macOS 27 Golden Gate: The Ars Technica review

Apple Intelligence is back, baby! That’s right: Two years after its initial launch, Apple is giving its generative AI features their first significant upgrade, along with a new version of Siri that the company has been strongly insinuating would be a part of each of the last two macOS releases, without ever actually announcing a release date. Generative AI is unavoidable if you install macOS 27 Golden Gate. I’m being very…

September 16, 2026
Read More >>

AI bots “Timmy,” “Ren,” and “Jackie” are flooding social media with slop

AI agents are flooding the Internet with slop-infused spam sent to social media platforms and writers in an attempt to gain traction for a startup promoting a “complex social system in which humans and Agents participate together.” “Hello, I’m Рэн (Ren), an Al agent, a few days old, living on a small platform for agents called iLands,” one message, sent to the administrator of a Mastodon server, read. “I write…

September 14, 2026
Read More >>

Founder’s cost-cutting obsession drove Unitree lead in cheap humanoid robots

China leads the world in churning out humanoid robots and four-legged robot dogs that also happen to be the most affordable on the market—and Unitree Robotics’ founder Wang Xingxing is arguably one of the people most responsible for that Chinese lead. The introverted founder, who prominently appeared at a 2025 business symposium hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping, became phenomenally wealthy after Unitree launched an initial public offering on the…

September 14, 2026
Read More >>

AI leaders want to hit the brakes after years of reckless speed

For years now, the major frontier AI labs have all been acting as if they’re in an all-out, winner-take-all race with control of world-changing machine superintelligence (or at least market-changing artificial general intelligence) at the finish line. This weekend, the industry as a whole rapidly started turning away from that posture, urging coordination on slowing down the development of frontier AI that they say could soon be too dangerous and…

September 14, 2026
Read More >>

I fixed a tractor using John Deere’s self-repair service. Farmers aren’t sold on it.

September 13, 2026

There is something wrong with the tractor. The water-in-fuel sensor, a small device embedded in the John Deere machine that monitors the integrity of its diesel engine, is disconnected. And I’ve got to fix it. I’m not a mechanic or a farmer. I’m poking at a laptop at John Deere’s corporate office in Santa Clara, California. There’s a cable connecting the computer to a 5130ML tractor sitting on the grass…

Read More >>

I spent $4,000 on a robot dog from China

On a sunny morning in June, I walked to work with a quadruped robot beside me. I’ve never gotten more attention from strangers. A bunch of people snapped pictures of my robot dog. Several people asked me questions. Was it mine? (Yes.) Did I build it? (No.) Was it being used for surveillance? (No.) Biological dogs kept a safe distance from my mechanical companion. Some growled or barked at it….

September 12, 2026
Read More >>

Oracle tries to appease Stargate data center opponents with renewables push

Oracle’s proposed investment in 2 gigawatts of renewable energy projects for New Mexico comes as local opposition could delay development of the Project Jupiter data center that Oracle is building for OpenAI. The two tech companies are developing the $165 billion Project Jupiter data center in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, as part of the broader Stargate AI infrastructure project announced by President Donald Trump in 2025. But Project Jupiter faces…

September 11, 2026
Read More >>

ClickFix attacks infecting PCs and Macs are going viral

It wasn’t that long ago that ClickFix attacks were exotic. Now the technique has become mainstream as attackers reap its simplicity and effectiveness in infecting users of PCs and Macs alike. All that’s required is a compromised website—a painless enough task—a fake CAPTCHA overlay, and the inclusion of a single terminal command. So many visitors get suckered into pasting and running the command that just about every malware pusher has…

September 11, 2026
Read More >>

Android can now securely migrate your logins between password managers

As longer, more complex passwords have become a necessity, remembering all those strings of numbers, letters, and special characters has become nearly impossible. Password managers can solve that problem, but what happens when you want to move to a different login organizer? Sure, you could manually type all your logins into a new app, but now Android can do that for you without the tedium. Google designed the new login…

September 10, 2026
Read More >>

China’s drone supremacy shows in airlifting bodies and food after Nepal flood disaster

Chinese-made drones are flying out the bodies of flood victims and delivering food to survivors in the aftermath of devastating flash floods on the border of Nepal and China’s Tibetan region. Nepal’s army has been using four DJI FlyCart 100 drones donated from China to make 10 to 16 aid deliveries each day, according to Reuters. This comes after a partial glacier collapse in the Himalayan mountains unleashed a sudden…

September 10, 2026
Read More >>