🪙 Seppuku Oath in Ethereum Plan

A former employee’s lawsuit says Ethereum Foundation staff were required to swear to commit seppuku if the software stopped being free. The oath was added to the foundation’s plan for the next 1000 years.

They had one weekend to sign or quit. About 80 of 250 employees asked for the clause to be removed.

Management kept it as “artistic decoration”, redrawing the text as an image with cats and anime girls. Protest organizers were fired.

📊@tech

🔓 A Sensor Powered by Wiring

30 million times less energy than one AirPod powers a battery-free temperature sensor. A graphene coil with a steel core harvests energy from the changing magnetic field around AC wiring.

A Cockcroft-Walton multiplier raises the weak alternating signal to DC voltage, while three capacitors store the energy. If the wiring loses power, the reserve can last a day, and likely a week.

The nanowatt design could support sensor networks in factories, logistics, atmosphere and soil monitoring, wearables, and medicine. It only works near live wiring, has not shown startup from fully discharged capacitors, and cannot power a smartphone.

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🤖 Claude Moves Into Office Work

Claude Meetings joins calls and writes meeting notes. In Sheets, it edits spreadsheets. Whiteboards lets users arrange ideas on a shared board.

Boards and spreadsheets are already available to subscribers. Adobe, Jira, Confluence, and Slack now open directly inside Claude.

After the announcement, Microsoft shares fell almost 3%.

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🤖 OpenAI Adds a $200 Retro Console

The ModRetro Chromatic Codex Edition costs $200 and reads Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges. It includes a rewritable cartridge for custom games.

With the ModRetro plugin, users can describe a game in Codex, then have it build levels and animate sprites. A demo snowboard level ran on the Chromatic.

Games can be tested in a built-in emulator, then written to the cartridge after a firmware update and developer mode switch. OpenAI also published browser-playable demos and downloadable ROMs.

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6️⃣ GTA VI Sets Preorder Record

Nearly $1 billion in preorders came in during the week before release, making GTA VI the most preordered game ever.

Cyberpunk 2077 held the previous record.

Rockstar appears to have recouped half of its rumored $2 billion budget. GTA V reached $1 billion 3 days after launch.

📊@tech

🗓 EpiPad Uses the Forearm as a Trackpad

A 5×4 mm millimeter-wave radar on the watch strap reads tiny changes in reflected signals as fingers press the skin, leaving the display untouched.

EpiPad estimates pressure from reflection phase and uses lightweight machine learning to recognize gestures. The forearm supports scrolling, zooming, clicks, pressure levels, and multi-finger input.

In tests with 20 volunteers, it achieved 92.8% gesture accuracy and 90.2% pressure accuracy, including with people absent from the training data. Its roughly 10 mm distance accuracy beat touchscreen and tilt controls, with fewer errors and higher efficiency.

📊@tech

🥬 Cannabis Producers Pivot to AI

A record cannabis price collapse is pushing producers to repurpose large industrial sites as AI data centers.

The sites already have power, water, climate control, and fiber optic links.

Producers want to become data center owners.

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🫙 Glass Conducts Heat at One Atom

Physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder pulled two glass pieces apart until only a one-atom chain connected them. A scanning thermal probe measured heat crossing the contact, which broke only after reaching that scale.

Heat arrived in steps. Each step reached 40% of the maximum a single channel can carry under quantum physics, producing the first observed quantized heat flow carried by atomic vibrations.

In ordinary glass, disorder scatters those vibrations. In a one-atom thread, there is no room for the disorder to act. Silicon dioxide is already used as an insulating layer in chips, where shrinking electronics makes heat management harder.

📊@tech

🤖 OpenAI Launches Vulnerability Agents

Organizations can now buy AI cybersecurity tools. Daybreak Red Team examines web app code to build attack chains and check whether patches close the flaws.

Daybreak Defense Factory scans codebases and prepares change requests with fixes and tests. Both use GPT-6 Cyber, but developers must approve patch deployment.

📊@tech