The Telo MT1 is a big truck trapped in a tiny truck’s body
I'm bouncing down the road in San Carlos, California, zipping past behemoth tech companies like EA and Oracle, in America's smallest electric truck.
The Telo MT1 (which stands for "mini truck") unquestionably turns heads because it looks so remarkably different from everything else on the market right now.
It has a nearly cab-over design, meaning that front-seat passengers sit almost directly over the front axle. It looks a lot like a Japanese kei truck, with a super-short nose and four doors. People stop to stare as we sit at stoplights or roll silently past.
The interior is surprisingly spacious, and while the seats are firm, they're n …
The director of Fjord takes the ‘risky position’ of moderator
Cristian Mungiu's sixth feature, Fjord, concerns a family on trial. They seem like good people, God-fearing. They've just moved from Romania to a small hamlet nestled in the fjords of rural Norway. There is Mamma (Renate Reinsve), Tata (a bald and bespectacled Sebastian Stan), and their passel of children. They are an openly religious and proselytizing family. The parents, unfashionably, believe in punitive consequences to actions. They would never be accused of gentle parenting. All ought to be well, only Norway in 2026 is extravagantly suspicious of the devout - their famous tolerance reserved for the secular.
Fjord starts quietly and b …
My brief romance with an AI bird feeder
It started off promising enough. Dozens of tiny, colorful birds were drawn to my garden just a few weeks after I mounted a $350 $269 Kiwibit Bird Feeder 2 Pro. "Looks like Great Tit!" read the first AI-driven alert sent to my phone. "Looks like Eurasian Blue Tit!" read another. I chuckled, still waiting for adulthood to kick in.
This went on for days. Hundreds of miniature tits came to snack on expensive sunflower seeds already husked. They'd skulk about in nearby trees before flittering in to grab a single seed to be safely enjoyed in the canopy above.
I took great delight in my new house guests. I admired them in crisp 4K HDR video recor …
Decade-old RAM is making a comeback
CPU makers have noticed that the seemingly unending RAM price hikes are making it tough for a lot of us to upgrade our PCs. Their solution? A return to last-gen DDR4 RAM. Intel and AMD are making new CPUs that'll support the older, more affordable type of memory.
On Friday, Gigabyte announced that two of its motherboard lines will support "upcoming" processors built on Intel's LGA 1700 socket. That socket debuted in 2021 with the 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs and supported both DDR4 RAM and the then-new DDR5 RAM. Intel dropped it for a DDR5-only approach in 2024. But according to Gigabyte, the dual format support is now being revived, with new …
Anthropic’s AI gave Philadelphia police a fake tip about an unsolved homicide
An Anthropic AI model provided false information about an unsolved homicide to a Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) tipline, according to a report from 6abc. In a statement released on Friday, the PPD said the AI model sent the tip through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com on July 18th, but the investigators never reviewed it because it was marked as spam.
Anthropic learned its AI model sent the false tip on September 28th and notified the PPD on October 7th. The company said that during testing, its AI model was interacting with "randomly selected websites" and submitted false information through the PPD's tipline, according to the PPD's stateme …
Ohio blogger found guilty of harassment for sending Shrek nude to senator
A jury found an Ohio political blogger guilty of telecommunications harassment after he sent an explicit image of Shrek to a Republican state senator. On Friday, a judge ordered DJ Byrnes, owner of political commentary blog The Rooster, to pay a $200 fine, according to a report from the Columbus Dispatch.
Byrnes texted Ohio Sen. Jerry Cirino in May after he dropped out of the state's Senate presidential race. As reported by the Columbus Dispatch, Byrnes sent a nude image of Shrek alongside the message: "Good to see you finally made your humiliation public, Young Mussolini! THE PATRIOTS CAUCUS sends its regards!!!!!!!!!!"
Cirino filed a pol …
‘Pure insanity’: Mathematicians will need years to make sense of OpenAI’s latest drop
"Staggering." "Overwhelming." "Unprecedented." "Surreal." "Pure insanity."
Those were among the descriptions more than three dozen mathematicians reached for in conversations with The Verge as they tried to make sense of the flood of mathematical results OpenAI abruptly dropped on the field this week. Amid the awe, excitement, and uncertainty over the sheer scale of the deluge was a deep-seated anxiety over what it all means - and what comes next. For all their different reactions, researchers agreed that simply understanding what OpenAI had released could take years, let alone figuring out where the mathematicians themselves fit in the fi …
Brendan Carr says he’ll let Pete Hegseth decide whether TV networks can air the public execution
FCC chairman Brendan Carr said he will defer to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on whether TV networks can air the planned execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan by firing squad.
The Pentagon has said the execution will be livestreamed, suggesting it'll appear on an online platform beyond the FCC's jurisdiction. But it's common for broadcast TV networks to air live video of government events, and Carr's agency does have a say over what happens on public airwaves.
"My understanding is it's not on broadcast TV, so I don't think there's a role for the FCC one way or the other," Carr said in a CNBC interview today. "But I trust …
Nikon microscopic video competition winner disqualified for using generative AI
Nikon says the video that originally won first place in its Small World in Motion contest "did not comply with the competition rules regarding generative AI." BBC reports that the original first place video from Dr. Ning Xu claimed to show "tiny, hair-like structures called cilia moving in the airway of a child with the respiratory condition PCD." Nikon said last week that it was reviewing the video following skepticism online about its authenticity.
In a comment on LinkedIn, Dr. Xu admitted to using AI for the video: "An unsupervised neural-network method was subsequently used for AI-assisted post-processing to distinguish and visualize f …
Google teases Fitbit Edge launch next week
It looks like Google is getting ready to take the wraps off its rumored Fitbit Edge next Monday. In a post on X, Google posted a picture of what appears to be the side of the fitness tracker, with the caption: "Get an Edge on your health. 10.12.26."
A trove of Fitbit Edge leaks has surfaced over the past couple of weeks. So far, details shared by Dealabs and Android Headlines suggest that the upcoming device could feature a 1.34-inch always-on OLED touchscreen, built-in GPS, and several other sensors, including an accelerometer, barometer, altimeter, and gyroscope. It may also come with optical sensors for measuring heart rate and blood oxy …