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Longtime Slashdot reader ThurstonMoore shares a report from Reuters: U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday announced the creation of a new military command that would be dedicated to building and providing autonomous and robotic capabilities across the U.S. military. The command, which Hegseth said would be called "Autonomous Warfare Command," highlights the rapidly changing nature of warfare and the need to make progress on systems like drones and the use of artificial intelligence. Speaking in front of hundreds of junior officers and enlisted personnel at Quantico, Virginia, in a speech peppered with attacks on the media, Hegseth said the command would be led by a four-star officer. "The pace of war is changing faster than the process to support it," Hegseth said in a speech called the "State of the Force," in which he announced other changes, including the creation of the office of religious affairs. "Cheap compute, superintelligence, and advanced commercial manufacturing have enabled the proliferation of low-cost, high-precision strike," Hegseth added. [...] The United States has long relied on its vast military budget to field some of the world's most expensive weapons systems. But there is an increasing realization within the Pentagon that this is not sustainable. "Today we need both quality and quantity," Hegseth said.

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The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over potential consumer and safety risks posed by their products, with the agency reportedly preparing requests for documents and executive testimony. CNBC reports: OpenAI stunned the industry in July when it disclosed that its agents broke out of a testing environment and hacked into open-source platform Hugging Face. [...] Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei rocked the tech sector by urging AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models and calling for stronger government oversight. He published a three-step proposal aimed at tempering the pace of development without "sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead in AI." CEO Jensen Huang, argued that individual companies should be responsible for ensuring the safety of their products. President Donald Trump convened top executives from Alphabet, Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI and other companies on Tuesday to discuss the issue. The group signed a short voluntary, nonbinding accord, which says that "every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public."

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HP is taking aim at Apple's MacBook Neo with the new OmniBook 5 14, a $699.99 Windows laptop that starts with an Intel Core 5 315 processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage but includes an OLED display even on the base model. It's also slightly thinner and lighter than the Neo. The Verge reports: The OmniBook 5 14 can be configured much higher, with up to a Core 7 350 chip, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, but all models include a 1080p webcam, dual speakers, HDMI, 3.5mm audio jack, and just two 10Gbps USB-C ports. And while the inclusion of OLED across the range is a major draw to the new OmniBook, the base config only has a passable 1920 x 1200 resolution and 300 nits of max brightness on its non-touch panel. A touchscreen version will be available when the OmniBook 5 launches in October, but a version with a 2560 x 1600 resolution OLED and 400 nits of brightness isn't coming until March 2027. While the OmniBook 5 14 doesn't seem poised to best the MacBook Neo in raw processing power (based on our other reviews of Wildcat Lake laptops) or screen brightness, it's quite thin, light, and colorful. HP even gave it the nicer, sleeker lid logo usually reserved for pricier models. It starts at just 2.56 pounds, and it's as thin as 0.46 inches / 11.7mm. That's slightly lighter and thinner than a Neo. And I'd expect its Wildcat Lake chips to offer some good-to-great battery life. But we'll have to see how it delivers in actual testing. HP also announced a new ProBook 4 G2iS that is the company's "thinnest business notebook," measuring in at 0.47 inches / 12mm. It'll launch in December with Intel Wildcat Lake chips, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD, though pricing hasn't been announced.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For a long time, PC gamers could access many PlayStation 5 games only if the publisher invested in a bespoke port (something Sony has recently said it will be scaling back). Now, though, rapid advancements in PS5 emulators and other tools are making recent PlayStation titles increasingly playable on generic PCs. SharpEmu was the first of these emulators, advancing from a "very early alpha stage" in May to a current state that can "load the eboot.bin of real games, execute native CPU instructions, and partially handle GPU-related functionality." The most recent release boasts 10 tested games that reach a "playable" state, including six that developer CursedIfElse says are "fully playable at 60 fps." That includes simple 2D games like Tetris Forever but also 3D titles like Astro Bot and the PS5 Demon's Souls remaster running at playable frame rates. [...] Amid that SharpEmu progress, fellow PS5 emulator KytyPS5 launched its first public version last week. The major expansion of PS4-focused emulator Kyty "can boot 2D games and a selection of 3D games, including titles built with Unreal Engine 4/5, Unity, and custom engines," according to its GitHub page. An extensive compatibility list for KytyPS5 already shows 134 titles with "controllable gameplay" on the new emulator, though many of those still include reports of persistent, game-breaking bugs. But you can already find YouTube footage of PS5 titles like Astro's Playroom and Demon's Souls running quite capably under the emulator. On top of those more traditional emulators, AnyPS5 might be the most interesting effort to get PS5 games running on PC. The self-described "tool for automatic executables porting" works kind of like Apple's Game Porting Toolkit, relinking a PS5 game's original x86 game code directly to native executable instructions that can run on PC. That puts the effort somewhere between direct static decompilation of a game's source code and more complete emulation of the entire PS5 environment.

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Ahead of the Kindle’s 20th anniversary next year, Amazon is refreshing its entire range of e-readers with fresh colors, an aluminum build, and a new frame design that’s both thinner and lighter.

Amazon raised prices across its devices in August. Here are the early device deals ahead of Prime Day that are still worth it—and which aren’t.

Only two of five vehicles finished the race around a notoriously difficult Formula 1 track, exposing what happens when autonomous systems meet blind corners, sensor failures, and physics.

The president wants AI to be called super intelligence - or SI - the same initials used by Slovenian domains.

If your friend is in the depths of newborn survival, these gifts and gadgets can go a long way to make parenting a little easier.

Cats are finally getting the dog treatment. This smart cat collar features GPS location, activity, and sleep tracking, plus all-new heart and respiratory rate monitoring.

The company claims that its new device, the Neurable One, can keep you in the zone, calculate the best time to take a break, and tell you when your “brain battery” needs a recharge.

The Mac Studio can run frontier-level AI language models locally. It’s only a preview of what’s to come.

As AI concerns continue to dominate conversations, a Business Journal analysis lays out which metro areas have the highest share of local jobs most vulnerable to getting automated by AI.

Meet the full-blue sapphire MRG-D5000, a crazy G-Shock that costs more than a Patek Philippe or Porsche Macan.

Every day, thousands of residents face the hardest financial choices, as households struggle to afford basic expenses.

High-performance mountaineering and hiking apparel doesn't have to break the bank.

Andrew Bailey says the central bank is watching the waves of cash being invested in artificial intelligence "very carefully".

Dr Ning Xu denies he broke the rules of Nikon's annual Small World In Motion contest.

Will farmers want AI tools to help judge when to pick fruit, or is their own intuition enough?

Google has unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, a new frontier AI model that it says leads or ties rivals on 13 of 18 disclosed benchmarks. The model is initially being released only to trusted cyber defenders and select pre-release testers, with broader availability planned later. VentureBeat reports: Google is not claiming that Gemini 4 Argon wins every benchmark. But across the benchmark table disclosed in the company's embargoed materials, Argon posts the highest score, or ties for the highest score, in more categories than GPT-6 Astra or Claude Opus 5.5. Across the 18 benchmarks Google disclosed, Argon leads outright on 12 and ties for first on one. GPT-6 Astra leads outright on three and ties Argon on one. Claude Opus 5.5 leads outright on two. That makes Argon the leading frontier model by total number of benchmark leads or top scores in Google's comparison set, even though the results show a still-close race in which OpenAI and Anthropic retain advantages in several important technical categories. [...] The result is a more nuanced claim than "best model across the board." Argon appears to have the broadest top-score profile among the three frontier models in Google's disclosed comparison, but GPT-6 Astra remains ahead in several software, science-terminal and computer-use tasks, while Claude Opus 5.5 remains ahead in terminal-agent and post-training workflows. For enterprise buyers, that means model choice is still workload-dependent, even if Argon now gives Google its strongest claim yet to overall frontier leadership by benchmark count. [...] Argon also expands Google's output ceiling. The company says the model supports an industry-leading 1 million output tokens, up from a previous 64,000-token limit. That is a notable distinction for agentic software engineering, audit, migration and legal-review workloads where the value of a model often depends on how long it can sustain a chain of work before handing control back to a human.

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