Editorial
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
California Wants a Kill Switch for Frontier AI. The Order Never Says What One Is.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Artificial Intelligence,
A kill switch is an easy thing to picture. Somewhere in a data center sits a big red button, and if a frontier AI model slips its constraints, somebody walks over and presses it.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on September 18 that has been read as asking for exactly that. Engadget wrote that the governor "wants to implement a kill switch for frontier AI models." Gizmodo called the idea "eyebrow-raising." The order itself doesn't say what the switch is, how it works, or who gets to pull it.
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Paris Opened a Criminal Probe Into Smart Glasses Filming, Five Days Before Meta Connect
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Cameras, Wearables, Editorial,
You can be filmed on a public street by a stranger in ordinary-looking sunglasses, end up on TikTok, and never know either thing happened. The Paris prosecutor's office says it has recently opened at least one criminal investigation following sexual harassment complaints involving smart glasses, after a run of videos in which men record women in public without their consent and post the footage for engagement.
Prosecutors told Reuters that their cybercrime unit tested a pair of the glasses about two weeks ago to work out what offenses the devices could be used to commit. They did not say whether Meta is a target of the investigation or whether the file covers only the unnamed people doing the filming. Meta has not been named as a suspect, and the office has not clarified the scope. Anyone telling you France is prosecuting Meta is ahead of the reporting.
The Zelda movie is called The Legend of Zelda, and drops on April 30, 2027
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Movies, Video Games,
Nintendo had the biggest Zelda stage it has built in years, a 40th anniversary Direct packed with a remade Ocarina of Time and a themed Switch 2, and when it came time to talk about the live-action movie, it showed a logo. The title is The Legend of Zelda. No subtitle, no footage, no release date you didn't already know. Shigeru Miyamoto came out, said a few careful sentences, and that was the segment.
I don't think that's nothing. A logo reveal is still a reveal, and Miyamoto on camera talking about a movie is rare enough that people will pull it apart frame by frame. But seven months out from a worldwide theatrical release, "here's the font" is a strange thing to lead with, and the way Nintendo framed it tells you a lot about how it plans to run this campaign.
Click to continue reading The Zelda movie is called The Legend of Zelda, and drops on April 30, 2027
Tesla Said the Cybercab Is Legal. NHTSA Wants to See the Homework.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Editorial, Transportation,
Tesla put its first production Cybercabs on public streets in Austin this week. Federal safety regulators opened a file on them before the next day was over.
The probe is an audit query, AQ26002, from NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation, and it covers roughly 1,000 vehicles. No crash set it off. The agency is asking about paperwork, specifically the paperwork Tesla filed on itself.
Click to continue reading Tesla Said the Cybercab Is Legal. NHTSA Wants to See the Homework.
John Ternus Is Apple’s CEO. His New Bio Focuses on Durability and Repairs.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Editorial,
Apple's leadership page changed today. John Ternus is listed as CEO, Tim Cook has moved to executive chair with a seat on the board, and the board section now carries headshots instead of a plain list of names. Apple also rewrote the bio under Ternus's photo. Day one came with no keynote and no memo to the troops. It came with a webpage, and somebody at Apple picked every word on it.
The longest paragraph in that bio skips past iPad, AirPods, and the run of iPhones he shepherded through hardware engineering. It's about things not breaking. "John has led much of the company's focus in areas like reliability and durability, introducing new techniques that have made Apple products remarkably resilient," it reads, before listing a recycled aluminum compound now used across multiple product lines, the 3D-printed titanium in Apple Watch Ultra, and "advancements in reparability that have increased the life spans of several Apple products."
Click to continue reading John Ternus Is Apple’s CEO. His New Bio Focuses on Durability and Repairs.
Rockstar Says GTA 6 Has No Microtransactions and No AI. Now Ask About GTA Online.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Video Games, Artificial Intelligence,
Ask a game executive about monetization and you normally get a paragraph with an escape hatch built into it. Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson gave reporters two short answers instead: there is no monetization in Grand Theft Auto 6, and no generative AI in it either.
That comes from Kinda Funny's Andy Cortez and Greg Miller, who each put the question to Nelson during press visits to the studio and reported the answers on the Kinda Funny Gamecast. Cortez asked whether you can use real-world money to buy things in the game and got "no monetization." Miller says he asked point blank whether AI is in the game and got "no AI." A New York Times feature on GTA VI published August 27 lands in the same place, and reports that Rockstar emphasized the game's human-made craft.
Meta Closes the Ray-Ban Glasses Trick for Hiding the Recording Light
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Cameras, Wearables, Editorial,
The white light on the front of a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses is the only thing standing between you and a stranger filming you. That's the whole design. There's no shutter sound, no lens barrel, no obvious gesture. A small LED comes on, and you're supposed to notice it and act accordingly.
Meta has started rolling out an update that closes the newest way people were getting around it. Until now, the glasses only checked the LED at the moment you pressed record. Start a video with the light exposed, then slide a finger or a piece of tape over it, and the camera kept going. Alex Himel, Meta's VP of wearables, announced the fix on Threads: "The camera will now stop working if the light is covered during a recording."
Click to continue reading Meta Closes the Ray-Ban Glasses Trick for Hiding the Recording Light
You Don’t Own What You Bought. Here’s the Proof. (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Editorial, Home Entertainment, Smart Home, Misc. Tech, Videos,
You bought the thing. It's sitting in your house. The box listed the features, you paid the money, the return window closed. So you own it, right? Here's the uncomfortable answer I landed on after digging through more than a decade of firmware updates, lawsuits, and shutdown notices: a company can sell you a product, wait out your return window, and then reach back into it to slow it down, strip its features, or kill it entirely, without anyone ever touching the hardware sitting in your living room.
Click to continue reading You Don’t Own What You Bought. Here’s the Proof. (Video)
Chatbots in Europe Now Have to Tell You They’re Chatbots
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Internet, Artificial Intelligence,
You know that customer service chat where you spend four minutes being pleasant to something before realizing it was never a person? In the European Union, that's now against the law. As of August 2nd, the transparency obligations in the EU's AI Act are live and being enforced, and the headline requirement is refreshingly blunt: if you're talking to a machine, the machine has to say so.
The rules cover three things. Chatbots and other interactive AI systems must disclose that a user is dealing with AI rather than a human. Deepfakes, meaning AI-generated or AI-edited images, video, and audio, must be labeled. And AI-generated or altered content has to carry machine-readable marks so platforms and researchers can detect it downstream.
Click to continue reading Chatbots in Europe Now Have to Tell You They’re Chatbots
Gemini 3.6 Is Google Buying Time in the AI Race
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Google, Artificial Intelligence,
Every few weeks, one of the big AI labs drops a new model and asks you to care. Google's latest ask is Gemini 3.6, and the honest pitch is sitting right there in the release: it is cheaper to run than the last one. That is it. That is the headline feature.
Which is not nothing, if you are the person paying the bill. Google calls 3.6 its workhorse model, the one meant to balance quality against cost, and it does deliver real savings there: up to 65% fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash in some cases, and about 17% fewer overall. Tokens are how these models get billed, so fewer tokens means a smaller invoice for the companies wiring Gemini into their apps. For everyone else, it is the kind of improvement you feel in a spreadsheet, not in a conversation.
Click to continue reading Gemini 3.6 Is Google Buying Time in the AI Race