📌 Daily Recap · Oct 03

🚁 DoorDash drones delivering Chipotle in under five minutes
🎬 Dexter is back, older, and still very much killing
🎮 Rockstar paid a million bucks to tease GTA 6
💸 NYC forces apps to make canceling as easy as signing up
📈 Nvidia alone is worth twice the entire crypto market

Someone in your circle definitely missed all of this — their loss, your move

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $84,998 📈 +0.5% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,695 📈 +0.5% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 65 — Greed

💡 An AI That Convinces Half of People It's Human

Tavus builds conversational AI avatars. Their new Griffin-Lite just posted a striking number: 26 out of 54 participants finished a one-minute video call believing they'd spoken to a real person. The previous system convinced one out of 41.

Caveat: participants were told they'd meet another human — no one mentioned a bot. Results are self-reported and unverified. On NVIDIA's VideoFDB benchmark, Griffin-Lite ranks first: 3.83 versus 2.80 for the next-best system.

The model isn't public yet — Tavus is still building safety measures. When the creators themselves won't ship it, that tells you more than any press release. Especially given that North Korea-linked hackers were already running deepfake video calls — with far cruder tools.

Decrypt

🎬 Nine million Brits watched celebrities betray each other

*Celebrity Traitors* — BBC's reality show where a hidden faction schemes against teammates trying to unmask them — just set a franchise record: 8.8 million viewers at premiere, peaking at 9 million. Every second person watching TV in Britain that evening was watching this.

That's ~3 million more than either previous U.K. launch. Richard E. Grant, Bella Ramsey, Michael Sheen and James Blunt are among this season's castle dwellers — and Grant has apparently turned episode one into his personal chaos workshop, per Variety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwCCPWdNC9U

🎬 Four attempts. One finally works.

Brian De Palma's 1976 *Carrie* remains the gold standard. Three revivals — 1999, 2002, 2013 — all failed. Now Mike Flanagan (*Gerald's Game*, *Doctor Sleep*) brings an eight-episode series to Prime Video in 2026, and it actually holds up.

He remixes rather than retells: Carrie enters high school as the new girl for the first time in any version, and Margaret White becomes a crusader against an anonymous Instagram account targeting her daughter. Samantha Sloyan, a Flanagan regular, owns every scene she's in.

After three misfires, the fourth attempt counts.

Collider

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkUw2nh6fT0

🎬 Disney+ is raising prices for the fourth time in four years

$6.99 in 2019, $21.49 in 2026 — 207% in seven years. Disney+ and Hulu are hiking again, and the real question is what you're getting for it.

Netflix makes originals, Apple TV+ wins awards, Hulu has The Bear and Shogun. Disney+ is mostly running on Marvel, Star Wars, and nostalgia. The ad-supported bundle at $12.49 is the only offer that feels honest.

Raising prices while subscribers cut back on everything else is a bet that habit beats a calculator. Sometimes it does. It's still a risky bet.

Someone in your group chat thinks streaming killed the cable bill. Show them the math.

Collider

📌 Daily Recap · Oct 04

🤖 AI fools half of callers into thinking it's human
🗡️ Nine million Brits glued to celebrity backstabbing TV
🩸 Mike Flanagan finally makes a Carrie adaptation worth watching
💸 Disney+ costs 207% more than it did in 2019

Somebody near you was heads-down all day — this is their five-second catch-up

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $86,277 📈 +1.5% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,728 📈 +1.2% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 70 — Greed

🎬 Elizabeth Holmes let them in — 34 days before prison

Holmes founded Theranos, once valued at $9 billion, on a blood-testing technology that didn't work. Convicted of fraud in 2022, she's now serving an 11-year sentence.

Before it started, she let Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim film her at home. Seven crew members, three cameras, 16-hour days. One wide lens to cover the whole house; two 25–250mm zooms locked on faces. A 4:3 aspect ratio — classic reality-TV throwback — to catch every reaction the moment something landed.

Fielder meant to stay behind the camera. Holmes kept talking to him anyway, so the operators kept panning over. Accidental subject.

"The face is the ultimate landscape," Oppenheim said. When you're trying to decide if someone is telling the truth — and she's a month from prison — that framing earns its keep. Variety has the story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvW_N5p1q44

💸 The $300 million hair-dryer heist

US export controls made NVIDIA's AI chips so valuable in China that an entire smuggling industry grew up around them. Officials now say NVIDIA had chances to notice — and didn't.

Federal prosecutors arrested Greg Lui for moving servers with $300M in restricted chips to China. Bloomberg reports it's part of a $2.5B scheme: Super Micro co-founder "Wally" Liaw allegedly sold servers to a Bangkok front company, ostensibly for Thailand — they went straight to China, serial numbers stripped with a red hair dryer.

NVIDIA disputes any negligence. CEO Jensen Huang declined Congress's invitation to testify; Senator Warren's reply was short: "If he has time for a $1M-a-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago, he can find time for us."

The hair dryer is still plugged in.

Engadget

💸 Trump's third meme coin dinner

On November 22, the top 185 holders of TRUMP will gather for a gala dinner with President Trump at his Virginia golf club — the same venue as the first dinner in May, where VIP guests averaged $4.8 million spent on tokens and Trump stayed about an hour.

🔸 Top 29 — VIP reception with the president
🔸 Top 4 — an 18-karat gold Trump watch
🔸 Private meeting — not on offer for anyone

The timing stings a little. Two weeks ago, the Clarity Act — crypto's big legislative push — failed in the Senate, with Trump's personal holdings the main sticking point. His latest disclosure shows he earned over $635 million from the coin in 2025, almost entirely in royalties. The coin itself trades around $2.04, down 97% since launch. Someone's paying more for that dinner than the menu suggests.

Via Decrypt.

☀️ California legalized balcony solar — with a catch

Governor Newsom signed the Plug and Play Solar Act on September 30th; it takes effect January 2027. The idea: renters finally get a cheap, self-installed path to lower electricity bills.

The catch is UL3700 certification — which requires a non-standard plug and socket, often meaning a licensed electrician. Not exactly plug-and-play. Certified products are limited to a handful: Hoymiles, APsystems, Mango. Power cap sits at 1,200W, well below a rooftop system's 6,000W+.

Utilities PG&E and SDG&E opposed the bill and are already hinting at passing costs to non-solar customers. Solidarity.

Via The Verge.

Engadget

📌 Daily Recap · Oct 05

🎬 Holmes let cameras in 34 days before prison
💸 Man smuggled $300M in AI chips through hair-dryer loophole
🍽️ Trump's third meme coin dinner already has 185 guests
☀️ California okayed balcony solar — but the plug doesn't exist yet

Tag whoever was heads-down today — they missed a weird one

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News