Discover • Tech News

🤖 Blogger Turns His Parrots Into R2-D2 There's a YouTube video called R2D2 Sounds for bird mimicking that has racked up more than 1.3 million views. When a blogger played it for his cockatiels, they picked it up almost instantly—and became flying droids, not literally, of course.

🐶 Dogs May Use Blinking as a Social Signal Scientists have found that dogs blink more often when they see people blinking, especially their owners. However, they do not simply copy human blinking: dogs were not necessarily more likely to blink immediately after a person did. Researchers believe this reaction may reflect increased attention and social interaction, suggesting that blinking could be part of dogs' nonverbal communication with humans.

📱 Developer Uses Shock Collar to Stop Doomscrolling Liam Kloppers tested an electric shock collar as a radical way to combat doomscrolling. He connected the device to an app that delivered a shock when he opened his social media blacklist. Even the weak pulse was so intense that Kloppers almost threw his phone at the wall.

"I was now too scared to use my phone. I was also too scared to keep using the collar," he says.

So, he decided to replace the shock with an irritating high-pitched beep. How do you feel about this approach? 🔥 — I'd try it myself 🤯 — Too extreme!

🤖 A Robot Broke the 100-Meter World Record At the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, the android Tiangong Ultra ran the 100 meters in 9.39 seconds, beating Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world, by 0.19 seconds. Now it's only a matter of time before robots are allowed into the regular, "human" Olympics... Would you watch competitions like these? ❤️ — Yes, that's a real show! 🤔 — The robots will win anyway...

👨‍💻 AI Creates New Jobs AI adoption has led to new jobs at 54% of UK companies, according to a Lloyds survey that included businesses ranging from small companies to multinational corporations. The findings offer a different perspective on the common fear that AI will put people out of work. A King's College London study found that 69% of workers are worried about losing their jobs due to AI, and 57% of Britons believe the technology will eliminate more jobs than it creates. But the bigger shift may be less about mass layoffs and more about the job market changing: some roles are disappearing, while new ones are emerging. 💼 Companies increasingly see AI adoption as essential to staying competitive. Six in 10 businesses surveyed by Lloyds said they risk falling behind if they fail to embrace new technologies. And to help employees adapt, 58% of employers plan to invest in workforce training over the next year. Is AI a threat to your job? ❤️ — I'm irreplaceable! 🤔 — I'll need to learn some new skills 🔥 — Soon we'll all be out of work...

🤖 China's First Robot Olympics Injury During a running practice session, a robot failed to make a turn, crashed into a padded wall, and fell, breaking its back. It is now unlikely to take part in the competition...

🌥 Anthropic Launches a New Educational Platform The main idea of Claude Academy is that the right mindset and practice matter more than the tool itself: once you learn how to use AI, you can improve your knowledge and work in virtually any field. The platform offers lessons on working with Claude Cowork and Claude Code, using the bot for learning, tips on applying AI at work, and more. ➡️ Explore the courses here.

💡 GPT-Image 2.5 Probably Spotted on the Arena Users may have spotted a new stealth model, luna-lisa-alpha, which could be OpenAI's brand-new image model. Can you feel the progress? ❤️ — Yes, it looks great! 🤔 — Not really…

💰 Scammers Are Selling Mini Dinosaurs Online A Brazilian X user said his father's friend wanted to buy mini dinosaurs from a WhatsApp ad, but his family stopped him. The price was 500 Brazilian reais (about $100). The obviously AI-generated video, complete with a Gemini watermark, raised no suspicion.

6️⃣ GTA VI Gameplay Leaked Rockstar hasn't confirmed the footage is real, but they've started actively taking it down, hinting that it's legitimate. Still, based on the UI and some animations, these aren't final builds of the game—but we can get a general picture. What do you think? ❤️ — Looks amazing 🤔 — Looks like a disappointment...

💬 ChatGPT Launches Teens Mode It will turn on automatically if the AI determines that the user is under 18 or if they say so themselves. Teens Mode will place a greater emphasis on education and enhanced safety filters. For example, teens will be reminded to take breaks, parents will be able to set "study hours," when Study Mode is enabled by default, or "quiet hours," when ChatGPT is unavailable. Is such a mode necessary? ❤️ — Yes, that's the right thing 👎 — No, that's absurd!

🎧 Camera-Equipped AirPods Pro Spotted The macOS 26.7 release candidate appears to confirm that Apple is working on camera-equipped AirPods Pro. It includes a short promotional video in which a user asks Siri to identify a book they're holding using Visual Intelligence.

💬 OpenAI Expands Codex Context Window to 1M Tokens OpenAI has made Codex's full 1 million-token context window available to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers. Previously, the feature was limited to API-key access. Users can enable the larger window by adding these settings to ~/.codex/config.toml:

model_context_window = 1000000
model_auto_compact_token_limit = 900000

The same options can also be provided through command-line flags.

💰 Anthropic Could Go Public at a Valuation of More Than $2 Trillion Anthropic investors expect the company to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more. For comparison, SpaceX was valued at $1.77 trillion when it went public. If that forecast holds, Anthropic would set a new record. Investors are betting on rapid business growth. They expect Anthropiс's annualized revenue to reach $100-120 billion by the end of 2026-more than tenfold from the start of the year. Anthropic has already filed for an IPO but has not yet announced the offering price or size. Do you think this valuation is realistic? ❤️ — Yes, the growth justifies it 🔥 — No, the AI market is overheated

🌀 A Chinese Man Washed His Windows with a Typhoon An inventive resident of Zhejiang left his windows soapy ahead of the typhoon—and the storm did the rest of the work. The glass was left perfectly clean. What do you think of the idea? ❤️ — Smart! 🤣 — Lazy

💽 Chinese MinMax Has Released Music 3, An Open-Source Music Generator It creates songs of up to five minutes and runs locally—even on consumer hardware. The full model fits on a GPU with 24 GB of VRAM, but it can run with as little as 8 GB. ➡ You can try it for free on Hugging Face.

🐳 DeepSeek Releases Agent Harness DeepSeek Harness is a framework for AI agents built around a new paradigm: "everything is a plugin." Models, tools, skills, sessions, sandboxes, filesystems, loops, orchestration, and UI are all implemented as plugins and can be mixed, matched, replaced, and extended. ➡ The source code and setup instructions are available on GitHub. For now, it's a developer preview.

🐶 Gamgee Is Building Personalized Cancer Vaccines for Dogs The company was founded by Sydney entrepreneur Paul Conyngham, who turned to AI to design an mRNA vaccine for his own dog, Rosie, when she was dying of aggressive mast cell cancer. Back in 2024, vets gave her a couple of months. But thanks to Paul's persistence and the scientists he pulled in to make his idea real, Rosie is still alive today. Now Conyngham wants to make cancer vaccine technology available to everyone. The startup is accepting applications from owners of dogs with cancer for its first clinical trial.

🚀 Roscosmos Shares Eclipse Photos From the ISS Russia's space agency Roscosmos has published photos of the eclipse taken from the International Space Station. Cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov captured one of the year's most anticipated celestial events from an altitude of 400 kilometers.

🦇 Batman Makes People More Polite, Study Finds A 2025 experiment found people behave better when a superhero is nearby. A "pregnant" actress boarded a subway car. Normally, about 38% of passengers offered her a seat. But when a "hero" in a Batman costume boarded alongside her, that number nearly doubled to 67%. Oddly, 44% of those who gave up their seat in the Batman group said they never even noticed him. Researchers believe this points to a hidden "spillover" effect of attention in crowded public spaces. Do you give up your seat on public transport? ❤️ — Yes, always! 👀 — No, I need Batman...