Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? The Kia EV9 was one of the first EVs from an established automaker truly designed for American tastes. It’s a big, boxy SUV that gives drivers a commanding view of the road, while three rows of seats and quick charging make it perfect for […]
Smart plugs are among the most useful smart home devices you can buy. You can use a smart plug to turn almost any electrical device into a smart device that can be turned on and off remotely. With the right automations, however, smart plugs can offer something even more valuable: peace of mind.
Apple's Johny Srouji may be the latest company executive to seek greener pastures, according to a report from Bloomberg. The report said that Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, told Tim Cook that he is "seriously considering leaving in the near future."
While the report didn't mention if Srouji has another job lined up, Bloomberg's sources claimed that he wants to join another company if he leaves Apple. Srouji joined the company in 2008 to develop Apple's first in-house system-on-a-chip and eventually led the transition to Apple silicon.
If Srouji leaves Apple, he would be the latest in a string of departures of longtime execs. At the start of the month, Apple announced that John Giannandrea, the company's senior vice president for machine learning and AI strategy, would be retiring from his role in spring 2026. A couple of days later, Bloomberg reported that the company's head of interface design, Alan Dye, would be leaving for a role at Meta. Adding to those exits, Apple also revealed that Kate Adams, who has been Apple's general counsel since 2017, and Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, will both be leaving in early 2026.
The shakeup at the executive level comes after Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously reported that Cook may not be preparing for his own departure as CEO next year. Gurman's prediction counters a report from the Financial Times that claimed that Apple was accelerating succession plans for Cook with an expected stepping down sometime next year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apples-johny-srouji-could-continue-the-companys-executive-exodus-according-to-report-200750252.html?src=rss
Johny Srouji (R), senior vice president of hardware technologies at Apple, and an Apple engineer view testing data on Apple's new C1 cellular modem in a shield room that blocks interference from cellular networks at Apple's wireless labs, in Sunnyvale, California, U.S., February 18, 2025. REUTERS/Stephen Nellis
"A structure designed to prevent radioactive leakage at the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine is no longer operational," reports Politico, "after Russian drones targeted it earlier this year, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog has found."
[T]he large steel structure "lost its primary safety functions, including the confinement capability" when its outer cladding was set ablaze after being struck by Russian drones, according to a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Beyond that, there was "no permanent damage to its load-bearing structures or monitoring systems," it said. "Limited temporary repairs have been carried out on the roof, but timely and comprehensive restoration remains essential to prevent further degradation and ensure long-term nuclear safety," IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in astatement.
The Guardian has pictures of the protective shield — incuding the damage from the drone strike. The shield is the world's largest movable land structure, reports CNN:
The IAEA, which has a permanent presence at the site, will "continue to do everything it can to support efforts to fully restore nuclear safety and security," Grossi said.... Built in 2010 and completed in 2019, it was designed to last 100 years and has played a crucial role in securing the site.
The project cost €2.1 billion and was funded by contributions from more than 45 donor countries and organizations through the Chernobyl Shelter Fund, according to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which in 2019 hailed the venture as "the largest international collaboration ever in the field of nuclear safety."
It’s only been a day since Netflix announced an $82.7 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros., and the acquisition has already been described as sending Hollywood into “full-blown panic mode,” “possibly a death blow to theatrical filmmaking,” and maybe even “the end of Hollywood” itself.
Colleen Aubrey, AWS senior vice president of Applied AI Solutions, speaks during the AWS re:Invent keynote about the company’s push toward AI “teammates” and agentic development. (Amazon Photo)
LAS VEGAS — Speaking this week on the Amazon Web Services re:Invent stage, AWS executive Colleen Aubrey delivered a prediction that doubled as a wake-up call for companies still thinking of AI as just another tool.
“I believe that over the next few years, agentic teammates can be essential to every team — as essential as the people sitting right next to you,” Aubrey said during the Wednesday keynote. “They will fundamentally transform how companies build and deliver for their customers.”
But what does that look like in practice? On her own team, for example, she challenged groups that once had 50 people taking nine months to deliver a new product to do the same with 10 people working for three months.
Meanwhile, non-engineers such as finance analysts are building working prototypes using AI tools, contributing code in Amazon’s Kiro agentic development tool alongside engineers and feeding those prototypes into Amazon’s famous PR/FAQ planning process on weekly cycles.
Those are some of the details that Aubrey shared when we sat down with her after the keynote at the GeekWire Studios booth in the re:Invent expo hall to dig into the themes from her talk. Aubrey is senior vice president of Applied AI Solutions at AWS, overseeing the company’s push into business applications for call centers, supply chains, and other sectors.
Continue reading for takeaways from the conversation, watch the video below, and listen to the conversation starting in the second segment of this week’s GeekWire Podcast.
The ‘teammate’ mental model changes everything. Aubrey draws a clear line between single-purpose AI tools that do one thing well and the agentic teammates she sees emerging — systems that take responsibility for whole objectives, and require a different kind of management.
“I think people will increasingly be managers of AI,” she said. “The days of having to do the individual keystrokes ourselves, I think, are fast fading. And in fact, everyone is going to be a manager now. You have to think about prioritization, delegation, and auditing. What’s the quality of our feedback, providing coaching. What are the guardrails?”
Amazon Connect crosses $1 billion. AWS’s call center platform reached $1 billion in annual revenue on a run rate basis, with Aubrey noting it has accelerated year-over-year growth for two consecutive years.
This week at re:Invent, the team announced 29 new capabilities across four areas: Nova Sonic voice interaction that Aubrey says is “very close to being indistinguishable” from human conversation; agents that complete tasks on behalf of customers; clickstream intelligence for product recommendations; and observability tools for inspecting AI reasoning.
One interesting detail: Aubrey said she’s often surprised by Nova Sonic’s sophistication and empathy in complex conversations — and equally surprised when it fails at basic tasks like spelling an address correctly.
“There’s still work to do to really polish that,” she said.
The ROI question gets a “yes and no.” Asked whether companies are seeing the business value to justify AI agent investments, Aubrey offered a nuanced response. “I observe companies to struggle to realize the business impact,” she said. But she said the value often shows up as eliminating bottlenecks — clearing backlogs, erasing technical debt, accelerating security patching — rather than immediate revenue gains.
“I’m not going to see the impact on my P&L today,” she said, “but if I fast forward a year, I’m going to have a product in market where real customers are using and getting real value, and we’re learning and iterating where I might not have even been halfway there in the past.”
Her advice for companies still hesitating: “If you don’t start today, that’s a one way door decision… I think you have to start the journey today. I would suggest people get focused, they get moving, because if you don’t, I think that becomes existential.”
Trust requires observability. Aubrey says companies won’t get full value from AI teammates if they can’t see how they’re reasoning.
“If you don’t trust an AI teammate, then you’re never going to realize the full benefit,” she said. “You’re not going to give them the hard tasks, you’re not going to invest in their development.”
The solution is treating AI inspection the same way you’d manage a human colleague: understand why it took an action, audit the quality, and iterate.
“You can refine your knowledge bases. You can refine your workflows. You can refine your guardrails, and then confidently keep iterating… the same way we do with each other. We keep iterating, we keep learning, and we keep getting better,” she said.
Product updates: Beyond Connect, Aubrey offered updates on other parts of her portfolio of Amazon’s applied AI solutions.
Just Walk Out, Amazon’s cashierless checkout technology, deployed more than 150 new stores in 2025 and should accelerate next year.
AWS Supply Chain, meanwhile, is getting a reset. “I’m going to declare that a pivot,” she said, with a Q1 announcement coming around agentic decision-making for supply and demand planning.
Also coming in Q1: a life sciences product focused on antibody discovery, currently in beta.
She teased “a few other new investment areas” expected to come in early 2026.
Nothing lasts forever, and that includes the ROMs required to make a retrocomputer run. Even worse, what if you’re rolling your own firmware? Period-appropriate EPROMs and their programmers aren’t always cheap or easy to get a hold of these days. [Kyo-ta04] had that problem, and thanks to them, we now all have a solution: Pico2ROMEmu, a ROM emulator based on, you guessed it, the Raspberry Pi Pico2.
The Pico2ROMEmu in its natural habitat on a Z80 SBC.
The ROM emulator has been tested at 10MHz with a Z80 processor and 12MHz with an MC68000. An interesting detail here is that rather than use the RP2350’s RISC-V or ARM cores, [kyo-ta04] is doing all the work using the chip’s powerful PIO. PIO means “programmable I/O,” and if you need a primer, check this out. Using PIO means the main core of the microcontroller needn’t be involved — and in this context, a faster ROM emulator.
We’ve seen ROM emulators before, of course — the OneROM comes to mind, which can also use the RP2350 and its PIOs. That project hasn’t been chasing these sorts of speeds as it is focused on older, slower machines. That may change in the newest revision. It’s great to see another contender in this space, though, especially one to serve slightly higher-performance retrocomputers. Code and Gerbers for the Pico2RomeEMU are available on GitHub under an MIT license.
As cloud-native adoption soars, companies are turning to managed SRE services to navigate infrastructure complexity Kubernetes has won. According to VMware’s research, over 60% of enterprises now run containerized workloads on the platform, and that number continues to climb. But victory has come with an unexpected cost: operational complexity that even experienced engineering teams struggle […]
I used to see the double dash (--) in Excel spreadsheets and wonder what it did. It's an essential shortcut to force Excel to treat TRUE and FALSE as the numbers 1 and 0, meaning you can easily sum or count the results of a logical test across a range. Now I know, and I want to share this powerful trick with you.
Smartphones used to have a stronger sense of personality. In the early days, it wasn't just the hardware that left an impression—the default wallpaper was a defining feature you'd see at the launch event and every ad that followed. Here are some of the most iconic smartphone wallpapers of all time, in no particular order.
On balance, USB-C has been pretty great. I would be the last person to suggest that we should go back to the bad old days of USB-A (insofar as we've actually left it) or, even worse, micro-USB.
No one wants to be spied on. A VPN is one piece of the cyber security puzzle to help protect your personal information—and you should install it on all of your devices.
Black Friday has come and gone, and with it, most of the wallet-saving deals have retreated into the ether. That is almost all of those deals, but one: Ninja has its Black Friday deal on the Ninja Crispi air fryer. The Ninja Crispi is $40 off this weekend, for who knows how much longer. This air fryer features two glass bottoms in 4-quart and 6-cup capacities. This portable cooking system is an air fryer, in addition to baking, reheating, and something Ninja refers to as "Max Crisp," which is likely closely related to broiling.
The two different sizes offer unique capabilities for cooking different quantities of food at various speeds. For example, the 6-cup glass-bottom bowl can reheat some fries or veggies (who says potatoes aren't vegetables) in as little as 7 minutes, while the 4-quart glass-bottom bowl can bake a whole chicken and vegetables.
If the combination of a glass bottom and extreme heat gives you pause, don't worry, Ninja is already way ahead of you. The borosilicate glass (which the famously heat-resistant Pyrex brand's glass is made of) is thermal shock-resistant, and both glass bottoms come with heat-protected feet that allow the device to sit atop any material countertop you want (except plastic). The glass bottoms are also dishwasher safe.
To prevent its robotaxi fleet from passing stopped school buses, Waymo is issuing another software recall in 2025. While it's not a traditional recall that pulls vehicles from the road, Waymo is voluntarily updating software for its autonomous fleet in response to an investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. According to Waymo, the recall will be filed with the federal agency early next week.
Mauricio Peña, Waymo's chief safety officer, said in a statement that Waymo sees far fewer crashes involving pedestrians than human drivers, but that the company knows when "our behavior should be better."
"As a result, we have made the decision to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA related to appropriately slowing and stopping in these scenarios," Peña said in a statement to multiple news outlets. "We will continue analyzing our vehicles’ performance and making necessary fixes as part of our commitment to continuous improvement."
According to the NHTSA investigation, some Waymo autonomous vehicles were seen failing to stop for school buses that had their stop signs and flashing lights deployed. The federal agency said in the report that there were instances of Waymo cars driving past stopped school buses in Atlanta and Austin, Texas.
Earlier this year, Waymo issued another software recall after some of its robotaxi fleet were seen hitting gates, chains, and similar objects. Last year, Waymo also filed two other software recalls, one of which addressed a fleet vehicle crashing into a telephone pole and another correcting how two separate robotaxis hit the same exact pickup truck that was being towed.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/waymos-robotaxi-fleet-is-being-recalled-again-this-time-for-failing-to-stop-for-school-buses-190222243.html?src=rss
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