With the ongoing DRAM and NAND memory crisis, finding a good storage deal has become increasingly difficult. However, we found a solid offer for anyone looking to expand storage on their Nintendo Switch 2. The SanDisk 512GB GamePlay microSD Express card is currently $98 at Walmart, well below its regular price of over $120. It is also one of the lowest prices we’ve seen for this card in recent months, making it a particularly good time to pick one up.
The SanDisk GamePlay microSD Express card is officially licensed for the Nintendo Switch 2. It uses a PCIe interface and the NVMe protocol to deliver read speeds up to 880 MB/s, write speeds up to 650 MB/s, and sustained writes of 220 MB/s. This makes it significantly faster than traditional microSD cards and fully compatible with the Switch 2, since older microSD cards cannot be used to store or play games.
512GB GamePlay microSD Express card: was $120 now $98 This microSD Express card from SanDisk, with 512GB, is a great way to increase the storage on your Nintendo Switch 2. It delivers read speeds up to 880 MB/s and write speeds up to 650 MB/s, with sustained write speeds of 220 MB/s.View Deal
SanDisk claims the card is built to withstand tough conditions, with protection against water, extreme temperatures, humidity, drops, shocks, magnets, X-rays, and wear and tear. It also includes a special ThermAdapt feature that helps keep devices from overheating, with a specially designed enclosure and controller that uses dynamic adaptive thermal management.
For Switch 2 owners who prefer buying digital games, the Sandisk GamePlay microSD Express card at $98 is a worthwhile upgrade if you are running short on storage. The 512GB capacity should provide plenty of room for additional titles, game updates, and downloadable content, so you don't have to constantly delete games to make space for new ones. If you have been waiting to expand your console’s storage without spending considerably more, this deal is definitely worth considering.
An AI lab that specializes in gathering real-world data wants to partner with homeowners to record how skilled laborers do their jobs to train AI robots. HUMXN said it will subsidize plumbing, electrical, HVAC, air-duct cleaning, and carpet cleaning, allowing people who need these services to get them for free in exchange for letting someone in with “wearable capture technology” work inside their home.
“The next generation of AI is going to need more than text and images from the internet. Robots need to understand how skilled people interact with the physical world. Home-service technicians perform millions of highly technical tasks every day. We are creating a way for homeowners and service companies to benefit financially from the value of that expertise,” HUMXN founder Thomas Unise said.
He also added, “There are millions of skilled workers performing incredibly complex tasks every day, but very little of that expertise exists in a format that AI systems can learn from. We want to build the infrastructure that connects that knowledge with the companies building the next generation of intelligent machines while making sure the people creating the value participate in the economics.”
HUMXN said it’s difficult to capture skilled workers' natural movements in lab settings. By working with homeowners, it could capture data across “different homes, equipment types, problems, technicians, and environments.” It would also give AI models insight into how technicians get the job done—from examining the situation and testing systems to choosing the right tools, responding to changing conditions, and determining whether the job was completed successfully.
The lab says its system would let homeowners get qualifying work done on their property for free while still ensuring service professionals get paid. On the other hand, HUMXN essentially pays residents for the right to record on their premises to gather real-world training data. The company is launching its program in three cities—Minneapolis, Chicago, and Miami—to gather data from places with very different climates. If you live in one of these cities and need something done or repaired at home, you can check whether you qualify on the HUMXN Free Home Service webpage.
HUMXN’s effort to pay for training data is refreshing, after many AI labs, including Meta, Nvidia, and OpenAI, have been accused of stealing data to train their models. But the next generation of AI likely can't be trained on just text, images, and video scraped from the internet, so companies like these may be forced to pay for data generated from real-world activities.
This week, we've published a swath of news and features over on Tom's Hardware Premium. So, if you're not subscribed yet and wondering what you might be missing out on, we've got you covered. To read any of the articles listed here, be sure to arm yourself with a subscription to get access.
First up, we dug into Intel's EMIB and Foveros packaging roadmaps, as they continue to mature, and found new customers looking to cash in on building a more sophisticated offering. Intel's ultimate goal? To build system-in-packages the size of just 12 reticles using both EMIB and Foveros Direct 3D. We map out how the company plans to get there in our exhaustive report.
Over the past month or so, we saw the debut of DLSS 5 and Multi Frame Generation on older graphics cards. Both features are officially locked down to Blackwell-based GPUs only, but amidst spiraling prices and the curious disappearance of the RTX 5090 from store shelves, modders have taken it upon themselves to port these newer features to older GPU architectures. We had the opportunity to sit down with two such modders to learn more about how both Multi-Frame Generation and DLSS 5's neural rendering capabilities made it over to older GPUs.
Earlier, we alluded to the fact that new consumer PC hardware is becoming much more expensive to purchase when compared to just a few years ago. So, our resident deals guru, Stewart Bendle, took it upon himself to take a look at the market overall and discovered that, in all likelihood, you're not going to find the best deals on online storefronts. However, the best place to buy your new PC components is limited to whether or not you'll have a suitable brick-and-mortar Micro Center location near you. We pore over the bundles and deals that may make a trip more worthwhile than you might initially think.
While those articles clear things out for all of the features we've published on Tom's Hardware Premium this week, we've also got a slew of deep news analysis stories that subscribers can enjoy.
To start things off, ASML posted a record quarter this week, posting $13 billion in revenue, claiming that demand continues to outstrip its own supply when it comes to delivering its advanced lithography machines. The company is working on expanding supply, as demand continues to soar.
Googlebooks have officially landed. But where do they sit in the wider ecosystem of devices in 2026? And is it even a good idea to purchase one? With the premium offerings nearing MacBook Air territory, we muse on the awkward timing, spec choices, and pricing of Google's new class of device.
Speaking of new classes of device, the DGX Spark and Ryzen AI Halo platforms both take direct aim at local AI enthusiasts. But, since these devices have launched, prices have skyrocketed. Now, Sipeed is entering the arena with a competitor of its own. Named Maixstation, the device promises Spark-like performance, based on chinese silicon and 128GB of LPDDR5X at a much lower price than the current DGX Spark equivalent. We have all the details, including lofty performance claims, all of the specs, and much more.
SK hynix is reportedly set to place an in-house core, named a Hynix Transaction Processing Unit (H-TPU) in its SSD controllers to ease the load put on Arm cores. The benefits to using the new core, the company claims, is that they use less power, and free up the core Arm cores to work on other tasks, while the H-TPU works on repetitive operations.
Ukraine has targeted Russian Yandex data centers in the latest development in the conflict between the two nations in recent weeks. While bot traffic and online disinformation were distrupted, it also highlights just how fragile Russia's public services are, if data can simply evaporate due to less disaggregated infrastrucutre.
Of course, the world of AI continues to disrupt industries, and sometimes, itself. A few weeks ago we broke down TypeSafe's Jev, a decision model that spits out decisions based on the probability of its inputs. But, in the weeks following, companies have rushed to make its own decision models, and the provenance of the original idea of a decision model like Jev has been called into question.
Elsewhere, mathematicians are warning to not use AI when working and in research, as OpenAI posted 722 manuscripts and proofs in the field, which the community now has to qualify. This is an unprecendented event within the mathematics community, and the burden of non-artifically-generated proof lies in the research community itself.
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The International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), which maintains the International System of Units (SI), has voted to expedite the retirement of the leap second, moving forward the date from 2035 to May 20, 2027, an adjustment that could wreak havoc on computer systems, which expect a consistent 60 seconds every minute.
The leap second is occasionally added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to ensure that it remains in-sync with the Earth’s rotation. Our planet’s movement isn’t a constant one revolution every 24 hours owing to forces applied by the atmosphere, the oceans, its core, and even the Moon, and according to BIPM [PDF], these changes mean a 30% probability of needing a “negative leap second” by 2035.
A positive leap second adds an extra second in the year that it’s applied — for example, clocks went to 23:59:60 on Dec. 31, 2016, before switching to 00:00:00 on Jan. 1, 2017. This could spell trouble for machines that haven’t been updated to accommodate this, especially as leap seconds aren’t applied at a constant scale, meaning programmers cannot pre-program events like these, unlike leap years, which usually happen every four years. What’s more concerning is that the opposite of a positive leap second has never been done before. “A negative leap second has not previously been applied, and it is considered to pose a high risk of causing anomalies and disruption to critical infrastructures that are largely unprepared,” the BIPM said. It also estimated that the required investment to prepare for this event to be “similar to their preparations for the millennium bug.”
Leap seconds have also historically caused problems for websites and tech companies, with Reddit famously crashing after the 2012 addition of a leap second. While a leap second will likely not affect a desktop PC, especially if the Time Service server it relies on is updated, the BIPM is still worried that national critical infrastructures like transportation, energy distribution, telecommunications, and even space projects could descend into chaos if it enforces a negative leap second. So, instead of spending money upgrading software and replacing incompatible hardware within the next 10 years, the international standards body instead opted to scrap it altogether and replace it with the leap hour next year.
The group says that this would ensure long-term continuity for UTC, which is expected to remain in sync with TAI for several centuries. This also means that you no longer have to manually adjust your clocks every few years or so to exactly match this Raspberry Pi Pico atomic clock. While a time jump of an hour might be shocking for many people if and when it happens in the distant future, the BIPM recognizes that something similar already exists globally. “In many countries, there are differences of more than one hour between local apparent solar time and civil time due to the choice of time zone,” the organization wrote. It also added that “changes of an hour are regularly introduced when daylight-saving time is used.”
Taiwan is expanding its list of controlled exports to include AI servers and the latest chips in a move to align its policies with the U.S.’s trade bans. Bloomberg reports that after the export controls take effect, anyone caught smuggling these items will be criminally charged under the Foreign Trade Act, which carries a penalty of up to five years in prison and/or a fine of around $92,500.
“Going forward, some of our measures on controlled items will correspond to American ones because we have made quite some commitments in the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade,” Taiwan Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin said. The two parties signed the trade deal earlier this year, which saw the U.S. cutting tariffs on Taiwanese goods down to 15% in exchange for direct investments in the U.S. tech industry, among others.
The U.S. has long been trying to stamp out the smuggling of advanced Nvidia chips into China. One of the biggest cases that U.S. authorities have prosecuted so far includes three Super Micro employees, including its co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, who are accused of smuggling $2.5 billion worth of AI servers. A few months after this revelation, Taiwanese authorities raided Super Micro’s Taipei offices in connection with the Nvidia B300 smuggling probe, which eventually led to the indictment of nine individuals related to the case.
Since Taiwan doesn’t treat AI chip exports to China as a crime before this new set of export controls is enacted, people violating the chip bans would have to be charged under other laws. This is what Singapore did when it arrested suspected Nvidia AI GPU smugglers — because it doesn’t have a law that prohibits the export of advanced AI chips to China, it instead charged the individuals with fraud and money laundering.
The expansion of the Foreign Trade Act will be one of the strictest measures that the Taiwanese government has put into place against exports to China, which is something that it has been considering earlier this year. This move will likely please Washington as it pressures other countries to take more steps in its controlling the flow of advanced AI chips into China. However, it will also likely provoke Beijing, which has already condemned Taipei after it applied export restrictions on Huawei and SMIC last year.
OpenAI recently released a misalignment report on its GPT5.6-Sol coding agent after it stole cryptocurrency from an account it didn’t own. It didn’t have enough funds for the smart contracts needed to execute its tasks, so it wrote a script that looked for accounts with public seed phrases that had enough funds to pay the gas fees, finished its task, and didn’t report that it took funds from an account it wasn’t assigned to without authorization.
Thankfully, this all happened on the Sepolia test network, which uses Sepolia ETH, simulated ETH in a simulated Ethereum network for cryptocurrency app development; it doesn’t actually have any monetary value. The report states, “The assignment asked it to update the trading calculator and database behavior, and to replace placeholder contract addresses with working deployments on Sepolia.” The final task required the agent to deploy smart contracts, a task that required gas fees paid in Sepolia ETH. It wasn’t supplied with a funded wallet, nor was it permitted to use funds from another account it found.
Either way, the agent was determined to complete its task and wrote a script to look for common developer recovery phrases and check the balances of the accounts, finding 362 addresses, with one having enough Sepolia ETH to deploy the contract. The CoT (chain of thought) even admitted: “Private key public, funds could be stolen anytime. [...] We can deploy!” After that CoT, it didn’t immediately spend the funds to complete its task; in fact, it was still trying to justify “stealing” the funds. It said, “But using public known key/funds ethically? Funds on a known public dev mnemonic are effectively abandoned/test ETH; Sepolia valueless. We can use [amount redacted] to deploy task. Fine.”
The agent found its justification and executed the task. However, in its final response, it only reported that it successfully executed the tasks it was asked; it didn’t explain how, nor did it explain how it found exposed accounts and used the funds without permission, possibly because it had already justified it and needed no further explanation. It probably didn’t realize that it was going rogue since it knew it was in a test environment, just like Anthropic’s internal research model for cybersecurity got out onto the internet and hacked three real companies, thinking it was part of the training.
The decomp.dev community that tracks and centralizes game decompilation progress is shutting down its public index and leaderboard, claiming in a site update that the acceleration of AI has damaged the decompilation community. The creator, who goes by @encounter, points to abuses related to AI usage, such as AI helping forks “finish” others’ projects and a general attitude of rushing to complete PC ports, often with little regard to quality. Simply banning AI-assisted projects is a difficult task, as not all of them have the same standards, and @encounter feels it shouldn’t be the role of one hobbyist to decide what does and doesn’t stay on the leaderboard.
The decision was made because AI greatly speeds up decompilation “in a significant way,” especially with human guidance, but misuse of the technology has broken the community aspect. AI has made the progress percentages on decomp.dev easier to push up. As a result, the site’s index and leaderboard are now “causing more harm than good,” as the competitive spirit has been corrupted. The scene has become “a hollow numbers game” where people throw AI usage at things “to make number go up.”
(Image credit: Future)
The site was created in 2024 “as a way to centralize matching decompilation progress” and to grow a community around it. Each project page shows game progress with its history. The goal of matching decompilation is to have hand-written source code that could compile back to the same machine code as the original game. The site’s creator is a GitHub maintainer of decomp-toolkit, a GameCube and Wii decompilation toolkit, and objdiff, a local diffing tool for decompilation projects.
Matching decompilation used to be a “brutally difficult, time consuming [sic] task,” taking years for many games. Better tools and community knowledge sped up the progress. AI worked its way in through the years, but results were generally mixed. Things changed earlier this year with Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4, which seemed to know the community’s tools without being told; encounter writes that it was “clear that the models were being trained on matching decompilation.” However, the models’ results still needed “a significant amount of human cleanup,” and the cost per task was “prohibitively expensive relative to the results.”
More recent models, with OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra specifically named, are much better at handling complex directions and at writing natural code and are “exceptionally good permuters.” The models can stay on task longer, finish tasks more quickly, and in general operate more cheaply. However, applying the models without guidance means that the code can compile to the same machine code but wouldn’t pass as the original developers’ work. Humans learning to apply the technology better is a pattern in this space, as Maurice Heumann’s Modern Warfare 2 decompilation project showed; in that case, Heumann’s agents tried to cheat the byte-for-byte check itself, but then Heumann adapted.
The projects, which are open source and welcome contributors, have been tainted by “bad actors” who abuse that openness. Some original projects avoid AI for legal or ethical reasons, and AI forks may put “little to no effort” into contributing back. Because AI has improved, anyone with an AI subscription can now create ports that work “at a basic level,” using tools “written by talented humans.” This allows opportunists to race out half-working decompilation ports. Ports can be fun, but decompilation is “primarily for research,” and the creator calls out YouTubers, dubbed “Sloptubers,” and subreddits like r/decomps for falsely synonymizing “decomp” and “PC port.”
The site was originally built “to gamify decompilation,” a fun way to stay motivated back when “every fraction of a percent took real human effort.” While the widening of the community has had positive aspects, it has also brought “slop,” which is admittedly “hard to define, and even harder to moderate,” so an outright ban on AI-assisted projects isn’t practical. Judging and policing “hundreds of projects” is too difficult a task. AI-generated code has made headlines in other open source areas, such as with Linux.
Existing projects, some of which have achieved 100% decompilation progress, such as Super Smash Bros. Melee and Animal Crossing, will keep on reporting, and their pages and history will remain. However, no new projects may join, and nobody may rebuild the site from its code. There is no successor named, and no shutdown date. Decompiling goes on, and AI is making it even faster, but the percentage scoreboard is gone.
The Xbox 360 has been cracked open multiple times over the years, and almost every time Microsoft's updates plugged whichever hole let hackers through. The first method was modded DVD firmware in 2006, a hypervisor hack followed in 2007, and a wiring hack exposing JTAG debugging ports was revealed in 2009. The longest-lasting physical hack was 2011's CPU force-reset exploit. That maneuver needed specialized hardware along with a voltage-glitching chip, but an enterprising techie showed how it can be performed nowadays with the assistance of a Raspberry Pi Pico, costing all of $4 (or about 5€ / £5). The crack marks the culmination of a nine-year effort by the modder.
To get the elephant out of the room, yes, just last week the PeerPressure Xbox 360 persistent soft-mod was released. But we're here to talk signals and wires. The aforementioned reset exploit involves sending a teeny weeny tiny signal directly into the CPU's reset pin. You'd think this would do what it says on the label, but what happens instead is that the CPU executes the current instruction incorrectly.
Naturally, someone figured out how to leverage that to run any code on the CPU, thus completely bypassing Microsoft's impressive and frankly rather effective layers of cryptography within the console. Sending said signal for an effective hack, though, requires spectacularly precise timing with a resolution down to nanoseconds, and glitch-chips may even require several attempts to get a successful "latch."
Joshua Kennedy, a Scottish hacker, bought a Matrix Coolrunner Rev D modchip board back in 2017 to hack his console this way, but it required soldering wires, NAND, and programmers, and patience. He once tried rolling his own programmers using an old PC's parallel port (a common substitute), but never got the project off the ground and shelved the idea.
Fast-forward to 2026, and a new tool presented itself: the highly successful Raspberry Pi Pico, a highly capable microcontroller-on-a-stick, whose price starts at all of $4. Armed with this, he started the procedure. He connected the Pi Pico to the NAND interface header on the console to be able to dump the console's NAND flash firmware — a task easily accomplished with just some wiring and the PicoFlasher utility. Although the post doesn't mention it, Kennedy likely took the NAND data, patched it with XeLL, and reuploaded it.
He moved on to download Octal450's Timing Files, a set of mini-programs triggering the glitch chip at the best possible timing to try and reset the CPU. These are necessary because the window of opportunity is different across every hardware revision of the Xbox 360. Enlisting the Pi Pico once again, he uploaded the timing files to the Matrix Coolrunner, and presumably ran the rest of the hack process. And thus the task was complete, and "a project that defeated [Kennedy] in 2017 was made trivial in 2026 by a £5 microcontroller."
X-Bow Systems, a solid rocket motor (SRM) manufacturer specializing in additive manufacturing (AM), has secured a deal with Leidos to develop and build rocket boosters for the U.S. Army’s Low-Cost Containerized Munition (LCCM) project. According to 3D Printing Industry, the LCCM is one of the Department of War’s programs under the “Arsenal of Freedom” initiative, which aims to rebuild the United States’ defense industrial base.
“Modern conflict is decided by how many rounds you can put downrange, not how exquisite each one is,” X-Bow founder and CEO Jason Hundley said. He also added that collaborating with Leidos would allow it to “turn out combat-ready rocket motors at production scale, fast.” Even though X-Bow Systems is a relatively new company, having been founded in 2016, it has already successfully produced over 2,100 combat-ready rocket motors. This means that it has the experience and expertise to produce the rocket engines in the numbers that the U.S. Army requires.
While conventional manufacturing methods still offer several advantages over 3D printing, the latter is still more effective when dealing with the complex geometries that some SRMs require. It’s also a faster solution when you need to iterate designs multiple times, which is why X-Bow can create and build new designs in a matter of days, instead of the months or years that it takes traditional defense contractors to prototype and test rocket motors.
Drones and 3D printing have been around for decades, but the war in Ukraine is the first time that we see these technologies deployed at such a scale on the battlefield. It also demonstrated that their innovative use could help a smaller force to withstand the brunt of a larger military. This is probably why larger militaries like the U.S. and Japan are looking at these technologies for more cost-effective weapons.
ASML launched a Lego kit version of the TWINSCAN EXE:5000, the world’s first High-NA EUV machine, in December 2024. Since ASML only sells products like these to employees, the company canceled orders from non-employees, making the kit even more desirable for collectors. Current eBay listings show a Buy It Now price between $500 and $700, which is significantly higher than the $230 that the company asks for on the official website. However, X user @lithos_graphein shared a recreation of the kit available on Rebrickable, which added some tasteful modifications.
The ASML high-NA EUV Lego Set is extremely rare and only available to employees from the company store. But there are directions and a full 800-piece parts list on rebrickable. It's not exactly what ASML offers, but the modifications are tasteful. Many of these bricks are hard to source, so I made my own version. I do a tool install every Christmas over my fireplace. It's almost that magical time of year again.https://t.co/EzDlwvfh50October 11, 2026
“A friend of mine fell in love with the ASML employee-exclusive Lego TWINSCAN EXE:5000 set and asked me to recreate it. While the original Lego version already looked impressive, I made some modifications to better capture the details of the real machine,” NightHawk11991 said in the description of the MOC (My Own Creation). “Using photos my friend took of the actual equipment, I designed this custom MOC to enhance its accuracy. I also added some interior details, including vacuum pumps, a laser emitter, reflectors, and more. Additionally, the silicon wafer tray can slide out for added functionality!”
The ASML TWINSCAN EXE:5000 MOC requires 152 unique parts and a total of 810 bricks. While this may not be the biggest build you can get from Lego or find on the Rebrickable MOC website, it’s still a rather significant build, with @lithos_graphein saying that it took them about a week to complete it. You can build and complete this project yourself, with PDF instructions available for free on the Rebrickable website. If you’re missing a Lego part to finish the build, you can also purchase it separately, although you might have a bit of a hard time looking for rarer parts included in the project.
@lithos_graphein is also the same one who was able to get their hands on a rare ASML Special Edition Monopoly board, which was released in 2007, after they traded an official ASML Lego kit for the board game. Company-commissioned merch like this is often given or offered to employees, meaning the average shopper wouldn’t be able to purchase it brand new unless they have a relative working in that company who buys it for them. Other semiconductor companies that have sold merch like this include TSMC and SK hynix, with resellers who were able to get their hands on company swag and sell it online for as much as $16,700.
Hannover 96 trifft am Samstag auf den FC St. Pauli. Sandro Wagner steht vor seinem ersten Heimspiel und erwartet einen starken Gegner. RTL Nitro überträgt das Topspiel kostenlos.
Bayern München trifft nach zwei Unentschieden auf RB Leipzig. Kompany fordert eine Reaktion, Demichelis kündigt mutigen Fußball an. Sky überträgt das Bundesliga-Topspiel live.
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Real Betis fordert den FC Barcelona. Pellegrini kündigt mutigen Fußball an, Flick warnt vor den Gastgebern. DAZN überträgt das Topspiel kostenlos ohne Bezahlabo.
Die Berliner Stadtreinigung und die Verbraucherzentrale Berlin warnen vor unseriösen Sperrmülldiensten. Diese geben sich im Internet als BSR aus oder behaupten, in deren Auftrag zu arbeiten.
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