Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn't name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories.

"Your Beauty item is confirmed!" an email about my retainer cleaning tablets read. Shoppers have posted other iterations of the redacted emails as well: "Ordered: 1 Hardware item," "Your Drugstore, Shoes, and other items are here!" and "1 Nutrition & Wellness, 1 Wireless Accessories," for example. The emails have clip art-style illustrations of general product categories, and a shopper has to exit their email and go to Amazon to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Joby Aviation announced it was acquiring Dayton, Ohio-based defense firm Resonant Sciences in a $500 million deal, in a bid by the electric aircraft company to expand further into the military industrial complex.

Joby says it expects to finance the deal with $450 million in cash and $50 million in equity. After the deal closes, which is expected in early 2027, Resonant will continue its existing work as Joby's dedicated defense division, the company said. The commercial division will remain focused on air taxis, the first of which are expected to launch later this year.

The deal is the latest example of the fledgling electric aviation in …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Researchers devised a way to extract “reasoning traces” from Claude, GPT, and Gemini. What they found, they say, indicates that some Chinese AI may be trained on leading US models.

Recently, a man I was rock climbing with told me about how he'd used AI to make a motivational poster for himself, which he'd hung on his bedroom wall: a bear, walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that said, "Do cool shit." I made what I hoped was a polite noise. What reaction was this man looking for? He probably hoped someone, maybe me, would say it was cool or inspiring. It seemed I was not the first person he'd told about this poster. "You know, it's funny," he said to me. "No one ever says anything about it."

I have been thinking about this now for several days. There's a sort of turducken of things that I find off-puttin …

Read the full story at The Verge.