Pixi’s new iOS app turns text messages into interactive AR experiences

Pixi’s new iOS app turns text messages into interactive AR experiences

🔥 Discover this insightful post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Startups,Media & Entertainment,AI,Apps,Social,augmented reality,iOS app,Generative AI 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: Forget stickers, GIFs, and emoji reactions. Pixi is betting that the next evolution of messaging is interactive augmented reality (AR). The startup launched its native messaging app on the App Store on Wednesday, allowing users to send AI-powered AR characters through iMessage. Instead of appearing as static media, the characters come to life through the recipient's iPhone camera, where they can interact with their surroundings, interact with people, and respond in real time. Although augmented reality isn't so new and…
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Challenging the Narrative of European Decline: Revised, Free Repost

Challenging the Narrative of European Decline: Revised, Free Repost

✨ Discover this insightful post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: 📌 **What You’ll Learn**: A number of people have asked me to put some of my recent writing on European economic performance outside the paywall. Here is the central argument, revised to include data I think is slightly more informative.I’m still in Europe, where one of the luxuries I’m experiencing is not having to think about Donald Trump and the nightmarish state of U.S. politics 100% of the time — more like 90%, but still. And by way of luxuriating in the slight emotional distance, I’ll postpone my next…
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Google is betting on Gemini to reinvent the smart home speaker

Google is betting on Gemini to reinvent the smart home speaker

🔥 Discover this must-read post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: AI,Gadgets,Media & Entertainment,audio device,Google,google home,smart speaker 📌 **What You’ll Learn**: After years of incremental updates, Google is betting that its Gemini AI system can reinvent its smart speaker. The company on Wednesday introduced its first audio device designed specifically for Gemini with a Google Home speaker priced at $99.99. The new Google Home device is the first standalone smart speaker from the tech giant since the Nest Audio in September 2020. This older device arrived at a time when smart speakers were largely viewed as easy-to-use controllers for your smart…
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Hospitals and universities repurposing drugs at 90% lower cost

Hospitals and universities repurposing drugs at 90% lower cost

🚀 Read this awesome post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: This “hidden” research system, which operates outside of the patent system, has huge potential to regularly provide society with affordable treatments. Examples of this have included using a cancer drug to treat a leading cause of blindness, changing a drug from treating breast cancer to preventing it, and using an old anti-inflammatory drug to treat Covid. The new research led by King’s College London and published in the Cambridge Law Journal explores the parallel drug innovation system taking place outside of pharmaceutical companies. The research…
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Two Stanford graduates have raised $11 million to build a non-invasive, wearable device that tracks hormones

Two Stanford graduates have raised $11 million to build a non-invasive, wearable device that tracks hormones

✨ Explore this insightful post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Fundraising,Clair Health,hormone tracking,Khosla Ventures 📌 **What You’ll Learn**: Stanford graduates Jenny Dhawan and Abhinav Agarwal want to solve two tough problems: create a wearable device that works well and measures hormones to help women better understand their health. The couple is building a startup called Clair Health that tracks signs of inflammation and bloating, energy levels, and classifies cycle phase to give insight into cycle irregularities and perimenopause, as well as hormonal fluctuations, and how to navigate those changes. The company has raised $11.6 million in a funding round led…
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AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs, leaving users unaware that they may be vulnerable — security feature vanishes after newer AGESA firmware, AMD engineers go radio silent when pressed about the change

AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs, leaving users unaware that they may be vulnerable — security feature vanishes after newer AGESA firmware, AMD engineers go radio silent when pressed about the change

🚀 Discover this awesome post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: ✅ **What You’ll Learn**: According to a report by Ars Technica, AMD has quietly stripped a critical security feature from its lower-end CPUs, leaving unaware users potentially vulnerable to physical attacks. Following a months-long investigation tracked on GitHub, Ben Kilpatrick confirmed that the Transparent Secure Memory Encryption (TSME) feature — which protects CPUs against physical exploits that siphon data from connected memory chips — was suddenly no longer available on AMD CPUs outside the company's Pro lineup.As the exhaustive inquiry, which involved conversations with AMD engineers, board vendors, and…
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Mastodon is looking to newsletters to help revive the open social web

Mastodon is looking to newsletters to help revive the open social web

💥 Explore this trending post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Apps,Media & Entertainment,Social,newsletters,Mastodon,open social web 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: Mastodon, the open, decentralized alternative to big tech apps like X and Threads, is betting that email can help solve the biggest problem the open social network faces: audience growth. With the latest release of the software, the social networking platform is introducing email newsletters, a feature that will allow writers to send their posts directly to subscribers' inboxes, even if those subscribers don't have or want a Mastodon account. This feature could allow Mastodon to evolve beyond being just another…
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Arbee’s WIP Emporium » I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle

🚀 Discover this must-read post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: ✅ **What You’ll Learn**: One of the reasons little progress was made on the Power Macintosh emulation in MAME for a long time is that it’s very tedious to debug. There’s a lot of code surface, it’s written in 3 languages (PowerPC, emulated 680×0, and compiled FORTH), and I’m not as familiar with the innards of the newer stuff like the Code Fragment Manager as I am with the behavior of the 680×0 codebase. So, this being 2026, I asked Claude Code if it could control and debug MAME.…
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Global model maker Odyssey has secured a $1.45 billion valuation boosted by Amazon and other big names

Global model maker Odyssey has secured a $1.45 billion valuation boosted by Amazon and other big names

🔥 Check out this insightful post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: AI,Fundraising,Startups,TC,In Brief,odyssey,world models 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: Odyssey, a global AI startup founded by CEO and self-driving vehicle pioneer Oliver Cameron and CTO Jeff Hook, has raised a $310 million Series B round at a $1.45 billion valuation led by Natural Capital, with participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV and others. Universal models are the next big thing in AI beyond large text- and chat-based language models. They collect data from the physical world and simulate it with precise physics. In the case of Odyssey, it emulated how Google…
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Local Qwen isn’t a worse Opus, it’s a different tool

Local Qwen isn’t a worse Opus, it’s a different tool

💥 Explore this awesome post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: ✅ **What You’ll Learn**: We've all heard people say that local Qwen 27B or 35-A3B is "near-Opus level", but I have receipts from a software business and open source projects, and am here to be transparent with you. This post is long-form for a reason. It's not a cursory glance, an unsubstantiated claim on X about cancelling Claude Max, or a hobbyist report from a model running at single-digit tokens per second with a 32K context window. It isn't written by a famous CEO tweeting about coding from an…
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