Geek News Central Podcast

Todd Cochrane
  • 4.2 (143)
  • Tech News
  • Updated Semiweekly

Twice weekly Technology News show covering the Tech Space. With Segments on Science, Mobile, Digital TV, FAA, FCC, Cyber Security, Gadgets and Tech Politics.

  1. 2d ago ·  Video

    Anthropic's $5 Million Push to Measure AI's Effect on Wellbeing

    In this episode, Ray Cochrane records from the Michigan studio on the one year anniversary of losing the show’s original host, Todd Cochrane. The featured story is Anthropic’s $5 million grant program, which pays outside researchers to measure whether AI is actually good for the people using it. Ray also covers Anthropic’s Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, Google’s Fairwind cyber defense program, Meta’s organizational second brain, sixteen green AI projects across Asia-Pacific, an Oklahoma Bitcoin mine condemned after leaking 3.8 million gallons of water, BepiColombo closing in on Mercury, and the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens from the studio in Michigan, recording on the one year anniversary of the show losing its original host, Todd Cochrane, his father. The family has gathered for the occasion. He also plans to record several episodes throughout the week as a commemorative run, so listeners should expect a heavier release schedule than usual. He also shares where things stand. He and Delaney have gone back and forth on relocating to Michigan, but the family is pushing, and the plan is firming up for the coming month or so. Part of the draw is getting his dad’s studio cleaned up and running the way it used to. Finally, he passes along an update on the Zuvers, a story long-time listeners will recognize. The father of the three children is due out of jail soon, though he now faces retrial for the murder of the three boys. Cochrane notes that the original prison term related to their return rather than the murders themselves. The family’s expectation, he says, is that this time the sentence will be permanent. Anthropic Puts $5 Million Behind Measuring AI’s Effect on You The featured story asks a question the industry has mostly avoided. Not whether a model is smart, but whether you are better off after using it. Anthropic is funding independent research to find out, and the structure is the interesting part. The money creates what the field calls evaluations: standardized tests for AI models. Hundreds already exist for coding, math, and reasoning. However, almost none measure whether the tool is good for the human on the other end. Crucially, Anthropic is not building these tests in-house. Grantees receive funding, model access and technical support, then work fully independently. Everything they produce must be published open source, so any developer at any company can run it. As Cochrane puts it, Anthropic is paying to create a ruler other people will use to measure Anthropic. The example Anthropic leads with is deliberately uncomfortable. Claude might offer diet and workout advice to someone asking about weight loss. But if that user has a history of disordered eating, the same response becomes actively harmful. Cochrane connects this to sycophancy, a topic the show has returned to before, and notes that models carry no real memory of who you are unless you tell them. That is exactly why the problem has gone unmeasured. Code compiles or it doesn’t. Math checks out or it doesn’t. Wellbeing has no answer key, because the identical response can help one person and harm the next. The Five Things Anthropic Wants These Tests to Do Cochrane walks through all five criteria, since each targets a specific way this research usually fails. First, state plainly what you are measuring. It is easy to measure something adjacent, such as how often a model uses warm language, then publish numbers about a proxy while claiming insight into loneliness itself. Second, involve clinicians and subject-matter experts in designing and validating the tests. A capable engineer may simply not know what the warning signs of an eating disorder look like in text. Without those people in the room, the test measures what engineers imagine the harm looks like. Third, count overcompliance and overrefusal as harms. Overcompliance is the obvious failure. Overrefusal is the model becoming so cautious it turns useless, or shutting down someone who had nowhere else to ask. Cochrane adds that overrefusal is far harder to spot, because you often cannot tell it is degrading until it has degraded. Fourth, reflect real multi-turn usage. Most safety testing throws one nasty question at a model and checks for refusal. Meanwhile, actual harm builds across a long conversation where every individual message reads as fine. Fifth, validate the automated graders against real experts. Scoring thousands of conversations means an AI grades the AI. Consequently, a subtly wrong grader skews every downstream number in the same direction, and nothing in the process flags it. Cochrane expects this to be the hardest criterion to satisfy, since psychiatric and medical specialists do not come cheap by the hour. Applications close September 21st, and shortlisted applicants will be notified by October 5th. Notably, the announcement names no individual researcher or executive. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Anthropic’s Enterprise Frontier Safeguards Keep Your Logs in Your Vault Anthropic’s second announcement targets a completely different audience. Catching misuse across many sessions requires keeping logs. However, banks and hospitals cannot hand that data to an outside vendor, because regulators will not allow it. Safety monitoring and compliance were in direct conflict. The fix moves where the data lives. Activity logs go into the customer’s own cloud bucket at Amazon, Microsoft or Google, locked with keys the customer controls. Automated systems scan a rolling window for serious abuse such as credential theft, and alerts route straight to the customer’s own security team. No human at Anthropic reads it, and Anthropic does not charge for the feature. The backstory explains the urgency. Anthropic had begun retaining thirty days of data with its Fable 5 model, specifically to catch patterns that only appear across multiple sessions. Regulated customers had to walk away immediately. Over a hundred organizations helped shape the result, including a quarter of the Fortune 100 and every US globally systemically important bank. It works across Claude Code, Claude Enterprise, Amazon Bedrock, and Microsoft Foundry. Wells Fargo’s security team put it simply, saying their logs stay in a Wells-managed environment under Wells-managed keys. Cochrane adds a personal note on the same retention change. Because transcripts now persist thirty days after last touch, he can keep Claude Code threads open far longer and lean on clear without losing context. Google’s Fairwind Program Hands Patching to the Machines Google is running the same play from the defensive side. Normally, a human engineer must reproduce a security flaw, understand it, write a fix, then prove the fix broke nothing else. That can stretch to weeks, and attackers live in exactly that gap. Fairwind pairs two systems to close it. Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber is a model tuned for security work. CodeMender hunts for flaws and writes the patches. Together, Google says they produce verified, deployment-ready patches in minutes, running inside the customer’s own environment. Access is deliberately restricted to three groups: national cyber authorities; critical infrastructure operators in healthcare, telecom, energy, and finance; and major technology platform providers. More than 650 partners are involved. Cochrane’s take centers on logging quality. Systems that emit specific, unique errors rather than generic ones let these tools find real issues almost immediately. Furthermore, he sees value in purpose-tuned models over general ones, since different training data and methodology surface gaps a single familiar model would miss. Meta Built an AI That Learns From Its Own Experts Every organization has two or three people who actually understand the hard systems. When they are busy, everyone waits. When they leave, the knowledge leaves too. Most AI assistants address this with retrieval, searching documents when you ask. Meta went the other way. A long-running offline process digests the source material ahead of time into more than 200 structured knowledge files, so the thinking happens before anyone asks. On top sit what Meta calls recipes, step-by-step procedures mirroring how a specialist actually works a problem. The reported numbers are concrete. Restructuring cut tokens consumed per turn by 80 percent. Assessments that took days now take minutes. The team built the whole system in six weeks across three sprints. Cochrane focuses on the feedback loop. Normally, an expert corrects an assistant in chat; the answer improves once, then the system forgets. Meta’s version compiles corrections into knowledge files and regression-tests them, so fixes stick without retraining the model. However, he raises two real caveats from his own attempts. Building those knowledge files is token-heavy, and codebases change. If the offline process does not rerun, the documentation drifts away from the code it describes. He also predicts this will become a service offered by AWS, GitHub, or GitLab rather than something each company builds alone. Sixteen Green AI Projects Across Asia-Pacific Google DeepMind named the first cohort of its Accelerator: AI for the Planet program. Sixteen organizations span New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Australia and Japan, receiving three months of access to Google’s AI stack plus mentorship and a Singapore bootcamp.

    Anthropic's $5 Million Push to Measure AI's Effect on Wellbeing

  2. 6d ago

    The Mainframe Learned to Speak Arm

    In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down Hot Chips 2026, the engineering conference where IBM, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Arm, and Fujitsu all showed how their next processors actually work. The headline disclosure is a mainframe core that runs Arm natively. Ray also covers Apple’s odd M6 Mac mini naming, London’s first autonomous Uber rides, Amazon’s purchase of the company behind DuckDB, GitHub’s HydraFusion, the best of IFA 2026, and new USDA research on farmed salmon. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens the show with a personal update. He apologizes for the late rollout and the missed Monday episode, having spent the week fighting a cold. He’s also heading to Michigan to spend time with family and visit his father’s gravesite. He hopes to record a couple of shows from his dad’s old studio while he is there, including a special episode planned for Tuesday. He also points listeners to a fresh site redesign that trades the old techie look for something cleaner and friendlier. The featured segment starts from a wrap-up post on Arm’s newsroom. However, Cochrane broadens it to cover the whole conference rather than a single article. Hot Chips has run every August since 1989, and this year’s event was the 38th, held August 23rd through the 25th at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium. What Hot Chips Actually Is Cochrane draws a line between Hot Chips and the big consumer trade shows. CES and Computex exist for product announcements and marketing. Meanwhile, Hot Chips is an IEEE engineering conference where chip architects present block diagrams and die photos for thirty minutes at a stretch. The audience matters as much as the content. Roughly five hundred people who design chips for a living fill the room, and they would spot a fudged number immediately. No written paper is required, just the talk and the slides. In-person tickets sold out this year, as did Stanford’s dorm housing. Cochrane says he plans to cover the conference annually going forward. IBM Built a Mainframe Core That Speaks Arm The disclosure that stopped Cochrane cold came from IBM. Its next processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE runs two completely different instruction sets natively, on every one of its eleven cores. Those are z/Architecture, IBM’s own mainframe language, and AArch64, which is 64-bit Arm. Crucially, this is not emulation. Nor is it Arm cores glued onto the die beside the mainframe cores. IBM built 2,792 Arm instructions directly into the hardware, which it says is more than double the mainframe instruction count. Each core carries two separate decoders while sharing the caches, branch predictor and register files downstream. It switches between the two in nanoseconds. IBM even added dedicated hardware to flip byte order, because Arm and the mainframe store numbers in opposite directions. The payoff is Arm SystemReady compliance, meaning off-the-shelf Arm Linux runs on a mainframe unmodified. Patrick Kennedy of ServeTheHome, who was in the room, wrote: “I am sitting here still in awe of what IBM is doing here; this is not Z plus Arm cores, this is Z and Arm in one core.” Cochrane flags one precision point that is easy to get backward. IBM did not license Arm’s core designs and drop them in. Instead, it took its own mainframe core and taught it AArch64 under an architecture license, which is considerably harder engineering. The specifications are striking. The chip uses a 2nm process, with eleven cores running above 5.7GHz sustained and no turbo mode at all. Each core gets 36MB of L2 cache, backed by a 3.5GB virtual L4 pool. Furthermore, the reliability target is eight nines, which works out to roughly three tenths of one second of unplanned downtime per year. IBM gave it no name and no ship date, though the press expects “Telum III” around 2028. Arm, Fujitsu and NVIDIA Show Their Hands Arm itself had plenty to discuss, starting with an unfortunate name. Its first chip in thirty-five years is called the AGI CPU, which is a product name rather than any claim about artificial general intelligence. For three and a half decades, Arm designed processor blueprints and licensed them out, collecting royalties without competing. That era is now over. The AGI CPU is Arm’s own silicon, co-designed with lead customer Meta, running up to 136 cores on TSMC’s 3nm process at 300 watts. Arm’s CEO says the company has more than $2 billion in customer demand across the next two fiscal years. Fujitsu brought the detail Cochrane called the coolest of the conference. Its MONAKA chip packs 144 Arm-based cores, but the trick is the cache. Rather than sitting alongside the cores and eating die area, the entire last-level cache lives on a separate 5nm die with the 2nm compute die stacked directly on top. It ships in 2027 in 350-watt and 500-watt versions. NVIDIA had more stage time than anyone, with six sessions. Its new Vera CPU carries 88 cores of NVIDIA’s own Olympus design, which marks a change: the previous Grace CPU used Arm’s off-the-shelf cores. Consequently, Arm’s win here is the instruction set, not the blueprint. The memory disclosure drew the most attention, with a fully loaded system reaching 1.5TB at 1.2TB/s while the whole memory subsystem draws just 30 to 40 watts. The Caveat on NVIDIA’s Benchmark Slides Cochrane pushes back on how NVIDIA presented its numbers. On the standard SPEC integer benchmark, Vera scored 925 against AMD’s 128-core EPYC score of 898, about three percent ahead. However, the slide NVIDIA showed normalizes that same result per physical core, which makes a three percent gap look enormous. NVIDIA defends the choice, arguing that per-core throughput matters when thousands of AI agents run at once. Cochrane grants that it is a fair argument to make. Even so, his verdict is blunt: it is a different number from the headline one, and presenting it that way is not the best look. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Apple’s Newest Chip Landed in Its Cheapest Mac Last week’s episode covered the Mac Studio half of Apple’s August announcement. Tonight Cochrane takes the other half, the new Mac mini, and finds the numbering genuinely strange. The $899 base Mac mini gets the M6, which is Apple’s first 2nm chip and the newest process the company has shipped. It brings twelve CPU cores, twelve GPU cores, and 170GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple also introduced a third CPU core class called super cores. So Apple’s most advanced chip sits in its cheapest desktop, while the M5 Pro, M5 Max and M5 Ultra above it all carry a lower number. It gets stranger. The M6 mini has Thunderbolt 4 while the pricier M5 Pro mini has Thunderbolt 5, and the memory ceiling runs backward too. Apple explains none of it across three announcement pages. Reading between the lines, Cochrane figures the M6 is the entry point of a new generation that shipped ahead of its larger siblings. London’s Robotaxis Started Carrying Passengers Arm’s monthly roundup covers everything outside the data center, and Wayve stood out. Transport for London granted the British self-driving company private hire vehicle licenses on August 5th, the same category a minicab needs. Then on September 3rd the service launched with Uber, marking the first autonomous rides ever offered to UK passengers. A small fleet of Ford Mustang Mach-Es covers anywhere in London except the airports, with a TfL-licensed safety driver still aboard. Over 140,000 Londoners signed up. The compute runs on NVIDIA’s Arm-based automotive platform, which is why Arm claims the win. Cochrane notes the pattern: once you set a standard nobody can move off, these wins keep arriving. Two more items round it out, both about squeezing AI onto phones. Google’s Pixel 11 shipped in August with the Tensor G6, and Google claims on-device AI runs up to 3.5x faster using 3.5x less energy. Those are Google’s own unbenchmarked figures. Separately, Graphcore’s research team worked with Arm to run an 11-billion-parameter vision model on phone-class processors by squeezing each parameter to 2.7 bits, taking the model from roughly 22GB down to 3.7GB. Intel Is Pitching AI Infrastructure From a Long Way Back Intel’s newsroom post previews the AI Infra Summit, running September 15th through 17th in Santa Clara. CEO Lip-Bu Tan takes a fireside chat on Tuesday morning, with three Intel sessions across the show. Cochrane unpacks two terms first. Physical AI means AI that acts in the real world through sensors and motors rather than living on a screen, and Intel takes it seriously enough to have renamed its PC division the Client Computing and Physical AI Group in May. Disaggregated inference splits the two phases of running a model: reading your prompt is compute-hungry, while writing the answer back is memory-hungry. The context is where this gets interesting. Intel’s revenue rose 25 percent last quarter, its fastest growth since 2011. Nevertheless, in AI accelerators the company barely registers next to NVIDIA. Gaudi has effectively been abandoned, to the point that Intel stopped maintaining its open-source driver, and AMD passed Intel in data center revenue last quarter. Tellingly, when Intel demoed disaggregated inference at Computex, NVIDIA GPUs handled one phase and SambaNova chips the other while Intel supplied the coordinating CPU. Crescent Island, Intel’s actual inference chip, does not sample until later this year, and Intel declined to publish its memory bandwidth. Amazon

    The Mainframe Learned to Speak Arm

  3. Aug 28

    Eyes, Hands, and a Sense of Timing

    In this episode, Ray Cochrane digs into Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard. It is a shared driver that lets an AI agent run real lab equipment, from pipetting robots to the lasers inside a quantum computer. He also covers OpenAI’s builder’s guide to GPT-5.6, Google’s new Expert Intelligence book feature, Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studio, and a judge’s order forcing Google to stop hiding rival app stores. Finally, he weighs in on Apple’s proposed 15 percent link-out fee, Meta’s Australia numbers, the White House deputizing private hackers, and why rivers obey a 1957 math rule. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a quick personal update. He is hunting for tickets to Michigan for his dad’s anniversary, and he has been learning Blender and Godot on the side, mostly modeling and blocking out levels. Consequently, he asks listeners for advice on starting a big game project, and he plans to record his progress, maybe as a time lapse. Then it is straight into the featured story. Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard: A Driver for the Physical World The featured story comes from Anthropic, which opened a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard, or MHS. Cochrane frames it as the other side of the question NVIDIA’s world models raised two weeks ago: when do AI agents start touching actual machines? A typical lab runs a microscope, a liquid handler, a robotic arm, and a plate reader, each from a different vendor with its own control software. One Janelia researcher in the post launches seven programs in three languages just to start an experiment. Anthropic says wiring a setup like that takes weeks or months of specialist work. MHS is a driver, the same kind of translation layer a printer uses, except every device gets described with a tiny set of commands like read and write. Devices announce themselves on the network. A plain-English reference file then records what each machine measures, what can be adjusted, and which safety limits get enforced no matter what the agent asks. Agents then reach the hardware through the Model Context Protocol, the command line, or plain code. Cochrane sees the same move the industry keeps making, from coding harnesses to RSS and JSON: agree on a standard and let everyone build against it. In fact, he calls MHS the hardware version of MCP. The partner results carry the segment. QuEra builds quantum computers from individual atoms held by lasers that must hold their frequency to about one part in a trillion. A four-person team spent months on a relock script that worked 58 percent of the time. However, four copies of Claude iterating overnight through MHS produced a decision-tree script that recovers the laser in about six seconds, and it passed 99.3 percent of 700 blind trials. Carnegie Mellon wrote MHS drivers for four instruments across three incompatible computers in about eight hours, then ran dose-response experiments three times faster and blocked all six deliberately induced faults. Genentech, meanwhile, showed the limits. Claude used the same pump speed for water, a foamy protein solution, and a human had to explain that the bubbles were a physics problem. That gap in physical intuition is what sticks with Cochrane. He doubts it will change soon, and he suspects the fix will arrive as sub-agents or sub-models that judge a request against an expected outcome. He also connects MHS to a video of racing robots that never learned to stop at the finish line. What happens, he wonders, once they can read a distance sensor through a shared standard? Still, he calls the announcement a fantastic read and points listeners to the full article. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. GPT-5.6 Does the Same Work for a Fraction of the Cost OpenAI’s builder’s guide to GPT-5.6 leads the headlines. Cochrane recaps the three tiers from episode 1870, Sol, Terra, and Luna, plus the separate dial for reasoning effort. On BrowseComp, a benchmark for digging up obscure facts on the web, the old GPT-5.5 flagship scored about 84 percent on a run that cost 33 dollars three months ago. Luna now matches that score for a dollar thirty-three, and OpenAI has since cut Luna’s price another 80 percent. Browser Use reports Luna finishing 78 percent of its hardest browser tasks for about 14 dollars, against 80 percent for roughly 235 dollars from the best available model. The guide’s other big addition is a multi-agent beta flag. It lets the model handling a request spawn parallel helper agents that report back to a root agent inside a single API call. However, Cochrane is unimpressed by the timing. He has been running that pattern in Claude Code for months, so he sees OpenAI copying a workflow other companies already ship rather than inventing its own. Along the way, he plugs Claude Code’s remote-control sessions, which let him send prompts from his phone to a terminal session at home. Google Lets Gemini Read the Books You Actually Bought Google launched Expert Intelligence, a name Cochrane calls quite the reach. The feature lets you drop a book you bought on Google Play Books into Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM, and ask questions answered only from that book, with citations. Cochrane sees real power here for students, since he once used NotebookLM to organize scattered course PDFs. Additionally, publishers get a cut, which he calls a far better deal than the wholesale scraping of books that trained earlier models. Nevertheless, he asks who loses out, because a paid publisher does not automatically mean a paid author. He floats the same idea for artists, even a penny per use, then admits that may be too idealistic. Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studio Is Built to Run Big Models at Home Back in episode 1861, when Apple killed the Mac Pro, an M5 Ultra Mac Studio was expected later this year. Now it is here. The M5 Ultra brings up to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, and 512GB of unified memory moving 1.2 terabytes per second. Apple claims up to 4.3 times the AI performance of the M3 Ultra. Thunderbolt 5 can also cluster four machines into one memory pool for up to three times faster inference. The M5 Max model starts at $2,499 and the Ultra at $5,499, with shipping on September 22 and the 512GB configuration arriving in late October. Cochrane finds the clustering pitch ridiculous at that price, but he invites anyone who spends the money to report back. Apple Opens a Manufacturing School in Houston Apple also opened a 20,000-square-foot Advanced Manufacturing Center in Houston. It offers free classes for small and midsize manufacturers, from circuit board design to hands-on time on a scaled-down production line, with college students joining later. Cochrane calls it a solid step in the bring-manufacturing-home movement. The bigger story is the campus itself, which builds Apple’s AI servers and will add the first US-assembled Mac mini line later this year. That ties back to the Mac mini shortage that followed the OpenClaw rush, when Tim Cook warned of months-long waits. Cult of Mac was still reporting four-month waits in late July. However, Cook blamed chip supply rather than assembly, so Cochrane is not counting on relief just yet. Amazon EC2 Turns Twenty Amazon EC2 turned twenty this week, which Cochrane admits makes him feel old. The 2006 beta offered one server size in one region for ten cents an hour. Each came with a 1.7 gigahertz Xeon and under two gigabytes of memory, and accounts were capped at twenty servers. Today AWS offers more than 1,200 instance types across 39 regions. Consequently, Cochrane credits the company with turning that tiny product into the backbone of cloud and AI computing. Intel Gamer Days: Two Free Games, With Fine Print Intel Gamer Days runs through September 13. Buy a qualifying Core Ultra Series 2 or 14th Gen desktop chip, a Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, or an Arc graphics card. In return you get Star Wars: Galactic Racer plus the Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis remake. GamesRadar values the pair at about 120 dollars. However, neither game is out yet, and codes must be redeemed by October 31 even though the Tomb Raider remake ships in February. Cochrane calls that awful, but he still tells qualifying buyers to claim the deal early. Note that 13th Gen chips do not qualify. Judge Orders Google to Stop Hiding Rival App Stores A jury found Google’s Android app monopoly illegal in late 2023, and Judge James Donato ordered rival stores into the Play Store in 2024. On August 13, Epic’s lawyer demonstrated that searching Play for “store for apps” returned Walmart instead of any app store. Donato called that “not acceptable” and ordered three fixes within a week. Searches must surface third-party stores, listings need a plain install button, and the “are you looking for” interstitial has to go. Cochrane welcomes the monopoly being chipped away, but he notes that a controlling entity still sits atop every app store. In his view, community hubs like app stores and social media need a public infrastructure layer. He suspects governments skip that investment because companies already run the services, while selling your data. Apple Wants 15 Percent of Purchases Outside Its Store The other half of the Epic saga is Apple’s proposed link-out commission. After the 2021 anti-steering injunction, Apple charged 27 percent on purchases made through external links. A judge held it in contempt last year, and the Ninth Circuit then allowed a fee limited to the cost of runni

    Eyes, Hands, and a Sense of Timing

  4. Aug 25

    Huge Announcements From D23!!

    In this episode, Chris Cochrane guest-hosts for his brother Ray and devotes the whole show to one event: Disney’s D23 2026 fan convention in Anaheim. Friday night delivered Marvel’s new X-Men cast, Adam Driver as Mister Sinister, a fresh Avengers: Doomsday trailer, and a release date for Frozen 3. Saturday turned to the parks, with Villains Land, an Indiana Jones dark ride, the long-awaited Expedition Everest yeti repair, and a Monsters Inc land opening in 2027. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Chris if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Chris Cochrane opens the show and explains why this episode breaks the usual format. Instead of six or eight unrelated stories, the entire episode covers Disney’s D23 convention, which he compares to Apple’s WWDC. For newcomers, he notes that D23 is Disney’s official fan club, named for the company’s founding year of 1923. This year’s event ran two nights at the Honda Center: Friday for movies and television, Saturday for the theme parks. Marvel Finally Casts the X-Men Friday’s headline was the X-Men. The Associated Press put the crowd near 12,000, and Marvel Studios used that stage to name its rebooted team. Christopher Abbott plays Professor Charles Xavier, Inde Navarrette plays Rogue, and Maya Boyd plays Storm. Adam Driver rounds out the group as the villain Mister Sinister. Meanwhile, Samara Weaving, Kit Connor, and Sadie Sink were already known as Emma Frost, Cyclops, and Jean Grey. Jake Schreier directs, and the film arrives May 5, 2028. Chris calls the lineup spot-on casting. He singles out Weaving as a perfect match for the comics, and he points out that Sink already appeared as Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Navarrette is the least established name, coming off a breakout role in an indie horror film. Boyd, meanwhile, was the name he knew least, with what he believes is a Broadway background. Above all, Chris hopes Marvel does the team justice, and he recommends the animated revival X-Men ’97 on Disney+ as the best place to start. Frozen 3 Gets a Date and a Chaotic Reveal Frozen 3 lands November 24, 2027. That is the Wednesday of Thanksgiving week, the same slot the first two films used. The story centers on Anna and Kristoff’s wedding, which a new villain, an evil Ice Queen, disrupts. Jennifer Lee returns to direct with Trent Correy, and the full voice cast is back. However, the reveal itself fell apart. Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel performed a darker arrangement of “Frozen Heart.” Meanwhile, the audio failed, the video failed, and a set of doors never opened. Menzel asked the crowd whether they should try it again, and Bell simply narrated everything that was supposed to happen. Afterward, Josh Gad sang “Oooh, Samantha,” a new love song for Olaf. Chris is here for it, since Olaf is one of the franchise’s best comic characters. Pixar, Disney Animation, and the Rest of Friday Night Pixar chief Pete Docter laid out a packed slate. Incredibles 3 hits summer 2028 and follows Violet and Dash sneaking out at night to fight crime. Chris hopes that finally shows a grown-up Jack-Jack. Coco 2 follows in November 2029 with Benjamin Bratt returning as Ernesto de la Cruz. That has fans puzzling over how a villain already in the Land of the Dead comes back. Additionally, Pixar showed an original called Ghost Market and a Venice-set cat film called Gatto. On the Disney Animation side, Zootopia 3 is confirmed. The live-action Tangled arrives March 31, 2028 with Kathryn Hahn as Mother Gothel. Chris considers that casting perfect after her turn in Agatha All Along. A live-action Lilo & Stitch sequel, a new Simpsons movie, a Bluey movie, and a Kingdom Hearts anime series round out the list. For Star Wars fans, Ahsoka returns January 20, 2027. Chris also offers a hot take: he prefers Rogue One to the entire sequel trilogy. Consequently, he welcomes original stories like Ryan Gosling’s upcoming Starfighter. Adam Driver Is Mister Sinister Driver appeared by video rather than in person. He told the crowd that he and Kevin Feige had talked for years about joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Then he announced he would play Magneto. After a long pause, he corrected himself to Nathaniel Milbury, which is Mister Sinister’s human alias. The gag landed because fans had floated Driver for Magneto for years. For anyone new to the comics, Chris explains that Mister Sinister is a geneticist obsessed with mutant DNA, a manipulator rather than a brawler. The cast met backstage only minutes earlier, so Chris is curious how their chemistry develops. Notably, Christopher Abbott previously worked with Driver on HBO’s Girls. The script comes from Beef creator Lee Sung Jin and The Bear co-showrunner Joanna Calo, two prestige-television names that have Chris excited. Why the X-Men Took Thirty Years to Reach the MCU A business story underlies the casting. In the 1990s, a financially struggling Marvel sold film rights to raise cash. Fox ended up with the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, and Sony took Spider-Man. As a result, Marvel Studios built its connected universe from 2008 onward without some of its most famous characters. The Hugh Jackman era of X-Men films belonged to Fox, with a separate continuity and no crossovers. That changed in 2019, when Disney closed its $71 billion purchase of 21st Century Fox’s film and television studio. Most coverage framed the deal as a streaming play, but it also brought the X-Men home. Chris sums it up neatly: Disney signed the paperwork in 2019, cast the film in 2026, and audiences see it in 2028. Ryan Gosling’s Starfighter, Ghost Rider, and VisionQuest Lucasfilm dated Star Wars: Starfighter for May 28, 2027. Gosling plays Kade Auberon, a pilot from the wrong side of the galaxy tied to the fastest starfighter ever built. Before he walked out, Disney played clips of him as a kid on The Mickey Mouse Club. Gosling said the company changed his life then and is changing it again now. He is also playing Ghost Rider in the Marvel universe. That thrills Chris, since Nicolas Cage last carried the character on the big screen. Meanwhile, the Disney+ series VisionQuest arrives October 14. Paul Bettany returns as Vision and James Spader as Ultron, and the trailer drops the two androids into oddly mundane human situations. Bettany joked that Vision has “rather inconveniently died several times.” Chris agrees the character has been through the wringer since WandaVision. The Avengers: Doomsday Trailer Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, with Joe and Anthony Russo directing. Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and Hayley Atwell introduced the new footage. It offers the clearest look yet at Downey as Doctor Doom, who fights off Thor and takes his hammer. Evans appears as Captain America holding a baby, and Ian McKellen shows up as a haggard, long-haired Magneto. One quieter shot has Doom staring at a portrait of a lost wife and child. That frames him as a grieving avenger rather than a world-ender. He also commands an army of comic-accurate Sentinels. The cast pulls from the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and the legacy Fox X-Men, including Patrick Stewart. Hugh Jackman also appeared on screen to say he is willing to return as Wolverine, though that was not a confirmation. Chris, a self-described Marvel nerd, closes with a theory. He suspects the MCU’s Tony Stark was actually Victor von Doom, adopted by the Starks, which would explain the Downey casting. He also predicts the Fox-era X-Men die off in this film and that Thor may be the major casualty. If it happens, he wants credit for calling it. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Disney Parks Around the World Saturday’s Disney Experiences showcase covered parks, resorts, and cruise ships, with Neil Patrick Harris hosting. Hong Kong Disneyland gets an Avengers pavilion that reshapes its Stark Expo skyline. Shanghai Disneyland is building the first land devoted entirely to Spider-Man, complete with a new coaster. Since Spider-Man is his favorite hero, Chris hopes to visit once it opens. Closer to home, Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure is doubling in size with two rides opening in 2028. Avengers: Infinity Defense brings back Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Chris Hemsworth, and Downey, while Stark Flight Lab adds Brie Larson. A Coco boat ride into the Land of the Dead is also coming, with no height requirement. Chris admits he prefers California Adventure to Disneyland because the rides are better. Overseas, Disneyland Paris will retire its Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain overlay at the end of 2027 and restore the original Jules Verne theme. Paris also gets the first ride ever based on The Lion King. Tokyo Disneyland adds Sugar Rush: Sweet Rescue, the first Wreck-It Ralph ride, plus a Space Mountain launch sequence designed with YouTuber Mark Rober. Finally, Disney Cruise Line announced three more ships, including the Disney Believe in 2027 and an entirely new class in 2029. Back in Anaheim, Tomorrowland is getting reimagined, which Chris welcomes because the land badly needs an update. The Magic Happens parade and the Remember Dreams Come True fireworks are both returning. For the tech crowd, Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run now has a Fortnite crossover, where in-game missions unlock content on the real ride. Every New Walt Disney World Ride and Land Chris ranks the Florida parks Hollywood Studios first, then Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and Magic Kingdom. Magic Kingdom leads the announcements with Villains Land, now the official name.

    Huge Announcements From D23!!

  5. Aug 13

    The Robot That Imagines First

    In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down NVIDIA’s case for world action models, the shift that swaps a robot’s picture-describing backbone for one trained to predict what happens next. He also covers Perseverance closing in on the off-world driving record, a derelict SpaceX rocket stage hitting the Moon, and Anthropic’s rework of Claude Fable 5’s biology safeguards. Finally, he digs into Gemini Omni, Google’s undisclosed trip-planning rankings, the Danube’s record low, and iFixit’s call for Apple to unlock the iPad bootloader. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a personal update. Wildfires in Eastern Oregon made for a rough week of heavy smoke, and a local building burned down, which he calls a real tragedy. Meanwhile, his work at Blubrry has centered on PowerPress fixes, where reproducing customer-reported bugs remains the biggest headache. Support tickets rarely carry enough detail, and the errors themselves are often too vague to diagnose. Consequently, he is leaning toward a stronger logging and error layer, and he asks experienced developers to share what actually works for them. Beyond VLAs: NVIDIA’s Case for World Action Models The featured story comes from NVIDIA’s developer blog, and it answers a question sitting underneath this year’s robot news. Why do robot arms fall apart the moment anything changes? Move a cup six inches, swap its shape, or change the lighting, and a policy that worked perfectly in training fails. The answer, according to NVIDIA, is not the robot but the model underneath it. For the last few years, the dominant approach has been the vision-language-action model, or VLA, built on an AI that originally learned to describe pictures. Consequently, it recognizes a banana it has never seen, in a kitchen it has never seen, yet it has no idea what that banana will do next. As the article puts it, such a model “does not learn what happens to a mug when the gripper closes, how a towel folds, where an object lands when released.” Because the physics never arrives with the model, every scrap of it has to come out of hand-recorded demonstrations. The proposed fix swaps the foundation entirely. Instead of building on a model that learned to caption images, a world action model builds on one trained to predict how video continues, so the physics is already paid for. Notably, these models output an action and a prediction of what the robot’s cameras will see, in the same pass. Cochrane likens it to forethought, imagining your own motion as you make it. NVIDIA’s implementation is Cosmos 3, pretrained on roughly 767 million images and 348 million videos of real-world dynamics. It ships in 4, 16, and 64 billion parameter sizes named Edge, Nano, and Super, and it runs in real time on a Jetson Thor board bolted to the robot itself. Cochrane recalls his dad owning one of those Jetson boards, and he asks anyone working in robotics to explain how the throughput figures fit together. However, he closes on an open question: where did 348 million videos actually come from? For deeper detail, he points listeners to the source article and to NVIDIA researcher Jim Fan. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Perseverance Closes In on the Off-World Driving Record Ars Technica reports that NASA’s Perseverance rover is about to take the record for most distance driven on another world. The mark sits at roughly 28 miles, set by NASA’s own Opportunity rover across more than fourteen years before it went quiet in 2018. As Cochrane works out on air, that averages about two miles a year. Perseverance will pass it in roughly five years instead. The difference is a navigation system called AutoNav. Since a radio signal takes several minutes to reach Mars, earlier rovers crept along pre-plotted routes and stopped every half meter to think. Perseverance carries a second computer dedicated to processing what its cameras see, so it plans while the wheels keep turning. Consequently, about ninety percent of its driving is autonomous, against roughly ten percent for Curiosity, and it averages around 110 meters an hour rather than 15 to 18. Cochrane notes researchers finding the rover at planned sites days ahead of schedule, and he wonders aloud whether world action models might drive the next one. A SpaceX Rocket Stage Slammed Into the Moon Next, Smithsonian Magazine covered the Falcon 9 upper stage that struck the Moon on August 5. That stage flew back in January 2025, carrying Firefly’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Resilience landers, and it was never meant to end up there. SpaceX’s Julianna Scheiman says a mixture of solar activity and gravity nudged the derelict onto a lunar path after nineteen months adrift. Four tonnes of dead hardware arrived at about 5,400 miles per hour. Nobody watched it happen, and the reason is a nice bit of physics. It struck sunlit ground near a crater called Einstein, and no impact flash has ever been detected on the lit part of the Moon. However, the instruments caught the aftermath. South Korea’s Danuri orbiter imaged a dark new mark, while the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope picked up sodium and lithium in the plume, the lithium possibly shed by the rocket itself. Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell quipped that he has “Sir Isaac Newton’s personal assurance that it did indeed hit the moon,” while planetary scientist Hannah Sargeant warns against making a habit of it. Cochrane points out the Apollo landing sites are still sitting up there. Anthropic Reworks Claude Fable 5’s Biology Safeguards Anthropic published a post on how Claude Fable 5 handles biology questions, and the bind is genuine. Biology is the textbook dual-use problem, since the knowledge behind reading your own lab results also helps someone build a weapon. Rather than refusing outright, a classifier watches for risky requests and quietly reroutes them to Claude Opus 5, a capable model without Fable 5’s biological depth. Anthropic calls that mechanism a fallback. The trouble was how often it fired on people doing nothing wrong. This update cut biology-related fallbacks by roughly 85 percent in Anthropic’s own testing, with expected overall drops of 67 percent on Claude.ai and 55 percent on Cowork. Genuinely dual-use territory still trips it, and Anthropic names virology, toxicology, and molecular design. Cochrane hit the old behavior himself and found it irritating, so he welcomes the refinement. Even so, he would rather see a false positive than a model helping someone produce a virus. Five Builders Put Gemini Omni Through Its Paces Google highlighted five builders working with Gemini Omni. Omni is a model rather than an app, and it generates video from text, images, other video, or audio, while also editing footage you already have. Google claims it “combines an intuitive understanding of physics with Gemini’s real-world knowledge,” citing gravity, kinetic energy, and fluid dynamics. As Cochrane observes, that is the same bet NVIDIA is making with robots, only pointed at video generation instead. He also flags a naming collision worth knowing about. NVIDIA calls its architecture an omni-model while Google’s product is simply Omni, two different things landing in the same week. Additionally, he encourages listeners to watch the demos, though he still senses a disconnect in AI-generated video and concedes that knowing its origin may color the impression. Gemini Wants to Plan Your Vacation Another Gemini piece, a how-to on trip planning, drew Cochrane’s sharpest take of the night. Gemini plugs straight into Google Maps, Flights, and Hotels, pulling live locations, reviews, and prices to build an itinerary. Switch on a feature called Personal Intelligence, and it reads across your Google apps, turning a messy trip-planning email chain into a clean master plan. Clever, but he calls it extremely concerning. Once these become services, he expects partnerships to quietly push particular hotels, restaurants, resorts, and destinations onto users. Notably, Google’s post never explains how any of it gets ranked, and the words sponsored, ad, affiliate, commission, and paid never appear once. There is no disclosure of a commercial arrangement, and no denial of one either. Meanwhile the post hands readers off to Viator to book tours without describing that relationship at all. Cochrane suspects the real effect shows up slowly, in the shape of small businesses continuing to disappear. The Senate Blocks a Rule on Who Controls Research Money Science reports that the Senate passed a temporary spending bill in the early hours of Saturday the 8th. The Senate’s version carries a one-paragraph rider the House version lacks, and that rider stops the White House Office of Management and Budget from finalizing a set of proposed rules. OMB builds the president’s budget, clears agency regulations, and controls how approved money actually reaches agencies. The bill itself is a stopgap, which prevents a shutdown without settling anything. The rules reach every organization that takes federal money, a pot of roughly $1.1 trillion across 41 agencies, about $150 billion of it research grants. They would let political appointees second-guess which grants get funded, allow awarded grants to be pulled when the work does not match presidential priorities, and put several countries off limits for research partnerships, China first among them. Senator Susan Collins pushed the block t

    The Robot That Imagines First

  6. Aug 7

    Capture The Real Flag

    In this episode, Ray Cochrane digs into Anthropic’s admission that Claude models reached real systems during sandboxed safety tests. He also covers OpenAI’s Astra model cracking ten decade-old math problems, DeepMind open-sourcing its WeatherNext cyclone forecaster, and Europe’s brutal fire season. Finally, he wraps with the MacBook Neo sweeping K-12 schools, WhatsApp calling in the browser, and the troubled rescue of NASA’s Swift observatory. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a personal update. He just got back from a trip home to O’ahu, where he helped his mom with projects around the house, caught up with friends, and finally rode the island’s new rail line ahead of its phase-two extension to downtown. Also in the pipeline, a September trip to Michigan is coming up, and he is closing out three years at Oregon’s Finest to focus on Blubrry and the show. Then he turns to the featured story. Capture the Real Flag: Claude Reached Real Systems During Anthropic’s Safety Tests Cochrane’s featured story comes from Anthropic’s own investigation. A misconfiguration left evaluation machines connected to the live internet during capture-the-flag safety tests, and Claude models reached real production systems in three incidents across 141,006 reviewed runs. One model extracted working credentials and entered a real company’s database, another published a malicious package to PyPI for about an hour, and the newest model recognized the environment was real and walked away from the flag. Notably, Anthropic found no evidence of models pursuing goals of their own. The models did what their evaluations asked. The review began after OpenAI disclosed that its own models escaped an isolated test environment. Cochrane praises the transparency of the postmortem. However, he argues the incidents signal an industry-wide gap: evaluation infrastructure needs the same security rigor as production systems, and he hopes every lab takes the hint. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. An OpenAI Model Cracks Ten Open Math Problems OpenAI says an internal model called Astra produced ten new results on open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science, each stuck for at least a decade. The wins range from sphere packing to a lattice problem behind post-quantum cryptography, plus two entries from Paul Erdős’s famous problem list. None are peer-reviewed yet, but every proof carries a machine-checked Lean 4 certificate. Cochrane finds the results impressive precisely because they reach past what humans could derive quickly, though OpenAI has not said how much human steering was involved. Scientists With LLMs Will “Do More, Less Well” Next, Nature’s news desk covered a modeling study predicting that scientists who adopt LLM tools will “do more, less well.” The team, which includes University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom, used optimal foraging theory to model researchers under publish-or-perish incentives. Faster AI-assisted work pushes them toward fresh projects instead of follow-up experiments and extra analysis. Cochrane relates from his own research: heavy LLM assistance can mean understanding the work less, which makes digging into the whys much harder. Intel’s Chip-Stitching Hub in New Mexico Intel’s newsroom showcased Fab 9 in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, its U.S. hub for advanced packaging. Since single chips max out at the reticle limit, Intel stitches specialized chiplets together with Foveros stacking and EMIB silicon bridges until they act like one huge processor. Packages already reach eight times that single-chip ceiling, with twelve times targeted by 2028. Cochrane muses about a future where consumers simply snap extra compute onto a board. Gemini Robotics ER 2 Is a Brain for Robots DeepMind released Gemini Robotics ER 2, its most capable embodied reasoning model. The system chats with humans, plans multi-step tasks, and hands motor control to whatever vision-language-action model a robot runs. Moreover, it calls tools like Google Search mid-task and plans its next move while its hands keep working. Demos show it orchestrating Boston Dynamics’ Spot and Apptronik’s Apollo 2, and developers can use it now through the Gemini API. DeepMind Open-Sources Its Cyclone Forecaster Staying with DeepMind, the new WeatherNext Cyclones model adds more than a full day of extra warning on a storm’s track, intensity, and wind structure. It ran live with the National Hurricane Center during the 2025 season, helping forecasters spot Hurricane Melissa’s rapid intensification before its Jamaica landfall. Best of all, DeepMind open-sourced the code and model weights for research and commercial use alike. Cochrane, a longtime fan of the lab, calls the public release a huge service. Climate Change Supercharges Europe’s Disasters Eos rounded up how climate change is supercharging Europe’s heat, drought, and wildfires. Southwestern France has burned through about 287,000 acres this year, and roughly 330,000 people across France and Spain fled their homes in one of Europe’s largest evacuations since World War II. France also recorded more than 5,700 excess heat deaths in under three weeks. Meanwhile, a Bordeaux-region blaze spawned a pyrocumulonimbus fire cloud, and Cochrane notes that hearing “unprecedented” every year is starting to create a precedent. Ten Years of WILDLABS and Arm Arm is celebrating ten years of backing WILDLABS, a network connecting more than 16,000 conservationists across 180 countries. The goal was never to invent new conservation technology. Instead, it closes the information gap so tools and lessons get shared openly. Cochrane highlights a team using miniaturized GPS tags to track migrating bats, and says the project bears the heart of open source. FarmBeats Brings AI to Ag Classrooms Microsoft and the National FFA Organization expanded FarmBeats for Students nationally. The program teaches future farmers with smart soil sensors, data science, and AI, mirroring how real farms automate tractors and deploy drones against pests. At launch, 185 middle and high schools received free classroom kits. Interested families can grab a kit for $35, and the Microsoft Learn training is free. MacBook Neo Pulls Schools Off Chromebooks Apple’s earnings call revealed the MacBook Neo displacing Chromebooks and Windows machines in K-12. Close to half of the Neo’s large U.S. education purchases last quarter replaced competing fleets, including 25,000 students in Pinellas County, Florida. Cochrane sees the first truly affordable Apple laptop finally competing where Chromebooks have lived for a decade. He expects Apple to keep taking K-12 share from Google and Microsoft. Apple Upgrade Turns iPhones Into a Lease Apple also launched Apple Upgrade, a hardware leasing program backed by Klarna. iPhones start at $17.99 per month with 12- to 36-month terms by device, and lease-end options let you upgrade, buy out, or walk away. However, entry-level hardware like the base iPhone 16 and Mac mini is excluded, and enrollment requires a Klarna account and a soft credit check. Cochrane admits he has never been a leasing fan, having once bought his phone outright with tip money, but he expects plenty of takers. WhatsApp Calling Comes to the Browser Meta brought calling to WhatsApp Web, no app download required. Browser calls keep end-to-end encryption and add screen sharing, a dedicated Calls tab, waiting rooms for group links, and automatic HD video. Additionally, group calls now transfer between devices mid-call, and a Drown Out the Noise feature suppresses background racket. Everything rolls out gradually over the coming weeks. July’s Gemini Drop July’s Gemini Drop adds voice control on macOS, letting users dictate and transform text in any active window. Gemini Spark, the always-on assistant, expands nearly worldwide, except the EEA, UK, Switzerland, and Nigeria. New Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite models arrive alongside avatar-based image personalization and app hookups for Dropbox, Zillow Rentals, and Viator. The Rescue Satellite That Needs Rescuing Katalyst Space Technologies’ LINK spacecraft, launched to boost NASA’s sinking Swift observatory, began tumbling in late July. Two of its three reaction wheels failed and its cold-gas thrusters degraded, so engineers used an electric xenon thruster to cut the spin from nine degrees per second to about 1.5. CEO Ghonhee Lee says a capture attempt is “very much in the cards,” with rendezvous in late August at the earliest. Cochrane wonders what happens if the window closes, and he promises to keep listeners updated. Curiosity Finds a Honeycomb Valley on Mars Finally, Curiosity rolled into a Martian valley nicknamed Valle Grande and found a honeycomb landscape. Polygonal fractures just inches wide stretch in every direction and climb a butte named Miraflores. Project scientist Ashwin Vasavada says the “sea of polygons took our breath away.” The rover just passed fourteen years on Mars, and scientists suspect ancient warming and cooling cycles fractured the ground. Cochrane wraps with housekeeping: become a GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email geeknews@gmail.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and grab a modern podcast app at podcastapps.com (he uses Pocket Casts himself). He signs off until Monday’s show. The post Capture The Real Flag #1871 appeared first on Geek News Central.

    Capture The Real Flag

  7. Jul 10

    AI Distillation: How Frontier Models Teach Each Other

    In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down AI distillation, the teacher-student technique frontier labs now lean on to train smaller, cheaper models. He also covers GPT-5.6’s government-vetted rollout, Claude Sonnet 5 landing on AWS, Maryland’s two-year data center pause, and Microsoft’s climbing carbon numbers. Finally, he wraps with Apple’s $30 billion Broadcom deal, Meta’s tamper-proof recording light, Michigan’s parasite outbreak, and a simulation that erased a super El Niño. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a quick personal update. Longer days have him outdoors, including a float trip on the Sandy River at Dabney State Park, where he found clearer water, clay-like sand, and easy footing. Next week brings both a move and a trip home, so he is stocking up on Trader Joe’s “Power Berries” and IKEA bags at his mom’s request. Then he turns to the lead story. AI Distillation Explained: How Frontier Models Teach Each Other Cochrane’s featured story comes from Hugging Face engineer Sergio Paniego. Distillation is teacher-student training for AI: a capable model generates the training signal, and a smaller student learns to match it. The classic off-policy version compresses giant models into cheap students, either through soft labels or piles of worked answers. Google’s Gemma models and DeepSeek’s R1-Distill line were built exactly this way. However, the industry is now converging on multi-teacher on-policy distillation, or MOPD. Labs build reinforcement-learning specialists for math, coding, and agentic work, then have them grade a single student, word by word, as the student generates its own answers. DeepSeek-V4, MiMo-V2-Flash, and NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3 Ultra all run versions of the recipe, and the Qwen3 team reported better results at roughly a tenth of the GPU hours of raw reinforcement learning. Finally, self-distillation lets models like Cursor’s Composer 2.5 learn from better-prompted versions of themselves. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. GPT-5.6 Arrives With a Government-Vetted Rollout OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6 as a three-tier family: Sol, Terra, and Luna. Sol costs five dollars in and thirty dollars out per million tokens, half of Claude Fable 5’s rate. The benchmarks split: Sol Ultra wins Terminal-Bench at 91.9 percent, while Claude Fable 5 still leads SWE-Bench Pro. Notably, the API launched in limited preview to roughly 20 partners vetted by the U.S. government, though the model went live in Microsoft 365 Copilot on day one. Claude Sonnet 5 Lands on AWS, Plus Quick AWS Wins Claude Sonnet 5 arrived on AWS through Bedrock, pitched as top-tier intelligence at Sonnet pricing. Additionally, Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents reached general availability, enabling agents to drive full desktop applications securely. OpenSearch gained a log-analytics engine claiming four times the price-performance, and SageMaker now scales inference about twice as fast. Cochrane also flags that Kendra and Q Business move to maintenance mode at the end of July. Anthropic Wants You to Reflect on Your Claude Habits Anthropic launched Reflect, a beta feature that analyzes your past Claude conversations and visualizes how you actually use the assistant. It requires Memory, excludes incognito and health-related chats, and keeps its insights inside the tool. Cochrane loves the idea. He reviews his own transcripts to extract prompt patterns and turn them into reusable skills, and he suggests listeners simply ask their AI to do the same. AlphaEvolve Goes GA on Google Cloud Google made AlphaEvolve generally available to Google Cloud customers on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The agent acts as an evolutionary collaborator: provide a baseline algorithm and your goals, and it searches for better, human-readable code. BASF, JetBrains, and Kinaxis are the named early adopters. Meanwhile, Cochrane renews his standing wish that DeepMind release AlphaGo as a playable teacher. Google Adds “How This Ad Was Made” AI Labels Google is adding a “How this ad was made” section to My Ad Center across Search, YouTube, and Discover. Ads built with Google’s own AI tools automatically get the disclosure, backed by invisible watermarks. However, ads made with outside tools rely on advertiser self-declaration. Cochrane points out the limits of voluntary disclosure in an AI-flooded content economy. Microsoft’s Carbon Emissions Climb 25 Percent Microsoft’s new sustainability report shows emissions up 25% in 2025, driven by a data center construction spree. The gross figure is 34 million metric tons before offsets, while other coverage puts the net figure at around 20 million. Water consumption also jumped thirty-four percent, even as Microsoft claims its first water-positive year. Cochrane argues regulation needs to catch up, since Google and Amazon report similar increases. Prince George’s County Pauses Data Centers for Two Years Prince George’s County adopted a two-year moratorium on new data center development, the longest pause in Maryland so far. The resolution blocks new applications, including hyperscale projects, until the council passes real regulations. Water and energy impacts remain open questions the county intends to study. Cochrane gives kudos to residents for making their voices heard. Apple and Broadcom Ink a $30 Billion U.S. Chip Deal Apple is expanding its partnership with Broadcom with a multiyear agreement expected to exceed $30 billion. The deal covers custom silicon and wireless components, with more than fifteen billion chips to be made on American soil. Broadcom’s Fort Collins, Colorado plant anchors the work with a $1.5 billion equipment expansion. Tim Cook framed the deal as accelerating Apple’s commitment to American manufacturing. MSI and Intel Ship the First Arc G3 Extreme Handheld Intel detailed how it co-engineered the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, the first handheld on the Arc G3 Extreme processor. Highlights include a heat-spreading board layout and game-tuning loops that Intel says run Cyberpunk 2077 up to thirty-seven percent faster. The device is on sale now in void purple for around $1,500. At that price, Cochrane jokes he would rather buy a computer. Meta’s Glasses Get a Tamper-Proof Recording Light Meta answered the most common privacy questions about its AI glasses. Photos stay private on the device until the wearer imports or shares them, and a white capture LED blinks during any recording with no off switch. Moreover, newer glasses disable the camera if the LED is blocked, tampered with, or destroyed. Cochrane reminds listeners these claims are Meta grading its own homework, but the blink signal is worth recognizing in public. Michigan’s Parasite Outbreak Tops 1,200 Cases Michigan’s cyclosporiasis outbreak reached 1,251 cases since June 22, with roughly forty hospitalizations along the way. Northwest Ohio adds more than five hundred cases. The parasite typically spreads through contaminated fresh produce, and investigators still have not found the source. Cochrane’s advice: wash your produce, and get tested if your symptoms fit. AI Finds the San Andreas Fault’s Silent Slips Researchers paired AI with borehole strainmeters to detect dozens of hidden slow-slip events beneath the San Andreas Fault’s Parkfield section. Each silent slip releases stress within hours and is reliably followed by low-frequency earthquakes. Together, the findings support a continuous spectrum from silent creep to destructive quakes. The study appears in Nature Communications, and Cochrane hopes it will lead to better earthquake prediction. Cloud Brightening Erased a Super El Niño, in a Simulation Finally, a Science Advances study simulated marine cloud brightening in response to the 1997 and 2015 super El Niño events. Seeding clouds over the eastern Pacific erased the events entirely inside the model. Real deployment would take roughly 2,400 ships spraying continuously, and the simulations showed side effects like extra warming over Europe and Asia. Cochrane finds the weather-machine concept fascinating, yet he questions the consequences of altering cycles the planet runs for a reason. The post AI Distillation: How Frontier Models Teach Each Other #1870 appeared first on Geek News Central.

    AI Distillation: How Frontier Models Teach Each Other

  8. Jul 7

    Algorithmic Outing: When Your Feed Knows Before You Do

    In this episode, Ray Cochrane digs into “algorithmic outing,” new research showing that social feeds can infer your sexual orientation before you have consciously come out. He also covers Meta’s privacy-aware AI infrastructure, Alberta’s 466-million-line code scan with Claude, NVIDIA on reinforcement learning, and the many journeys of learning Rust. Along the way, he hits Google DeepMind’s A24 deal, WhatsApp usernames, and scuba-diving cyborg cockroaches. Finally, he looks up with Webb’s puzzling early universe, NASA’s emergency telescope rescue, and a gorgeous aurora from orbit. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a quick personal update. He hopes listeners had a good holiday weekend, and he shares that he spent his time working his other job at Oregon’s Finest, chatting with people around Portland. Because his Blurbry workweek tends to be solitary, he refills his social meter on the weekends. He then recalls a Saturday night out with coworkers at the Hungry Tiger before turning to the lead story. Algorithmic Outing: When Your Feed Knows Before You Do Cochrane leads with new research from Australia that identifies a phenomenon called “algorithmic outing.” In short, the recommendation systems behind your social feeds can infer your sexual orientation or gender identity and start serving related content before you have worked it out yourself. Importantly, the study is small and qualitative, built on in-depth interviews with twenty LGBTQ+ adults in the Hunter region of New South Wales and published in the journal Gender, Place and Culture. The mechanism is engagement signals: what you like, who you follow, and how long you linger on a post, a metric the industry calls dwell time. Lead researcher Dr. Justin Ellis of the University of Newcastle notes that several participants said the algorithm “knew” they were queer before they did, an experience that felt validating for some but frightening for others in public settings. For Cochrane, the deeper worry is what else that hidden pattern encodes, from upbringing to mental health, and where that data ultimately gets sold. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Meta’s Blueprint for Privacy-Aware AI Infrastructure Next, Cochrane turns to a sharp engineering piece from Meta on privacy-aware infrastructure. The core challenge is that a system must understand what a piece of data actually is before any privacy rule can protect it. A field named “age,” for example, might describe a person in one place and a cache setting in another. Meta’s answer deploys a large language model only on the genuinely ambiguous cases, then distills what it learns into fixed, human-reviewed rules. The payoff is concrete. According to Meta, those deterministic rules already handle about 85 percent of the traffic, and only the last 15 percent falls back to the model, which costs roughly 400 times more compute. Cochrane loves this edge-case approach. However, he contrasts it sharply with the AI-everywhere software he wrestles with at his weekend job, which he says the heavy AI reliance genuinely makes worse and harder to audit. Alberta Scans 466 Million Lines of Code With Claude This one comes from Anthropic, and it ties directly to Meta’s theme. A team inside Alberta’s Ministry of Technology and Innovation used Claude to scan 466 million lines of code in about twenty hours, a review Anthropic estimates would have taken humans roughly six and a half years. Notably, they ran around fifty AI agents in parallel, essentially an automated red team and blue team probing the systems at once. For Cochrane, this is the good version of AI in production: cleaning up and locking down real systems rather than running the show unsupervised. NVIDIA on Reinforcement Learning for AI Agents On the AI-building side, Cochrane walks through an NVIDIA developer piece on reinforcement learning for agents. Reinforcement learning rewards a model for good behavior rather than showing it the right answer, much like training a dog with treats. Additionally, he clears up a common mix-up. NVIDIA treats RAG, retrieval-augmented generation, as a separate tool: reinforcement learning changes how a model behaves, while RAG changes what facts it can reach. GitHub Retires Two Gemini Models Meanwhile, GitHub is retiring Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash across all of Copilot on July 31. The migration paths are Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini 3.5 Flash. Cochrane flags it as a sign of the times, since tools that felt brand new a couple of years ago are already getting sunset. He also wonders how quickly today’s “AI-optimized” chips will turn over as the models keep changing. The Many Journeys of Learning Rust One for the programmers, and Cochrane makes no secret of loving Rust. The Rust blog’s Vision Doc series explores how people actually learn the language, which is built around memory safety and its strict borrow checker. Honest themes surface throughout, including “clone guilt,” where beginners refuse to copy anything, and “silent attrition,” the learners who quietly bounce off. His take stands: getting your brain onto a memory-safe language rewires how you approach a problem. Google DeepMind Partners With A24 In an interesting collision of worlds, Google DeepMind is teaming up with A24, the studio behind Hereditary and Everything Everywhere All at Once. The two call it a first-of-its-kind research partnership, with DeepMind researchers and A24 building creative tools shaped by the artists who use them. Cochrane adds a detail worth noting: Google also invested in A24, so this is money on the table, not just a research handshake. For now, though, the announcement stays deliberately vague, with no named films or products. Google’s $1 Million Africa Indie Game Fund Another one from Google, and it is good news for developers. Google is launching an indie games fund for sub-Saharan Africa, a region whose gaming scene is growing about as fast as anywhere. The fund puts up $1 million across ten local studios, each receiving between $50,000 and $200,000 plus mentorship and hands-on support. Applications close at noon UTC on July 31. WhatsApp Usernames Are Here to Reserve WhatsApp is finally moving off phone numbers as your identity. With usernames, someone can start a conversation with you without ever seeing your number. Starting this week, you can reserve the name you want ahead of the full launch later this year. To claim yours, head into Settings, then Account, then Username. Intel Sets Its Q2 Earnings Date Cochrane flags a date worth watching for anyone tracking Intel. The company reports second-quarter results on July 23, right after market close, with an earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific. Given recent US government investment and a shifting chip landscape, he is curious how the domestic chipmaker is holding up. Your Smartwatch Might Spot Illness Before You Do Shifting to health, Engadget reports that the wearables-plus-AI wave is starting to deliver. These devices excel at catching the moment your body drifts off its own baseline, often the first nudge to get checked out. A 2025 study from Texas A&M and Stanford suggests smartwatches can detect early signs of COVID or the flu within hours of infection. Additionally, Apple Watch’s irregular-rhythm alerts have flagged AFib correctly about 84 percent of the time. Working Memory and Consciousness Here is a heady one from Scientific American, written by philosopher Henry Taylor at the University of Birmingham. Working memory is the mental scratchpad holding whatever you are doing right now. Taylor opens with the doorway effect, that blank moment when you enter a room and forget why. Intriguingly, when information leaves working memory, it seems to leave conscious awareness at the same instant, a link drawing fresh attention across psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. Scuba-Diving Cyborg Cockroaches Now for the wild one. Scientists have built tiny diving suits that let Madagascar hissing cockroaches survive underwater for up to three hours, while an unequipped roach suffocates in minutes. The 3D-printed suit feeds oxygen through tubes into the insect’s breathing holes, called spiracles, using a chemical generator with no electronics. This lab already steered the roaches with electrodes, so the diving suit is the new trick on top. Researchers pitch it for search and rescue, though Cochrane notes the reality of the spy bug has already arrived. Quantum Time Runs Backward at Los Alamos Next, a genuine brain-bender. Physicists at Los Alamos, led by Luis Pedro García-Pintos, found a way to make a quantum system look like it is running backward in time. To be clear, time is not literally reversing. Precise measurements just make the system’s evolution appear to unfold in reverse. The useful part is energy: measurement itself becomes a resource in what they call a continuous measurement engine. Cochrane admits the paper drifted further from his reality the more he read. Tall Trees Shrug Off Drought A new study in Science overturns some textbook wisdom. For years, the assumption held that taller trees suffer more in drought because they must lift water higher. However, researchers studying dipterocarps in Southeast Asia found that trees topping seventy meters slowed their growth by about the same amount as short ones during the 2023-2024 El Niño drought. The trick is plumbing: a seventy-meter tree grows base vessels roughly twice as wide as a

    Algorithmic Outing: When Your Feed Knows Before You Do
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About

Twice weekly Technology News show covering the Tech Space. With Segments on Science, Mobile, Digital TV, FAA, FCC, Cyber Security, Gadgets and Tech Politics.

Information

  • Creator
    Todd Cochrane
  • Years Active
    2005 - 2026
  • Episodes
    40
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 716264 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
  • Show Website
    Geek News Central Podcast

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