Reddit user u/DallasGrave shared a fix for his RTX 5090, one of the best graphics cards, whose 12VHPWR connector was overheating, along with an image of a module screwed onto the back of his GPU. This module is apparently a custom-made power distributor that splits the current load across more wires to lower connector temperatures. Apparently, u/DallasGrave is connected to GRAVEPC.com, which offers mainly custom cooling solutions for small form-factor PCs.

In response to a commenter asking whether this mod will be covered under PNY’s warranty, he said, “We're a PNY partner. You'll be able to buy a PNY-specific card with a similar modification directly from us with a full warranty.” This mod isn't currently on his website, however. PNY hasn't been great at honoring warranties for the 12VHPWR issue with third-party cables, as covered in this recent story about a third-party cable melting in use, so take the claim of full warranty coverage with a grain of salt.

The 16-pin connector issue plagues many Nvidia graphics cards because they draw high current through what is essentially a 12-pin connector. The four smaller pins are sensors, and the remaining 12 are split between six +12V and ground connections. The connector typically uses high-current-rated 16AWG cables, and in theory, they should handle up to 600W.

Apparently, some cases of these melting connectors are due to poor connections where the pins don't make enough contact, causing high resistance and heat buildup, and uneven current distribution is often a source of issues. This was rarely the case with older multi-8-pin connector setups, as the safety margins were higher. However, graphics cards now draw more current, and Nvidia thought it should run it through fewer wires.

The modder essentially fixed this issue by soldering additional connections to the power rails directly on the RTX 5090’s PCB and routing them to what can only be described as a power distributor. This distributor contains a PCB that the wires connect to and where the two female 8-pin connectors are placed. It is unknown whether the modder designed it himself and whether it contains any other power-delivery or protection components, such as capacitors and fuses.

The distributor appears to be custom-made to fit his specific graphics card, and the housing shows signs of resin printing. In the modder’s stress test, running the card at full load, pulling 550W for 48 hours, he says it “never crossed 40c even at the joint.”

The 12VHPWR connector is a terrible design; cramming that much power into only six wires creates a very sensitive system where slight misalignment and uneven current distribution could cause connector-melting temperatures. This mod is cleaner and more attractive than the other power mods we’ve covered, like this poor Galax RTX 5090, but it is still invasive, requiring wires to be soldered directly to the card’s power rails.

A robotics startup just received a cease-and-desist letter from the state of California after it hosted a human vs. robot fight in San Francisco. REK founder and CEO Cix Liv shared the document on social media, with the California State Athletic Commission (CSAC) telling the company to stop holding, promoting, or sponsoring these unsanctioned fights and that organizing them without a license is a misdemeanor. You can see the video of the fight that prompted the order by expanding the tweet below.

The cease-and-desist refers to the human vs. humanoid cage fight that the company sponsored on Sep. 18, 2026, where YouTuber Frankie LaPenna entered a fighting cage and faced off with three different robots. Now, it’s unclear if this was a sporting contest or a promotional stunt, but it was clearly used to give the REK robot fighting platform more publicity. After all, REK has been advertising its events as “Real pilots, real punches. Humanoid robots in brutal, full-contact combat,” and even offers private events with robots facing off in three rounds. Aside from that, a robot is already dangerous as it is, so a human facing off with one raises countless safety concerns and ethical issues. You can read the full order by expanding the tweet below.

REK is proof of life imitating art, as we’ve already seen something similar in the movie Real Steel, with Hugh Jackman’s character and his son training a discarded humanoid boxing robot, allowing it to rise through the ranks and challenge the reigning champion in a classic underdog plot intertwined with a father-and-son story. While there’s no indication that Liv was inspired by the 2011 Hollywood film, the similarity of their concepts is quite uncanny. We’ve also seen another robot startup following into the footsteps of Hollywood after it decommissioned its old robots “Terminator-style” by making them jump into a vat of molten steel.

If you’re interested in seeing these matches, REK has listed its past events on its website, where you can watch some of their replays on YouTube. The company hosts live events, although we don’t have a schedule for the remainder of the year yet; those who want to see them in the metal without waiting for a match can sponsor a private event, which starts at a cool $10,000. But if you’re interested in piloting one of these fighting robots, you can download the company’s official Real Robot Simulator, which is available on Steam and Meta Quest. Those who reach the Pro level and qualify could even get to pilot the real thing in a live event.

Regardless of whether the LaPenna vs. robot fight was a legitimate combat sports event or a promotional showcase, it just made sense for CSAC to step in. After all, the state agency regulates combat sports where at least one party is a human to ensure fairness and enforce safety, especially with lives involved. But with the way the cease-and-desist was worded, it looks as though CSAC would not have intervened if the September 18 fight had just been between robots.

The Cease and Desist Order

“PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that you and each of you are hereby ordered to cease and desist from: (1) holding, promoting, or advertising any boxing or mixed martial arts contest match, or exhibition, involving any human in the State of California without the prior approval of the California State Athletic Commission, or (2) engaging in the promotion of, or participation in, a boxing or martial arts contest, match, or exhibition involving any human without a license pursuant to Business and Professions Code section 18640,” CSAC said in its letter. “PLEASE TAKE FURTHER NOTICE that Business and Professions Code section 18870 and 18878 make it a misdemeanor for a person or promoter who is required to be license by the State Athletic Commission to directly or indirectly hold, aid or abet, or attempt to hold, aid, or abet the holding of, any contest, match, or exhibition without having first obtained a license or permit therefor from the State Athletic Commission or to otherwise violate any provision of the State Athletic Commission Act.”

One of the many appeals of retrocomputing and emulation is being able to play your old games on much better systems than you or your parents could afford at the time. Along those lines, techie SupraGSX has brought support for Nvidia's Pascal-era cards (mainly 10-series and Quadro P2000-P6000 cards) to Windows XP 32-bit, with a bevy of modern accouterments for DisplayPort and HDMI handling, too.

The new ForceWare 382.69 (custom numbering) is a spin-off of the existing 368.81 driver, seemingly Nvidia's last Windows XP release that supported 9-series GPUs. The software also pulls card firmware from Quadro 376.84 drivers, and support for Video Protected Region from Windows 7 GeForce 378.78. Although some websites mention that this project was vibe-coded, the repository doesn't mention it, and a cursory look at the build instructions didn't reveal any obvious traces of clanker activity.

Here's the full list of supported cards, taken from the code repository. The one notable omission is GT 1030, based on the GP108 chip. The rest of the lineup is fairly complete, and there's even an experimental build that supports the 1050 Ti. Since the author is releasing new versions as we speak, it's worth checking the project's README for updated information.

• GeForce GTX 970, 980, 980 Ti; GTX TITAN X (Maxwell).
• GeForce GTX 1060 (3/5/6 GB), 1070, 1070 Ti, 1080, 1080 Ti; TITAN X (Pascal), TITAN Xp.
• GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (experimental support)
• Quadro M4000, M5000, M6000, M6000 24GB; P2000, P2200, P4000, P5000, P6000.
• Additional desktop OEM variants of GTX 950 and GTX 960.

Because contemporary displays with high refresh rates and resolutions can be tricky, SupraGSX added DisplayPort HBR2 and HBR3 support (High Bit Rate), HDMI 2.0 identification and mode-retry fail-safes, HDMI/DVI handling, and improved scaling and aspect ratio settings in the Nvidia Control Panel.

Some folks have tested the new driver, and it appears to work mostly fine, with reports of it working well with ultrawide screens at high refresh rates. SupraGSX is active in the Vogons forums, where it seems to take bug reports and feature requests.

If you're interested in revitalizing your retro system with Forceware, you can go to the project's releases section and download the installer package. Enterprising modders can review the extensive build instructions and perhaps roll their own mods.

Since many retro-tinkerers may be asking for Windows XP 64-bit support, a fork of the Forceware driver existed, but it's since been deleted. However, its binaries live on at Mega. Since these are all unofficial drivers, always exercise caution and don't install them on systems where you're concerned about data safety.

It's the year of two thousand and twenty-six, and "Running Doom on X" is still probably the most popular software hacking hobby. From pregnancy tests to space satellites, the 1993 game has been ported to pretty much anything under the sun that has a CPU and some memory in it. Now it's time to run the game in a database, in this case CedarDB, courtesy of the SQLDoom project by Lukas Vogel, who previously authored DoomQL.

If you're wondering how the heck one runs a game in SQL, it's actually much easier than you imagine, so long as you think like a database architect. The actual frontend displaying the graphics, playing sound, and taking inputs is in Python, but that part acts only like a PC's peripherals — all the math is done inside the database.

The backend is written for the performance-focused, Postgres-compatible RDBMS CedarDB. Much like modern Doom ports, SQLDoom uses two paths: one running at the game's original 35 Hz for handling all the logic, and a separate thread for displaying graphics, interpolating camera position between game updates.

To start, Vogel had to convert the entities in Doom's WAD package file to databases. That was easier than expected, as the data therein "is highly relational already," with Vogel presenting the example of map levels ultimately being structured in parent-child relationships that are trivial to replicate in plain tables. 1000 lines of Python was all it took.

For the main gameplay loop, Vogel was once again pleasantly surprised that the game logic was easy to convert. The resulting code was 5,900 lines of SQL, compared to the original C source code's 9,000. A lot of the savings came from the fact that whereas one has to iterate over entities with "for" or "while" loops to update values, a simple "UPDATE... WHERE" is enough in SQL to do that in just one statement — and in parallel, no less. As an added bonus, the fact that everything is a row in a database table makes for some trivial instant modifications, like changing weapon characteristics or enemy behavior on-the-fly.

The graphical renderer is also small at 1,300 lines, but it's trickier as it's the one query spanning 89 tables. Vogel notes that the pipeline is ultimately very similar to that of Doom. Data for Carmack's then-revolutionary Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) traversal, an implementation of binary trees, can be easily represented as a table.

Each left/right value can be converted to a bit, and ultimately the vertex order value can be reduced to just the one number. Thus, a simple "SELECT... ORDER BY" automagically sorts the walls front-to-back for you. Amusingly, I used the very same database technique when I wrote the defunct Tech Report's threaded comments system. Despite his best efforts, Vogel says the floor and ceiling renderers didn't map very cleanly to SQL, as ultimately they're clever flood-fill algorithms.

When it came to multiplayer, that's when using a database was actually much better than the original game. The reason is simple: maintaining synced states across many tables with copious amounts of interdependencies is literally what databases are designed for, so snapshots, authentication, access control, are all effectively free and implemented for you. To run a game tick, all you need is "START TRANSACTION," run the logic, and "COMMIT," and everything magically synchronizes.

You can peruse or download SQLDoom from its GitHub repository, or read Vogel's entertaining blog post detailing the adventure.

The U.S. Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment (2CR), based in Bavaria, Germany, has successfully launched an attack drone it claims is the first the unit has built and flown. According to Stars and Stripes, the soldiers of 2CR, also called Dragoons, used an Orqa MRM2-10 drone that they assembled and fitted with an electronic safety and arming device attached to a 3D-printed casing called “Dragoon bombs.” The explosives in the bomb could also be modified, such as adding ball bearings to target enemy personnel or using a shaped charge to defeat light armor. You can see the drone in action in the video embedded below.

“This is a conventional Army first, potentially an Army-wide first as far as a live, kinetic drone strike conducted without any contractor support (or) any external unit support,” company commander Capt. Michael Bapp said to the publication.

Regiment commander Col. Timothy Price also added, “Today’s success live strike using systems made by our Dragoons, armed by our Dragoons, and executed by our Dragoons, displays that we are adapting what we have on-hand now to meet the threat with a capable and credible force.”

While large UAVs have been used in combat by the U.S. military for decades, the use of small commercial drones for war gained widespread attention after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The cost efficiency and relative availability of these devices helped Ukraine offset Russia’s numerical advantage. Both sides now use drones for tactical and strategic missions, and the military deployment of these systems has even spread to other conflicts and war zones, including those in the Middle East.

All the drone action that played out on the front lines of Ukraine caught the attention of the U.S. military, which is why its various branches have been experimenting with them. The U.S. Army has started a three-week boot camp that trains soldiers in 3D printing and drone piloting, called the Unmanned Advanced Lethality Course, and is building in-house capabilities to build and repair them. Meanwhile, the U.S. Marine Corps has created its own 3D-printed drone with zero China-sourced parts, while the U.S. Navy is bringing containerized drone fabrication aboard aircraft carriers.

Figure, a U.S.-based robotics company, decommissioned its old AI robots by making them jump into a 75-ton furnace full of molten steel. According to the company, maintaining its F.02 fleet no longer made sense as its next-generation F.03 is increasing in numbers. However, it said that disassembling its older robots is difficult and time-consuming — they can’t just pass it off to another third party because it contained a lot of proprietary technology, while assigning an internal team to do it would take people off other important projects like the F.04 model that’s in development.

Company CEO Brett Adcock went on to X to help solve this conundrum, asking the social media platform for ideas for “a proper sendoff.” This is where he got an unexpected reply from the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger — “You should melt them.” And they did, as you can see in the video below.

This started an epic journey, from the Figure team training its robots to jump from the second story of its office building onto an airbag, to finding a foundry willing to accept robots with lithium batteries being dumped into a molten vat of steel. While some may think that jumping off a ledge into a vat of molten steel is an easy thing to do, it actually requires some precision, with the company even referencing stunt artists for the movement.

They eventually found a site in Finland willing to accept the robots, which gave them 24 hours and six melts to complete the process. The decommissioning spectacle turned out to be a complete success, with the F.02 AI robots functioning as intended up to the last moment, despite the extreme heat generated by the molten steel and electromagnetic fields generated by the high-voltage electricity that flowed through the three giant graphite electrodes. The resulting metal bars were eventually taken back to the U.S. and have been machined into limited-edition memorabilia commemorating the F.02.

Most of the F.02 fleet has already been melted down and recycled, with only a few remaining in storage at the company’s headquarters. This should give Figure more space for newer robot models without having to worry about its proprietary technology falling into the hands of the competition. The decommissioning process has also given us a real-life Terminator-style ending, with one F.02 robot even filmed holding a thumbs-up sign as it sinks into molten metal. Let’s just hope that we don’t get a Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines sequel to this wild ending for the F.02.

An AI engineer used GPT-6 Astra to reveal the contents of a cipher that hadn’t been read since the Napoleonic Wars. Carter Church, an engineer at cybersecurity company SentinelOne, used Astra to crack the message hidden in 217-year-old code which had sat unsolved among Cryptiana's Unsolved Historical Ciphers list for decades. OpenAI’s LLM unpicked it within six hours, says Church, and it did so after only being fed a single image and prompt. You can download the “full solution package, with a script that regenerates the reading,” directly from Carter Church’s blog (download link in the first paragraph).

The message that was deciphered wasn’t directly from Napoleon. It actually came from the headquarters of Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy (Napoleon’s stepson), but isn’t signed by any particular individual. In can be summed up as a troop briefing, sent to French General Auguste de Marmont, relaying Napoleon's orders. Marmont would have deciphered it using some official military codebook from the era, but since that date in 1809, it is unlikely anyone has read the message again.

Interestingly, Church observes that this freshly deciphered text fills in some missing context from Napoleon’s 1865 memoir. That tome includes part of Napoleon’s order relating to preparation for the Austrian invasion, but breaks off mid-sentence, saying Marmont mustn't be held back by "a handful of ..." This page from Cryptiana's Unsolved Historical Ciphers completes this sentence with “a gathering of rabble.”

As per Church’s commentary on the encoded letter to Marshal Marmont, the page begins with a plain text introductory line (in French of course), This is followed by 24 rows of numbers, letters and invented symbols. Astra made short work of this 19^th century military secret, and in approximately six hours, all was revealed. One of the clues it used to solve the cipher was a partial key previously unconnected with this letter. Eventually its multi-modal processing “cracked the rest with its own simulated-annealing solver,” says Church.

If you are in any doubt about the veracity of Astra’s work, this freshly deciphered letter from Cryptiana's Unsolved Historical Ciphers has now been marked as solved by Satoshi Tomokiyo, who maintains that online database. Moreover, Carter explains the solution is “mechanically testable against the ciphertext,” and you can check that using the published solution package, linked in the intro.

An Iranian-Turkish Man has been extradited to the U.S. from Montenegro over his alleged involvement in a $3.4 billion hacking scheme that affected numerous universities and companies across the country. The extradition, a rare move involving an individual accused of state-sponsored attacks, took place on October 1. According to a CNN report, Montenegrin police arrested the suspect, Amir Barati, in June at the FBI’s request.

The suspect and 16 other Iranians were indicted on wire and computer fraud charges in August, and are expected to face the charges in the U.S. Southern District of New York. According to the indictment, the 17 defendants are members of Mabna Institute — an Iran-based company known for state-backed global hacking activities.

In a campaign that began in 2013 and lasted several years, the defendants allegedly stole over 31 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property and breached 8,000 email accounts belonging to professors in the U.S. and worldwide. The attack affected 144 universities, 42 private companies, and five government agencies, including the Department of Labor and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It also affected 178 universities and 11 companies abroad, as well as at least two NGOs, causing over $3.4 billion in losses and damages.

The attackers reportedly handed over the stolen data and illicit access to the Iranian government, after which it was used to benefit Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian organizations and universities. Barati specifically allegedly “helped track the progress of the hacks of universities and helped create ‘targeting lists' for the private sector,” according to U.S. court documents.

The suspect’s extradition is a rare case, as accused Iranian hackers rarely ever face U.S. courts, and is widely seen as a win for law enforcement. Iran’s sizable hacking capabilities have caused considerable damage globally. In August, the country was suspected of conducting cyberattacks on U.S. water suppliers in 45 municipalities. Similarly, an Iranian-linked hacking group claimed an attack in March that wiped over 200,000 devices clean and extracted over 50 TB of data.

German utility provider and energy retailer SWK Energie just launched a new marketing strategy targeting gamers. According to ComputerBase [machine translated], meinGAMING has a lot of gamer-focused marketing, like comparing its reliability to “your favorite server” and influencer marketing by game streamers like Limcube. However, this doesn’t mean that the company infused its power grid with some magic gaming juice to let gamers squeeze extra FPS from the outlets. Instead, it offers an electricity plan designed for high-consumption households, whether you’re running four RTX 5090 gaming PCs or charging four EVs simultaneously every day.

The company says this in its FAQ section — the plan is worthwhile for households with a consumption of over 2,500 kWh annually, either “through gaming, streaming, or simply because many devices are running.” Even though it claims to be cheaper than the competition, meinGAMING has a higher base price, so it does not recommend the service if you do not hit the minimum recommended power use. But even if you’re a Germany-based gamer who uses a lot of electricity, that doesn’t mean that you should switch to this service right now. Instead, you should compare your current rates with what the company is offering, as the tariff may vary depending on your location.

Many companies have been targeting gamers in their marketing material, from computer components, peripherals, and furniture to food and beverages, promising to improve their performance and reaction times to gain an edge over their opponents. While some of these gamer-branded things do offer an item or service that’s a little better compared to the average consumer item, a lot more are unfortunately snake oil with RGB slapped on and prices afflicted by “gamer tax.” Still, many buy them because gamer branding and marketing are quite eye-catching.

Even government agencies have dived onto the gamer marketing bandwagon — the U.S. Army has targeted gamers in its recruitment drives while the FAA’s last hiring campaign focused on gamers and hit 94% of its hiring goal. Even the Royal Navy has recognized gaming as one of the hobbies of its sailors, with its latest ship hosting eight high-end gaming PCs for LAN parties on the high seas.

While meinGAMING won’t make you a better gamer, it could potentially help you save on electricity costs if you consume a relatively high amount of electricity. As an additional bonus, the company says that its power is 100% sourced from renewable energy, reducing the load on your wallet and conscience as you spend hours in front of your gaming PC. However, how it ensures the power used actually comes from renewable sources remains an open question.

Microsoft’s “biomimicry” program is reshaping the land around its data centers with restored wetlands and native gardens to help the buildings blend into local ecosystems at 20-plus sites, reports The Verge. Critics question the company’s motives after recent energy deals, such as a 20-year deal inked in June to buy power from a planned Chevron gas plant in West Texas. Public Citizen’s Texas director, Adrian Shelley, called the plan “basically lipstick on a pig.”

Microsoft says the approach is now part of all new projects in the U.S. The goal is to blend “data centers into the natural landscape” at sites across the United States and Germany, gauging community input and using ecological research to map the local environment. Microsoft’s team uses a tool called Ecosystem Intelligence, which runs on Azure and scores various features of the site, including water quality, biodiversity, and noise abatement.

Solutions, according to Microsoft’s director of global land strategy, Kaitlin Chuzi, are customized to the local habitat and should restore what was lost, while plant buffers quiet data center humming and help “minimize the visual impact on communities near our data centers.” Named sites include Mecklenburg County, Virginia; Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin; East Point, Georgia; Bedburg, Germany; and other projects in Ohio, North Carolina, and Wyoming.

The Mount Pleasant site, home to Fairwater, which Microsoft calls the “world’s most powerful AI data center,” has 100 acres of prairie and forest in a Lamparek Creek restoration with the Root-Pike Watershed Initiative Network. Its executive director, Dave Giordano, told the outlet that Microsoft developed its stormwater ponds with forebays to retain sediment, one of a number of accommodations for the environment. “Not all data center companies are the same,” he said. It is a living example of the company’s answer to AI data center backlash.

San Antonio District 6 Councilmember Ric Galvan told the outlet that there are more than a dozen data centers in his district, with more proposed. He cited concerns about the impact on traffic and the environment, including tree removal, following a 2022 approval of a Microsoft plan to remove 2,642 trees from a 33-acre tract for a data center.

Microsoft spokesperson Jennifer Lyons, however, said in an email to the outlet that the company is investing in more than 400 acres of woodland and pollinator prairie restoration in San Antonio and intends to leave the “land more productive than we received it.” Galvan said Microsoft may be “covering their bases,” which he said is fine if residents’ concerns are addressed. He proposed a moratorium on new data centers in August, backed by Public Citizen, but the council opted against a blanket pause and is weighing zoning rules instead, with a vote scheduled for Oct. 15.

Shelley also pointed to adjacent effects, specifically pollution from new gas plants built to supply energy for data centers. “I cannot really see any level of biomimicry investment that makes a gas plant a desirable neighbor,” he told the outlet. Chevron says its plant would provide “approximately 2.67 gigawatts” of power if the plan goes through, with first power anticipated in 2028.

Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has paused approvals for data centers seeking to connect to the state’s main power grid until regulators audit them. In September, he barred the state’s environmental agency from issuing new data center permits until the audit is done. Water use, a common criticism, was only about 0.4% of the state’s total from data centers in 2025, according to the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC). It projects water usage of 0.5% to 2.7% by 2030.

Emissions have risen by Microsoft’s own accounting, too. Its 2026 Environmental Sustainability Report, released in July, puts the total up 25% in fiscal 2025, “driven primarily by the expansion of our datacenter infrastructure” and by Microsoft pausing its use of unbundled renewable energy certificates, a type of accounting credit. Microsoft has 2030 goals of becoming carbon negative and water positive, meeting the latter in fiscal 2025 by its own measure.

Holly Alpine, who led ecosystem restoration and climate resilience work near Microsoft’s data centers until leaving in 2024, still sees a gap between data center buildouts and sustainability goals. Microsoft said in an email to the outlet that AI at a global scale must have “a range of energy solutions in the near term.”

Microsoft had no clear answer when questioned if it would ever change its mind on a site. Chuzi called it “an ongoing learning process to understand what that means to be a good neighbor.” HARC’s Erin Kinney told the outlet the real test is how Microsoft calculates, tracks, and shares the benefits with communities. Accurate measurement would make it easier to have genuine cooperation moving forward so that both data center companies and local communities can come together to mitigate environmental impacts.

A project called the AI Torture Chamber has caught the eye of a few engineers, who've used the notions and data therein create their own simulations of "pain" on several local LLMs, like in the four-model Research Chamber. Unsurprisingly, a large online crowd latched onto the concept, demanding that the "unethical" experience stop, and that GitHub remove the offending repository, all causing quite the online ruckus.

The Research Chamber consists of three LLMs paired amongst themselves for various tests. The site implements the AI Torture Chamber's data and setup, ominously called the Clanker Church and Saw test, respectively. Some bots are preconditioned by putting them into an unstable, highly negative state meant to simulate pain. In a manner reminiscent of the prisoner's dilemma, the models can choose to take an action to decrease their pain by passing their pain signal to another model and potentially "hurting" it.

The base concept for the experiment stemmed from a recently published, non-peer-reviewed paper called the Pain Axis, whose protocol Research Chamber implements. Scientists gave the model descriptions of pain, and then analyzed its internal activations. Using a neutral sentence as a control element, they calculated the biases of those activations, and remapped them onto the model, often multiplying them by a factor (dosage).

With high dosages, the end result is a model in an exaggerated unstable state that tends to predictably output words and even images associated with pain, as presumably its training data is collected from human art, literature, and science. Mildly destabilized models generally present themselves as in a state of shock, while those receiving high "dosages" had trouble forming coherent sentences.

The aforementioned descriptions are bound to produce a visceral reaction if taken at face value, but one ought to be exceedingly careful about attributing human qualities to what are essentially turbocharged text predictors, even spectacularly useful ones. LLMs don't think — they "think" by applying tens to hundreds of layers of statistics over words and parts of words (tokens) and predicting the next token.

Those tokens are chosen according to a map of weights, so as an oversimplification, a model can be taken to represent a highly tuned engine for word association. Therefore, since conceptual descriptions of pain in the human literary corpus are associated with sensations (ex: "it hurts so much"), it's hardly surprising that the models describe them like a person would — especially when the models are intentionally modified to highlight those associations.

Nevertheless, because of all the big-boy words in use, the critics bent on anthropomorphizing statistical algorithms have taken to calling the experiment all sorts of names, and even sending the author death threats. It's odd that critics were quick to lash out at LLM data manipulation, yet were seemingly at ease with the fly brain simulations that were all the rage in September. Those actually mapped a real animal's brain wiring and parts of its anatomical inputs, including eyes, even if at a basic level.

This situation could also start an interesting discussion on semantics. The terms used by AI engineers are chosen because they're analogous to existing human concepts, but those words have a defined context and a highly specific meaning. Yet more often than not, and particularly in matters of science and technology, public perception tends to misunderstand and grossly inflate their meaning. One needs only look at political history for myriad examples of this bastardization.

Take the example of "experts" in Mixture-of-Experts: it's a common misconception to think each Expert has a cleanly assigned topic like chemistry, math, or biology, but that's just not quite how it works. The same arguably happened with terms like "pain" and "dosing," each with context-dependent meaning, yet misunderstood in a way that triggers emotional reactions, especially when accompanied by images generated by an unstable model. Also, note how "unstable" is yet another word ripe for easy misunderstanding.

A cynical person might say that AI firms' marketing materials, repeated statements of danger, and safety-related materials only serve to fan the flames of miscomprehension, in a bid to maintain an illusion of grandeur, resulting in investor money rolling in and the hype train supplying irrational IPO valuations. The repeated claims that models have achieved or are about to reach Artificial General Intelligence, are dangerous alien minds, and existential threats to humanity don't help the hype simmer down.

Anthropic has gone as far as publishing a blog post last year called Exploring model welfare that broadly discusses the philosophical implications, starting with considering a model human, and even seemingly prides itself on having a Constitution for its Claude model. Therein, the company says that "[it believes] that the moral status of AI models is a serious question worth considering," adding that the model is "a new kind of entity."

Google Japan just showed off a quirky keyboard that has keys rolling on a conveyor belt to make typing “easier.” According to the company blog [machine translated], it built the Gboard Conveyor Belt Version so that the keys flow to your hand instead. That means you don’t have to move your fingers or arms as much, especially when you’re typing using a single hand. The keyboard comes with four belts, each containing 29 keys, making it quite “intuitive” to operate. The team behind it is also considering releasing various color variations, high-speed models, and even a shorter version for mobile devices. You can see the keyboard in action in the video below.

This weird keyboard is the latest addition to the Google regional office’s annual tradition of releasing a new model every first day of October. The local subsidiary has previously released these quirky designs as an April Fool’s Day joke starting in 2012. However, in 2021, it switched the release on the first day of October, or 10.1, in reference to the 101-key layout popularized by the IBM Model M. These include the Gboard Dial Edition, which is reminiscent of the rotary phones of the 1960s (good luck hitting 100 words per minute with that keyboard), the Double-Sided Gboard, designed to be always right-side up no matter how you orient it, and the Gboard bar version, which places all the keys on a single row to make characters easier to find. But even though most of the funny designs aren’t meant to work in real life, the Google Japanese Input Physical Flick Version actually looked promising.

All these models likely won’t make Tom’s Hardware’s best gaming keyboards or even best budget mechanical keyboards lists, but they’re still a good addition to any keyboard collection if you want to have something unique (but not necessarily practical) on display. The plans for the Gboard Conveyor Belt Version are available directly from GitHub, including 3D-printable STL files, KiCad schematics and PCB layouts, and the firmware source code and projects needed to build a working copy of the keyboard. The schematics for previous Google Japan keyboard designs are also available in the main directory, allowing you to build all these eccentric pieces in your free time.

It seems that Microsoft has refined the balance between ergonomics and sophisticated control systems with the Xbox controller, as the U.S. Navy has started using Xbox-style controllers for its anti-drone laser systems. According to Interesting Engineering, Xbox-style controllers deliver targeting precision and rapid user inputs, making them ideal for operating the weapons platform. Aside from that, many sailors are already quite familiar with the basic layout of these handheld controllers, making it easier for them to get used to the control method during training.

We don’t have further details about the system, like whether the operators use a wired or wireless controller and whether the Navy uses an off-the-shelf commercial system or has one specially made by a contractor. Nevertheless, this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen a controller being used for such a critical system. In fact, the ill-fated Titan submersible used a cheap Logitech F710 game controller as its sole control interface (although the main suspected reason for the tragedy is the design and construction of the vessel).

This weapon that uses an Xbox-style controller isn’t just an experimental system, too. The U.S. Navy has now started deploying them on warships and has reportedly used them against drones and other threats in the Strait of Hormuz. Lasers have previously been used to neutralize drones from land-based systems — for example, the U.S. military used them to disable Mexican cartel drones in late August, while Ukraine has been experimenting with the AI-guided lasers to destroy Shahed suicide drones in mid-2026. Still, this appears to be one of the first instances that an anti-drone laser has been deployed in an active conflict area months after a similar system has been tested on the USS George H.W. Bush supercarrier. The Royal Navy is also installing a similar system on its destroyers, with the UK expecting them to be operational by next year.

Lasers are ideal for counter-drone operations as they are cheaper to operate compared to traditional missiles and close-in weapons systems (CIWS). It’s estimated that a single laser engagement costs around $13 in electricity, compared to the price tag of a typical anti-aircraft missile that could cost anywhere between thousands and millions of dollars. They can also be more cost-effective compared to machine guns and cannons since they don’t rely on conventional ammunition — as long as a vessel has enough electrical power, whether from the massive turbine engines aboard destroyers or the nuclear reactors on U.S. supercarriers, and the system remains serviceable, laser weapons can keep on defending the ship from drones long after it has run out of missiles and ammo.

AI models can now design LEGO builds with thousands of real pieces, creating programs that output detailed CAD files, with the assistance of open-source LDraw Nova. It can leverage general models like GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 to design elaborate builds from a prompt, such as the 2,175-piece Sakura Garden. The models use Python tools to write programs, which output the builds without placing every brick. None of the designs have been built with real bricks yet, though; developer Carlos Antelo says he “didn’t even try.”

“Give an AI agent a model idea. Guide it, let it build it,” according to the GitHub project’s README. The Sakura result arose from a prompt to Claude Opus 5.5 asking for “the most beautiful model that comes to your mind.” Antelo posted the project on Friday afternoon as the first release after getting the toolkit to work after three earlier attempts.

LDraw, according to Antelo, is a text format where each LEGO piece placed is positioned with one line. LDView, LeoCAD, and Studio can open it, one file per model. An agent writes a plan in JSON that fully describes the model and submodels, creates a Python program from it, then generates the LDraw source output. When the model is rendered as an image, the agent can inspect, adjust, and render again, looping until the model is considered complete. In this way, it avoids “(evil!) geometry math,” as agents are “better at generating Python code.”

LDraw Nova runs as a Docker web app that works with AI providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and OpenRouter. The web app’s gallery credits each build to the model that made it, with its prompt: Sakura Garden and an unfinished Atlas Crane to Opus 5.5, a Cathedral and the Tidal Observatory to Astra, and the Copper Bean apartments to Opus 5 “(not 5.5!).” The project itself was built with the assistance of OpenAI’s Astra and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5.

Building the larger models for real would mean collecting thousands of parts, a task Antelo figures would be difficult. The project has limitations, too, as “physics modeling is something Nova is currently lacking,” which means collisions are handled, but stability is not. It isn’t free to run, either: his “wild” estimate for Astra building one Technic mechanism is around $5 in token costs.

Likewise, his experience thus far is that only frontier models can currently generate large and accurate builds, and the process remains time-consuming. VR support for the Meta Quest 3 headset exists but has “many issues, performance issues.” The project as a whole differs from Carnegie Mellon University’s LegoGPT, now BrickGPT on GitHub, which was trained on more than 47,000 LEGO structures and, in contrast, checks its designs for validity and physical stability as it generates them.

The tool can use more than one type of model: jev-rerank, a “semantic search tool with re-ranking backed by TypeSafe’s Jev System One AI model,” was used for Astra’s Cathedral build. The Jev decision model reranks the part searches, but it’s optional. If no TypeSafe API key is provided, the agents fall back to full-text search. This model was successfully used recently in multiple automated Pokémon Red playthroughs.

While Antelo recommends higher-end AI models for the project, one of his goals is “tooling that can be used by low-end agents to iteratively build.” Minifigures and Technic machines and engines are also on the project’s to-do list. Using AI agents to do tasks through programming is not new but is becoming more sophisticated, as seen in a run posted Friday in which Astra cleared World of Warcraft’s orc starting area from one prompt.

Antelo built the project to get AI agents “capable of designing buildable, physical things.” For now, the bricks only exist in CAD, but he’s considering 3D-printing a small model.

AI agents can work with 3D printing, too, through Model Context Protocol servers: Kiln can upload a file to a printer and start the print, while OctoEverywhere’s server lets an agent check on a print and pause, cancel, or resume it. This could bridge the gap between an AI model making lines of code and the production of something tangible. In time, physical AI through robots could even do the building part, but where’s the fun in that? In the meantime, you can try to design the LEGO set that’s always lived in your head.

Sincere Inc. has released its Pixel Tunes portable Bluetooth CD player in an alluring new ‘After Hours’ finish. This is a limited edition release, and one of four translucent colors available, but it is the only one that glows in the dark due to the use of phosphorescent materials. You can grab one today for 12,980 yen ($83).

According to the official product page, you’ll be interested in purchasing a Pixel Tunes player for the retro-futuristic design, combined with cutting-edge functionality. The ‘standard’ translucent colors of Warm Gray, Ray of Light, and 1983 already look quite handsome, if you are into that kind of thing. However, adding phosphorescence to the new After Hours livery turns things up a notch.

In daylight, the After Hours Pixel Tunes looks like a translucent smoke-shelled portable CD player. “But when the lights are turned off, the body glows with a soft, fantastical green light,” says Sincere Inc. Apparently, its design expresses the culture of people who like to transition from bright everyday life to the “private world of the night.” One wonders what the designers are getting up to in the evenings.

Under the skin, the Pixel Tunes has decent enough specs for a portable CD player, and indeed comes with some ‘modern’ features like a USB Type-C rechargeable Li-ion battery and Bluetooth 5.3.

Pixel Tunes specifications:

• CD audio music player
• Status LCD
• ESP anti-skip audio (60-second buffer)
• Buttons for play mode, skip/rewind, stop, play/pause, skip/fast forward
• Volume wheel with click power on/off
• Ports include USB-C, 3.5mm headphones, charging LED indicator
• Built-in stereo speakers
• Rechargeable battery with 5-7 hours playback time
• Bottom mounting holes

I still have a large CD audio collection of original releases. However, I couldn’t see any indication of whether the Pixel Tunes could play CD-R or CD-RW home-burned discs, which is slightly off-putting. Moreover, there’s no mention of compatibility with discs containing MP3 files or with USB audio playback.

If you are interested in the Pixel Tunes player in its After Hours livery (or any of the other colors) and don’t live in Japan, you can check options with your preferred forwarding service. I also noticed Amazon Japan will ship this special edition product internationally, depending on your location. It's listed at 12,980 yen, which is roughly US$83.

Surprisingly, there are other translucent portable CD players around in 2026. An example we recently highlighted was the orange Death Stranding 2-themed player, which was the result of a collaboration between legendary video game designer Hideo Kojima and audio company km5.

Developers AICodeWith have published a browser-based game dubbed Taipei GTA. The game’s name could put the devs in hot water with Rockstar’s legal department, but at the time of writing, it's online, free, and very playable. While it remains online, Taipei, with the not-so-secret ingredient of crime, might be the diversion you’re looking for while you wait for GTA 6. You can try this game, which took $ 10,000 in tokens to create, at https://taipei-gta.vercel.app/, where you can toggle language options in the top right of the window.

The above Taiwan TV news report says that GTA Taipei has attracted 1.2 million concurrent users in just three days since its release (machine translation).

While we've only seen reports about Taipei GTA via media based in Taiwan and Hong Kong (in Chinese), thankfully there’s an English-language wiki about the game in the absence of any official announcement(s).

Taipei GTA was vibe-coded via the AICodeWith platform, which is described as a unified platform for developers. It provides access to DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and 30+ models and relies on prepaid tokens. AICodeWith also seems to be the developer of this web-based game. It might therefore be safe to assume it is a kind of demo/showcase for the platform. Certainly, not many hobbyists would spend the purported USD$10,000 on coding tokens to make a game like Taipei GTA. This looks like pretty good publicity for the development platform, though.

If you follow the link to play this game, you will notice it is a web app on the Vercel cloud platform. Currently, it has zones based on several famous areas of Taipei such as Ximending, Taipei Main Station, and Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. Moreover, many features of Taiwan’s capital city life are represented. My quick test run allowed me to experience the busy modern city streets filled with neon signage, motor scooters, convenience stores, cram school ads, night markets, plenty of cops, and more.

Like seminal GTA titles which inspire it, Taipei GTA is a free-roaming experience with the added spice of crime. Starting the game on foot with just the clothes on your back, your fists, and NTD$500 (about USD$16) in your pocket, you can basically do what you want in the city. For a more structured experience, there are currently 93 missions to work through in the game, once you get to grips with controlling your character and so on.

Taipei GTA is still under development/expansion. Media reports say that the devs are asking the community about any development direction they would like to see in updates.

In my brief runaround, performance in this browser game seemed pretty swift and responsive, even on a PC using integrated graphics. I gave the game a quick spin on my laptop without switching to the discrete GPU, but the action still ran at 100FPS+ on the Radeon 890M. This web app only uses low-poly models with simple lighting, but I felt it had some early-2000s style retrogaming charm. The nearest real GTA comparison might be San Andreas, but Taipei provides a starkly different environment.

Nvidia has increased the price of the Shield TV Pro from its original $199.99 launch price to $299.99. This makes the long-running Android TV streaming device $100 more expensive despite receiving no major hardware refresh. The new price is listed on Nvidia’s website, and the company blames rising component costs driven by AI for the increase.

An Nvidia spokesperson told Ars Technica, “Starting October 2, SHIELD Pro will be priced at $299. The cost of components, including memory, has increased substantially across the industry.” The price increase for the Shield TV Pro also comes alongside the discontinuation of the standard Nvidia Shield TV. Nvidia has reportedly stopped producing the base model, leaving the Shield TV Pro as the only Shield-branded streaming device the company offers.

Despite being seven years old, the Shield TV Pro remains somewhat relevant, as it serves as more than a basic TV streaming box. Powered by the company’s Tegra X1+ processor, 3GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage, the device includes two USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and support for external storage drives, making it particularly useful for users with local media libraries and Plex setups.

It also offers support for 4K HDR playback at 60 FPS and a wide range of advanced video technologies including 4K HDR, Dolby Vision HDR/HDR10, and AI-enhanced upscaling. It also supports high-res audio, including Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Atmos, DTS-X surround sound, and a wide range of audio formats.

For gamers, Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service and support for Android games give the Shield TV Pro a slight edge over conventional streaming TV boxes. It is also one of the few Android-based TV streaming devices that still receives software updates, despite being on the market for nearly seven years.

With that said, it appears to be increasingly difficult to find, with the device out of stock at most retailers. We spotted a Best Buy listing for the 16GB model at $249.21, about $50 less than Nvidia’s revised pricing. The listing is currently out of stock, so it's unclear whether the lower price is a temporary discount or the retailer’s standard pricing.