Tech

Austin Russell, the billionaire founder of Luminar, has made a bid to acquire the lidar-maker five months after he was replaced as CEO following an ethics inquiry. The takeover effort was disclosed in an SEC filing by Russell early Friday morning. It would involve his new company, Russell AI Labs, purchasing 100% of the outstanding shares of Luminar’s Class A …

USB hubs should be simple devices, but apparently it’s not possible to make One Port to Rule Them All without things getting a little messy. We have a full explainer here, but if you just want to get the basics before you buy your hub, here are a few things to keep in mind. Ports speeds matter; version numbers don’t. …

Compare Our Picks Others Tested Photograph: Molly Higgins Closer Pets C200 2-Meal Automatic Pet Feeder for $30: This automatic feeder is super simple, which is both its weakness and its strength. It’s essentially two shallow plastic containers with stainless steel inserts (both dishwasher safe) and tamper-resistant lids that are locked and automatically open using an old-school egg-style timer that runs …

Squarespace via Jacob Roach There’s plenty to explore in the Squarespace editor later, but Blueprint AI gets you to the editor with a clearer view of what your site is and what it should look like. Squarespace likes to highlight its award-winning templates, and they look great, but often only within specific contexts. The Tantillo template is bold, direct, and …

Compare Top 7 Tote Bags Honorable Mentions Photograph: Kat Merck Peak Design Everyday Tote for $160: The first time I subbed in this tote for my usual bag, at a youth basketball tournament, I disappointed about a dozen parents who had clocked it as a cooler. “I thought you had brought drinks,” a friend said, dejected. And to their credit, …

In Evelyn Mora’s early career, she realized that fashion designers, although often deeply focused on sustainability, couldn’t stage environmentally friendly large-scale fashion shows.   In 2021, she launched VLGE, a gaming and immersive-world-building platform that specializes in working with brands. It lets brands build their own worlds, fill them with interactive content and games, and export said worlds to other platforms like …

South Korean telco giant SK Telecom is making big changes at its new AI division, AI CIC, just weeks after it was launched. Staff employed by the unit are being offered a voluntary retirement program as part of a broader effort to bring together the company’s various AI-related divisions, SK Telecom confirmed to TechCrunch. “In late September, SK Telecom announced …

So what is it about the Enhance Select 700 aids that makes them 200 better than the Select 500? The big sell is a new audio feature called SoundScape Auto Focus. This technology is designed to improve speech clarity in noisy conditions, filtering out background sounds and automatically prioritizing human voices. Auto Focus is integrated into the hardware and can’t …

Compare Our Top Picks Honorable Mentions We have tested 100+ mattresses over the years and have removed many that are out-of-stock or out-of-date. Here are a few more products that are still available, which we liked but didn’t love as much as the ones above. Puffy Cloud for $949: This enhanced all-foam mattress offers profound pressure relief without feeling too …

As a purely creative instrument, Sora, the new AI video app from OpenAI, is a game changer. Dream up any scenario and it appears in an instant. Freddy Krueger as a contestant on Dancing With the Stars. Mr. Rogers teaching Tupac Shakur the lyrics to the legendary rap diss “Hit Em Up.” But just as its innovations are remarkable, so …