Tech Archive

Vivo’s X Fold 6 accidentally feels like a throwback

Dominic PrestonOct 1

Sean HollisterOct 1

Android Central, a good blog, has been gutted.

Staffers don’t know whether the site will shut down — but managing editor Derrek Lee confirms to The Verge that all remaining staff were laid off today. EIC Shruti Shekar confirms she’s been laid off, senior editor Harish Jonnalagadda and senior content producer Nicolas Sutrich wrote they’d been laid off, and senior editor Namarah Saud Fatmi also appears to be gone.

Android Central’s masthead was already down to six staffers after layoffs earlier this year. Earlier today, owner Future PLC announced it would pause its share buyback and focus on reducing debt.

Update, October 1st: Future claims that Android Central “will continue” somehow.

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia has a ‘newly refreshed’ design

Jay PetersOct 1

Stevie BonifieldSep 30

Micron’s DRAM revenue increased 343 percent over the past year.

The chip company said it pulled in a record $39.8 billion in quarterly revenue from DRAM, which has been in short supply. Micron also reported record quarterly revenue for its data center business at $18 billion, up from $1.57 billion in the same quarter last year. Its quarterly NAND revenue also shot up 526 percent to $14.1 billion.

Micron Technology, Inc. Reports Record Fiscal Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year 2026 Results

[Micron]

Emma RothSep 30

The Pentagon is working with Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey to shape “the future of warfare.”

Musk, Luckey, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will co-direct the Pentagon’s Project Meridian, an initiative meant to identify new capabilities and technologies to deploy in the US military, according to a press release:

Secretary Hegseth has commissioned Project Meridian to secure America’s long-term military superiority by identifying the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield. Project Meridian will examine the full spectrum of future warfighting domains, from subterranean depths to the cislunar frontier.

Gaby Del ValleSep 30

Two more cops got caught using government databases to track romantic interests.

A pair of sheriff’s deputies in Pinellas County, Florida, were arrested on felony charges by their own department for using official databases to look up women they were interested in — including a 17-year-old girl.

One of the sheriff’s deputies, Karl Gwynne, reportedly looked up a woman on the agency’s automatic license plate reader database 300 times.

2 Pinellas deputies arrested for tracking people they were interested in, sheriff says

[Tampa Bay Times]

Stevie BonifieldSep 30

Google’s ‘skills’ replacement for Gems is available in Gemini chats starting today.

The reusable, custom instructions for Gemini are also rolling out to Workspace users starting October 5th and in the Gemini app starting October 13th. Google’s shutting down Gems starting in November for individual users, and as early as March 1st, 2027 for Workspace users.

Let skills in Gemini tackle your most repetitive tasks

[Google]

Google announces Gemini 4 and says it’s so capable that only ‘trusted cyber defenders’ can have it right now

Jay PetersSep 30

Emma RothSep 30

OpenAI claims Moonshot extracted its data to train AI models.

In a blog post on Wednesday, OpenAI says it disrupted a “coordinated campaign designed to extract protected reasoning from our models.” The company hasn’t linked the activity to a single actor, but traced a “core cluster” of it to Moonshot, the Chinese company behind the leading AI model Kimi. Anthropic has made similar accusations against Moonshot as well.

Disrupting a coordinated model-distillation campaign

[OpenAI]

The AI Tamagotchis are coming

Personal AI hardware has mostly crashed and burned. OpenAI and Meta are counting on two selling points: It’s useful, and it’s cute.

Hayden FieldSep 30

Allison JohnsonSep 30

Frictionmaxxing our way through the AI agent boom.

I chatted with 9to5Google’s Will Sattelberg about Meta’s AI agent Muse, the labor of opening a website, and why calling your gas company might actually be the spice of life. Is the agentic AI era all about automating away “the ins and outs of living,” as one astute Verge reader put it? Is there a happier, carefree life waiting at the end of your to-do list, or just more stuff to do? It’s always an excellent time catching up with Will and spiraling about the pain points of modern living in good company.