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Today marks the final step in Google's multi-year Manifest V2 wind-down: every remaining MV2 extension, uBlock Origin included, is gone from the Chrome Web Store. Chrome 150 already killed the ExtensionManifestV2Disabled policy escape hatch back in June, so there's no flag left to flip. Chrome users get uBlock Origin Lite; the full-fat version now lives only on Firefox and Brave.
KAIST's Professor Jun Han, working with NUS and Singapore Management University, built SweepLED — a roughly seven-dollar LED attachment that sweeps illumination angles while the phone camera stays fixed, then uses ML to read the reflection signature off a hidden lens. It hits 94 percent accuracy and flags cameras stashed in chargers, clocks, and remotes in under five seconds. The paper, first-authored by doctoral student Jonghyuk Yun, was presented at ACM MobiSys 2026.
Jason Tucker pointed three mic-equipped security cameras at BirdNet-Go, a self-hosted audio classifier running locally in Docker with Google's Perch v2 model in the stack. Over twelve months it logged more than 418,000 bird detections across 271 species at about 60.9 percent average confidence. Everything stays on-prem, piping alerts to Home Assistant and Discord — a clean case study in edge inference without a cloud bill.
Autonomous Technologies Group, a Brooklyn-based YC Fall 2025 company, is recruiting engineers for what it bills as an advanced AI research lab building autonomous systems for decision-making under uncertainty. The focus lands squarely on LLMs, algorithmic trading, and portfolio optimization. They're explicitly casting a wide net across disciplines rather than hiring narrow specialists.
Grow Now! Games shipped an explorable cyberpunk downtown rendered entirely by a 2.5D raycaster, where every wall, window, and rooftop light is a glyph blitted from a character atlas rather than a pixel. It's one self-contained index.html — no Unity, no Unreal, no models, no textures, no build step, no libraries. Traffic moves, pedestrians walk, and the whole thing runs on plain JavaScript against a canvas element.
A browser-based rig that turns a laser pointer, a projector, and a webcam into a wall-sized drawing tool. The camera tracks the laser dot, maps its coordinates into projector space, and paints strokes back onto the surface in real time. It ships with dripping-ink physics, 3D rotation, and a set of brush styles — all running in the browser.
Someone rewired an ordinary phone booth to reject payment and route calls over the internet, then planted it at 3:30 and Ceiba in Black Rock City. Anyone at Burning Man gets five free minutes to anywhere in the world, and the outside world can dial +1 (775) 557-4848 to reach a random attendee. Expect busy signals and unanswered rings — that's part of the charm.
Tao distills all of mathematics down to six pillars — numbers, algebra, geometry, probability, analysis, and dynamics — in a Big Think interview tracing the path from counting sheep to quantum mechanics, wireless networks, and AI. It's the companion piece to his forthcoming popular-math book, Six Math Essentials, out from Quanta Books on October 27, 2026. Preorders are already open.
The long-promised Myth and Magic update lands in November, timed to the game's twentieth anniversary. Rather than bolting on a fixed spell list, it procedurally generates an entire cosmology and mythology per world, and derives that world's magic system from those first principles. Rituals, workshops, auras, and environmental effects all fall out of the generated metaphysics — the fantasy-universe generator the Adams brothers promised over a decade ago.
Wild Himalayan honey carries grayanotoxin from rhododendron blossoms, which can crater your heart rate and blood pressure. A review of 68 documented poisonings found 72 percent were middle-aged men who ate it deliberately for perceived health benefits, with cases clustering around spring harvests when toxin levels peak. Researchers flag online sales as the real hazard, since batch-to-batch potency varies wildly and buyers have no dosing guidance.
