‘I Like My Big Rat Wife’: Meet the People Using Chatbots to Write Custom Fiction
While the publishing industry frets over how authors are using AI, many readers are taking things into their own hands.
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The Download: AI’s real extinction threat and age-reversal tech for eyes
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Roundtables: could AI really kill us all? Employees at the world’s leading AI labs are saying there’s a real possibility that advanced AI could destroy humanity. Are they right? Or is…
A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is a startup offering fun music apps without any AI prompting
Former Spotify exec’s company releases experimental “singles” that involves users in music making.
The four-hour-long Elon Musk documentary might be preaching to the choir
It makes sense that Musk is a long film. The latest from Alex Gibney, who has previously directed documentaries about Theranos and Steve Jobs, is an impressively thorough retelling of the story of Elon Musk, from his early days as a dot-com millionaire to “taking a wood chipper” to vital US government departments. In order…
Microsoft says ‘people matter more than AI’ following safety concerns
Microsoft is publishing a 37-page “humanist AI code of conduct” today, amid growing safety concerns over AI model progress. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a coordinated slow down of AI development over the weekend, after researchers warned recently that AI model progress could outpace our ability to safely deploy increasingly complex systems and verify…
What happens after a town de-Flocks
From Florida to Washington state, local governments across the country are canceling their contracts with Flock, the company behind the controversial AI-enabled license plate readers, in response to public outcry. But ending the contracts doesn’t necessarily mean the cameras will come down immediately – or that the information they’ve gathered will be deleted anytime soon.…
Cursor MCP Servers vs VS Code Agents: 12 Steps [2026]
Cursor’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration has quietly become one of the most searched setup topics among developers moving between Visual Studio Code and Cursor in 2026. Searches for “cursor mcp servers” now pull roughly 720 monthly queries in the US, and the reason is simple: MCP lets an AI coding agent reach outside the…
HBM4 Crunch: DRAM Inventory Falls Below 10 Days [2026]
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the two companies that together control roughly 64% of global DRAM revenue, saw their finished memory inventory fall below 10 days of supply on September 7, 2026, according to TechTimes. That threshold, unheard of in prior memory cycles, marks the sharpest sign yet that the race to build HBM4 for…
Open-Source vphone-cli Boots Full iOS 27 on Mac [2026]
An open-source command-line tool built by a solo developer has done something Apple never officially offered: boot a complete, real copy of iOS as a virtual machine on a Mac. The project, called vphone-cli, jumped from a niche GitHub repo to nearly 12,000 stars in under seven months, and as of this week it runs…
Xbox Project Helix: AMD Chip Confirmed, No Date Set [2026]
Microsoft has spent 2026 doing something it has never done before a console launch: talking about the next Xbox in public, in pieces, for six months straight. The project has a name, Project Helix, a chip partner, AMD, and a phrase that has replaced “next Xbox” in every Microsoft slide deck since Gamescom 2026: “family…