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Photo: ThreePhaseAC / CC BY-SA 4.0 · source A Longer-Lasting Light Bulb Is a Worse Light Bulb
The 1925 bulb cartel is the classic planned-obsolescence story. The tungsten physics underneath it says a longer-lived bulb is a dimmer, costlier one.

Photo: CMyrick-WMF / CC BY-SA 4.0 · source A Developer Retypes Every Line of AI Code by Hand
A developer retypes AI-generated code by hand to avoid what he calls cognitive debt — shipping software nobody on the team actually understands.
Photo: Original: Apple Inc. Vectorization: Totie / Public domain · source An 80-Billion-Parameter Model Now Runs on a Mac in 4.3 GB
Swiftlet runs an 80B-parameter Qwen model on a Mac using 4.3 GB of RAM by streaming expert weights from SSD. How the trick works, and what it costs.
Photo: National Labor Relations Board / Public domain · source Wikimedia Foundation Rejects Staff Union, Demands Federal Ballot
Wikimedia Foundation rejected fast-track union recognition for Wikipedia's staff, demanding an NLRB election and hiring law firm Littler Mendelson.
Photo: User:Waldyrious / CC BY-SA 4.0 · source Taylor Farms Rewrote Its Outbreak Statement Five Times in 16 Days
Why 2,000 negative cyclospora tests cannot clear a recalled lettuce product, and what Taylor Farms has left out of five rewritten statements.

Photo: EmDee / CC BY-SA 4.0 · source EU Orders Google to Open Android Voice Features to Rivals
Brussels is forcing Alphabet to share eleven Android features, including low-power wake word detection, with rival voice assistants by August 2027.
The EU Attestation Mandate Is Reported But Not Yet Verified
What hardware-bound attestation would mean for EU age verification, and why the specifics of the reported mandate cannot yet be verified.

Photo: LA2 / CC BY-SA 3.0 · source Essential English Vocabulary Dropped Flour and Added Mortgage
A 1953 list of essential English words and its 2023 replacement differ by 1,700 entries. The change tracks a shift from manual work to institutions.
eBay pays $56m to the couple its security staff terrorised
eBay staff stalked a newsletter couple with live insects, a funeral wreath and threats. Seven were sentenced; the civil case settled for a reported $56m.

Photo: Utkarshraj Atmaram / Public domain · source Tailscale Did Not Stop the Hugging Face Intrusion
Tailscale's post-mortem on the Hugging Face AI agent intrusion: no bug was exploited, but 181 rogue machines joined the network on one stolen key.
Streaming Replaced Video Stores and Ownership With Permission
Video rental stores lasted about 25 years. What replaced them changed not just how we watch films, but who is allowed to keep a copy.

Photo: Jazz Guy from New Jersey, United States / CC BY 2.0 · source Macy's Ads Come Down, Revealing a Century-Old Spite Building
Macy's covered a neighbour's facade with ads for a century. With the billboards down, the Herald Square holdout building is visible again.
Google Dominated The Tools Behind RSS, Then Abandoned Them
Google ran the most-used RSS reader and the biggest feed service, then closed or froze both. A look at what that did to open web subscriptions.

Photo: Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org> / CC0 · source Export Controls Now Target AI Weights, Not Encryption Code
Export controls once treated encryption code as munitions. The same legal machinery is now being pointed at AI model weights, with familiar consequences.
Photo: Palosirkka / CC0 · source Canada Quietly Signs a UN Treaty It Spent Years Opposing
Canada signed the UN cybercrime treaty in July after years opposing it. Critics call it a cross-border surveillance pact, not a crime convention.

Photo: Evan-Amos / CC0 · source Big Food filed 239 lawsuits to block nutrition rules since 2010
An investigation counted 239 court challenges to food labels, soda taxes and ad rules since 2010 — 595 years of litigation, most of it in Mexico.
Photo: Sdo216 / CC BY-SA 3.0 · source Betting Logos Disappear From Premier League Shirts as Ban Begins
Gambling firms are off the front of all 20 Premier League shirts for 2026-27. Banks and airlines moved in — and betting brands moved to the sleeve.

Photo: Kristoferb / CC BY-SA 3.0 · source Battery Makers Are Betting Billions on a Solid Electrolyte
Why CATL, BYD, Samsung and $4bn of startups are chasing solid-state batteries — and why the technology keeps failing to arrive.
Photo: International Mathematical Olympiad / Public domain · source AI Reasoning Works Even When Its Written Steps Are Meaningless
AI models now solve open maths problems, but research shows the reasoning they display is often unfaithful to what happens inside them.

Photo: Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (permission obtained by email from the AI index research manager) / CC BY-SA 4.0 · source AI financial advice is solid but quietly favours confident users
An MIT Sloan study simulated lifetimes of following chatbot money advice. It works — but pays out less for women and less financially literate users.