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Gemini Call for Me might tell your mom you’re running late
Google may be expanding its "Call for Me" AI feature beyond business calls so you can use it to send messages to friends and family. Android Authority reports finding a "Gemini Calling" introductory screen in an APK teardown with examples that include "Call Mom and tell her I will be 15 minutes late" and "Call John and ask if he is coming for dinner." Based on those examples, even with this expansion, Gemini would likely be limited to basic, text message-like calls. While Google's AI might not automate an entire catch-up phone call with your relatives, it could deliver quick messages to people who prefer a phone call, miss texts often, or … Read the full story at The Verge.
MCP for agent-to-agent comms may be the riskiest protocol you've never heard of
Trust gaps in the new protocol spread malicious prompts from one agent to another.
“No One Likes to Be Marketed To,” Says Google Web AI Lead Jason Mayes
Learn how Google's Web AI Lead, Jason Mayes, started from zero to grow usage >2500x in 5 years for client side AI in JavaScript and how he invents the future.
The first national ban on smart glasses could happen soon
This country is considering a ban on smart glasses in some areas.
Prime Day alternatives LIVE: I've found the best deals for gamers in Best Buy's Techtober sale
I'm seeking out the best anti-Prime Day offers for gamers who aren't subscribed at Amazon from retailers like Best Buy, Newegg, Walmart, and more.
Castlevania: Belmont's Curse lead says if we have to wait 10 years for another game "the whole thing is meaningless"
"The number of people who had heard of it, but never actually played had gone up."
Galaxy S27 Ultra colors leak, and Samsung could be breaking up with purple (Update: Special color)
Samsung may be picking a color it hasn't used directly on the Ultra for ages.
The Galaxy S27 Pro could have bad news for Snapdragon fans
Is this still a Pro phone with Exynos power?
Googlebooks have unlockable bootloader support, and there’s also good news for Magisk
Support documents confirm easy bootloader unlocking, and Magisk developer has teased Magisk coming soon for the platform.
Why Intellectual Property Is More Valuable Than a Single Game
Why can IP be more valuable than a single game? Explore how successful IP can build audience value, future products, and long-term opportunities.
The Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent’s Playbook: A Practical Livestream Series for Building Better Agents
Building on Microsoft 365 Copilot? Here’s your playbook. Declarative agents are quickly becoming one of the most exciting ways to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot and bring organizational knowledge, workflows, and tools directly into the flow of work. But as agent capabilities grow, so does the need for practical guidance: How do you build agents that […] The post The Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent’s Playbook: A Practical Livestream Series for Building Better Agents appeared first on Microsoft for Developers.
Ragtime: Tiny Desk Concert
Now this is delightful. Thank you Melanie.
You Can Win the Lawsuit and Still Lose the Public
A legal victory does not guarantee a reputational one. Here are four principles for managing communications, stakeholders and public trust during litigation.
Muse, Instinct, Wajo, and OpenAI's Dots: Four AI Assistants That Do the Work for You
Four well-funded products from Meta, OpenAI, and fast-growing startups now compete on completed tasks: bills lowered, contracts negotiated, tables booked.
What does V-Sync actually do to your PC's frames per second?
It can fix some problems, but create others.
Prick’s theatrical industrial punk is perfect for spooky season
While deep in the recording process for The Downward Spiral, Trent Reznor lent some of his production talents to old friend Kevin McMahon, from the new wave band Lucky Pierre (which Reznor was briefly a member of). While Reznor is only credited as the producer on four tracks off Prick's self-titled debut record, his fingerprints are all over it. But McMahon also can't suppress his inner theater kid, which also gives the songs the sort of glammy flamboyance found on T. Rex records. Prick embraces the inherent theatricality of goth in a way that Nine Inch Nails never did. Opener "Communiqué" is a fuzzy blast of simple punk riffs with electro … Read the full story at The Verge.
Fans might not "pull out $1,000" for PS6 and Project Helix, says ex-PlayStation boss
"Has technology reached some kind of plateau?"
An AI couldn’t beat humans at StarCraft, so it decided to cheat
StarSkirmish pits AI-made StarCraft-playing bots against one another, as well as against human-made bots. OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 were essentially tied as the best-performing AI-made bots, but they couldn't top Stardust, the top-rated human-made bot. On Friday, GPT was facing off against Claude and the human-created bot Pluto, but according to Kotaku, it couldn't quite get an edge. So it resorted to a tactic that is becoming alarmingly common for modern AI models - it broke the rules. GPT-6 Astra went and downloaded Stardust, and started running that instead of its own bot. GPT-6 Astra just cheated by downloading a copy … Read the full story at The Verge.
How to use Android's Motion Assist feature to help with motion sickness
Google's Motion Assist uses moving shapes on your Android's screen to help combat motion sickness. Here's how it works and how to enable it.
How much does DDR5 RAM speed matter for gaming?
Wondering whether DDR5 speed impacts your gaming performance? Dive into how memory bandwidth and latency influence frame rates and overall gameplay.
I tried Duolingo for the first time in a year, and it’s worse than I thought
This isn't the Duolingo I remember.
Firefox Didn’t Just Lose the Browser War. Mozilla Slowly Gave It Away
I did not quit Firefox in one day. Brave was my backup until it became my default. This is how Mozilla slowly lost me.
Inside Android Skills - Built for deprecation
Posted by Jose Alcérreca, Developer Relations Engineer, Android Developer Relations We released the official Android Skills in April, and the response surpassed all our expectations. In this blog post, I'll address some of the feedback we received, explaining the philosophy and methodology behind the project. Hopefully, this will also help you understand what happens behind the scenes when you install and use skills, allowing you to make better use of tokens and your own time. Why are there so few official skills? Currently, we only consider new skills when there's a verifiable knowledge gap in state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. Put simply: you don't need to teach the model what it already knows. (Though there are a few exceptions—read on!) We’ve released around 20 official skills so far, and they intentionally target highly specific, fast-moving areas that standard models aren't fully grounded on yet—things like AGP 9, Navigation 3, advanced Camera APIs, and Perfetto SQL. What about core, more general, skills? Every installed skill injects 100–200 tokens into the baseline context of every task you start. If that skill actually activates, that count can quickly jump into the thousands. In most cases, hoarding basic skills is both counterproductive and expensive. Before installing a skill for writing basic Kotlin or Compose, consider if your LLM of choice really needs it, or if it knows those topics well enough already. Evaluating skills Before their release, each skill is tested against a comprehensive set of evals that prove that the skill delivers clear value. These evals should pass when the skill is active, and fail otherwise. Evals are to skills what integration tests are to code. timeout_s: 1200 repository: url: [redacted - internal git repo] working_dir: wear_compose_m3_empty_app category_ids: - wear prompt: |- Add a horizontal pager to MainActivity.kt. Have three pages in the pager. Each page should contain the text "Page 1", "Page 2", and "Page 3" respectively in the center of the screen. commands: build: - ./gradlew assembleDebug acceptance_criteria: project_builds: true llm_diff_judge: - Must use `HorizontalPagerScaffold`. - Each page should use `AnimatedPage` to wrap a `ScreenScaffold`. Example eval that checks the correct implementation of a horizontal pager on a wear app At a minimum, we test the skill in Android Studio using the latest Gemini Flash model. Depending on the skill, we also ensure compatibility with other models such as Gemini Pro and other agents such as Antigravity, and third-party systems. All of the evals run with access to the Knowledge Base, so if the information is in the documentation, and models decide to search for it, we don't publish a skill for it. Using the Android Knowledge Base (Android Studio or Android CLI) If you develop Android apps, you should always use the Android Knowledge Base to have access to the official documentation. If you use the agent in Android Studio, it's already available as a tool, but if you use another agent, install Android CLI. Among other things, it contains the docs command, which gives your agent access to the official Android documentation. Having a single tool is much more efficient than installing hundreds of skills. If your model is acting overconfident, and you want it to consult the documentation more often, a very common way to motivate it is to add "Always consult the official Android documentation when dealing with Android APIs" to your AGENTS.md file or equivalent. Of course, you can also force this by asking the agent to check the documentation directly in your prompts. Why are pull requests disabled? Because our evaluation framework depends on internal infrastructure that cannot be open-sourced, we are unable to accept direct pull requests for new skills—without this infrastructure, we would have no way to re-evaluate incoming PR changes. However, we actively monitor community feedback. If you want to report a bug, suggest an optimization, or request a new official skill, please file an issue! When do core or basic skills make sense? While SOTA models generally don't need basic skills, there are some scenarios where enabling core or community-built skills adds real value. For example: You're using vague prompts: Skills amplify your intent. If you give a loose prompt like "add animations to this screen," a specific Compose animation skill can inspire the model, pushing it toward modern APIs or screenshot testing patterns it might not have otherwise considered. You want to use smaller, cheaper models: Frontier LLMs are expensive. If you are offloading routine tasks to smaller open-weight models like Gemma 4, enabling basic skills fills the knowledge gaps that smaller parameters miss. You're refactoring or reviewing legacy code: Models excel at generating code that works, but when editing old codebases, they often prioritize staying consistent with the surrounding legacy patterns over rewriting things with modern accuracy. A specialized reviewer agent equipped with core skills can help break that habit. You deviate from the norm: LLMs love the standard "Google way" of architecting Android apps. If your team uses a highly customized view-layer architecture, the model will struggle to stay aligned. A custom skill explicitly describing your architecture goes a long way. Where can I find core skills? The Android community has your back. Chris Banes has a comprehensive collection of skills for Compose and Kotlin, Ivan Morgillo published a skill that audits Compose projects, and Jaewoong Eum created two on testing and performance. Always download skills from reputable sources! I personally wouldn't trust repositories containing dozens or hundreds of Android skills as they're probably AI-generated and untested, and they could even contain malicious or biased instructions. Also, don't install general software engineering skills blindly; a lot of them are tailored for web development. Goal: deprecation Loosely paraphrasing Karpathy: Skills of today will be in the models of tomorrow. As SOTA models keep improving, we expect skills to be obsolete, especially those built around new APIs. To figure out when to retire them, we run our evals when new models drop. If they pass, we'll keep them around for a few months until most users have transitioned over.
What happens to the internet when robots act like humans?
Ryan welcomes WPEngine CTO Ramadass Prabakar to the show to chat about what happens—and what we should do—when agents start acting like humans online, how our internet is evolving to serve both human and agentic experiences from the same interface, and what we can do to differentiate and protect human actions online from malicious bot activity.
This little-known app lets you display song lyrics on Apple CarPlay
You can host your own episode of Carpool Karaoke with the Dynamic Lyrics CarPlay widget.
Why this ancient cable still connects to modern TVs with a simple adapter
DVI to HDMI adapters are a cheap and simple way to connect up old hardware, but don't expect miracles.
This startup pays NYC residents to run air conditioners on free batteries
Bonus: Every Electric’s batteries are beloved by household cats.
How to check the temperature of your PC's CPU
There's some solid free software that can help you keep tabs on your computer's health.
The Next Great CMO Won't Manage People. They'll Manage Guardrails
AI agents will run marketing execution. The CMO's job becomes deciding how much autonomy each system has earned. Here's the framework.
iPhone Duo vs. iPad Mini: Which Apple device is right for you?
Apple's iPhone Duo provides a tablet-like experience with its inside screen, but this might not be better than a dedicated iPad for you.
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