Ray A. Smith / Wall Street Journal:
Companies, including Google and Cisco, have reinstated in-person interviews for some roles to combat AI-driven cheating, with some using deepfake detection tech  —  More companies are returning to face-to-face meetings to counter cheating by candidates—and more ominous digital threats

Financial Times:
Sources: DeepSeek R2's launch delay is due to training issues on Huawei Ascend chips, prompting a switch to Nvidia chips for training and Huawei's for inference  —  Difficulties of training Chinese start-up's latest system with domestic tech highlights dependence on Nvidia

Zac Bowden / Windows Central:
Microsoft Windows head Pavan Davuluri says the next Windows version will be more ambient, pervasive and multi-modal, with voice becoming more important  —  In a new video, Microsoft CVP and Windows boss Pavan Davuluri has teased that the future of Windows will consist of a truly ambient …

Zvi Mowshowitz / Don't Worry About the Vase:
GPT-5 review: GPT-5-Thinking is a substantial upgrade over o3, Auto is only useful for free tier users, picking the right model still matters, and more  —  What do I ultimately make of all the new versions of GPT-5?  —  The practical offerings and how they interact continues to change by the day.

Alexandra Alper, reporting for Reuters:

Donald Trump’s Navy and Air Force are poised to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined to develop, work initially aimed at overhauling antiquated human resources systems.

The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.

I don’t want to be a ninny about this, but why is Reuters flatly describing the Navy and Air Force as possessions of the president? Did they ever describe them as belonging to Joe Biden, or Barack Obama? I don’t think they did, and a cursory search suggests they did not, but even if they did, it was wrong then. Now is not the time for sloppy language around this.

Anyway, this is both as crooked and stupid as shit.

See also: Jessie Blaeser, reporting for Politico:

The Trump administration’s claim that it is saving billions of dollars through DOGE-related cuts to federal contracts is drastically exaggerated, according to a new Politico analysis of public data and federal spending records.

Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that Politico could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion. Despite the administration’s claims, not a single one of those 1.4 billion dollars will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money has been returned to agencies mandated by law to spend it.

The DOGE scam was never about saving money. It was about destroying honest government programs and projects to redirect the firehose of taxpayer money to American oligarchs like Thiel, one of Elon Musk’s “PayPal Mafia” cronies.