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  In late 1970, a Titan IIIC rocket launched from Space Launch Complex 40 at what was then called Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It carried a top-secret payload for the US military. Much has changed in spaceflight since then. The Titan IIIC would bow out in 1982 after dozens of launches. Various Titans continued launching from Space Launch Complex 40 until 2005, at which point the US Air Force—in a competitive process hotly opposed by United Launch Alliance—turned the pad over to a small, largely unknown startup called SpaceX. And Cape Canaveral is now a “Space Force” station. But those unspecified payloads? Until last month, some of them were still flying operationally. They were looking for missile launches The US government would later disclose that the top-secret payload that launched in November 1970 was a “Defense Support Program” satellite. The initial block of these satellites, launched from 1970 to 1973, had a mass of about 1 metric ton, and each carried about 2,000 inf...

  The era of generative AI has upended technology supply chains, and there is one ironclad rule in 2026: If it has memory or storage, it’s getting more expensive. Even devices with years-old tech inside are still apparently subject to that unwritten rule. Nvidia has just announced that the Shield TV Pro is getting $100 more expensive, effective immediately. The most recent version of the Shield streaming box debuted in 2019, running Android TV with AI upscaling and hardware decoding for almost any type of media. While it ran an aging Tegra X1+ processor, that was (and still is) fast for a TV media streamer. The device launched at $199.99, with a non-Pro variant at $149.99. The non-Pro Shield has since been discontinued, but the Shield TV Pro lives on at the new $299.99 price. Nvidia has confirmed that you can blame AI for the higher Shield TV pricing. “Starting October 2, SHIELD Pro will be priced at $299. The cost of components, including memory, has increased substantially across...

  Tesla sold 486,532 electric vehicles during the third quarter of 2026. That’s a 2.1 percent decrease on the same quarter in 2025, when the company found homes for 497,099 EVs, and one might think that would be bad news for a company valued on the premise of near-constant growth. But Tesla stock is up this morning; the year-over-year numbers might look bad, but the company still exceeded analysts’ expectations of 456,600 cars, which would have been a larger 8 percent year-on-year decline Total production at Tesla actually increased year over year; it built 464,391 vehicles—a 3.7 percent increase—457,387 of which were Models 3 and Y (a 4.9 percent increase year over year). The remaining 7,004 were other models, mostly Cybertrucks, with presumably some Semis and Cybercabs, as the Models S and X are now retired; this category saw a 39.8 percent decrease year over year. But the company couldn’t sell all the cars it made in Q3. It was able to sell 478,237 Models 3 and Y, a 0.6 percent ...

  California’s attorney general and three city attorneys announced a $272.5 million settlement with Lyft after allegations that the company “committed wage theft by misclassifying drivers as independent contractors rather than employees” between 2016 and 2020, according to a Thursday statement . The case dates back to May 2020, when then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is now the Democratic candidate for governor, sued both Uber and Lyft . That lawsuit said the ridehailing companies evaded state law when they declared that their drivers were not employees. Thursday’s settlement affects only Lyft, while the case against Uber continues. “We are proud to announce this landmark win for workers, the largest misclassification settlement in California’s history,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said in the statement. “Rideshare companies like Lyft have enjoyed massive growth and profits on the backs of drivers over the past decade, many who are from immigrant communities and communities o...

  Deep Blue took down Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go in 2016, and poker bots have been beating professionals for years. But one classic game called Stratego held out. Even DeepMind, with its exceptional budget, couldn’t build a machine that reliably beat the best human players. Now, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, New York University, and Stanford University has done it. Their AI, called Ataraxos, beat Pim Niemeijer, arguably the best Stratego player of all time, 15 games to one, with four draws. And it took just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars to train it. Hidden armies In Stratego , each player gets 40 pieces representing military ranks, from a marshal down to a spy, plus bombs and a flag. You win by capturing the opponent’s flag. Your opponent knows where your pieces are, but not what they are. Identities are revealed only when two pieces collide in battle—the weaker one is removed, and the identity of the winner is revealed...