TeeJay Tech Bro

  You may never be able to fully recapture the magic of staring out the bus window listening to a grainy YouTube-to-MP3 version of Relient K, but you can try. Amid a Gen Z retro tech renaissance, Bose announced its first pair of wired headphones in 11 years yesterday. The Bose Noise Cancelling Wired Earbuds will be available for $99 on October 15, but preorders are live. Because traditional aux ports have been eradicated everywhere but tiny airplane TVs, the Bose headphones have a USB-C plug. The headphones must be plugged into a device to use since they have no batteries (that also means nothing to charge). The reviews are in: Testers have celebrated the more durable cord and good audio quality, but found the noise canceling to be slightly less impressive than other Bose devices. Reviewers are lauding the pair as one of the best wired headphones on the market…which the new headphones probably should be considering they cost much more than the sub-$30 price tag such products typi...

  Tis the season for leaf peeping and, now that a slew of automakers reported earnings last week, deets peeping. Analysts were especially interested to see what’s happening to the auto industry amid high gas prices . The big takeaways Hybrid and passenger vehicles are having a moment. That, in turn, benefited Asian auto manufacturers in the quarter, because Ford, GM, and Stellantis have surrendered those categories: In the US market, Kia offers seven hybrid models, Hyundai six, Honda five, and Toyota 18. The Detroit automakers only offer two hybrid models: the Ford Maverick midsize pickup and a version of the Chevrolet Corvette. That’s impacting overall market share. Asian automakers made more than half of the new cars that Americans bought in Q3, according to Cox Automotive, and cars from US manufacturers accounted for a record-low share of ~36%. Hybrid vehicles drove a lot of it: Korean automakers: Hyundai’s hybrid sales rose 39% in the third quarter, and Kia’s rose 152%. Japane...

  As far as debuts go, big-budget comedy Digger looked a lot like The Shockmaster over the weekend, spectacularly crashing and falling on its face. According to Variety, the political satire, directed by Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu: Grossed only $8 million domestically and $12 million internationally. Finished fifth at the North American box office, losing out to thriller Verity and three holdovers. With mixed reviews and a break-even point of at least $300 million, the movie could end up losing as much as $200 million, per Variety. Gross earnings: It’s more bad news for Warner Bros., which already had some spectacular flops this year, including Supergirl ($80 million loss) and Frankenstein flick The Bride! ($100 million loss), Variety reported. According to the New York Times, the studio hasn’t had a single film gross more than $100 million domestically in 2026. Risky business: Digger is a disappointing swansong for Warner Bros. as a standalone studio, with ...

  With all the talk about how AI might one day kill us all, it’s easy to forget that AI has already been life-threatening to some, not through bioweapons, but psychologically. For example, Character.AI settled several wrongful death lawsuits earlier this year brought by families of underage users who died by suicide after interactions with its bots. Multiple families have also sued OpenAI over ChatGPT’s alleged role in their loved ones’ suicides and delusions. Making AI safer across languages and cultures is the mission of Circuit Breaker Labs, one of TechCrunch’s 2026 Startup Battlefield 200 finalists. (Circuit Breaker will be pitching at TechCrunch Disrupt , which takes place this year at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 13-15.) Founders Shirali and Arul Nigam, who are siblings, were motivated by Sewell Setzer, the 14-year-old who developed an emotional attachment to a Character.AI chatbot and confessed thoughts to it of harming himself before dying by suicide. The c...

  Facing new competition in the audiobook market from Spotify, Audible is turning to AI and other technology to enhance the listening experience. On Thursday, the Amazon-owned company introduced three new features that will allow listeners to explore a book’s characters, engage in interactive stories, and view additional imagery and bonus information about landmarks or places mentioned in the book. If you’re thinking the last would be great for highlighting the different courts’ locations in Sarah J. Maas’ faerie realm of Prythian, I must disappoint you. The feature will first arrive in just one title for now, “The Cultural Tutor: A Modern Guide to History, Art and Philosophy in 49 Short Chapters” by Sheehan Quirke, which focuses on making culture more accessible by teaching about poetry, art, architecture, geography, and more in short lessons. The other new features, a character guide and interactive stories, are also starting off fairly small. With Audible’s October 1 release of...

  OpenAI is again experimenting with how its conversational AI assistant, ChatGPT, can help users as they shop online. On Thursday, the company announced the global launch of two new shopping features, including a way to virtually try on clothing and accessories and a new favoriting function that can help users save products they like for later reference. The updates arrive at a time when AI assistants are exploring consumer use cases around shopping. OpenAI already had to pivot from one of its earlier ideas in this space, an instant checkout feature that ended up not performing well. More recently, agentic AI startup Instinct began pushing product recommendations to users, but some felt that the proactive recommendations were an overreach, more akin to ads than helpful suggestions. OpenAI said its new shopping features leverage the newly launched ChatGPT Images 2.5 model , which the company claims produces more natural lighting and richer textures, follows editing instructions m...