• Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating “Skydance” behemoth
• Support Ars and get a better reading experience in return
• Amazon kills Alexa’s ability to control Echo speakers' AUX input
• Neutrino physicist wins 2026 Nobel Physics Prize
• Googlebook "Better Together" phone features don't work with Samsung at launch
• Why is NASA bringing 7,500 contractors back to work as civil servants?
• All-electric camping gets a solar upgrade: The 2027 Pebble Flow
• Big Oil asks Supreme Court to kill climate lawsuits before trial
• OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic
• Licensing costs driving 90 percent of VMware users to explore options: Survey
• MCP for agent-to-agent comms may be the riskiest protocol you've never heard of
• Cable lobby to sue Trump FCC over repeal of national TV ownership cap
• Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage
• Command-line tool quickly removes Apple Intelligence from macOS 27
• Controlling the brain with light earns a physiology Nobel
• Russian drones strike Ukraine’s data centers by exploiting air defense gaps
• F1 in Bahrain... in Malaysia: The race needed a software update to start
• Mass quarantine issued in Russia after unexplained death of plague researcher
• AI glasses face their first major government crackdown
• Explaining Hall-effect, TMR, and other new types of "mechanical" switches
| • Mistral says ML4 was trained using 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs in its own data centers in Europe and much of its training data was multilingual (Mistral Blog)
• Meta, Walmart, Stripe, and others publish the Personal Agent Protocol to standardize and secure interactions between AI bots and businesses (Kate Rooney/CNBC)
• Flai, which makes AI tools for car dealerships to manage phone calls, emails, and texts, raised a $27M Series A led by Base10 Partners (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)
• Sources: AI neocloud Lambda is raising up to $4B led by Blackstone and Coatue at a pre-money valuation of $14.5B in a final round before its planned IPO (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal)
• A look at consumer AI trends: ChatGPT has 3x more US subscribers than Claude or Gemini, the top 1% of spenders drive 19.5% of spend, and AI agents gain traction (Olivia Moore/Andreessen Horowitz)
• Navra, founded by SoFi and Figure co-founder Mike Cagney to make on-chain lending and securities markets more accessible, raised a $19M Series A led by Ribbit (Ryan Lawler/Axios)
• Anthropic expands its Claude Startups program, including up to $45K in discounts and credits via the Claude Startup Stack and a one-time $1,000 API credit (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)
• Google DeepMind launches EmbeddingGemma 2, a 740M-parameter model to map code, images, video, and audio in a shared embedding space, under an Apache 2.0 license (Google)
• Vinci, which makes software used to simulate elements of chip and other hardware design, raised $250M at a $1.5B valuation (Max A. Cherney/Reuters)
• Anduril lands an up to $2.9B US Navy contract to make Virginia-class submarine components, days after Palmer Luckey was named to a DOD future weapons task force (Samantha Subin/CNBC)
• Mistral releases Mistral Large 4, dubbed "le Chonk", a 1T-parameter open-weight model for general agentic capabilities (Sabrina Ortiz/The Deep View)
• Uber agrees to acquire Boston-based catering platform ezCater for $2.3B in cash to help Uber Eats reach corporate clients; the deal is set to close in months (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)
• UK retailer Asos' stock falls 10%+ after users got app notifications saying "we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance"; source: Asos is investigating (Financial Times)
• Anthropic's IPO prospectus: Dario Amodei made $18M in 2025, ranking in the middle of top tech executives, and President Daniela Amodei, his sister, made $16.4M (Reuters)
• Study: China is struggling to attract foreign AI talent; for every 30 Chinese AI researchers in the US in 2025, only one in China made the opposite journey (Zeyi Yang/New York Times)
| • Doom on the Vectrex turns the classic shooter into Tron-like vector art
• Skydance will combine HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single streaming service
• Google Photos vs. Gallery app: What's the difference and which should you use?
• Asos hit by extortion hack that may have compromised some customer data
• Why it's important to regularly replace your surge protectors
• Don't throw away your old digital camera — do this instead
• How to check if your Android phone is still getting security updates
• How to supercharge your Windows 11 PC with this built-in automation tool
• Affordable alternatives to Nintendo's Switch 2 Pro Controller
• Why don't you see external antennas on mesh Wi-Fi systems?
• Apple iPhone Duo vs. Motorola Razr Ultra: How do these foldables compare?
• Controversial $110 billion mega-merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. finally closes
• The Emmy Awards are moving to Prime Video in 2027
• Should you buy or rent your router from your internet service provider?
• JBL's PartyBox Ultimate 2 delivers 1,500 watts of sound and a built-in light show
• 4 simple benchmarks to test your PC's performance
• Nintendo Switch Sports Resort hands-on: Bigger and better than ever
• Spotify expands its Music Quiz trivia feature
• How to fix distorted audio on your PS5
• What does the shield icon mean on your Samsung Galaxy?
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