Maxwell Zeff / Wired:
How Black Forest Labs, a 70-person startup based in Germany, became a top competitor in AI image generation; sources: it recently declined to partner with xAI  —  Black Forest Labs has long punched above its weight in the AI image generation space.  Its next move?  Powering physical AI.

OpenAI has announced a new version of its ChatGPT Pro subscription that costs $100 per month. The new Pro tier offers "5x more" usage of its Codex coding tool than the $20 per month Plus subscription and "is best for longer, high-effort Codex sessions," OpenAI says. The company is introducing the new tier as it […]

In September, Apple launched its latest batch of smartwatches, including the Apple Watch Series 11, the SE 3, and the Ultra 3. Each has its own pros and cons, but the introduction of Apple’s newest wearables also means there are now more Apple Watch models on the market than ever before — and a lot […]

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is launching an investigation into OpenAI over public safety and national security risks, as reported earlier by Reuters. In a statement on Thursday, Uthmeier says there are concerns that OpenAI's data and technology are "falling into the hands of America's enemies, such as the Chinese Communist Party." Uthmeier also says […]

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Software developer Photon, whose product requires running a bunch of Macs to connect to iMessage, discovered a pretty major bug:

Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock… ICMP (ping) keeps working. Everything else dies. The only fix most people know is a reboot.

The whole story is wild (albeit technical). Photon says they’re working on a fix, but really, this is something Apple should be working on.

If you keep track of time using milliseconds, and store that in an unsigned 32-bit integer, it overflows after 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds. That’s the bug.

I think this bug is new to Tahoe. If you look at Apple’s open-source XNU kernel code — e.g. lines 3,732 to 3,745 in tcp_subr.c — you can see that the lines assigning the time in milliseconds to a uint32_t variable were checked in just six months ago, whereas most of the file is five years old. Also, I personally ran my MacBook Pro — at the time, running MacOS 15.7.2 Sequoia — up to 91 days of uptime in January. I even mentioned that remarkable uptime in my annual report card, in praise of Apple’s software reliability. Apple’s pre-Tahoe reliability, that is.

I was hesitant to link to this at all because the original (unbylined) report from Photon is so hard to follow. It’s downright manic — over 3,500 words with 33 section headings (<h2> and <h3> tags), with no cohesive narrative. The bug, seemingly, is not that complicated. The whole write-up from Photon just screams “AI-generated slop” to me, and I thus hesitate even to link to Snell’s piece linking to it. But I think the bug is real, and my sympathy for everyone afflicted with MacOS 26 Tahoe is sincere. (And if I’m wrong about the post being AI slop and a human at Photon actually wrote this, I would suggest taking it easy with the cocaine.)