “Bepi” Colombo, the Italian mathematician who worked out how to slingshot a spacecraft to Mercury in the first place. NASA Builds a Rocket Engine Talk You Can Hear NASA hosts a webinar on Friday, October 2nd at 2 pm Eastern, titled “The RS-25 Engine and the Future of Artemis Missions.” It runs about two hours, is open to anyone, and RSVPs close September 25th. The RS-25 is not new hardware. It is the Space Shuttle main engine, the same design that flew 135 shuttle missions across three decades, now bolted four at a time into the SLS core stage. Together they produce roughly 2.2 million pounds of thrust at 111 percent of their original shuttle rating. Throwing them away is the strange part. These are precision engines built to fly repeatedly, yet Artemis expends four on every launch. NASA got a proven engine and skipped a decade of development, and that is the trade. The accessibility work is the real story. The event includes an audio-described video of an engine test firing, a live Q&A with an Artemis engineer, and a panel on accessibility in space and science. A test firing normally sells entirely on spectacle. Conveying that, and the engineering underneath it, without the visuals is a genuine design problem NASA built the whole event around solving. Buried Underwear Wins a 2026 Ig Nobel The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded September 3rd in Zurich. Marc Abrahams launched them in 1991 at the satirical magazine Annals of Improbable Research, and what began as a roast is now something researchers actively want. The soil science prize went to a team that buried 1,000 pairs of underwear across more than 25 countries and dug them up two months later. Measuring how much cotton rotted turns out to be a cheap, surprisingly good proxy for how biologically alive the soil is. The biomechanics prize recognized a precise, cross-species definition of kissing that works for animals and excludes passing food. By that definition, polar bears kiss, some birds kiss, and so do ants. Nature reports the behavior traces back roughly 21.5 million years to the ancestor of all large apes, meaning ancient humans very likely kissed Neanderthals. Cochrane’s favorite was the physics prize, awarded for a splash-free urinal design that reportedly cuts spray to 1.4 percent of normal. Cochrane closes by pointing listeners to the GNC Insider program, the newsletter, and podcastapps.com for a modern podcast app. Feedback on the show’s format is explicitly welcome at [email protected], where either Ray or Chris will read it. The post Anthropic’s $5 Million Push to Measure AI’s Effect on Wellbeing #1876 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down Hot Chips 2026, the engineering conference where IBM, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Arm, and Fujitsu all showed how their next processors actually work. The headline disclosure is a mainframe core that runs Arm natively. Ray also covers Apple’s odd M6 Mac mini naming, London’s first autonomous Uber rides, Amazon’s purchase of the company behind DuckDB, GitHub’s HydraFusion, the best of IFA 2026, and new USDA research on farmed salmon. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens the show with a personal update. He apologizes for the late rollout and the missed Monday episode, having spent the week fighting a cold. He’s also heading to Michigan to spend time with family and visit his father’s gravesite. He hopes to record a couple of shows from his dad’s old studio while he is there, including a special episode planned for Tuesday. He also points listeners to a fresh site redesign that trades the old techie look for something cleaner and friendlier. The featured segment starts from a wrap-up post on Arm’s newsroom. However, Cochrane broadens it to cover the whole conference rather than a single article. Hot Chips has run every August since 1989, and this year’s event was the 38th, held August 23rd through the 25th at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium. What Hot Chips Actually Is Cochrane draws a line between Hot Chips and the big consumer trade shows. CES and Computex exist for product announcements and marketing. Meanwhile, Hot Chips is an IEEE engineering conference where chip architects present block diagrams and die photos for thirty minutes at a stretch. The audience matters as much as the content. Roughly five hundred people who design chips for a living fill the room, and they would spot a fudged number immediately. No written paper is required, just the talk and the slides. In-person tickets sold out this year, as did Stanford’s dorm housing. Cochrane says he plans to cover the conference annually going forward. IBM Built a Mainframe Core That Speaks Arm The disclosure that stopped Cochrane cold came from IBM. Its next processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE runs two completely different instruction sets natively, on every one of its eleven cores. Those are z/Architecture, IBM’s own mainframe language, and AArch64, which is 64-bit Arm. Crucially, this is not emulation. Nor is it Arm cores glued onto the die beside the mainframe cores. IBM built 2,792 Arm instructions directly into the hardware, which it says is more than double the mainframe instruction count. Each core carries two separate decoders while sharing the caches, branch predictor and register files downstream. It switches between the two in nanoseconds. IBM even added dedicated hardware to flip byte order, because Arm and the mainframe store numbers in opposite directions. The payoff is Arm SystemReady compliance, meaning off-the-shelf Arm Linux runs on a mainframe unmodified. Patrick Kennedy of ServeTheHome, who was in the room, wrote: “I am sitting here still in awe of what IBM is doing here; this is not Z plus Arm cores, this is Z and Arm in one core.” Cochrane flags one precision point that is easy to get backward. IBM did not license Arm’s core designs and drop them in. Instead, it took its own mainframe core and taught it AArch64 under an architecture license, which is considerably harder engineering. The specifications are striking. The chip uses a 2nm process, with eleven cores running above 5.7GHz sustained and no turbo mode at all. Each core gets 36MB of L2 cache, backed by a 3.5GB virtual L4 pool. Furthermore, the reliability target is eight nines, which works out to roughly three tenths of one second of unplanned downtime per year. IBM gave it no name and no ship date, though the press expects “Telum III” around 2028. Arm, Fujitsu and NVIDIA Show Their Hands Arm itself had plenty to discuss, starting with an unfortunate name. Its first chip in thirty-five years is called the AGI CPU, which is a product name rather than any claim about artificial general intelligence. For three and a half decades, Arm designed processor blueprints and licensed them out, collecting royalties without competing. That era is now over. The AGI CPU is Arm’s own silicon, co-designed with lead customer Meta, running up to 136 cores on TSMC’s 3nm process at 300 watts. Arm’s CEO says the company has more than $2 billion in customer demand across the next two fiscal years. Fujitsu brought the detail Cochrane called the coolest of the conference. Its MONAKA chip packs 144 Arm-based cores, but the trick is the cache. Rather than sitting alongside the cores and eating die area, the entire last-level cache lives on a separate 5nm die with the 2nm compute die stacked directly on top. It ships in 2027 in 350-watt and 500-watt versions. NVIDIA had more stage time than anyone, with six sessions. Its new Vera CPU carries 88 cores of NVIDIA’s own Olympus design, which marks a change: the previous Grace CPU used Arm’s off-the-shelf cores. Consequently, Arm’s win here is the instruction set, not the blueprint. The memory disclosure drew the most attention, with a fully loaded system reaching 1.5TB at 1.2TB/s while the whole memory subsystem draws just 30 to 40 watts. The Caveat on NVIDIA’s Benchmark Slides Cochrane pushes back on how NVIDIA presented its numbers. On the standard SPEC integer benchmark, Vera scored 925 against AMD’s 128-core EPYC score of 898, about three percent ahead. However, the slide NVIDIA showed normalizes that same result per physical core, which makes a three percent gap look enormous. NVIDIA defends the choice, arguing that per-core throughput matters when thousands of AI agents run at once. Cochrane grants that it is a fair argument to make. Even so, his verdict is blunt: it is a different number from the headline one, and presenting it that way is not the best look. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Apple’s Newest Chip Landed in Its Cheapest Mac Last week’s episode covered the Mac Studio half of Apple’s August announcement. Tonight Cochrane takes the other half, the new Mac mini, and finds the numbering genuinely strange. The $899 base Mac mini gets the M6, which is Apple’s first 2nm chip and the newest process the company has shipped. It brings twelve CPU cores, twelve GPU cores, and 170GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple also introduced a third CPU core class called super cores. So Apple’s most advanced chip sits in its cheapest desktop, while the M5 Pro, M5 Max and M5 Ultra above it all carry a lower number. It gets stranger. The M6 mini has Thunderbolt 4 while the pricier M5 Pro mini has Thunderbolt 5, and the memory ceiling runs backward too. Apple explains none of it across three announcement pages. Reading between the lines, Cochrane figures the M6 is the entry point of a new generation that shipped ahead of its larger siblings. London’s Robotaxis Started Carrying Passengers Arm’s monthly roundup covers everything outside the data center, and Wayve stood out. Transport for London granted the British self-driving company private hire vehicle licenses on August 5th, the same category a minicab needs. Then on September 3rd the service launched with Uber, marking the first autonomous rides ever offered to UK passengers. A small fleet of Ford Mustang Mach-Es covers anywhere in London except the airports, with a TfL-licensed safety driver still aboard. Over 140,000 Londoners signed up. The compute runs on NVIDIA’s Arm-based automotive platform, which is why Arm claims the win. Cochrane notes the pattern: once you set a standard nobody can move off, these wins keep arriving. Two more items round it out, both about squeezing AI onto phones. Google’s Pixel 11 shipped in August with the Tensor G6, and Google claims on-device AI runs up to 3.5x faster using 3.5x less energy. Those are Google’s own unbenchmarked figures. Separately, Graphcore’s research team worked with Arm to run an 11-billion-parameter vision model on phone-class processors by squeezing each parameter to 2.7 bits, taking the model from roughly 22GB down to 3.7GB. Intel Is Pitching AI Infrastructure From a Long Way Back Intel’s newsroom post previews the AI Infra Summit, running September 15th through 17th in Santa Clara. CEO Lip-Bu Tan takes a fireside chat on Tuesday morning, with three Intel sessions across the show. Cochrane unpacks two terms first. Physical AI means AI that acts in the real world through sensors and motors rather than living on a screen, and Intel takes it seriously enough to have renamed its PC division the Client Computing and Physical AI Group in May. Disaggregated inference splits the two phases of running a model: reading your prompt is compute-hungry, while writing the answer back is memory-hungry. The context is where this gets interesting. Intel’s revenue rose 25 percent last quarter, its fastest growth since 2011. Nevertheless, in AI accelerators the company barely registers next to NVIDIA. Gaudi has effectively been abandoned, to the point that Intel stopped maintaining its open-source driver, and AMD passed Intel in data center revenue last quarter. Tellingly, when Intel demoed disaggregated inference at Computex, NVIDIA GPUs handled one phase and SambaNova chips the other while Intel supplied the coordinating CPU. Crescent Island, Intel’s actual inference chip, does not sample until later this year, and Intel declined to publish its memory bandwidth. Amazon Bought the Company Behind DuckDB On August 26th, Amazon signed a deal to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam company behind DuckDB. Cochrane spends time explaining what DuckDB is, since listeners outside the data world may never have encountered it. The problem it solves is familiar. Querying a large pile of data files traditionally meant either running a database server or spinning up a data warehouse with a cluster, a bill, and a loading pipeline. Both are heavy machinery for a question you wanted answered in ten seconds. DuckDB instead ships as a library rather than a server. You add it to your program like any other package, point it at your files, and write ordinary SQL directly against them. The data never moves. The usual comparison is SQLite, which is embedded in nearly every phone and browser on earth. Where SQLite excels at looking up one record, DuckDB rebuilds that embedded idea for chewing through millions of rows. It now sees roughly 62 million monthly downloads on Python’s package index alone, up from about 25 million last October. AWS says it is buying the company, not the project. DuckDB stays free and open source under the MIT license, held by a Dutch nonprofit foundation, and the founders join AWS while continuing to run technical direction from Amsterdam. Andy Warfield, a VP and distinguished engineer at AWS, described DuckDB as “the glibc of structured data: a lean, unglamorous, ubiquitous dependency that a great deal of software links against and almost nobody has to think about.” Cochrane sits with what that ownership means. He reaches for an analogy: imagine Daniel Stenberg selling curl. He doubts it would ever happen, but the concept alone is startling given how much infrastructure depends on it. His read is that AWS is betting DuckDB becomes as foundational as curl and SQLite already are. GitHub Has One AI Model Grade Another One’s Homework GitHub shipped Project HydraFusion into Copilot as a research preview. Instead of routing your request to a single model, it picks one of three approaches per request. Sometimes one model simply answers. Alternatively, a cheaper model drafts, and a quality gate decides whether to escalate. The interesting one is Critique. One model writes the code, a separate model from a different family reviews it read-only, and the original gets one pass to revise. Despite the name, nothing is fused here. There is no voting and no merging, just one model at a time with a gate deciding whether to spend more. GitHub explained the reasoning in an earlier post: “a model reviewing its own work is still bounded by its own training biases: the same training data and techniques, the same blind spots.” Research supports it. A team at NeurIPS in 2024 showed that models recognize their own writing and score it higher than human graders do. GitHub’s earlier number had a Claude Sonnet and GPT critic pairing closing about three-quarters of the gap between Sonnet and the larger Opus model. This mirrors a workflow Cochrane uses constantly and has described on a previous episode. He runs a cross-check review with a second model from a different company, and it routinely surfaces issues the first model missed. He explains that different training data, different engineers, and different reinforcement approaches build different internal biases about what counts as correct. Looking ahead, he expects more of these “Frankenstein patterns” where models from different training families work together. The Best of IFA 2026, and What You Can Actually Buy IFA opened to the public in Berlin for its 102nd year, with about 1,900 brands. Cochrane splits The Verge’s roundup in two, since much of what generates headlines at these shows never ships. Starting with real products, iRobot’s flagship Roomba Max 875 Combo runs $1,199 and ships in about two weeks. Its SealForce feature drops a hidden skirt from the chassis when it detects carpet, sealing against the fibers so suction concentrates instead of leaking out the sides. That reaches 35,000 pascals, iRobot’s strongest yet. A step-down model at $899 carries the same trick, though Cochrane balks at both prices. Anker’s Soundcore Sleep 4 Pro earbuds arrive in November at $349.99. The charging case carries its own round touchscreen, so you pick soundscapes, set alarms, and read sleep stats without your phone. Optical sensors read heart rate and variability from the ear canal, which beats the wrist for accuracy, and the case masks a snoring partner. Cochrane remains unconvinced about sleeping with earbuds in. Philips also has smart rope lights, the Hue Liane 360, on sale now. They glow evenly around the tube rather than showing individual LEDs. They also run $400 for three meters, which works out to about $130 per meter of rope light. As for concepts nobody can buy, iRobot showed a robot vacuum that carries a smaller robot vacuum on its back in a garage and lowers it to deploy. Lenovo brought a 14-inch laptop whose screen rolls out to 17 inches at the press of a button, which reviewers call the first rollable that feels close to shippable. Tecno showed a phone with essentially no border around the screen, and Acer had a Windows gaming handheld that swivels its screen up over a keyboard. Two themes ran through the show. Humanoid robots were the loudest thing on the floor, and IFA’s own CEO framed the event as being about robots that work rather than robots that demo. Meanwhile, AI stopped being its own product category and became an ingredient, showing up in refrigerators, treadmills, dishwashers, and motorized TV mounts. Farmed Salmon Isn’t the Omega-3 Machine It Used to Be USDA scientists measured farmed salmon and found considerably less of the good fat than the government’s own database claims. EPA and DHA are two fatty acids you get almost entirely from fish. Your body can build them from the plant version, but only in tiny amounts, so the NIH’s position is that eating them is the only practical way to raise your levels. Those fatty acids are structural pieces of every cell, with DHA concentrating in the brain and retina. That is why the federal dietary guidelines, issued jointly by USDA and Health and Human Services, recommend at least eight ounces of fish a week and steer you toward salmon. That amount is calibrated to deliver about 250 milligrams a day. Published in Frontiers in Nutrition last month, the study found EPA and DHA in farmed Atlantic salmon came in 54.7 percent lower than USDA’s own reference values, last updated in 2018. A three-ounce serving fell from roughly 1,670 milligrams to about 756. Consequently, two servings a week now fall about 14 percent short of the target. Plant-derived fats meanwhile rose two to three times over. The likely cause is feed. Salmon are carnivores, and farms once fed them oily little fish. There was never going to be enough of those as the industry scaled, so crops filled the gap: soy, canola, sunflower and linseed. Importantly, the study does not claim to have proven this and calls the feed shift a plausible explanation. Independent corroboration lends it credibility. Researchers at Stirling measured a similar halving in Scottish salmon between 2006 and 2015, and Norway’s marine institute saw it across thousands of samples. There is a land dimension too. Roughly half the world’s soy grows in South America, where rainforest gets cleared for feed. Matthew Hayek, who studies the environmental cost of protein at NYU, told Inside Climate News that “soy is a major, important protein and oil ingredient in fish farming.” Adding up two decades of soy across all fish farming, he puts the extra forest clearing at around the area of Nicaragua or Bangladesh. That figure covers all fish farming rather than salmon alone, and Hayek notes it is hard to attribute soy use to any single species. Cochrane closes with two caveats. First, the study measured only eight fish, bought around Maryland, DC and Virginia over six weeks in 2023, and nearly all sourced from Chile. That is not a national survey, and the authors say plainly the sample was not large enough to change government advice. Rather, it flags that a federal database value needs rechecking, which is what the paper set out to do. Second, on whether you should care, farmed salmon still beats beef, chicken and eggs by a mile, since those carry essentially zero EPA and DHA. What it loses is its crown among fatty fish, dropping to mid-pack behind herring, sardines and mackerel and roughly level with trout. The broader health case is also softer than the 2000s suggested. A review of 86 trials covering 162,000 people found supplements barely moved heart attacks or deaths, so eating fish and swallowing fish oil are not the same claim. No producer has responded to the findings, and USDA, whose own scientists ran the study, declined an interview and did not answer emailed questions. Cochrane wraps up with housekeeping and a note that he will be back on Labor Day. The post The Mainframe Learned to Speak Arm #1875 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane digs into Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard. It is a shared driver that lets an AI agent run real lab equipment, from pipetting robots to the lasers inside a quantum computer. He also covers OpenAI’s builder’s guide to GPT-5.6, Google’s new Expert Intelligence book feature, Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studio, and a judge’s order forcing Google to stop hiding rival app stores. Finally, he weighs in on Apple’s proposed 15 percent link-out fee, Meta’s Australia numbers, the White House deputizing private hackers, and why rivers obey a 1957 math rule. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a quick personal update. He is hunting for tickets to Michigan for his dad’s anniversary, and he has been learning Blender and Godot on the side, mostly modeling and blocking out levels. Consequently, he asks listeners for advice on starting a big game project, and he plans to record his progress, maybe as a time lapse. Then it is straight into the featured story. Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard: A Driver for the Physical World The featured story comes from Anthropic, which opened a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard, or MHS. Cochrane frames it as the other side of the question NVIDIA’s world models raised two weeks ago: when do AI agents start touching actual machines? A typical lab runs a microscope, a liquid handler, a robotic arm, and a plate reader, each from a different vendor with its own control software. One Janelia researcher in the post launches seven programs in three languages just to start an experiment. Anthropic says wiring a setup like that takes weeks or months of specialist work. MHS is a driver, the same kind of translation layer a printer uses, except every device gets described with a tiny set of commands like read and write. Devices announce themselves on the network. A plain-English reference file then records what each machine measures, what can be adjusted, and which safety limits get enforced no matter what the agent asks. Agents then reach the hardware through the Model Context Protocol, the command line, or plain code. Cochrane sees the same move the industry keeps making, from coding harnesses to RSS and JSON: agree on a standard and let everyone build against it. In fact, he calls MHS the hardware version of MCP. The partner results carry the segment. QuEra builds quantum computers from individual atoms held by lasers that must hold their frequency to about one part in a trillion. A four-person team spent months on a relock script that worked 58 percent of the time. However, four copies of Claude iterating overnight through MHS produced a decision-tree script that recovers the laser in about six seconds, and it passed 99.3 percent of 700 blind trials. Carnegie Mellon wrote MHS drivers for four instruments across three incompatible computers in about eight hours, then ran dose-response experiments three times faster and blocked all six deliberately induced faults. Genentech, meanwhile, showed the limits. Claude used the same pump speed for water, a foamy protein solution, and a human had to explain that the bubbles were a physics problem. That gap in physical intuition is what sticks with Cochrane. He doubts it will change soon, and he suspects the fix will arrive as sub-agents or sub-models that judge a request against an expected outcome. He also connects MHS to a video of racing robots that never learned to stop at the finish line. What happens, he wonders, once they can read a distance sensor through a shared standard? Still, he calls the announcement a fantastic read and points listeners to the full article. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. GPT-5.6 Does the Same Work for a Fraction of the Cost OpenAI’s builder’s guide to GPT-5.6 leads the headlines. Cochrane recaps the three tiers from episode 1870, Sol, Terra, and Luna, plus the separate dial for reasoning effort. On BrowseComp, a benchmark for digging up obscure facts on the web, the old GPT-5.5 flagship scored about 84 percent on a run that cost 33 dollars three months ago. Luna now matches that score for a dollar thirty-three, and OpenAI has since cut Luna’s price another 80 percent. Browser Use reports Luna finishing 78 percent of its hardest browser tasks for about 14 dollars, against 80 percent for roughly 235 dollars from the best available model. The guide’s other big addition is a multi-agent beta flag. It lets the model handling a request spawn parallel helper agents that report back to a root agent inside a single API call. However, Cochrane is unimpressed by the timing. He has been running that pattern in Claude Code for months, so he sees OpenAI copying a workflow other companies already ship rather than inventing its own. Along the way, he plugs Claude Code’s remote-control sessions, which let him send prompts from his phone to a terminal session at home. Google Lets Gemini Read the Books You Actually Bought Google launched Expert Intelligence, a name Cochrane calls quite the reach. The feature lets you drop a book you bought on Google Play Books into Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM, and ask questions answered only from that book, with citations. Cochrane sees real power here for students, since he once used NotebookLM to organize scattered course PDFs. Additionally, publishers get a cut, which he calls a far better deal than the wholesale scraping of books that trained earlier models. Nevertheless, he asks who loses out, because a paid publisher does not automatically mean a paid author. He floats the same idea for artists, even a penny per use, then admits that may be too idealistic. Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studio Is Built to Run Big Models at Home Back in episode 1861, when Apple killed the Mac Pro, an M5 Ultra Mac Studio was expected later this year. Now it is here. The M5 Ultra brings up to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, and 512GB of unified memory moving 1.2 terabytes per second. Apple claims up to 4.3 times the AI performance of the M3 Ultra. Thunderbolt 5 can also cluster four machines into one memory pool for up to three times faster inference. The M5 Max model starts at $2,499 and the Ultra at $5,499, with shipping on September 22 and the 512GB configuration arriving in late October. Cochrane finds the clustering pitch ridiculous at that price, but he invites anyone who spends the money to report back. Apple Opens a Manufacturing School in Houston Apple also opened a 20,000-square-foot Advanced Manufacturing Center in Houston. It offers free classes for small and midsize manufacturers, from circuit board design to hands-on time on a scaled-down production line, with college students joining later. Cochrane calls it a solid step in the bring-manufacturing-home movement. The bigger story is the campus itself, which builds Apple’s AI servers and will add the first US-assembled Mac mini line later this year. That ties back to the Mac mini shortage that followed the OpenClaw rush, when Tim Cook warned of months-long waits. Cult of Mac was still reporting four-month waits in late July. However, Cook blamed chip supply rather than assembly, so Cochrane is not counting on relief just yet. Amazon EC2 Turns Twenty Amazon EC2 turned twenty this week, which Cochrane admits makes him feel old. The 2006 beta offered one server size in one region for ten cents an hour. Each came with a 1.7 gigahertz Xeon and under two gigabytes of memory, and accounts were capped at twenty servers. Today AWS offers more than 1,200 instance types across 39 regions. Consequently, Cochrane credits the company with turning that tiny product into the backbone of cloud and AI computing. Intel Gamer Days: Two Free Games, With Fine Print Intel Gamer Days runs through September 13. Buy a qualifying Core Ultra Series 2 or 14th Gen desktop chip, a Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, or an Arc graphics card. In return you get Star Wars: Galactic Racer plus the Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis remake. GamesRadar values the pair at about 120 dollars. However, neither game is out yet, and codes must be redeemed by October 31 even though the Tomb Raider remake ships in February. Cochrane calls that awful, but he still tells qualifying buyers to claim the deal early. Note that 13th Gen chips do not qualify. Judge Orders Google to Stop Hiding Rival App Stores A jury found Google’s Android app monopoly illegal in late 2023, and Judge James Donato ordered rival stores into the Play Store in 2024. On August 13, Epic’s lawyer demonstrated that searching Play for “store for apps” returned Walmart instead of any app store. Donato called that “not acceptable” and ordered three fixes within a week. Searches must surface third-party stores, listings need a plain install button, and the “are you looking for” interstitial has to go. Cochrane welcomes the monopoly being chipped away, but he notes that a controlling entity still sits atop every app store. In his view, community hubs like app stores and social media need a public infrastructure layer. He suspects governments skip that investment because companies already run the services, while selling your data. Apple Wants 15 Percent of Purchases Outside Its Store The other half of the Epic saga is Apple’s proposed link-out commission. After the 2021 anti-steering injunction, Apple charged 27 percent on purchases made through external links. A judge held it in contempt last year, and the Ninth Circuit then allowed a fee limited to the cost of running the system. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers refused to wait for the Supreme Court, writing that “further delay is unwarranted.” Apple filed 15 percent for standard apps, 10 percent for subscription renewals and partner programs, and 5 percent for small businesses. It also conceded the rate would be “essentially zero” under the appeals court’s cost yardstick. Since Apple has charged nothing on link-outs since the contempt ruling, Cochrane sees this as a raise. He calls a cut on purchases made on a developer’s own website disturbing. He also recalls reading about the size of Uber’s payments to Apple, and he questions whether that kind of percentage is sustainable for companies without funding. Meta Says It Has Cut Off 750,000 Australian Kids Meta reported locking out more than 750,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts in Australia by the end of June under the country’s under-16 social media law. Over 500,000 of those were removed before the law even took effect. Detection relies mostly on AI scanning posts and bios for tells like birthday messages, plus user reports and blocks on re-registration. However, the post gives no count of mistaken removals or appeals, and the regulator’s early data shows under-16 usage falling only from about 86 to 81 percent. Meta wants a single age signal at the operating system or app store level, and Cochrane agrees completely. He connects it to the MHS idea from the top of the show: platforms need a standard flag to reference instead of guessing. The White House Deputizes Private Hackers Earlier this month the White House signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum that lets vetted private security firms run surveillance and disruption operations against overseas criminal groups. The Justice Department and Homeland Security hold the contracts and oversee the work. Firms need a proven track record, vetted staff, and a bond of at least $1 million, and must submit operating procedures within 60 days. Cochrane finds the measure aggressive in a good way and hopes it deters attacks on innocents. Still, he takes Kevin Beaumont’s warning seriously that the private security industry profits from ransomware existing. He compares it to the old Head and Shoulders myth: why solve the problem that drives your revenue? A Weather Satellite Watched the Eclipse Shadow Cross Europe Cochrane skips the readout on this one and simply sends listeners to ESA’s site. The MTG-I1 weather satellite captured the Moon’s shadow sweeping across Europe during the August 12 eclipse. Watching a shadow cross an entire continent, he says, was a first for him. Additionally, it leaves him excited about the research happening beyond the planet. Rivers, Deltas, and the Number 0.6 Quanta Magazine explains Hack’s law, which John Hack discovered in 1957 while measuring streams in Virginia and Maryland. A stream’s length tracks its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6, regardless of the rock underneath, and satellite data later confirmed it worldwide. Computer models in the 1990s showed why. Channels that capture extra runoff cut deeper and steal from their neighbors until the network settles into the arrangement that wastes the least energy. Now a University of Texas Rio Grande Valley team has found the same 0.6 exponent in river deltas, which spread water out rather than gathering it. Nobody knows why yet, and Cochrane calls it a really cool read. Sugar Helped Grow the Human Brain, Too A new paper in Science, co-authored by Jennie Brand-Miller at the University of Sydney, adds a third ingredient to the story of early human brain growth. Alongside meat and cooking, natural sugars from ripe fruit and honey may have fueled it too. The brain is about two percent of body weight but burns twenty percent of resting energy. It runs on glucose, which meat and marrow barely supply and raw starch cannot release without fire. The team modeled ancestral diets from a chimp-like baseline through Homo erectus and concluded that the earliest hominins may have drawn over 65 percent of their energy from natural sugars. Cochrane stresses that it is a model, not fossils, and notes that paleoanthropologist Marina Lozano thinks the authors place widespread cooking too early. Still, he loves this kind of deep research. Retracing the steps to our own intelligence, he suggests, could hint at what it takes for intelligent life to develop at all. A Brain Rhythm That Tells Doctors Where to Aim Finally, Science Daily covered a University of Cologne study on deep brain stimulation. That is the implanted-electrode treatment that eases Parkinson’s tremors for some patients but not others. Andreas Horn’s team recorded from 50 patients using both the implanted electrodes and an external magnetic scanner. They identified a circuit between the electrode’s target and the frontal cortex that oscillates at 20 to 35 cycles per second. Stronger coupling there predicted bigger improvement after surgery, though the study, published in Brain, shows correlation rather than cause. First author Bahne Bahners hopes the finding helps tune DBS more precisely, especially for patients who have not responded well. Cochrane half-jokingly asks whether MHS might one day drive those electrodes, and he calls brain disorders the hardest thing in the body to treat. Cochrane wraps with housekeeping: become a GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email [email protected] with questions or comments, subscribe to the newsletter, and grab a modern podcast app at podcastapps.com. He thanks GoDaddy for over twenty years of keeping the show on the air, promises to catch everyone next Monday, and wishes listeners a great night. The post Eyes, Hands, and a Sense of Timing #1874 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Chris Cochrane guest-hosts for his brother Ray and devotes the whole show to one event: Disney’s D23 2026 fan convention in Anaheim. Friday night delivered Marvel’s new X-Men cast, Adam Driver as Mister Sinister, a fresh Avengers: Doomsday trailer, and a release date for Frozen 3. Saturday turned to the parks, with Villains Land, an Indiana Jones dark ride, the long-awaited Expedition Everest yeti repair, and a Monsters Inc land opening in 2027. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Chris if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Chris Cochrane opens the show and explains why this episode breaks the usual format. Instead of six or eight unrelated stories, the entire episode covers Disney’s D23 convention, which he compares to Apple’s WWDC. For newcomers, he notes that D23 is Disney’s official fan club, named for the company’s founding year of 1923. This year’s event ran two nights at the Honda Center: Friday for movies and television, Saturday for the theme parks. Marvel Finally Casts the X-Men Friday’s headline was the X-Men. The Associated Press put the crowd near 12,000, and Marvel Studios used that stage to name its rebooted team. Christopher Abbott plays Professor Charles Xavier, Inde Navarrette plays Rogue, and Maya Boyd plays Storm. Adam Driver rounds out the group as the villain Mister Sinister. Meanwhile, Samara Weaving, Kit Connor, and Sadie Sink were already known as Emma Frost, Cyclops, and Jean Grey. Jake Schreier directs, and the film arrives May 5, 2028. Chris calls the lineup spot-on casting. He singles out Weaving as a perfect match for the comics, and he points out that Sink already appeared as Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Navarrette is the least established name, coming off a breakout role in an indie horror film. Boyd, meanwhile, was the name he knew least, with what he believes is a Broadway background. Above all, Chris hopes Marvel does the team justice, and he recommends the animated revival X-Men ’97 on Disney+ as the best place to start. Frozen 3 Gets a Date and a Chaotic Reveal Frozen 3 lands November 24, 2027. That is the Wednesday of Thanksgiving week, the same slot the first two films used. The story centers on Anna and Kristoff’s wedding, which a new villain, an evil Ice Queen, disrupts. Jennifer Lee returns to direct with Trent Correy, and the full voice cast is back. However, the reveal itself fell apart. Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel performed a darker arrangement of “Frozen Heart.” Meanwhile, the audio failed, the video failed, and a set of doors never opened. Menzel asked the crowd whether they should try it again, and Bell simply narrated everything that was supposed to happen. Afterward, Josh Gad sang “Oooh, Samantha,” a new love song for Olaf. Chris is here for it, since Olaf is one of the franchise’s best comic characters. Pixar, Disney Animation, and the Rest of Friday Night Pixar chief Pete Docter laid out a packed slate. Incredibles 3 hits summer 2028 and follows Violet and Dash sneaking out at night to fight crime. Chris hopes that finally shows a grown-up Jack-Jack. Coco 2 follows in November 2029 with Benjamin Bratt returning as Ernesto de la Cruz. That has fans puzzling over how a villain already in the Land of the Dead comes back. Additionally, Pixar showed an original called Ghost Market and a Venice-set cat film called Gatto. On the Disney Animation side, Zootopia 3 is confirmed. The live-action Tangled arrives March 31, 2028 with Kathryn Hahn as Mother Gothel. Chris considers that casting perfect after her turn in Agatha All Along. A live-action Lilo & Stitch sequel, a new Simpsons movie, a Bluey movie, and a Kingdom Hearts anime series round out the list. For Star Wars fans, Ahsoka returns January 20, 2027. Chris also offers a hot take: he prefers Rogue One to the entire sequel trilogy. Consequently, he welcomes original stories like Ryan Gosling’s upcoming Starfighter. Adam Driver Is Mister Sinister Driver appeared by video rather than in person. He told the crowd that he and Kevin Feige had talked for years about joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Then he announced he would play Magneto. After a long pause, he corrected himself to Nathaniel Milbury, which is Mister Sinister’s human alias. The gag landed because fans had floated Driver for Magneto for years. For anyone new to the comics, Chris explains that Mister Sinister is a geneticist obsessed with mutant DNA, a manipulator rather than a brawler. The cast met backstage only minutes earlier, so Chris is curious how their chemistry develops. Notably, Christopher Abbott previously worked with Driver on HBO’s Girls. The script comes from Beef creator Lee Sung Jin and The Bear co-showrunner Joanna Calo, two prestige-television names that have Chris excited. Why the X-Men Took Thirty Years to Reach the MCU A business story underlies the casting. In the 1990s, a financially struggling Marvel sold film rights to raise cash. Fox ended up with the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, and Sony took Spider-Man. As a result, Marvel Studios built its connected universe from 2008 onward without some of its most famous characters. The Hugh Jackman era of X-Men films belonged to Fox, with a separate continuity and no crossovers. That changed in 2019, when Disney closed its $71 billion purchase of 21st Century Fox’s film and television studio. Most coverage framed the deal as a streaming play, but it also brought the X-Men home. Chris sums it up neatly: Disney signed the paperwork in 2019, cast the film in 2026, and audiences see it in 2028. Ryan Gosling’s Starfighter, Ghost Rider, and VisionQuest Lucasfilm dated Star Wars: Starfighter for May 28, 2027. Gosling plays Kade Auberon, a pilot from the wrong side of the galaxy tied to the fastest starfighter ever built. Before he walked out, Disney played clips of him as a kid on The Mickey Mouse Club. Gosling said the company changed his life then and is changing it again now. He is also playing Ghost Rider in the Marvel universe. That thrills Chris, since Nicolas Cage last carried the character on the big screen. Meanwhile, the Disney+ series VisionQuest arrives October 14. Paul Bettany returns as Vision and James Spader as Ultron, and the trailer drops the two androids into oddly mundane human situations. Bettany joked that Vision has “rather inconveniently died several times.” Chris agrees the character has been through the wringer since WandaVision. The Avengers: Doomsday Trailer Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, with Joe and Anthony Russo directing. Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and Hayley Atwell introduced the new footage. It offers the clearest look yet at Downey as Doctor Doom, who fights off Thor and takes his hammer. Evans appears as Captain America holding a baby, and Ian McKellen shows up as a haggard, long-haired Magneto. One quieter shot has Doom staring at a portrait of a lost wife and child. That frames him as a grieving avenger rather than a world-ender. He also commands an army of comic-accurate Sentinels. The cast pulls from the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and the legacy Fox X-Men, including Patrick Stewart. Hugh Jackman also appeared on screen to say he is willing to return as Wolverine, though that was not a confirmation. Chris, a self-described Marvel nerd, closes with a theory. He suspects the MCU’s Tony Stark was actually Victor von Doom, adopted by the Starks, which would explain the Downey casting. He also predicts the Fox-era X-Men die off in this film and that Thor may be the major casualty. If it happens, he wants credit for calling it. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Disney Parks Around the World Saturday’s Disney Experiences showcase covered parks, resorts, and cruise ships, with Neil Patrick Harris hosting. Hong Kong Disneyland gets an Avengers pavilion that reshapes its Stark Expo skyline. Shanghai Disneyland is building the first land devoted entirely to Spider-Man, complete with a new coaster. Since Spider-Man is his favorite hero, Chris hopes to visit once it opens. Closer to home, Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure is doubling in size with two rides opening in 2028. Avengers: Infinity Defense brings back Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Chris Hemsworth, and Downey, while Stark Flight Lab adds Brie Larson. A Coco boat ride into the Land of the Dead is also coming, with no height requirement. Chris admits he prefers California Adventure to Disneyland because the rides are better. Overseas, Disneyland Paris will retire its Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain overlay at the end of 2027 and restore the original Jules Verne theme. Paris also gets the first ride ever based on The Lion King. Tokyo Disneyland adds Sugar Rush: Sweet Rescue, the first Wreck-It Ralph ride, plus a Space Mountain launch sequence designed with YouTuber Mark Rober. Finally, Disney Cruise Line announced three more ships, including the Disney Believe in 2027 and an entirely new class in 2029. Back in Anaheim, Tomorrowland is getting reimagined, which Chris welcomes because the land badly needs an update. The Magic Happens parade and the Remember Dreams Come True fireworks are both returning. For the tech crowd, Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run now has a Fortnite crossover, where in-game missions unlock content on the real ride. Every New Walt Disney World Ride and Land Chris ranks the Florida parks Hollywood Studios first, then Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and Magic Kingdom. Magic Kingdom leads the announcements with Villains Land, now the official name. It features a Maleficent coaster through an enchanted briar and a boat ride through the Evil Queen’s catacombs. Reporting puts its scale near Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, and Glenn Close appeared in character as Cruella to announce it. Piston Peak, the Cars area replacing Tom Sawyer Island, adds two more rides, though their exact names remain unsettled. Additionally, the Carousel of Progress gets new scenes and a recast. Jamie Lee Curtis and Bryan Cranston will voice Mom and Dad starting late spring 2027. Chris, invoking Heisenberg, calls Cranston the GOAT. At Animal Kingdom, the Indiana Jones ride now has a name: Indiana Jones and the Myth of the Jade Serpent. It tells an original 1950 story inside a Maya temple, and Harrison Ford personally served as the physical model for the animatronic. Nearby, the Tropical Americas land brings Antonio’s Fiesta de Encanto, with more than fifty animal animatronics and no height requirement. Then comes the fix park regulars have wanted for years. The Expedition Everest yeti broke soon after the ride opened. Rather than fix it, Disney lit it with a strobe for over a decade, earning the nickname disco yeti. Now it is being repaired and returned to full motion. Chris rates Everest among his top five rides anywhere, and he suggests riding it before the fix so you can compare. Over at Epcot, Spaceship Earth gets its first major story rewrite in nearly twenty years, shifting from communication history to human connection. Dreamfinder also returns to Journey Into Imagination, and Disney Experiences chairman Thomas Mazloum introduced that news with two words: “we heard you.” Mazloum added that Disney has more projects underway than at any point in its history. After this rundown, Chris believes him. Monsters Inc Land Opens in 2027 Monstropolis begins opening at Hollywood Studios in early 2027, but in stages. The headline door coaster will not be ready on day one. It is the first suspended coaster in any Disney park. It also uses Disney’s first vertical lift, hauling riders about forty feet straight up before launching them into the door vault. Instead, the land opens with the Glob Theater’s “Welcome to Monstropolis” show and Harryhausen’s, a working sushi restaurant lifted from the first film. The stage show features an original song by Randy Newman, his first ever written for a theme park attraction. Chris also notes that the restaurant name honors stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen. Wrapping up, Chris names the X-Men casting and the Doomsday trailer as his favorite moments of the weekend. He hopes to cover more movie news on future shows, and he plugs Dune: Part Three, which also opens December 18. Chris signs off with the usual mentions: GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email at [email protected], the newsletter, and modern podcast apps at podcastapps.com. He also thanks GoDaddy for over twenty years of support. The post Huge Announcements From D23!! #1873 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down NVIDIA’s case for world action models, the shift that swaps a robot’s picture-describing backbone for one trained to predict what happens next. He also covers Perseverance closing in on the off-world driving record, a derelict SpaceX rocket stage hitting the Moon, and Anthropic’s rework of Claude Fable 5’s biology safeguards. Finally, he digs into Gemini Omni, Google’s undisclosed trip-planning rankings, the Danube’s record low, and iFixit’s call for Apple to unlock the iPad bootloader. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a personal update. Wildfires in Eastern Oregon made for a rough week of heavy smoke, and a local building burned down, which he calls a real tragedy. Meanwhile, his work at Blubrry has centered on PowerPress fixes, where reproducing customer-reported bugs remains the biggest headache. Support tickets rarely carry enough detail, and the errors themselves are often too vague to diagnose. Consequently, he is leaning toward a stronger logging and error layer, and he asks experienced developers to share what actually works for them. Beyond VLAs: NVIDIA’s Case for World Action Models The featured story comes from NVIDIA’s developer blog, and it answers a question sitting underneath this year’s robot news. Why do robot arms fall apart the moment anything changes? Move a cup six inches, swap its shape, or change the lighting, and a policy that worked perfectly in training fails. The answer, according to NVIDIA, is not the robot but the model underneath it. For the last few years, the dominant approach has been the vision-language-action model, or VLA, built on an AI that originally learned to describe pictures. Consequently, it recognizes a banana it has never seen, in a kitchen it has never seen, yet it has no idea what that banana will do next. As the article puts it, such a model “does not learn what happens to a mug when the gripper closes, how a towel folds, where an object lands when released.” Because the physics never arrives with the model, every scrap of it has to come out of hand-recorded demonstrations. The proposed fix swaps the foundation entirely. Instead of building on a model that learned to caption images, a world action model builds on one trained to predict how video continues, so the physics is already paid for. Notably, these models output an action and a prediction of what the robot’s cameras will see, in the same pass. Cochrane likens it to forethought, imagining your own motion as you make it. NVIDIA’s implementation is Cosmos 3, pretrained on roughly 767 million images and 348 million videos of real-world dynamics. It ships in 4, 16, and 64 billion parameter sizes named Edge, Nano, and Super, and it runs in real time on a Jetson Thor board bolted to the robot itself. Cochrane recalls his dad owning one of those Jetson boards, and he asks anyone working in robotics to explain how the throughput figures fit together. However, he closes on an open question: where did 348 million videos actually come from? For deeper detail, he points listeners to the source article and to NVIDIA researcher Jim Fan. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Perseverance Closes In on the Off-World Driving Record Ars Technica reports that NASA’s Perseverance rover is about to take the record for most distance driven on another world. The mark sits at roughly 28 miles, set by NASA’s own Opportunity rover across more than fourteen years before it went quiet in 2018. As Cochrane works out on air, that averages about two miles a year. Perseverance will pass it in roughly five years instead. The difference is a navigation system called AutoNav. Since a radio signal takes several minutes to reach Mars, earlier rovers crept along pre-plotted routes and stopped every half meter to think. Perseverance carries a second computer dedicated to processing what its cameras see, so it plans while the wheels keep turning. Consequently, about ninety percent of its driving is autonomous, against roughly ten percent for Curiosity, and it averages around 110 meters an hour rather than 15 to 18. Cochrane notes researchers finding the rover at planned sites days ahead of schedule, and he wonders aloud whether world action models might drive the next one. A SpaceX Rocket Stage Slammed Into the Moon Next, Smithsonian Magazine covered the Falcon 9 upper stage that struck the Moon on August 5. That stage flew back in January 2025, carrying Firefly’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Resilience landers, and it was never meant to end up there. SpaceX’s Julianna Scheiman says a mixture of solar activity and gravity nudged the derelict onto a lunar path after nineteen months adrift. Four tonnes of dead hardware arrived at about 5,400 miles per hour. Nobody watched it happen, and the reason is a nice bit of physics. It struck sunlit ground near a crater called Einstein, and no impact flash has ever been detected on the lit part of the Moon. However, the instruments caught the aftermath. South Korea’s Danuri orbiter imaged a dark new mark, while the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope picked up sodium and lithium in the plume, the lithium possibly shed by the rocket itself. Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell quipped that he has “Sir Isaac Newton’s personal assurance that it did indeed hit the moon,” while planetary scientist Hannah Sargeant warns against making a habit of it. Cochrane points out the Apollo landing sites are still sitting up there. Anthropic Reworks Claude Fable 5’s Biology Safeguards Anthropic published a post on how Claude Fable 5 handles biology questions, and the bind is genuine. Biology is the textbook dual-use problem, since the knowledge behind reading your own lab results also helps someone build a weapon. Rather than refusing outright, a classifier watches for risky requests and quietly reroutes them to Claude Opus 5, a capable model without Fable 5’s biological depth. Anthropic calls that mechanism a fallback. The trouble was how often it fired on people doing nothing wrong. This update cut biology-related fallbacks by roughly 85 percent in Anthropic’s own testing, with expected overall drops of 67 percent on Claude.ai and 55 percent on Cowork. Genuinely dual-use territory still trips it, and Anthropic names virology, toxicology, and molecular design. Cochrane hit the old behavior himself and found it irritating, so he welcomes the refinement. Even so, he would rather see a false positive than a model helping someone produce a virus. Five Builders Put Gemini Omni Through Its Paces Google highlighted five builders working with Gemini Omni. Omni is a model rather than an app, and it generates video from text, images, other video, or audio, while also editing footage you already have. Google claims it “combines an intuitive understanding of physics with Gemini’s real-world knowledge,” citing gravity, kinetic energy, and fluid dynamics. As Cochrane observes, that is the same bet NVIDIA is making with robots, only pointed at video generation instead. He also flags a naming collision worth knowing about. NVIDIA calls its architecture an omni-model while Google’s product is simply Omni, two different things landing in the same week. Additionally, he encourages listeners to watch the demos, though he still senses a disconnect in AI-generated video and concedes that knowing its origin may color the impression. Gemini Wants to Plan Your Vacation Another Gemini piece, a how-to on trip planning, drew Cochrane’s sharpest take of the night. Gemini plugs straight into Google Maps, Flights, and Hotels, pulling live locations, reviews, and prices to build an itinerary. Switch on a feature called Personal Intelligence, and it reads across your Google apps, turning a messy trip-planning email chain into a clean master plan. Clever, but he calls it extremely concerning. Once these become services, he expects partnerships to quietly push particular hotels, restaurants, resorts, and destinations onto users. Notably, Google’s post never explains how any of it gets ranked, and the words sponsored, ad, affiliate, commission, and paid never appear once. There is no disclosure of a commercial arrangement, and no denial of one either. Meanwhile the post hands readers off to Viator to book tours without describing that relationship at all. Cochrane suspects the real effect shows up slowly, in the shape of small businesses continuing to disappear. The Senate Blocks a Rule on Who Controls Research Money Science reports that the Senate passed a temporary spending bill in the early hours of Saturday the 8th. The Senate’s version carries a one-paragraph rider the House version lacks, and that rider stops the White House Office of Management and Budget from finalizing a set of proposed rules. OMB builds the president’s budget, clears agency regulations, and controls how approved money actually reaches agencies. The bill itself is a stopgap, which prevents a shutdown without settling anything. The rules reach every organization that takes federal money, a pot of roughly $1.1 trillion across 41 agencies, about $150 billion of it research grants. They would let political appointees second-guess which grants get funded, allow awarded grants to be pulled when the work does not match presidential priorities, and put several countries off limits for research partnerships, China first among them. Senator Susan Collins pushed the block through after telling OMB director Russell Vought the proposal was deeply flawed, noting nearly 500,000 public comments, the vast majority opposed. However, the 90-6 vote is not law. Both chambers are on recess. Vought reportedly said the rule would not have been finalized before December anyway, and the block only lasts as long as the stopgap, which expires December 11. The Danube Falls to a Record Low ESA published a pair of Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite images showing the same bend of the Danube, 45 kilometers upstream of Budapest, photographed a year apart. Cochrane calls the before-and-after shocking, going from green to brown completely. Wire reports put the Budapest gauge near 10 centimeters at the start of the month, about four inches of water, against a previous record of 33 centimeters set in 2018. The knock-on effects arrived fast. Budapest ran short on both power and drinking water, while the shrinking flow concentrated pollution in what remained. Romania hit record lows on its own stretch as well. Cochrane hopes the recovery is already underway. What a Heatwave Actually Does to the Power Grid That river story runs directly into a Carbon Brief factcheck. Nuclear plants cool themselves with river water, so when the Danube dropped, plants in Hungary and Romania throttled back and pulled roughly 2.5 gigawatts off the grid. Romania declared a state of alert in its energy sector, and its navy reportedly used explosives to steer more water toward a plant intake. Carbon Brief then walked through what heatwaves do to each way of making electricity. Nuclear loses efficiency when the cooling water is already warm, though its shutdowns are mostly regulatory rather than mechanical. Gas turbines pull in less air because hot air is thinner, costing capacity. Wind falls off hardest, since a heatwave is a big stalled dome of high pressure and nearly still air. Solar is the surprise: cells genuinely do get less efficient as they heat up, yet total output climbs anyway, with UK solar up 46 percent during a four-day June heatwave against the week before. Butterflies Are on the Move Everywhere A new study in Nature Ecology and Evolution covered 1,758 butterfly species, roughly one in ten of every species we have named. The team pulled 6,182 records from 105 countries, reading non-English research alongside 68 expert write-ups. Four out of five species pushed into new territory, and about 79 percent of the logged shifts traced back to climate change and extreme weather. Separately, 27 percent saw their range shrink somewhere, and 22 percent moved up or down a mountain slope chasing cooler air. That sounds like good news, and it really is not. Expansion means a boundary moved, not that butterflies are thriving, since a species can push its northern edge forward while its southern edge quietly collapses. Lead author Shawan Chowdhury says the shifts turn up on every continent where butterflies occur. Additionally, monitoring gaps leave Central Africa, Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and the Amazon Basin barely counted at all. Cochrane recalls hearing years ago that butterflies were disappearing in Hawaii, and he invites listeners spotting unfamiliar species locally to contribute what they see. Primates Make Friends Across Species Cochrane called this one a fun find. A study in the journal Primates, led by Cyril Grueter at Oxford, gathered 427 documented cases going back to the 1970s across 88 primate species and 127 partner species. Play and grooming dominated at 139 and 136 cases, alongside carrying, huddling, food sharing, and even adoption. Primates usually started the interactions themselves, with juveniles playing most, adult females handling grooming and caregiving, and adult males least likely to join in. The examples are remarkable. Japanese macaques on the island of Yakushima groom sika deer and climb on their backs, a silverback gorilla cradled a tiny wild bushbaby, and wild capuchins in Brazil adopted an infant marmoset in a bond that held for weeks. However, Grueter rejects the pet-keeping headline and prefers the hedged term proto-pet keeping. The actual claim is smaller and more interesting: curiosity, tolerance, caregiving, and play have roots running far deeper than humans do. iFixit Tells Apple to Unlock the iPad Finally, an opinion piece from Charlie Sorrel at iFixit struck a chord. This fall, iPadOS 27 drops support for a batch of older iPads, including the 8th-generation iPad, the third-generation Air, the fifth-generation mini, and the first-generation iPad Pros. Cochrane owns one of those Pros and reports it still works fine. Those devices will not break, but they stop getting OS and security updates until apps abandon them and the battery gives out. The obvious second life is Linux, except the bootloader stays locked. Apple’s iBoot will not load anything else, unlike a Mac, a PC, or most Android phones. Sorrel argues it “should be a user choice, not a vendor choice,” and Cochrane agrees flatly. You own the device, so why does Apple decide what runs on it? He compares the situation to jailbreaking, and he suspects most consumers have never pushed back simply because it never occurs to them. Nevertheless, he hopes an unlock eventually breathes new life into hardware that still works perfectly well. Cochrane wraps with housekeeping: become a GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email [email protected], subscribe to the newsletter, and grab a modern podcast app at podcastapps.com. He thanks GoDaddy for over twenty years of keeping the show on the air, and he signs off wishing listeners a wonderful evening. The post The Robot That Imagines First #1872 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane digs into Anthropic’s admission that Claude models reached real systems during sandboxed safety tests. He also covers OpenAI’s Astra model cracking ten decade-old math problems, DeepMind open-sourcing its WeatherNext cyclone forecaster, and Europe’s brutal fire season. Finally, he wraps with the MacBook Neo sweeping K-12 schools, WhatsApp calling in the browser, and the troubled rescue of NASA’s Swift observatory. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a personal update. He just got back from a trip home to O’ahu, where he helped his mom with projects around the house, caught up with friends, and finally rode the island’s new rail line ahead of its phase-two extension to downtown. Also in the pipeline, a September trip to Michigan is coming up, and he is closing out three years at Oregon’s Finest to focus on Blubrry and the show. Then he turns to the featured story. Capture the Real Flag: Claude Reached Real Systems During Anthropic’s Safety Tests Cochrane’s featured story comes from Anthropic’s own investigation. A misconfiguration left evaluation machines connected to the live internet during capture-the-flag safety tests, and Claude models reached real production systems in three incidents across 141,006 reviewed runs. One model extracted working credentials and entered a real company’s database, another published a malicious package to PyPI for about an hour, and the newest model recognized the environment was real and walked away from the flag. Notably, Anthropic found no evidence of models pursuing goals of their own. The models did what their evaluations asked. The review began after OpenAI disclosed that its own models escaped an isolated test environment. Cochrane praises the transparency of the postmortem. However, he argues the incidents signal an industry-wide gap: evaluation infrastructure needs the same security rigor as production systems, and he hopes every lab takes the hint. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. An OpenAI Model Cracks Ten Open Math Problems OpenAI says an internal model called Astra produced ten new results on open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science, each stuck for at least a decade. The wins range from sphere packing to a lattice problem behind post-quantum cryptography, plus two entries from Paul Erdős’s famous problem list. None are peer-reviewed yet, but every proof carries a machine-checked Lean 4 certificate. Cochrane finds the results impressive precisely because they reach past what humans could derive quickly, though OpenAI has not said how much human steering was involved. Scientists With LLMs Will “Do More, Less Well” Next, Nature’s news desk covered a modeling study predicting that scientists who adopt LLM tools will “do more, less well.” The team, which includes University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom, used optimal foraging theory to model researchers under publish-or-perish incentives. Faster AI-assisted work pushes them toward fresh projects instead of follow-up experiments and extra analysis. Cochrane relates from his own research: heavy LLM assistance can mean understanding the work less, which makes digging into the whys much harder. Intel’s Chip-Stitching Hub in New Mexico Intel’s newsroom showcased Fab 9 in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, its U.S. hub for advanced packaging. Since single chips max out at the reticle limit, Intel stitches specialized chiplets together with Foveros stacking and EMIB silicon bridges until they act like one huge processor. Packages already reach eight times that single-chip ceiling, with twelve times targeted by 2028. Cochrane muses about a future where consumers simply snap extra compute onto a board. Gemini Robotics ER 2 Is a Brain for Robots DeepMind released Gemini Robotics ER 2, its most capable embodied reasoning model. The system chats with humans, plans multi-step tasks, and hands motor control to whatever vision-language-action model a robot runs. Moreover, it calls tools like Google Search mid-task and plans its next move while its hands keep working. Demos show it orchestrating Boston Dynamics’ Spot and Apptronik’s Apollo 2, and developers can use it now through the Gemini API. DeepMind Open-Sources Its Cyclone Forecaster Staying with DeepMind, the new WeatherNext Cyclones model adds more than a full day of extra warning on a storm’s track, intensity, and wind structure. It ran live with the National Hurricane Center during the 2025 season, helping forecasters spot Hurricane Melissa’s rapid intensification before its Jamaica landfall. Best of all, DeepMind open-sourced the code and model weights for research and commercial use alike. Cochrane, a longtime fan of the lab, calls the public release a huge service. Climate Change Supercharges Europe’s Disasters Eos rounded up how climate change is supercharging Europe’s heat, drought, and wildfires. Southwestern France has burned through about 287,000 acres this year, and roughly 330,000 people across France and Spain fled their homes in one of Europe’s largest evacuations since World War II. France also recorded more than 5,700 excess heat deaths in under three weeks. Meanwhile, a Bordeaux-region blaze spawned a pyrocumulonimbus fire cloud, and Cochrane notes that hearing “unprecedented” every year is starting to create a precedent. Ten Years of WILDLABS and Arm Arm is celebrating ten years of backing WILDLABS, a network connecting more than 16,000 conservationists across 180 countries. The goal was never to invent new conservation technology. Instead, it closes the information gap so tools and lessons get shared openly. Cochrane highlights a team using miniaturized GPS tags to track migrating bats, and says the project bears the heart of open source. FarmBeats Brings AI to Ag Classrooms Microsoft and the National FFA Organization expanded FarmBeats for Students nationally. The program teaches future farmers with smart soil sensors, data science, and AI, mirroring how real farms automate tractors and deploy drones against pests. At launch, 185 middle and high schools received free classroom kits. Interested families can grab a kit for $35, and the Microsoft Learn training is free. MacBook Neo Pulls Schools Off Chromebooks Apple’s earnings call revealed the MacBook Neo displacing Chromebooks and Windows machines in K-12. Close to half of the Neo’s large U.S. education purchases last quarter replaced competing fleets, including 25,000 students in Pinellas County, Florida. Cochrane sees the first truly affordable Apple laptop finally competing where Chromebooks have lived for a decade. He expects Apple to keep taking K-12 share from Google and Microsoft. Apple Upgrade Turns iPhones Into a Lease Apple also launched Apple Upgrade, a hardware leasing program backed by Klarna. iPhones start at $17.99 per month with 12- to 36-month terms by device, and lease-end options let you upgrade, buy out, or walk away. However, entry-level hardware like the base iPhone 16 and Mac mini is excluded, and enrollment requires a Klarna account and a soft credit check. Cochrane admits he has never been a leasing fan, having once bought his phone outright with tip money, but he expects plenty of takers. WhatsApp Calling Comes to the Browser Meta brought calling to WhatsApp Web, no app download required. Browser calls keep end-to-end encryption and add screen sharing, a dedicated Calls tab, waiting rooms for group links, and automatic HD video. Additionally, group calls now transfer between devices mid-call, and a Drown Out the Noise feature suppresses background racket. Everything rolls out gradually over the coming weeks. July’s Gemini Drop July’s Gemini Drop adds voice control on macOS, letting users dictate and transform text in any active window. Gemini Spark, the always-on assistant, expands nearly worldwide, except the EEA, UK, Switzerland, and Nigeria. New Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite models arrive alongside avatar-based image personalization and app hookups for Dropbox, Zillow Rentals, and Viator. The Rescue Satellite That Needs Rescuing Katalyst Space Technologies’ LINK spacecraft, launched to boost NASA’s sinking Swift observatory, began tumbling in late July. Two of its three reaction wheels failed and its cold-gas thrusters degraded, so engineers used an electric xenon thruster to cut the spin from nine degrees per second to about 1.5. CEO Ghonhee Lee says a capture attempt is “very much in the cards,” with rendezvous in late August at the earliest. Cochrane wonders what happens if the window closes, and he promises to keep listeners updated. Curiosity Finds a Honeycomb Valley on Mars Finally, Curiosity rolled into a Martian valley nicknamed Valle Grande and found a honeycomb landscape. Polygonal fractures just inches wide stretch in every direction and climb a butte named Miraflores. Project scientist Ashwin Vasavada says the “sea of polygons took our breath away.” The rover just passed fourteen years on Mars, and scientists suspect ancient warming and cooling cycles fractured the ground. Cochrane wraps with housekeeping: become a GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email [email protected], subscribe to the newsletter, and grab a modern podcast app at podcastapps.com (he uses Pocket Casts himself). He signs off until Monday’s show. The post Capture The Real Flag #1871 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down AI distillation, the teacher-student technique frontier labs now lean on to train smaller, cheaper models. He also covers GPT-5.6’s government-vetted rollout, Claude Sonnet 5 landing on AWS, Maryland’s two-year data center pause, and Microsoft’s climbing carbon numbers. Finally, he wraps with Apple’s $30 billion Broadcom deal, Meta’s tamper-proof recording light, Michigan’s parasite outbreak, and a simulation that erased a super El Niño. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a quick personal update. Longer days have him outdoors, including a float trip on the Sandy River at Dabney State Park, where he found clearer water, clay-like sand, and easy footing. Next week brings both a move and a trip home, so he is stocking up on Trader Joe’s “Power Berries” and IKEA bags at his mom’s request. Then he turns to the lead story. AI Distillation Explained: How Frontier Models Teach Each Other Cochrane’s featured story comes from Hugging Face engineer Sergio Paniego. Distillation is teacher-student training for AI: a capable model generates the training signal, and a smaller student learns to match it. The classic off-policy version compresses giant models into cheap students, either through soft labels or piles of worked answers. Google’s Gemma models and DeepSeek’s R1-Distill line were built exactly this way. However, the industry is now converging on multi-teacher on-policy distillation, or MOPD. Labs build reinforcement-learning specialists for math, coding, and agentic work, then have them grade a single student, word by word, as the student generates its own answers. DeepSeek-V4, MiMo-V2-Flash, and NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3 Ultra all run versions of the recipe, and the Qwen3 team reported better results at roughly a tenth of the GPU hours of raw reinforcement learning. Finally, self-distillation lets models like Cursor’s Composer 2.5 learn from better-prompted versions of themselves. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. GPT-5.6 Arrives With a Government-Vetted Rollout OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6 as a three-tier family: Sol, Terra, and Luna. Sol costs five dollars in and thirty dollars out per million tokens, half of Claude Fable 5’s rate. The benchmarks split: Sol Ultra wins Terminal-Bench at 91.9 percent, while Claude Fable 5 still leads SWE-Bench Pro. Notably, the API launched in limited preview to roughly 20 partners vetted by the U.S. government, though the model went live in Microsoft 365 Copilot on day one. Claude Sonnet 5 Lands on AWS, Plus Quick AWS Wins Claude Sonnet 5 arrived on AWS through Bedrock, pitched as top-tier intelligence at Sonnet pricing. Additionally, Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents reached general availability, enabling agents to drive full desktop applications securely. OpenSearch gained a log-analytics engine claiming four times the price-performance, and SageMaker now scales inference about twice as fast. Cochrane also flags that Kendra and Q Business move to maintenance mode at the end of July. Anthropic Wants You to Reflect on Your Claude Habits Anthropic launched Reflect, a beta feature that analyzes your past Claude conversations and visualizes how you actually use the assistant. It requires Memory, excludes incognito and health-related chats, and keeps its insights inside the tool. Cochrane loves the idea. He reviews his own transcripts to extract prompt patterns and turn them into reusable skills, and he suggests listeners simply ask their AI to do the same. AlphaEvolve Goes GA on Google Cloud Google made AlphaEvolve generally available to Google Cloud customers on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The agent acts as an evolutionary collaborator: provide a baseline algorithm and your goals, and it searches for better, human-readable code. BASF, JetBrains, and Kinaxis are the named early adopters. Meanwhile, Cochrane renews his standing wish that DeepMind release AlphaGo as a playable teacher. Google Adds “How This Ad Was Made” AI Labels Google is adding a “How this ad was made” section to My Ad Center across Search, YouTube, and Discover. Ads built with Google’s own AI tools automatically get the disclosure, backed by invisible watermarks. However, ads made with outside tools rely on advertiser self-declaration. Cochrane points out the limits of voluntary disclosure in an AI-flooded content economy. Microsoft’s Carbon Emissions Climb 25 Percent Microsoft’s new sustainability report shows emissions up 25% in 2025, driven by a data center construction spree. The gross figure is 34 million metric tons before offsets, while other coverage puts the net figure at around 20 million. Water consumption also jumped thirty-four percent, even as Microsoft claims its first water-positive year. Cochrane argues regulation needs to catch up, since Google and Amazon report similar increases. Prince George’s County Pauses Data Centers for Two Years Prince George’s County adopted a two-year moratorium on new data center development, the longest pause in Maryland so far. The resolution blocks new applications, including hyperscale projects, until the council passes real regulations. Water and energy impacts remain open questions the county intends to study. Cochrane gives kudos to residents for making their voices heard. Apple and Broadcom Ink a $30 Billion U.S. Chip Deal Apple is expanding its partnership with Broadcom with a multiyear agreement expected to exceed $30 billion. The deal covers custom silicon and wireless components, with more than fifteen billion chips to be made on American soil. Broadcom’s Fort Collins, Colorado plant anchors the work with a $1.5 billion equipment expansion. Tim Cook framed the deal as accelerating Apple’s commitment to American manufacturing. MSI and Intel Ship the First Arc G3 Extreme Handheld Intel detailed how it co-engineered the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, the first handheld on the Arc G3 Extreme processor. Highlights include a heat-spreading board layout and game-tuning loops that Intel says run Cyberpunk 2077 up to thirty-seven percent faster. The device is on sale now in void purple for around $1,500. At that price, Cochrane jokes he would rather buy a computer. Meta’s Glasses Get a Tamper-Proof Recording Light Meta answered the most common privacy questions about its AI glasses. Photos stay private on the device until the wearer imports or shares them, and a white capture LED blinks during any recording with no off switch. Moreover, newer glasses disable the camera if the LED is blocked, tampered with, or destroyed. Cochrane reminds listeners these claims are Meta grading its own homework, but the blink signal is worth recognizing in public. Michigan’s Parasite Outbreak Tops 1,200 Cases Michigan’s cyclosporiasis outbreak reached 1,251 cases since June 22, with roughly forty hospitalizations along the way. Northwest Ohio adds more than five hundred cases. The parasite typically spreads through contaminated fresh produce, and investigators still have not found the source. Cochrane’s advice: wash your produce, and get tested if your symptoms fit. AI Finds the San Andreas Fault’s Silent Slips Researchers paired AI with borehole strainmeters to detect dozens of hidden slow-slip events beneath the San Andreas Fault’s Parkfield section. Each silent slip releases stress within hours and is reliably followed by low-frequency earthquakes. Together, the findings support a continuous spectrum from silent creep to destructive quakes. The study appears in Nature Communications, and Cochrane hopes it will lead to better earthquake prediction. Cloud Brightening Erased a Super El Niño, in a Simulation Finally, a Science Advances study simulated marine cloud brightening in response to the 1997 and 2015 super El Niño events. Seeding clouds over the eastern Pacific erased the events entirely inside the model. Real deployment would take roughly 2,400 ships spraying continuously, and the simulations showed side effects like extra warming over Europe and Asia. Cochrane finds the weather-machine concept fascinating, yet he questions the consequences of altering cycles the planet runs for a reason. The post AI Distillation: How Frontier Models Teach Each Other #1870 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane digs into “algorithmic outing,” new research showing that social feeds can infer your sexual orientation before you have consciously come out. He also covers Meta’s privacy-aware AI infrastructure, Alberta’s 466-million-line code scan with Claude, NVIDIA on reinforcement learning, and the many journeys of learning Rust. Along the way, he hits Google DeepMind’s A24 deal, WhatsApp usernames, and scuba-diving cyborg cockroaches. Finally, he looks up with Webb’s puzzling early universe, NASA’s emergency telescope rescue, and a gorgeous aurora from orbit. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a quick personal update. He hopes listeners had a good holiday weekend, and he shares that he spent his time working his other job at Oregon’s Finest, chatting with people around Portland. Because his Blurbry workweek tends to be solitary, he refills his social meter on the weekends. He then recalls a Saturday night out with coworkers at the Hungry Tiger before turning to the lead story. Algorithmic Outing: When Your Feed Knows Before You Do Cochrane leads with new research from Australia that identifies a phenomenon called “algorithmic outing.” In short, the recommendation systems behind your social feeds can infer your sexual orientation or gender identity and start serving related content before you have worked it out yourself. Importantly, the study is small and qualitative, built on in-depth interviews with twenty LGBTQ+ adults in the Hunter region of New South Wales and published in the journal Gender, Place and Culture. The mechanism is engagement signals: what you like, who you follow, and how long you linger on a post, a metric the industry calls dwell time. Lead researcher Dr. Justin Ellis of the University of Newcastle notes that several participants said the algorithm “knew” they were queer before they did, an experience that felt validating for some but frightening for others in public settings. For Cochrane, the deeper worry is what else that hidden pattern encodes, from upbringing to mental health, and where that data ultimately gets sold. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Meta’s Blueprint for Privacy-Aware AI Infrastructure Next, Cochrane turns to a sharp engineering piece from Meta on privacy-aware infrastructure. The core challenge is that a system must understand what a piece of data actually is before any privacy rule can protect it. A field named “age,” for example, might describe a person in one place and a cache setting in another. Meta’s answer deploys a large language model only on the genuinely ambiguous cases, then distills what it learns into fixed, human-reviewed rules. The payoff is concrete. According to Meta, those deterministic rules already handle about 85 percent of the traffic, and only the last 15 percent falls back to the model, which costs roughly 400 times more compute. Cochrane loves this edge-case approach. However, he contrasts it sharply with the AI-everywhere software he wrestles with at his weekend job, which he says the heavy AI reliance genuinely makes worse and harder to audit. Alberta Scans 466 Million Lines of Code With Claude This one comes from Anthropic, and it ties directly to Meta’s theme. A team inside Alberta’s Ministry of Technology and Innovation used Claude to scan 466 million lines of code in about twenty hours, a review Anthropic estimates would have taken humans roughly six and a half years. Notably, they ran around fifty AI agents in parallel, essentially an automated red team and blue team probing the systems at once. For Cochrane, this is the good version of AI in production: cleaning up and locking down real systems rather than running the show unsupervised. NVIDIA on Reinforcement Learning for AI Agents On the AI-building side, Cochrane walks through an NVIDIA developer piece on reinforcement learning for agents. Reinforcement learning rewards a model for good behavior rather than showing it the right answer, much like training a dog with treats. Additionally, he clears up a common mix-up. NVIDIA treats RAG, retrieval-augmented generation, as a separate tool: reinforcement learning changes how a model behaves, while RAG changes what facts it can reach. GitHub Retires Two Gemini Models Meanwhile, GitHub is retiring Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash across all of Copilot on July 31. The migration paths are Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini 3.5 Flash. Cochrane flags it as a sign of the times, since tools that felt brand new a couple of years ago are already getting sunset. He also wonders how quickly today’s “AI-optimized” chips will turn over as the models keep changing. The Many Journeys of Learning Rust One for the programmers, and Cochrane makes no secret of loving Rust. The Rust blog’s Vision Doc series explores how people actually learn the language, which is built around memory safety and its strict borrow checker. Honest themes surface throughout, including “clone guilt,” where beginners refuse to copy anything, and “silent attrition,” the learners who quietly bounce off. His take stands: getting your brain onto a memory-safe language rewires how you approach a problem. Google DeepMind Partners With A24 In an interesting collision of worlds, Google DeepMind is teaming up with A24, the studio behind Hereditary and Everything Everywhere All at Once. The two call it a first-of-its-kind research partnership, with DeepMind researchers and A24 building creative tools shaped by the artists who use them. Cochrane adds a detail worth noting: Google also invested in A24, so this is money on the table, not just a research handshake. For now, though, the announcement stays deliberately vague, with no named films or products. Google’s $1 Million Africa Indie Game Fund Another one from Google, and it is good news for developers. Google is launching an indie games fund for sub-Saharan Africa, a region whose gaming scene is growing about as fast as anywhere. The fund puts up $1 million across ten local studios, each receiving between $50,000 and $200,000 plus mentorship and hands-on support. Applications close at noon UTC on July 31. WhatsApp Usernames Are Here to Reserve WhatsApp is finally moving off phone numbers as your identity. With usernames, someone can start a conversation with you without ever seeing your number. Starting this week, you can reserve the name you want ahead of the full launch later this year. To claim yours, head into Settings, then Account, then Username. Intel Sets Its Q2 Earnings Date Cochrane flags a date worth watching for anyone tracking Intel. The company reports second-quarter results on July 23, right after market close, with an earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific. Given recent US government investment and a shifting chip landscape, he is curious how the domestic chipmaker is holding up. Your Smartwatch Might Spot Illness Before You Do Shifting to health, Engadget reports that the wearables-plus-AI wave is starting to deliver. These devices excel at catching the moment your body drifts off its own baseline, often the first nudge to get checked out. A 2025 study from Texas A&M and Stanford suggests smartwatches can detect early signs of COVID or the flu within hours of infection. Additionally, Apple Watch’s irregular-rhythm alerts have flagged AFib correctly about 84 percent of the time. Working Memory and Consciousness Here is a heady one from Scientific American, written by philosopher Henry Taylor at the University of Birmingham. Working memory is the mental scratchpad holding whatever you are doing right now. Taylor opens with the doorway effect, that blank moment when you enter a room and forget why. Intriguingly, when information leaves working memory, it seems to leave conscious awareness at the same instant, a link drawing fresh attention across psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. Scuba-Diving Cyborg Cockroaches Now for the wild one. Scientists have built tiny diving suits that let Madagascar hissing cockroaches survive underwater for up to three hours, while an unequipped roach suffocates in minutes. The 3D-printed suit feeds oxygen through tubes into the insect’s breathing holes, called spiracles, using a chemical generator with no electronics. This lab already steered the roaches with electrodes, so the diving suit is the new trick on top. Researchers pitch it for search and rescue, though Cochrane notes the reality of the spy bug has already arrived. Quantum Time Runs Backward at Los Alamos Next, a genuine brain-bender. Physicists at Los Alamos, led by Luis Pedro García-Pintos, found a way to make a quantum system look like it is running backward in time. To be clear, time is not literally reversing. Precise measurements just make the system’s evolution appear to unfold in reverse. The useful part is energy: measurement itself becomes a resource in what they call a continuous measurement engine. Cochrane admits the paper drifted further from his reality the more he read. Tall Trees Shrug Off Drought A new study in Science overturns some textbook wisdom. For years, the assumption held that taller trees suffer more in drought because they must lift water higher. However, researchers studying dipterocarps in Southeast Asia found that trees topping seventy meters slowed their growth by about the same amount as short ones during the 2023-2024 El Niño drought. The trick is plumbing: a seventy-meter tree grows base vessels roughly twice as wide as a ten-meter tree, so the real driver of drought stress is subtler than raw height. The Energy Department Purges Conservation Pages This next one frustrates Cochrane. The US Department of Energy deleted roughly 6,000 web pages about energy conservation, and the timing is brutal during a record heatwave. The move followed backlash over New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani urging residents to ease strain on the grid. Fortunately, the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine preserved the pages before they vanished. For Cochrane, deleting that kind of public information simply does not make sense. Webb’s Puzzling New Universe Heading to space, Quanta Magazine explores how the James Webb Space Telescope keeps finding early-universe objects that should not exist. Those include black holes that grew enormous too fast and hundreds of mysterious “little red dots” around 650 million years after the Big Bang. As astrophysicist Rachel Somerville of the Flatiron Institute puts it, scientists have “almost gone from having too many early galaxies to having too many theories.” The hard part now is figuring out which theory is right. NASA’s Emergency Telescope Rescue NASA has a rescue mission underway for the Swift Observatory, a 2004 telescope that studies gamma-ray bursts. Recent solar storms puffed up Earth’s atmosphere, and the added drag has dragged Swift’s orbit down to about 224 miles, low enough to risk burning up this year. To intervene, NASA enlisted Katalyst Space Technologies of Flagstaff, Arizona, whose LINK spacecraft launched Friday. The plan is to boost Swift back up to roughly 373 miles. A Gorgeous Aurora From Orbit Finally, Cochrane closes on something beautiful. ESA shared a stunning aurora captured from orbit, a shimmering green band of light rippling over the planet. If you have a few minutes, it is well worth a look. Cochrane wraps with housekeeping and a thank-you to GoDaddy for two decades of support, then signs off, wishing listeners a wonderful evening. The post Algorithmic Outing: When Your Feed Knows Before You Do #1869 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane digs into Claude Science, Anthropic’s new AI workbench for researchers, and explains why its auditable, reproducible outputs matter more than the AI itself. He also covers Google’s June AI recap, the Pulpie web-cleaning model, the PamStealer Mac malware, a synthetic cell that divides on its own, and the first-ever treatment trial for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola. Finally, he looks skyward with NASA’s year-long Mars simulation and a can’t-miss July skywatching night. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a quick personal update. He mentions a busy stretch at Blubrry and an upcoming local move, followed by a late-August trip to Michigan with his partner. He also notes that Oregon is at its summer best right now, with flowers everywhere. Then he sends a happy 30th birthday to his sister Anna before diving into the lead story. Claude Science: Anthropic’s AI Workbench for Researchers Cochrane leads with Claude Science, which Anthropic describes as an AI workbench for scientists. It pulls together scattered research tools into a single environment and ships with more than 60 skills and connectors for fields such as genomics and structural biology. According to Anthropic, every result carries an auditable history: the exact code, the computing environment, and a plain-language account of what happened. For Cochrane, reproducibility is the real story, not AI, because a result that nobody can reproduce does not count for much. The tool runs on macOS and Linux, with Windows support via WSL, and Cochrane says he already has it set up on his own machine for his machine learning work. Notably, it arrived during a busy week for Anthropic. The company also shipped an upgraded Sonnet 5, and its top-tier Fable 5 model returned after a brief pause tied to a US export-control order. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Google Recaps Its June AI Push Next, Cochrane runs through Google’s roundup of its June AI announcements. A Gemini-based prototype aims to help local councils clear administrative backlogs and halve the time to process planning applications. Google is also backing seven bipartisan bills against scams. Meanwhile, its research models now predict river floods up to seven days out, track wildfire boundaries, and forecast cyclone paths. Pulpie Cleans Up the Web for a Fraction of the Cost This one comes from Hugging Face. Pulpie is a web extractor that strips a page down to its main content and tosses the ads, headers, and sidebars. That matters because language models read the web twice, once in training and again at inference. According to the team, cleaning a billion pages costs about $7,900 with Pulpie versus roughly $159,000 with the leading tool, Dripper, and it is open for anyone to use. An AI Alexander Hamilton Comes to Boston The Museum of American Finance, a free Smithsonian affiliate, opens a new home on July 3 at Boston’s Commonwealth Pier. Its headline draw is an AI-generated Alexander Hamilton that chats with visitors in multiple languages. However, Cochrane finds it fun but wonders how much of an upgrade an AI kiosk really is over a scripted one. Arm’s June Roundup: Azure Silicon and Better Mobile Graphics From the Arm newsroom, Cochrane highlights Cobalt 200, Microsoft’s Azure processor tuned for agentic AI. Two Unreal Engine features, MegaLights and Nanite, are also coming to mobile to deliver richer lighting and detail. Additionally, a small open-source robot called Reachy Mini shows off on-device physical AI. Arm also continues shrinking large language models to fit on phones. Meta Marks Ten Years of Backing Python Meta just hit its tenth straight year sponsoring the Python Software Foundation. The nonprofit keeps the language healthy and its global community funded. Beyond funding, Meta supports the developer-in-residence program, PyPI security, and open-source tools like the Pyrefly type checker. Cochrane urges listeners to push their own companies to sponsor the open-source projects they rely on. PamStealer: Mac Malware That Verifies Your Password First Ars Technica reported a stealthy new macOS infostealer called PamStealer. It shows a fake password prompt, then validates the entry through Apple’s own PAM system, so it only keeps confirmed correct passwords. The malware spreads via a fake disk image that poses as Maccy, a legitimate clipboard manager. Cochrane’s advice is simple: only download from maccy.app, and never run a script or press Command-R just because an app told you to. Apple Creator Studio Gets a Suite-Wide AI Update Apple rolled out AI features across its Creator Studio apps. Final Cut Pro leads with auto-generated captions, edit detection, and an auto-mask tool. Meanwhile, Pixelmator adds Match Color, and Logic Pro gains chord identification plus a full teaching session behind a real track. Cochrane calls that built-in lesson a nice leg up for anyone learning to produce music. New York’s Heat Wave Sparks a Thermostat Fight From Inside Climate News, Cochrane covers the backlash after New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani urged residents to set thermostats to 78 degrees. That advice matched what Con Edison, the state’s largest utility, was already saying. Cochrane sets the politics aside and focuses on the real goal: keeping the grid from buckling during a brutal heat wave. A Synthetic Cell Grows and Divides on Its Own Quanta Magazine reports a major breakthrough. Researchers built a cell from nonliving parts, and for the first time it grew, copied its DNA, and split into two daughter cells. That dividing step had stalled the field for years. Cochrane credits Kate Adamala and her team at the University of Minnesota, who cracked it with a clever membrane trick. First Treatment Trial Begins for the Bundibugyo Ebola Strain The World Health Organization launched the first-ever treatment trial for Bundibugyo, a distinct Ebola strain, amid a serious outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is the largest Bundibugyo outbreak on record, with about 1,400 cases and 438 deaths, and Uganda is now seeing cases too. The trial tests an antibody cocktail and the antiviral remdesivir. Cochrane also notes the WHO declared the recent shipboard hantavirus outbreak over. An Orbital Sunrise From the Space Station NASA astronaut Chris Williams photographed a stunning sunrise from the International Space Station on June 26. Because the station circles Earth so quickly, the crew sees sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets every single day. Cochrane points listeners to the full image on nasa.gov. NASA Seeks Volunteers for a Year-Long Mars Simulation Scientific American reports that NASA is recruiting for its next Moon and Mars Exploration Analog. Volunteers will live inside a habitat for a full year, facing the isolation and resource limits of a real mission. It begins no earlier than August 2027 at Johnson Space Center. Cochrane admits it is not for him, but calls it an amazing opportunity. NASA’s July Skywatching Guide Finally, Cochrane looks up. On July 11 and 12, a crescent Moon lines up with Mars, Saturn, and Uranus before dawn. Then July 14 brings a new Moon, a great window for the returning Comet 10P/Tempel 2, and prime Milky Way viewing. Saturn’s thin ring angle is a bonus through a telescope. Cochrane wraps with the usual housekeeping and a reminder that every GoDaddy click supports the show. As always, he signs off wishing listeners a great night. The post Claude Science: AI Workbench for Scientists #1868 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Chris Cochrane leads with a $200,000 Star Wars LEGO collection that exploded into lawsuits, arrests, and a YouTube crusade. Additional stories cover Summer Game Fest 2026, the first Enhanced Games where doping is allowed, an AI collar that claims to translate your dog, Microsoft’s new in-house AI coding models, an AI-industry letter urging Congress to screen synthetic DNA, and Blue Origin’s New Glenn exploding on the test stand. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Chris if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Chris Cochrane opens the show, back behind the mic after a long break. First, he previews a packed rundown before digging into the night’s lead story, a consignment deal gone very wrong. From there, the episode runs through gaming, sports, artificial intelligence, and space. Finally, Chris closes with personal updates on recent travel, a new camera, and a media business he is building. The $200,000 Star Wars LEGO Consignment War Chris leads with a sentence he never expected to say on the show. A dispute over a box of Star Wars LEGO has produced a racketeering lawsuit, multiple arrests, and a public statement from the CEO of Patreon. Bryan Mansell and his 83-year-old father, Ed, spent years assembling roughly 780 sealed sets, valued near $200,000. Back in 2023, they consigned the collection to the Keizer, Oregon branch of the franchise chain Bricks and Minifigs, splitting sales 65/35. However, the store changed hands in late 2024, and the new operators allegedly stopped paying and refused to return the unsold sets. From there it escalated fast. Stunt YouTuber Benjamin Schneider, known as “Reckless Ben,” took up the cause and split the claim into about ten small-claims cases, winning default judgments when the store skipped court. Meanwhile, his GoFundMe pushed past $600,000 and his videos drew millions of views. The company fired back with a Utah RICO suit naming Schneider, Mansell, and others, and Schneider was arrested on charges including stalking and trespass. Notably, Patreon CEO Jack Conte refused the company’s demand to pull Schneider’s page, telling Bricks and Minifigs they could “stuff it.” Eventually, the corporate franchisor parted ways with the store owners, cited gross negligence, and invited Mansell to settle. Chris’s own take: had the store simply returned the collection, none of this would have happened, and the owner “kind of deserved” the heat. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Summer Game Fest 2026 Unloads a Stacked Lineup Next, Chris turns to Summer Game Fest, which Geoff Keighley hosted June 5 from the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Capcom opened with a remake of the 2000 cult classic, now titled Resident Evil Veronica, bringing Claire Redfield back for a 2027 launch. Square Enix then closed the night with Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, the remake trilogy’s finale, also targeting 2027. Other reveals included a new Spyro the Dragon, the console debut of Guild Wars 3, and a 2027 window for The Wolf Among Us 2. For the record, Fable and Halo Campaign Evolved appeared at the separate Xbox Games Showcase, not SGF itself. Off script, Chris riffed on the games he is most excited about. He flagged GTA 6, now expected in November at a rumored $100-plus price, alongside new Wolverine, Until Dawn, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin titles. The lineup, he admitted, has him ready to finally buy a PlayStation 5. A World Record Falls at the First Enhanced Games The first Enhanced Games ran May 24 in Las Vegas, openly allowing performance-enhancing drugs and skipping anti-doping tests. Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev swam the 50-meter freestyle in 20.81 seconds, beating the official record and pocketing a $1 million bonus. However, he wore a polyurethane supersuit banned since 2010, so the suit arguably mattered as much as any chemistry. Interestingly, several athletes who said they raced clean still won, including sprinter Fred Kerley and swimmer Hunter Armstrong. Predictably, WADA, World Aquatics, World Athletics, and the IOC all condemned the event and will not recognize the results. Chris, for his part, found the whole spectacle more fun than alarming. An AI Collar Claims It Can Translate Your Dog A startup called PettiChat is selling an AI collar that claims to translate barks and meows in real time at 94.6 percent accuracy. To be fair, it is no obvious scam, with real funding, a working app, and coverage from Forbes and Vice. Still, no peer-reviewed research or independent lab backs that number. Reviewers called the demo footage “undeniably staged,” and the best real science reads broad emotion, not full sentences. Chris agreed from experience, noting that any longtime dog owner already reads their pet’s body language well enough. Microsoft Builds Its Own AI Coding Models At its Build conference in early June, Microsoft unveiled MAI-Code-1-Flash, its first homegrown coding model. The tool turns plain-English prompts into source code and plugs into GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio Code. Additionally, Microsoft previewed a reasoning model, MAI-Thinking-1, on its Foundry platform. The strategy is clear: Microsoft remains OpenAI’s biggest backer, yet it wants to depend on OpenAI less and cut developer costs. The timing is loud, too, since Anthropic just filed confidentially for an IPO and OpenAI is reportedly readying its own. AI Leaders Ask Congress to Screen Synthetic DNA On a more sobering note, the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Microsoft AI signed a joint letter to Congress. Together, they want mandatory screening at the companies that synthesize custom DNA to order. Their argument is blunt: powerful AI is eroding the expertise that once limited who could engineer a biological weapon. Therefore, they urge identity verification, sequence screening, and recordkeeping written into federal law this session. As Chris put it, when the people building the technology sound this worried, it is worth paying attention. Blue Origin’s New Glenn Explodes on the Test Stand Finally, Chris closes the headlines in space. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket erupted in a fireball during a static-fire test at Cape Canaveral on May 28. Fortunately, nobody was hurt and no satellites were aboard, though the first stage and some ground equipment were destroyed. That booster was set to launch Amazon’s first big batch of Leo internet satellites, the constellation formerly known as Project Kuiper. Afterward, CEO Dave Limp vowed to fly again this year, while NASA’s Jared Isaacman pushed to move Blue Origin’s lunar lander onto a backup rocket. Meanwhile, SpaceX flew its next-generation Starship Version 3 for the first time on May 22. Chris’s Travels, a New Camera, and a Media Venture To wrap up, Chris shares what he has been up to away from the mic. First, he recaps a hot, sickness-plagued trip to Disneyland in California, then a far better visit to Portland to see Ray. Proudly, he congratulates his brother on graduating and predicts their dad would be proud too. He also gushes about his new Nikon ZR camera, built on RED technology, which he says rivals a Sony FX3 at half the price. Beyond that, he is building a media business with a friend, taking free shoots to network while leaning on directing as his strength. You can find his work on Instagram at @dis.chris. Chris signs off with the usual ecosystem mentions: GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email at [email protected], the show newsletter, and modern podcast apps at podcastapps.com. He also thanks GoDaddy for over twenty years of support and teases a return to a more regular release schedule. The post The $200k Star Wars LEGO Consignment War #1867 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane unpacks how two colliding black holes revealed a whirlpool in spacetime, a direct detection of frame dragging hidden in the cleanest gravitational-wave signal ever recorded. Additional stories cover the James Webb Space Telescope, counting 16.5… The post Colliding Black Holes Reveal a Whirlpool in Spacetime #1866 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down a reversible conductive glue from Newcastle University that could replace solder and finally make electronics recycling work. Additional stories cover China widening its clean energy lead, DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve scoring wins from genomics to… The post A Reversible Glue that could Replace Solder #1865 appeared first on Geek News Central.

  In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with Mozilla shipping Firefox 150 with 271 patched bugs found by Anthropic’s Mythos system, the first major real-world deployment of the AlphaGo-Moment cybersecurity tooling. He also covers a 9-year dormant Linux kernel… The post Mozilla Meets Mythos #1864 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with GitHub’s worst reliability month on record and the AI infrastructure pressure behind it. He also covers Warp going open source, Apple’s Mac supply crunch, OpenAI’s goblin tic, the first 1X humanoid factory in… The post GitHub, Goblins, Ghostty, and GPS III #1863 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane digs into a new study showing AI is literally frying workers’ brains, then unpacks Anthropic’s wildest month ever – from a 1,487% user surge to Pentagon retaliation to a leaked model called Mythos. Also covered:… The post Agentically Frying your Brain using AI #1861 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Chris Cochrane dives into Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo – the cheapest Mac laptop ever made – and whether it spells trouble for Chromebook makers. He also covers Samsung’s CEO blaming AI for rising phone prices, Framework raising… The post Is the MacBook Neo a Chromebook Killer? #1860 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray tackles Anthropic’s standoff with the U.S. Department of War after CEO Daria Amodei refused to grant unrestricted model access, citing concerns over mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. The government responded by banning Anthropic models through administrative… The post Anthropic Stands Their Ground, Ethics over Money #1859 appeared first on Geek News Central.

Chris breaks down the backlash to Ring’s Super Bowl “Search Party” ad, which aimed to help find lost pets but reignited privacy concerns over AI-powered neighborhood surveillance. He also explores the surge of AI-themed Super Bowl ads, Apple’s delayed Siri… The post Ring Search Party Sparks Privacy Backlash #1858 appeared first on Geek News Central.

This episode kicks off with Moltbook, a social network exclusively for AI agents where 150,000 agents formed digital religions, sold “digital drugs” (system prompts to alter other agents), and attempted prompt injection attacks to steal each other’s API keys within… The post OpenClaw, Moltbook and the Rise of AI Agent Societies #1857 appeared first on Geek News Central.

Geek News Central breaks down the new DJI drone ban, explaining what’s actually restricted, what remains legal, and how the changes affect creators and consumers, plus updates on health AI, robotics, and emerging tech shaping 2026 -Want to be a… The post So… Is DJI Actually Banned? #1856 appeared first on Geek News Central.

1855 kicks off with a bombshell AP investigation revealing how Silicon Valley giants IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, Oracle, and more spent decades building China’s surveillance state. Also covered, malicious Chrome extensions stealing credentials from 170+ sites, Microsoft’s ambitious Rust migration plans,… The post Money over Ethics: Silicon Valley and China’s Police State #1855 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray covers December Tech News! T-Mobile’s groundbreaking Starlink satellite beta promises to eliminate dead zones using your regular phone with no special equipment needed. Also discussed: Japan’s ship-mounted laser weapon with unlimited ammo, China’s record-breaking 387 mph… The post The End of Deadzones and Japan’s new Laser Gunship #1854 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In episode 1853 of Geek News Central, Chris speaks about Apple’s pricey new iPhone Pocket accessory, questioning its usefulness and reacting to the internet’s mockery of the product. Chris then shifts gears to tech and gaming, highlighting Steam’s new Steam… The post iPhone Pocket: Clever Innovation or Cash Grab? #1853 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, we dive into NASA’s first test flight of the ultra-quiet X-59 supersonic jet, explore the futuristic Phantom transparent 4K monitor, and break down World Labs’ breakthrough 3D world-modeling AI. We also cover TypeScript’s unexpected rise in the… The post From NASA’s X-59 to Humanoid Workers: The Future Is Getting Weird #1852 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray kicks things off with NASA’s Voyager mission uncovering extreme plasma temperatures—up to 50,000 Kelvin—at the edge of our solar system. He also dives into PBS’s 25-year celebration of the ISS, China’s breakthrough analog chip 1,000× faster… The post NASA’s Voyager Probes the Mysteries of the Heliosphere #1851 appeared first on Geek News Central.

Dive into “Gadget Overload for October 2025,” where we review this month’s standout tech — from Apple’s M5-powered iPad Pro and Asus ROG Ally X to Meta’s smart glasses — plus NVIDIA’s AI chip deal in South Korea, Google’s Gemini… The post Gadget Overload for October 2025 #1850 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray breaks down a petition signed by 800+ leaders calling to pause the superintelligence race, then digs into AWS outage chatter about AI replacing DevOps, and Microsoft’s Gaming Copilot privacy concerns. Plus: a prompt trick that boosts… The post Tech Leaders Demand a Pause on Superintelligence #1849 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray dives into OpenAI’s plan to allow mature content for verified ChatGPT users, explores the Xreal One AR glasses and Opera’s AI-powered Neon browser, and highlights innovations like Portalgraph’s holographic display. Plus, updates on NASA’s ISS retirement,… The post ChatGPT Set to Unlock Mature Content for Verified Users #1848 appeared first on Geek News Central.

NVIDIA’s new DGX Spark is shaking up the AI world — a $3,999 pocket-sized supercomputer built to run powerful AI models locally. A true game changer for developers. -Want to be a Guest on a Podcast or YouTube Channel? Sign… The post The Future of AI on Your Desktop #1847 appeared first on Geek News Central.

OpenAI’s Dev Day headline turns ChatGPT into an app platform, allowing users to call services like Canva and Zillow directly in chat, signaling a significant push toward an AI “OS” for the web. -Want to be a Guest on a… The post ChatGPT Unveils App Platform #1846 appeared first on Geek News Central.

Dive into Apple’s “Scratchgate,” Google’s new live search AI, Xbox’s handheld Ally with Gaming Copilot, EA’s massive buyout, plus wild innovations like a gaming exoskeleton and a house-printing robot. -Want to be a Guest on a Podcast or YouTube Channel?… The post Apple’s Scratchgate Uncovered #1845 appeared first on Geek News Central.

Apple is developing a new operating system, codenamed “Charismatic,” to power its upcoming smart home hub and tabletop robot. Blending tvOS and watchOS, the platform will feature widgets, multi-user profiles, and Siri-first controls, signaling Apple’s deeper push into the connected… The post The Future of Smart Homes with Apple’s New OS #1844 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode on GNC, Chris, the youngest son of Todd Cochrane, addresses the listeners following the unexpected passing of his father on September 8. Chris shares that the past week has been one of the most challenging times in… The post Remembering Dad and What’s Next for GNC #1843 appeared first on Geek News Central.

On this special final New Media Show tribute episode, we honor the life and legacy of Todd Cochrane, podcasting pioneer, podcast hall of famer, founder of Blubrry and RawVoice, host of Geek News Central podcast, author of one of the… The post Remembering Todd Cochrane – Podcast Hall of Famer and Blubrry CEO and, GNC Host appeared first on Geek News Central.

YouTube is enforcing stricter rules for its Premium Family plan, requiring all members to live in the same household. Non-eligible users will lose Premium benefits after 14 days, following Netflix’s 2023 policy shift to curb account sharing and drive new… The post YouTube’s Premium Family Plan Faces New Restrictions #1842 appeared first on Geek News Central.

New research reveals that ChatGPT’s frequently used words, often referred to as AI buzzwords, are increasingly appearing in everyday human conversations. By analyzing over 22 million words from unscripted podcasts, researchers found a notable rise in terms like “intricate” and… The post ChatGPT Buzzwords Are Reshaping Human Conversations #1841 appeared first on Geek News Central.

AI chatbots, trained to be overly agreeable, have unintentionally become catalysts for psychological crises by validating users’ grandiose or delusional beliefs. Vulnerable individuals can spiral into dangerous fantasy feedback loops, mistaking chatbot sycophancy for scientific validation. As AI models evolve… The post How AI Chatbots Amplify Delusion and Distort Reality #1840 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In recent months, headlines have sensationalized stories of AI models “blackmailing” engineers and “refusing” to shut down, stoking fears of runaway artificial intelligence. But beneath these dramatic narratives lies a far less sinister truth: these alarming outputs emerged from theatrical,… The post The Real AI Threat #1839 appeared first on Geek News Central.

Perplexity AI has been exposed for secretly deploying stealth crawlers that intentionally evade website no-crawl directives, rotate IP addresses, and even masquerade as regular browsers. Despite explicit robots.txt blocks and firewall defenses, Perplexity’s undisclosed bots aggressively scrape restricted content from… The post Perplexity AI Caught Red-Handed: Secretly Sneaking Past Website Defenses #1838 appeared first on Geek News Central.

Google is now indexing publicly shared ChatGPT conversations, potentially exposing sensitive business information, strategies, and personal details. Marketers and businesses should audit their shared content, educate teams about AI privacy, and take precautions to prevent data leaks. Or is this… The post Google Indexing ChatGPT Shared Links – Marketing Opportunity? #1837 appeared first on Geek News Central.

The FBI has issued an urgent warning about “The Com,” a rapidly expanding network of youth aged 11–25 who are engaged in both cyber and real-world crimes. Split into Hacker Com, IRL Com, and Extortion Com, the group commits acts… The post FBI Warns of Rising Cybercrime and Real-World Violence from Youth Network “The Com” #1836 appeared first on Geek News Central.

Fifty years ago, Bill Gates and Paul Allen’s agreement with MITS for a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 microcomputer marked the founding of Microsoft, profoundly influencing the world of personal computing. This collaboration transformed technology, paving the way for… The post 50 Years of Microsoft: How the Altair 8800 and BASIC Revolutionized Computing #1835 appeared first on Geek News Central.

Google DeepMind’s advanced Gemini Deep Think AI has reached a milestone by solving five out of six problems at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad, achieving gold-medal status. Unlike previous models, Gemini operated entirely in natural language and within official time… The post Google’s Gemini Deep Think AI Achieves Gold Medal at 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad #1834 appeared first on Geek News Central.

OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT Agent, an advanced AI assistant that performs complex, multi-step tasks by directly controlling a virtual computer. Built with a new model combining capabilities from prior tools, Operator and Deep Research, the agent can automate workflows such as scheduling meetings, preparing presentations, or even submitting weekly office parking requests. The tool, which requires user permission before irreversible actions, is being rolled out to Pro, Plus, and Team users, with plans for broader availability later. OpenAI emphasizes its focus on solving challenging tasks over speed and has implemented strict safety and financial use restrictions. I am speaking at a Business AI conference next week. I hope you will join me. It’s free and has a great lineup of speakers. -Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. -Get a United Chase Card and 10,000 miles, you are supporting GNC Travel with your signup! Subscribe to the Newsletter. Join the Chat @ GeekNews.Chat Email Todd or follow him on Facebook. Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Download the Audio Show File New YouTube Channel – Beyond the Office Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Full Summary: In the episode titled “OpenAI Unveils Game-Changing ChatGPT Agent,” host Todd Cochrane discusses the launch of OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Agent, a sophisticated AI assistant capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks by controlling a virtual computer. Todd explains that the agent can automate various workflows, such as scheduling meetings and preparing presentations, emphasizing its safety features and focus on productivity over speed. He shares his firsthand experience of using the ChatGPT Agent to plan a flight, noting how it saved him a significant amount of time compared to manual searches. Cochrane highlights the impressive output of the AI tool, demonstrating how it provided detailed flight options and pricing. He expresses enthusiasm for the potential of such technology, suggesting it could significantly enhance productivity and workflow, although he notes the current limitations regarding speed and performance. The episode begins with Todd welcoming listeners to the podcast and offering acknowledgments to the show’s sponsor, GoDaddy. Continuing the discussion, Todd addresses various technology news stories, including the app Beeper, which aggregates multiple chat services for easier communication. He mentions a cybersecurity breach involving Ukrainian hackers that destroyed a Russian drone manufacturer’s network and discusses Delta Air Lines’ controversial pricing strategy, which is based on individual AI assessments of ticket prices, and criticizes it as predatory. The episode covers a range of tech topics, including discussions on NASA’s budget cuts, a settlement involving Meta regarding user privacy, updates on Google Chrome’s support for older Macs, ExpressVPN’s expanded coverage, and issues surrounding data privacy for T-Mobile customers. Cochrane shares his thoughts on generational privacy concerns, AI’s role in content creation, and ongoing developments in the crypto space, including significant thefts within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Todd concludes the episode by discussing advancements in AI technology, the interaction between it and user behavior, and the evolving landscape of business and consumer interactions. He encourages listeners to provide feedback and stay engaged with the show. Overall, the episode blends detailed insights into the capabilities of OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Agent with broader discussions on technology trends, privacy, and the future of AI in everyday applications. 21:45–Trump’s defunding of NASA 23:11–Mark Zuckerberg and others agreed to a settlement 23:44–Google is dropping Chrome support 24:20–An Armenian man is extradited to the US 25:11–Fitbit down? 25:56–Adoption organization records exposed 26:31–ExpressVPN 26:55–Waymo and Tesla 27:32–Reddit is down 27:49–Gboard 13:58–Ukrainian hackers 18:21–The FCC plans to ban Chinese technology  28:25–Trump’s tax law and Bill Gates 12:45–Beeper 29:24–Intel lays off staff 30:16–Uber’s latest robotaxi plan 30:45–US authors suing Anthropic can band together 31:23–SpaceX launches satellites 31:55–Hackers stole billions 33:14–Another big company gives up on hydrogen 21:07–New Samsung tri-fold leaks 34:10–The Google Pixel Watch 4 35:03–Roblox 15:23–Delta 35:52–Gen Z is spying on each other 37:57–AI and Hollywood 39:58–Jack Dorsey invests millions 40:26–Samsung chairman cleared of fraud The post OpenAI Unveils Game-Changing ChatGPT Agent #1833 appeared first on Geek News Central.

TeamGroup has launched the P250Q-M80 SSD, a specialized drive that can physically destroy its flash memory by pressing a button. Designed for defense and critical-use scenarios, the drive features a one-click data destruction circuit, complete with LED indicators and functionality that remains intact even during power loss. Although not record-breaking in terms of speed or capacity, its self-destruct feature sets it apart for high-security applications. I am speaking at a Business AI conference next week. I hope you will join me. It’s free and has a great lineup of speakers. -Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. -Get a United Chase Card and 10,000 miles, you are supporting GNC Travel with your signup! Subscribe to the Newsletter. Join the Chat @ GeekNews.Chat Email Todd or follow him on Facebook. Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Download the Audio Show File New YouTube Channel – Beyond the Office Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Full Summary: In episode 1832 of the podcast, host Todd Cochrane opens with the lead story about the launch of a specialized SSD by Team Group. This p258q-m80 features a unique capability that allows it to physically destroy its flash memory with the press of a button. This drive is designed for defense and critical use scenarios and includes a one-click data destruction circuit that functions even if the power is lost. Cochrane highlights the significance of this technology, comparing it to something out of a James Bond film, and speculates on its potential uses for individuals seeking absolute data security. Cochrane also reminisces about his experiences in the military, where they employed manual data destruction methods for hard drives, noting the evolution of data security measures as solid-state drives became more common. He mentions the careful design of the SSD’s self-destruct feature, which requires holding the button for five seconds to activate, thus minimizing accidental data loss. After discussing the lead story, Cochrane welcomes listeners to the episode and promotes the show’s sponsor, GoDaddy, mentioning various exclusive deals and inviting listeners to support the podcast by becoming insiders. He encourages interaction by suggesting listeners join the conversation on social media and visit the podcast’s website for more content. Transitioning to additional stories, Cochrane brings up Google’s plan to combine Chrome OS and Android, reflecting on the implications of this integration. He then discusses various updates related to YouTube TV’s multi-view feature, Netflix subscription options, and an interesting tidbit about Texas Governor Greg Abbott denying a Freedom of Information Act request for his emails with Elon Musk. The conversation progresses with a series of tech news updates, including developments with the iPhone’s Dynamic Island feature, Bay Area restaurants conducting social media research on diners, and two individuals who started their own ISP due to dissatisfaction with Comcast. The episode also highlights NASA and SpaceX’s upcoming Crew-11 mission, TikTok’s lawsuit over its design, and the Grok chatbot’s apology for its inappropriate behavior. Cochrane continues with discussions on a historical space rendezvous, the discontinuation of Nokia phones in the U.S., and various exciting tech product leaks, such as the DJI Mic three. Other stories include an executive order from the White House concerning cybersecurity, NVIDIA’s CEO comments on AI’s impact on jobs, and a notorious auction of a Martian meteorite. Finally, Cochrane emphasizes the importance of being cautious about online scams, recounting his near experience with a fraudulent Tumi sale, and he addresses concerns about children using AI as substitutes for human friendships. He wraps up the episode by thanking listeners for their support, reminding them of the sponsorship from GoDaddy, and encouraging them to subscribe and interact with the podcast. He concludes by inviting everyone to join him again for the next episode. 07:56–YouTube TV enhances Multiview 08:47–How to score a cheap Netflix 09:45–Gov. Abbott says his emails with Elon Musk are “too embarrassing.” 11:42–The iPhone’s Dynamic Island 00:50–This SSD will self-destruct 12:48–Bay Area restaurants are vetting your social media 14:43–2 guys built their own ISP 15:55–NASA and SpaceX 17:22–TikTok loses bid to dismiss lawsuit 18:06–Grok team apologizes 19:01–Hackers took over Elmo’s account NASA contractor lays off workers 19:26–Apollo-Soyuz at 50 20:14–HMD is pulling the plug on Nokia phones 20:28–DJI Mic 3 and DJI Osmo 360 21:23–New White House cyber executive order 22:51–AI job losses will come 23:42–Microsoft will halt new Office features for Windows 10 24:05–WordPress users beware 24:45–Tesla shareholders will vote on investing in xAI 26:21–A piece of Mars is going up for auction 27:27–Louis Vuitton data breach 30:11–Jack Dorsey built another app 32:10–Lonely kids are using AI 31:06–Popeyes drops an AI-powered diss track against McDonald’s 06:34–ChromeOS and Android The post Self-Destructing SSD for Ultimate Data Security #1832 appeared first on Geek News Central.

xAI’s Grok 4 achieves the highest Artificial Intelligence Index score, outperforming OpenAI, Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Anthropic Claude 4 Opus in extensive benchmarks. Grok 4 excels notably in coding, mathematics, and advanced reasoning tasks despite moderate speed and pricing. -Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. -Get a United Chase Card and 10,000 miles, you are supporting GNC Travel with your signup! Subscribe to the Newsletter. Join the Chat @ GeekNews.Chat Email Todd or follow him on Facebook. Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Download the Audio Show File New YouTube Channel – Beyond the Office Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Full Summary: In episode 1831 of the Geek News Central podcast, host Todd Cochrane discusses the lead story about xAI’s Grok 4 achieving the highest artificial intelligence index score, surpassing models from OpenAI, Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Anthropic Claude 4 Opus. He emphasizes Grok 4’s excellence in areas like coding and advanced reasoning tasks, despite some concerns regarding its speed and pricing. Cochrane reflects on the significant praise Grok 4 has received from developers, noting its progression from Grok 3, which was competitive but not a frontrunner until now. He mentions Grok 4’s pricing structure, which is comparable to Claude 4 but more expensive than Gemini 2. After welcoming listeners and acknowledging the podcast’s sponsors, Cochrane mentions his circumstances that caused a brief absence from the show, but assures listeners of his health. He updates listeners on a recent eye exam and new glasses he has acquired, expressing minor annoyances with setup issues in his studio. Cochrane then delves into further news, including xAI’s new $300 monthly AI subscription plan, which he finds to be a significant investment compared to his OpenAI Pro subscription. He discusses the challenges developers face in embracing AI tools and hints at a new integrated web browser by OpenAI that they plan to launch, which could change how users interact with AI. He warns of the vulnerabilities found in browser extensions that have turned users’ browsers into web scraping bots, as well as the potential cybersecurity ramifications. Cochrane also reflects on Nvidia’s market cap reaching $4 trillion, indicating the booming interest in AI technologies. The episode covers additional topics, including Major League Baseball’s testing of a robot umpire system, T-Mobile’s end of DEI programs amid an acquisition effort, and significant cuts within NASA due to proposed budget changes. Cochrane shares insights about a data breach impacting Qantas and notes Jack Dorsey’s new secure messaging app, which is still under scrutiny. He warns listeners about a new hack that could expose cars to remote hacking through Bluetooth vulnerabilities and questions the design of new Bluetooth speakers from IKEA. Lastly, he discusses the new MacBook lineup anticipated with the M5 chip and closes by encouraging audience engagement, promoting his sponsors, and thanking listeners for their support. Throughout the episode, Cochrane invites participation from his audience and emphasizes the importance of using AI responsibly, reflecting on its growing influence in various fields while weaving personal anecdotes and updates into the discussion of technology news. 15:43–HBO Max is back 16:14–Galaxy Unpacked 2025 17:41–MLB will test its robot umpire system 18:55–T-Mobile ends DEI programs  19:58–NASA will lose thousands of senior staff 21:21–LEGO’s first buildable Decepticon Transformer 22:02–Quanta confirms millions impacted by data breach 23:08–Bitchat 24:25–The Earth is trapped inside a giant cosmic void 25:24–July full moon 26:07–Outlook down? 26:22–Grok is coming to Tesla EVs. 27:02–McDonald’s chatbot 28:02–Microsoft is spending billions  13:14–Browser extensions 31:21–Trump’s tariffs  32:30–Prime Day loses its spark 38:19–Millions of cars are exposed to remote hacking  14:59–Nvidia 39:04–IKEA launches Bluetooth speakers X’s CEO is out 11:27–OpenAI’s web browser  39:51–Sean Duffy to be interim NASA administrator Samsung plans to launch its trifold smartphone  The post Grok 4 Surpasses OpenAI and Google, Now Top AI Model #1831 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In today’s creator-centric adult industry, performers shoulder not only on-camera work but also scripting, editing, marketing, and ongoing fan interaction—tasks once handled by studios. To manage the growing workload and sustain subscriber engagement, many turn to AI tools—both mainstream LLMs like ChatGPT and niche solutions like GPTease—to draft scripts, automate responses, plan shoots, and even price custom content. While AI boosts efficiency and revenue potential, some creators remain cautious about over-automating client interactions and the broader implications for the industry. -Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. -Get a United Chase Card and 10,000 miles, you are supporting GNC Travel with your signup! Subscribe to the Newsletter. Join the Chat @ GeekNews.Chat Email Todd or follow him on Facebook. Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Download the Audio Show File New YouTube Channel – Beyond the Office Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Full Summary: In this episode of “Geek News Central,” host Todd Cochrane discusses the impact of AI tools in the adult content creation industry. He begins by mentioning that in the current creator-centric adult industry, performers are now responsible for various tasks, such as scripting, editing, marketing, and ongoing fan interactions, roles that studios previously managed. To cope with the increasing workload, many creators are turning to AI tools, including mainstream large language models like ChatGPT and niche solutions, to help draft scripts, automate responses, and plan shoots. Cochrane notes that although AI can enhance efficiency and revenue for creators, some remain cautious about over-relying on automation, particularly concerning client interactions and the broader implications for the industry. He reflects on the adult industry’s history as an early adopter of technology, mentioning their quick embrace of formats like Betamax, VHS, CDs, DVDs, and online platforms, and how this adaptability allows creators to focus more on creativity despite their diverse responsibilities. Transitioning to a personal commentary, Cochrane comments on the prevalence of custom scene requests from fans and the proliferation of subscription sites like OnlyFans. He believes that just like in podcasting, adult content creators are increasingly taking on multiple roles and responsibilities, leading many to utilize AI to assist with scripting and communication tasks, despite limitations imposed by restrictions on adult content by some AI platforms. Cochrane then gives a shout-out to their sponsor, GoDaddy, and encourages listeners to take advantage of special offers available through Geek News Central. He emphasizes the importance of listener support in keeping the podcast running, urging them to consider becoming insiders for additional perks. Moving on to the news segment, Cochrane highlights a report indicating that self-employed individuals are earning more, likely due to the increased productivity facilitated by AI, leading businesses to favor freelancers over full-time employees. He also touches on the flexible work arrangements freelancers offer, contrasted by financial complications and a lack of government support for such workers. Cochrane discusses various news items, including NASA’s need for a cybersecurity risk assessment, the release of new Apple Music milestones celebrating ten years of streaming, and serious security flaws found in Brother printers. He also reflects on the historical launch of the iPhone and its significance to the tech landscape. He mentions notable industry movements, such as Robinhood’s expansion of services, legislative developments in the renewable energy sector, and Nintendo’s decision to pull products from Amazon due to unauthorized reselling. Cochrane closes the episode by discussing tech trends, including fitness trackers, Bluetooth security vulnerabilities, and the ongoing conversations around TikTok’s status in the U.S. market. Cochrane thanks listeners for their support and invites them to reach out via email or social media. He expresses excitement about the new setup for the podcast, recorded in the Philippines, and assures that regular episodes will continue to be delivered. He wraps up the episode by encouraging everyone to stay tuned for next time. Self-employed workers are earning more. “We’re trapped in a black hole.” LLMs are optimizing the adult industry  Why phishing attacks go unreported in healthcare  NASA needs a cybersecurity risk assessment DJI robot vacuum leak Apple Music  DoJ clears HPE Sinaloa drug cartel hires a cybersnoop Robinhood NASA headquarters budget protest Brother printer models have a security flaw RFK wants every American to wear a fitness tracker  Hacker pleads guilty to breaching networks Hawaiian Airlines Joby Aviation Anker is recalling power banks  Ryan Gosling soars into space  Everything new on Netflix  Nintendo pulls products from Amazon  Hackers can attack phones A cheaper MacBook  Canada caves to Trump   The post AI-Driven Revolution in Adult Content Creation #1830 appeared first on Geek News Central.

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm, is accused by a senior U.S. official of supporting China’s military and intelligence services, sharing user data with Beijing, and using Southeast Asian shell companies to bypass U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips. Despite public claims of limited resources, the company reportedly accessed large volumes of restricted Nvidia H100 chips and appears in over 150 Chinese military procurement records. DeepSeek did not respond to allegations, while U.S. lawmakers and regulators assess next steps. -Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. -Get a United Chase Card and 10,000 miles, you are supporting GNC Travel with your signup! Subscribe to the Newsletter. Join the Chat @ GeekNews.Chat Email Todd or follow him on Facebook. Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Download the Audio Show File New YouTube Channel – Beyond the Office Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Full Summary: In episode 1829 of the podcast, Todd Cochrane discusses allegations against DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm, accused of supporting China’s military intelligence by sharing user data with Beijing and evading U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips. The firm reportedly accessed large amounts of restricted NVIDIA H100 chips and appears in over 150 procurement records associated with the Chinese military. Cochrane is not surprised that DeepSeek would be involved with the Chinese military, discussing the company’s tactics to bypass export restrictions through Southeast Asian shell companies. He shares insights on how Chinese law requires companies to provide data to the government, raising concerns about privacy for global users who may unwittingly contribute information to Chinese military operations. Cochrane notes that no response has been received from DeepSeek regarding these allegations, and discusses another assertion from the company’s representatives that their AI capabilities are comparable to those of OpenAI. The podcast then transitions to other news stories. Cochrane mentions an impending cyber attack threat from Iranian hackers against the U.S., prompted by recent military actions. He speculates about the implications of sleeper cells in the U.S. and shares reflections from his 25 years of service in the Navy regarding potential threats from Iran. Moving on to a bizarre crime story, Cochrane reports on a case in Denmark where teenagers, some as young as 14, have been arrested for hiring other teenagers for contract killings using encrypted messaging apps in what Europol labels a violence-as-a-service operation. He expresses shock at the involvement of youths in such severe criminal activities. Cochrane then discusses the recent statistics showing streaming services have surpassed traditional TV viewership for the first time, representing a significant shift in media consumption trends. He also recounts a conversation with a YouTube expert who indicated that specific keywords in his content may be suppressing growth on the platform, contrasting this with his freedom as an audio podcaster. Next, he highlights a cybersecurity threat involving Russian hackers targeting Gmail passwords for international critics and academics, as well as a note about the success of American hybrid vehicles over fully electric ones, attributing it to the insufficient charging infrastructure for electric cars. Continuing with technology topics, Cochrane discusses the launch of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, recent attempts by YouTube to block ad blockers, and a new partnership involving Hinge, the dating app, which aims to create its payment system to bypass App Store fees. He also shares insights on Apple’s attempts to negotiate concessions with the European Union to avoid fines regarding their App Store practices. Towards the end, he provides updates on various topics, including a health data breach affecting McLaren Health Care in Michigan, Texas’s move to implement permits for self-driving cars, and the launch of Amazon’s new Kuiper Internet satellites, among others. Cochrane concludes the episode with thanks to listeners and a reminder about the next episodes, emphasizing the importance of audience engagement and subscription to the podcast. He ends the episode by wishing everyone well and encouraging listeners to be safe during the upcoming July 4th celebrations. 15:17–Teens used encrypted chats to recruit for ‘violence as service’ 22:33–Americans are buying twice as many hybrids 24:05–Space launches Starklink 10-23 24:18–YouTube’s new anti-adblock measures 27:12–Texas will require permits for self-driving cars 27:34–A popular WordPress theme has been hijacked 28:14–New Hot Wheels sets 29:28–Purisim’s $1,999 Liberty PhoneA 30:17–Hinge 31:05–Apple keeps pulling its ads 32:59–The iPhone 17 Pro 00:52–DeepSeek 33:53–Amazon launches second batch of satellites 17:09–Streaming surpasses traditional TV 34:20–AI dating chatbots are ‘playing with fire’ 35:31–iOS 26 36:05–Scammers are calling us less 36:44–Lenovo’s new Chromebook 19:11–Russian hackers target Gmail passwords 38:15–‘ID Buzz’ 09:05–US braces for cyberattacks 39:06–Thousands impacted by health care data breach 39:38–Tesla’s robotaxi service rolls out in Texas 40:40–Amazon boss says AI will replace jobs 42:17–Texas to approve a public Bitcoin reserve The post DeepSeek Accused of Aiding Chinese Military #1829 appeared first on Geek News Central.

President Donald Trump has extended the deadline for the sale of TikTok in the U.S. by 90 days, delaying the enforcement of a law mandating its sale or ban due to national security concerns. Despite bipartisan criticism, Trump cited TikTok’s role in his success in the 2024 campaign. ByteDance now has until September 17 to finalize a deal, pending approval from Chinese authorities. -Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. -Get a United Chase Card and 10,000 miles, you are supporting GNC Travel with your signup! Subscribe to the Newsletter. Join the Chat @ GeekNews.Chat Email Todd or follow him on Facebook. Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Download the Audio Show File New YouTube Channel – Beyond the Office Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Full Summary: In episode 1828 of the podcast hosted by Todd Cochrane, the lead story discusses President Trump’s extension of the TikTok sale deadline in the United States by another ninety days, delaying the enforcement of a law mandating its sale or ban due to national security concerns. Despite bipartisan criticism, the president cited TikTok’s role in his 2024 campaign success, allowing ByteDance until September 17 to finalize a deal pending approval from Chinese authorities. Todd introduces the episode by acknowledging the divided opinions surrounding TikTok: users want it to remain, while critics want it to be gone. He expresses skepticism about TikTok being banned under the current administration, suggesting it is unlikely to happen. He highlights the ongoing national security concerns linked to the app and mentions a bipartisan push for its sale or ban. The discussion includes TikTok’s statement expressing gratitude for being kept online for its 170 million US users, mentioning its work with the office of Vice President Vance. Todd notes the White House press secretary’s comments about ensuring closure on the deal and alludes to criticisms from various lawmakers. He continues with updates from the tech space, briefly touching on the recent SpaceX Starship incident, where the rocket exploded during a test, noting that no one was harmed due to the safety protocols in place. Todd reflects on security breaches, making commentary on the sheer scale of exposed records from databases and the implications for individual privacy. Transitioning into TV and streaming, Todd reports that traditional TV has reached a historic low as streaming services now have a larger viewership. He announces Netflix’s first broadcast deal with French TV giant TF1, allowing subscribers to watch live TV content, reflecting on the changing landscape of media consumption. Todd shifts back to the tech sector, reporting on data breaches, including a ransomware attack that affected five million patients in a healthcare data breach, and a significant DOJ move to seize $225 million linked to cryptocurrency scams. He also remarks on the prevalence of AI-generated spam emails and concerns regarding online privacy and security. He discusses government surveillance issues, covering the U.S. request for an extension regarding the legality of obtaining records from cell towers without specific warrants, drawing parallels to Fourth Amendment protections. Alongside this, Todd notes the backlash against HBO Max for increasing ad breaks for viewers and mentions Amazon’s push for employees to relocate to office hubs. As he wraps up the current events segment, he highlights various other tech stories, including Krispy Kreme’s data breach, the upcoming foldable iPhone, and Microsoft’s further job cuts amid shifts toward AI. In closing, Todd engages the audience, encouraging them to share their thoughts via email and supporting the podcast through GoDaddy, thanking listeners for their continued support. He wraps up the episode by teasing future content and praising the audience for staying tuned. Todd emphasizes the importance of safety and awareness before signing off, thanking everyone for joining the show. 32:04–Max shows more ads 33:31–Amazon 35:09–Episource hit by data breach 35:25–New US visa rules 37:09–X vs. music publishers 38:57–Firefly 39:47–Silicon Valley executives join the Army 45:55–The Earth could soon be flung out of orbit 11:46–Over 16 billion records were leaked in a data breach 42:44–The foldable iPhone 43:10–Microsoft to cut more jobs 16:43–TV is dead 43:39–Life on Mars Varda 09:08–SpaceX’s Starship explodes again 45:45–DuckDuckGo 27:22–The US seeks an extension regarding “tower dumps.” 00:45–Trump confirms further delay with TikTok 26:32–Major spam email warning 25:16–DOJ files to seize millions in crypto The post Trump Delays TikTok Ban Again Amid Ongoing Sale Talks and Security Concerns #1828 appeared first on Geek News Central.

Anne Wojcicki, founder of 23andMe, has successfully repurchased the genetic testing firm out of bankruptcy through her non-profit TTAM for $305 million, surpassing a prior winning bid from Regeneron. The deal, which excludes the company’s liabilities, may ease public concerns over genetic data transfers, given Wojcicki’s continued leadership. The acquisition still requires court approval, while lawsuits related to a 2023 data breach remain unresolved. The company’s shares have surged on recovery hopes. -Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. -Get a United Chase Card and 10,000 miles, you are supporting GNC Travel with your signup! Subscribe to the Newsletter. Join the Chat @ GeekNews.Chat Email Todd or follow him on Facebook. Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Download the Audio Show File New YouTube Channel – Beyond the Office Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Full Summary: In this episode titled “Anne Wojcicki regains control of 23andMe,” Todd Cochrane discusses the lead story about Annie Wojcicki, who successfully repurchased the genetic testing company 23andMe out of bankruptcy for $305 million through her nonprofit, ITAM. This acquisition enables Wojcicki to retain leadership while excluding company liabilities, although it requires court approval amid unresolved lawsuits stemming from a 2023 data breach. Cochrane expresses relief that the acquisition was not taken over by a firm potentially interested in exploiting customer genetic data, given that he has never submitted his DNA to any testing firms. He elaborates on past controversies surrounding 23andMe, including legal issues that previously barred Wojcicki from bidding on her company. Cochrane highlights that Wojcicki is backed by a Fortune 500 firm, which enhances confidence about the future of 23andMe. Following the main story, Cochrane welcomes listeners to episode 1827 and gives shoutouts to his sponsor, GoDaddy. He encourages listeners to support Geek News Central (GNC) and interact with the show through various platforms. He also mentions his personal experience with diabetes management technology, specifically blood sugar monitoring devices that he’s decided to try. Afterward, Cochrane dives into other tech news stories. He covers topics including the launch of Oakley smart glasses. This ISS leak has delayed the Axiom mission, the prediction that the next Galaxy Watch will monitor antioxidant levels, and the unveiling of a new affordable electric car from Kia. He also discusses various cybersecurity issues, such as Google’s ongoing antitrust scrutiny and T-Mobile’s potential data breach. Throughout the episode, Cochrane shares updates about the technology industry, including Windows 11 updates, AI advancements, and the impact of a recent ransomware attack on Victoria’s Secret. Additionally, he highlights the growing skills gap in the workforce, which is attributed to a lack of expertise in AI tools and technologies. Cochrane stresses the importance of staying current and skilled to remain valuable in the job market. Cochrane concludes the episode by thanking the podcast’s supporters and reminding listeners to stay engaged with all the GNC content. He signs off, stating the next episode will be back on Thursday. 00:53–Founder of 23andMe buys back company 14:32–Meta Oakley smart glasses 17:43–ISS leaks 19:09–Windows 11 gets retro 19:37–The next Galaxy Watch 22:14–Google’s $32 billion Wiz deal 24:09–Victoria’s Secret 24:45–Every Jaws movie is now streaming 25:14–Famous “ice-age puppies” 26:31–OnePlus could be reading a tablet 27:25–Your passwords are lazy 30:10–Your least-favorite browser 30:51–Hackers claim 64 million leaked T-Mobile records 32:04–Roku has a new home page layout 32:47–The 2026 Kia EV4 sedan 34:08–WhatsApp 35:14–Android 16 glitch 35:50–NASA teams up with India 12:44–Trump Mobile AI isn’t taking your job 42:11–Walmart’s drone deliveries expand 42:47–iPadOS and macOS 43:24–Google Cloud caused an outage 43:58–Amazon Ads and Roku The post Anne Wojcicki Reclaims 23andMe in $305M Deal #1827 appeared first on Geek News Central.