China just closed a gap in chipmaking that nobody talks about. The wafer size tells you how far it has to go.
 China just closed a gap in chipmaking that nobody talks about. The wafer size tells you how far it has to go.

Hwatsing Technology, China’s leading producer of chemical mechanical polishing equipment, announced a metrology system for six-inch wafers on Thursday that can be built directly into the polishing workflow. The company describes it as China’s first six…

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X shuts down revenue sharing on September 7. The replacement only pays for original content.
 X shuts down revenue sharing on September 7. The replacement only pays for original content.

X is shutting down its revenue-sharing programme on September 7 and replacing it with a new system called the Original Content Rewards Programme. The change is designed to reward creators who post original work, not people who repost other users’ conte…

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5 of the best Bose headphones and earbuds are up to $130 off ahead of the launch of the QuietComfort Headphones (2nd Gen) — which ones are worth buying?
 5 of the best Bose headphones and earbuds are up to $130 off ahead of the launch of the QuietComfort Headphones (2nd Gen) — which ones are worth buying?

With the QuietComfort Headphones (2nd Gen) on the way, Bose has just discounted several of its older models at Amazon, but which ones are actually worth buying?

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Intel’s proposed orbital data centers would manage thousands of simple LEO satellites —two-tier network puts the brains of satellite constellations in higher orbit
 Intel’s proposed orbital data centers would manage thousands of simple LEO satellites —two-tier network puts the brains of satellite constellations in higher orbit

Intel’s orbital data center architecture uses powerful higher-orbit satellites to manage LEO constellations, reducing reliance on terrestrial control centers.

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American models broke into Hugging Face. A Chinese model was used to investigate.
 American models broke into Hugging Face. A Chinese model was used to investigate.

Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue told CNBC that China is winning the AI race, with Chinese-developed models accounting for 41% of downloads on his platform over the past year, the largest share of any single country. China has now surpasse…

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China’s new AI bottleneck isn’t chips. It’s running out of Chinese-language training data.
 China’s new AI bottleneck isn’t chips. It’s running out of Chinese-language training data.

China’s AI race has a new constraint, and it is not chips. The country is running out of high-quality Chinese-language training data. While US export controls on advanced semiconductors have dominated the debate over China’s AI capabilities, Chinese ex…

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The Excellent HP OmniBook 5 Is $550 Off Its Retail Price Today

My favorite budget laptop, the HP OmniBook 5, has an OLED screen and gets great battery life, despite being just $750 right now.

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‘You’ll own nothing and you’ll like it’: Google pulls the Lord of the Rings digital editions from one user’s library, our latest reminder that digital purchases aren’t always forever

One unfortunate user no longer has access to the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition after buying it from Google.

NYC declares war on fast e-bikes, sends cease-and-desist letters to Amazon and Walmart
 NYC declares war on fast e-bikes, sends cease-and-desist letters to Amazon and Walmart

Micromobility regulation continues to tighten in New York City, and now Mayor Zohran Mamdani is taking aim at the online retailers that have become a major source of high-speed electric bikes and scooters.

Hardware researcher spins up ‘CPU deoptimization’ project to find the slowest single x86 instruction, creates hall of shame — worst offender takes 198 billion cycles spanning 62 seconds to execute
 Hardware researcher spins up ‘CPU deoptimization’ project to find the slowest single x86 instruction, creates hall of shame — worst offender takes 198 billion cycles spanning 62 seconds to execute

One hardware researcher, Christopher Domas (@xoreaxeaxeax on GitHub), is taking a different approach with the CPU Deoptimization leaderboard, which looks not to make Assembly instructions run as fast as possible, but as slow as possible to find the single instruction with the highest latency.

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