Opera has opened its AI-powered browser Neon to the public after a couple of months of testing, and anyone interested in trying it will need to pay $19.90 per month. The Norway-based company first unveiled Neon in May and launched it in early access to select users in October. Like Perplexity’s Comet, OpenAI’s Atlas, and The Browser Company’s Dia, Neon bakes an AI chatbot into its interface that can answer questions about pages, create mini apps and videos, and perform tasks. The browser uses your browsing history as context, so you can ask it to fetch details from a YouTube video you watched last week. The subscription also grants access to AI models including Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.1.
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It looks like Disney wasted no time delivering on CEO Bob Iger’s promise to bring AI-generated content to Disney+. On Thursday, the company announced the start of a three-year licensing agreement with OpenAI to bring more than 200 of its beloved characters, including those from Star Wars and Pixar, to the Sora app and ChatGPT. With the deal in place, OpenAI users will be able to prompt ChatGPT to generate images that tap into Disney’s intellectual property, with costumes, props, vehicles and environments covered.
The agreement does not cover voices or “talent likenesses.” On paper, that should mean Sora users won’t be able prompt the app to make a video with Black Widow and get something with Scarlett Johansson likeness in it.
Developing…
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-signs-deal-to-bring-disney-characters-to-sora-and-chatgpt-144344820.html?src=rss
Oracle stock dropped after it reported disappointing revenues on Wednesday alongside a $15 billion increase in its planned spending on data centers this year to serve artificial intelligence groups.
Shares in Larry Ellison’s database company fell 11 percent in pre-market trading on Thursday after it reported revenues of $16.1 billion in the last quarter, up 14 percent from the previous year, but below analysts’ estimates.
Oracle raised its forecast for capital expenditure this financial year by more than 40 percent to $50 billion. The outlay, largely directed to building data centers, climbed to $12 billion in the quarter, above expectations of $8.4 billion.
Generative AI tools continue to improve in terms of their photo editing capabilities, and OpenAI’s latest upgrade brings Adobe Photoshop right inside your ChatGPT app window (alongside Adobe Acrobat for handling PDFs, and Adobe Express for graphic design). It’s available to everyone, for free—you just need a ChatGPT account and an Adobe account.
As per Adobe, the idea is to make “creativity accessible for everyone” by plugging Photoshop tools directly into ChatGPT. The desktop version of Photoshop already comes with plenty of generative AI features of its own, so this is AI layered on top of more AI—but is it actually useful?
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Express and Adobe Acrobat are available now inside ChatGPT on the desktop, on the web, and on iOS. At the time of writing, you can also get Adobe Express inside ChatGPT for Android, with Photoshop and Acrobat “coming soon.” To weigh the capabilities of the new integration, I tested it in a desktop web browser.
To get started, all you need to do is type “Photoshop” at the start of your prompt: ChatGPT should recognize what you’re trying to do, and select Adobe Photoshop as the tool to use for the next prompt. You’ll also need to click through a couple of confirmation dialog boxes, and connect an Adobe account (if you don’t have one, you can make one for free).
With all the connections and logins completed, Photoshop is then added to the overflow menu in the prompt box, so just click on the + (plus) to select it. You can start describing what you want to happen using the same natural, conversational language you’d use for any other ChatGPT prompt. You do need to also upload an image or provide a public link to one—if you don’t do this before you submit your prompt, you’ll be asked to do it after.
You don’t need to know the names of all the Photoshop tools: Just describe what you want to happen and the relevant tools will be selected for you. One example Adobe gives is using the prompt “make my image pop,” which brings up the Bloom, Grain, and Lens Distortion effects—and each one can be adjusted via sliders on screen. It’s actually quite simple to use.
If you do know the name of the tools you want, you can call them up by name, and the classic brightness and contrast sliders are a good place to start. You can either say something like “make the picture brighter” or “adjust the image brightness”—both will bring up an overlay you can use to make brightness adjustments, but if you use the former prompt, the image will already have been made a little brighter.
ChatGPT and Photoshop let you add edit upon edit as needed, and you can save the image at any stage. There’s also the option to open your processed file in the Photoshop web app whenever you like: This web app uses a freemium model, with advanced features requiring a subscription, and seems to be what the ChatGPT integration is largely based on.
Adobe offers a handy ChatGPT prompts cheat sheet you can browse through, which gives you a good idea of what’s possible, and what you’re still going to need Photoshop proper for. Note that you can specify certain parts of the image to focus on (like “the face” or “the car”) but this depends on Photoshop-in-ChatGPT being able to correctly figure out where you want your selection to be. It needs to be pretty obvious and well delineated.
When I tried cutting out objects and removing backgrounds, this worked well—but then I had to turn to Photoshop on the web to actually drop in a different background. There’s no way to work with layers or masks here, and you can’t remove people or objects from photos, either. Sometimes, however, you do get a spool of “thinking” from ChatGPT about how it can’t do what the user is asking for.
I was able to apply some nice colorizations here, via prompts like “turn all the hues in this image to blue,” and I like the way ChatGPT will give you further instructions on how to get the effect you want. You can even say “show some examples” and it gives you a few presets to choose from—all of which can be adjusted via the sliders again.
The ability to run prompts like “turn this into an oil painting” or “turn this into a cartoon” are useful too, though the plug-in is limited by the effects available in Photoshop for the web: You’ll be directed to the closest effect and advised how to tweak it to get the look you want.
Actually, some of these effects work better in ChatGPT’s native image editor, which maybe explains why Adobe wanted to get involved here.
If ChatGPT’s image manipulation gets good enough, then Photoshop is no longer going to be needed by a substantial number of users: ChatGPT can already remove people and objects from photos, for example, quite effectively. What it’s not quite as good at is some of the basic adjustments (like colors and contrast) that Adobe software has been managing for years.
For quick, basic edits you want to type out in natural language—especially where you want to adjust the edits manually and need advice on what to do next—Photoshop inside ChatGPT is a handy tool to be able to turn to, especially as it’s free. For serious edits, though, you’re still going to want to fire up the main Photoshop app, or maybe even shun Adobe altogether and make use of ChatGPT’s steadily improving editing tools.
It was just at the end of month that Ubuntu 26.04 Snapshot 1 ISOs were published for the first “Resolute Raccoon” milestone. Out already is now Snapshot 2 with Canonical releasing these images ahead of their engineers having time off for end-of-year holidays…
Tourists from dozens of countries including the UK could be asked to provide a five-year social media history as a condition of entry to the United States, under a new proposal unveiled by American officials. From a report: The new condition would affect people from dozens of countries who are eligible to visit the US for 90 days without a visa, as long as they have filled out an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) form. Since returning to the White House in January, President Donald Trump has moved to toughen US borders more generally – citing national security as a reason.
Analysts say the new plan could pose an obstacle to potential visitors, or harm their digital rights. Asked whether the proposal could lead to a steep drop-off in tourism to the US, Trump said he was not concerned. “No. We’re doing so well,” the president said on Wednesday. “We just want people to come over here, and safe. We want safety. We want security. We want to make sure we’re not letting the wrong people come enter our country.”
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The Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 just hit its lowest price yet at $129.99 (according to price trackers), down from its usual $249.99. If you already use a Samsung phone, this might be a good time to take a closer look.
This 40mm Bluetooth model keeps things simple but refined, with an aluminum body and a 1.3-inch OLED display that’s crisp and easy to read. It weighs only 1 ounce, and while not super slim, it doesn’t feel bulky on the wrist. It’s built to handle real-world use with an IP68 rating, 5ATM waterproofing, and MIL-STD-810H certification. That means it can survive dust, splashes, and some rough handling. Just don’t expect it to hold up during extreme activities, since Samsung reserves those upgrades for the Galaxy Watch Ultra.
Performance-wise, the Watch 7 gets a noticeable bump over the previous model. It runs Wear OS 5 with Samsung’s One UI 6 layered on top, which adds new tools like customizable widgets, photo editing, and built-in translation. The dual-frequency GPS tracks location more accurately than before, although this PCMag review notes that the watch can still be slightly off when logging runs or sleep. The screen is responsive, and gesture controls work well. The biggest limitation is battery life: With average use, you’ll get about 22 to 27 hours before needing a recharge. If you want all-day notifications and overnight sleep tracking, charging it daily will become part of the routine.
Where the Galaxy Watch 7 stands out is in its health and fitness tracking. You get the basics like heart rate, blood oxygen, ECG, and automatic workout detection. But it also adds body composition analysis, FDA-approved sleep apnea detection, and a new AI Energy Score that summarizes your fitness and sleep data into a single number. Some of the smarter features, like snore detection, only work if you have a Samsung phone nearby, which limits the experience for non-Samsung users. Still, at this new lower price, the Watch 7 offers strong value for Android users who want solid fitness tools in a durable, polished design. And if you’re considering the new Galaxy Watch 8, it’s worth checking out this side-by-side comparison by PCMag to see how much of an upgrade it really is.
Nintendo has been slowly drip-feeding us GameCube games since the console joined its Nintendo Classics offering when the Switch 2 launched in June, and we just got another one. Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers can now play Wario’s one and only 3D platformer on the service.
Wario World launched in 2003 and was developed by Treasure (Gunstar Heroes, Ikaruga). You play as Wario, the flatulent antithesis of Nintendo’s primary mascot, in what is a combat-heavy platformer. Wario’s castle has been overthrown by an evil piece of sentient jewellery called Black Jewel, and it’s up to the garlic-loving antihero to punch and piledrive everything in sight in order to reclaim it.
Wario World was a relative commercial hit for Nintendo, but while many reviewers praised its chaotic gameplay, the game’s short length pulled the scores down. Interestingly, the same criticism was leveled at the similarly brief Luigi’s Mansion, which joined the Nintendo Classics app just ahead of Halloween.
Wario World becomes the seventh GameCube game that can be played on the Switch 2 via NSO. The service launched with The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, F-Zero GX and Soulcalibur II. Since then Nintendo has added Super Mario Strikers, Chibi-Robo!, Luigi’s Mansion and now Wario World. The likes of Super Mario Sunshine and Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance will arrive at some point.
It’s been a good week for NSO subscribers who enjoy retro 3D platformers. Yesterday Nintendo announced that Rayman 2: The Great Escape and Tonic Trouble are coming to its N64 emulator on December 17.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/warios-one-and-only-3d-platformer-is-now-playable-on-switch-2-133011950.html?src=rss
Planning is a key part of staying productive, but it has to be done right. To succeed, you need to understand why previous attempts at planning didn’t pan out. Conducting a personal after-action review is one way to assess your work and determine how to be more efficient, but to truly understand what went wrong and prepare for the future, you need to dig deep. Try the “Five Whys” technique to get to the bottom of things.
You should know, first of all, that this is yet another productivity protocol that springs from Japan’s famed factory system, like the 5S and 3M techniques. With this one, once you identify a problem, you’re going to ask, “Why?” five times, which will ultimately reveal the true root cause of the issue—and what you need to focus on fixing.
Some variations of the technique call on you to assemble a team for brainstorming before doing this, but if you’re assessing a personal issue, that part isn’t necessary. Your “team” can be the people posting on forums about the problem, for instance, or a group chat with your friends. If the issue is a household one, chat with your family. This doesn’t have to be super formal, but if the problem is one related to work and you do have coworkers involved, bring them into the discussion. In some cases, there may be no team at all—but that doesn’t mean you can’t use the Five Whys.
Whether you’re consulting a team or not, the real work begins when you define the problem. State it clearly and concisely. Ideally, write it down. Let’s say the problem is you didn’t get the dining room clean in time for dinner, so everyone had to eat at the counter. Simplify that to, “I didn’t clean the dining room on time.”
Next, ask, “Why?” Write down the answer—maybe it’s “I had to take a phone call from work.”
Ask, “Why?” Write down the answer and ask again. Then again, again, and again, until you’ve asked five times. So, your paper might look like this: I didn’t get the dining room clean > I had to take a phone call from work > I didn’t finish the reports my boss wanted > I didn’t have the data I needed from the sales department > The sales department was not aware of my deadline.
When you’re finished digging into the problem, you can see how the answer to the last “Why?” caused a domino effect that led to the original issue. Fixing these more granular problems will ultimately help prevent bigger ones. So, in this case, write down, “I will communicate deadlines and needs with other departments at work early on when working on a project.” The next time you have a project to do, when you’re planning out your to-dos around it, be sure to include, “Communicate with the sales department about the deadline for the data.”
There are plenty of productivity and scheduling apps that call on you to break your larger tasks down into smaller ones, like ABCDE or turning your responsibilities into “bites,” and it’s likely that the solution to your fifth Why will be something small enough to easily slot into one of those. Make sure you prioritize whatever that small step is, however. Use an approach like the MIT technique to prioritize your to-dos around their impact on your life. In this case, letting the sales team know about your deadline is a small task with a big impact, as it could have cleared the way for you to clean the dining room and enjoy a nice meal with your family.
Bear in mind that root causes aren’t always evident after five rounds of “Why?” For instance, maybe it’s not your job to communicate your deadline to the sales department. Maybe the person who was supposed to do that messed up or the people on that team didn’t check their emails. In that case, overhauling your protocols at work might be the answer. The “Five Whys” aren’t concrete; they’re a way to change your thinking around problems so you can easily identify their root causes and address those. Once you get in the habit of asking why and working backward, you’ll be able to do this quickly and alter your future plans more efficiently.
After rolling it out on desktop and Android earlier in 2025, Google is finally bringing its built-in Gemini AI experience to iPhone and iPad. It offers new features like summarizing pages and helping you test your knowledge about a subject you’re learning. As with any AI tool, though, it shouldn’t be trusted for anything important given the possibility of hallucinations and other errors.
When it arrives on your iOS device, tapping the spark icon at the left of the address bar (in place of the Google Lens camera) brings up a “Pages tool” that offers Lens and the new feature, “Ask Gemini.” You can then chat with Gemini about the current web page (by default) or any other topic. It may then offer suggestions that appear in the chat box like:
Summarize page: Tap to get key takeaways and insights that help you understand any topic.
Create FAQ about this topic: Tap to get FAQs based on info from this page and similar sites.
If you elect to just type in the chat window, here are some examples of what you can do:
Summarize key takeaways from an article
Explain a complex topic in a different way
Help you test your knowledge of a new subject you’re learning
Modify a recipe to meet dietary needs
Compare information or make recommendations based on your preferences
The response to your chat questions will float over the web page that then shifts to the background. A new chat can be started from the top right corner, and you’ll see a Liquid Glass overflow menu.
For now, Gemini in Chrome on iPhone and iPad is only supported in the US with the browser language set to English. You need to be signed into Chrome and the feature doesn’t work in incognito mode. Google also noted that the feature is only available to users 18 and older and may not roll out to your device immediately.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/googles-gemini-ai-comes-to-chrome-on-iphone-and-ipad-130003432.html?src=rss
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: OpenAI says the cyber capabilities of its frontier AI models are accelerating and warns Wednesday that upcoming models are likely to pose a “high” risk, according to a report shared first with Axios. The models’ growing capabilities could significantly expand the number of people able to carry out cyberattacks. OpenAI said it has already seen a significant increase in capabilities in recent releases, particularly as models are able to operate longer autonomously, paving the way for brute force attacks.
The company notes that GPT-5 scored a 27% on a capture-the-flag exercise in August, GPT-5.1-Codex-Max was able to score 76% last month. “We expect that upcoming AI models will continue on this trajectory,” the company says in the report. “In preparation, we are planning and evaluating as though each new model could reach ‘high’ levels of cybersecurity capability as measured by our Preparedness Framework.” “High” is the second-highest level, below the “critical” level at which models are unsafe to be released publicly. “What I would explicitly call out as the forcing function for this is the model’s ability to work for extended periods of time,” said OpenAI’s Fouad Matin.
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Many years ago, I saw a tweet go around that said something like, “You have the same amount of hours in a day as Beyoncé.” On the one hand, that was annoying, because while it’s true, I don’t have the same amount of resources. Still, yes, everyone has the same amount of hours in a day—point made.
But as it turns out, what may be more important thing to understand is that we all have the same amount of hours in a week. That’s the basis for the “168 method,” so named for the number of hours in a week. This productivity technique calls on you to expand your thinking around how much time you really have to get everything done, and act accordingly.
This idea comes from Laura Vanderkam, author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. (Straightforward!) This is one of the few productivity books I recommend, because its premise is actually novel and actionable. The guiding point of the book is that when you think of your time in longer spans, like a week, you realize you have plenty of it and can get things done pretty easily. When you consider an average day, by comparison, you may come to the conclusion you don’t have enough time to do everything you need to do, so you’ll either make excuses or sacrifices, neither of which are helpful in getting it all taken care of.
When you start thinking about your time on a bigger scale, you can stop letting the daily grind wear you down and breathe a little easier with the knowledge that you actually have a bunch of hours to work with. You can make a longer-term plan, expanding your timelines ever so slightly without giving yourself too much time to take on a given project (which is also a bad thing that can derail productivity).
Your first task here is to start tracking your time, and I mean militantly. You can use a time tracking software, calendar or scheduling software, a planner, or a regular old spreadsheet, but you have to be diligent and you have to be honest. For at least a week, mark down everything you did and the time it took you to do it, for the full 24 hours of each of the seven days. That includes sleeping, loafing, working, showering, commuting—everything. Be detailed, too. Don’t just mark down “working” from 9 a.m, to 5 p.m. List out the tasks you worked on and for how long, the breaks you took and what you did, and any extra work you did outside of those hours.
At the end of the week (or two or three weeks, if you’re feeling particularly serious), assess the data by conducting an objective after-action review. Did you need to spend two hours answering emails on Tuesday, or could it have been done in half an hour? What were the distractions that dragged that out? Did you spend as much time on a hobby as you wanted to? If not, when could it have fit in? Maybe Thursday night, when you were scrolling social media? And how did that scrolling make you feel? Was it a necessary moment of unwinding, or would you have felt more accomplished if you’d headed to the gym? (Don’t be too quick to write off your downtime, though, as breaks are also integral to productivity.)
Your answers to these questions will be subjective. There’s nothing inherently wrong with chilling out and doing nothing, or sleeping in, or even dragging your feet on a task. But by laying out a clear, visual schedule showing everything you did (and didn’t do), you can see exactly where, within that 168 hours, you could have done something else. You can then use this data to better plan your future to-do lists and activities. If you know you have some extra time on Wednesday nights, maybe that’s when you should practice the piano or clean the kitchen. If you know you’re taking more time than you need to on compiling inventories at work, cut that down and use the extra minutes for another task. The value in this method isn’t in shaming yourself about how you allocate your time, but in broadening your understanding of that time into a full week, where you almost certainly will find you have unaccounted-for hours that can be put toward the things you didn’t think you had time to do.
I’m not saying you’ll emerge from this journey on the same level as Beyoncé, but you’ll be on a better level than you were before, which is a start.
This week, ZRL racers headed back to New York for the final race of round 2. It was a scratch hosted on the new Empire Elevation route, and my team (Coalition Delusion) was tied for 1st place in the B1 Development Lime division. It all came down to this!
As usual, my team was chatting on Discord in the days leading up to the race, deciding how best to ride the course. We found ourselves in a difficult spot. Sure, we were tied for 1st. But we were up against team TSE, whose strength was climbing. (Ours is not.)
We searched high and low for a brilliant race strategy to secure the overall win, but found nothing. Our conclusion? Teamate David said it well: “I think there is only one tactic for this and it’s go into the KOM with as much energy as you can and try to empty yourself on that climb.”
I’d scouted the KOM to write the week’s race guide, but that wouldn’t make it any easier. I knew I was facing an all-out 5-minute effort on some steep slopes, so I pulled the Specialized Aethos out of the garage (level 3 upgraded, good enough), fitted with the fancy new ENVE 4.5 PRO wheels.
With a whiff of PR Lotion and mint MEG gum in my nostrils, I started my warmup, putting in a few good digs and chatting about Zwift with other riders as I woke up the heart and legs. Soon enough, it was time to sign into Discord and join the start pen. Let’s race!
The Empire Elevation route was brand-new, created for this specific race, and I’d never ridden it. But that didn’t mean it was unfamiliar. I’d ridden all of its roads multiple times via other routes, so I had a pretty good idea how this would play out as a scratch race.
Simply put: it would be quite easy for the first 24km. Then the KOM finish would be an all-out ~5-minute effort.
It played out as expected. Sure, some digs were required whenever the road tilted upward, including those pesky escalators. But the pace was never truly “high.” My heart rate sat firmly in the tempo zone, and I sat firmly in the draft.
There was just one snafu: I somehow neglected to fasten the upper Boa on my left shoe, and didn’t notice it until the race was underway! So I pedaled with a loose shoe until the Manhattan Bridge descent 12km in, where I managed to stop pedaling and fix it while sliding backward through the pack:
Here’s something a bit crazy, which also speaks to how easy the first bit of this course was: we didn’t lose a single rider from the starting pack of 48 in the lead-in to the final climb. When was the last time you did a ZRL race where nobody was dropped in the first 24km?
35 minutes into the race, we hung a right onto the glass road of the NY KOM, and the “fun” began.
Someone on Discord said, “Last 6 minutes of the round, so lay it on the road.” Exactly right (except it would be closer to 5 minutes). I steeled myself mentally and began to push. Time to empty the tank.
I stayed close to the front on the first and second of the four ramps, and still had a feather in my pocket with 1km to go. Then we hit the “main” ramp, and the pack began to stretch out ahead. I triggered the feather and kept hammering, riding on that razor’s edge between easing and losing places or pushing harder and blowing up in spectacular fashion.
With 600 meters to go, I realized I was just behind a TSE rider named Grosso. I lacked the glycogenic bandwidth to execute complex strategies, but I knew one thing: we had to beat TSE to win 1st overall! So I dug deeper, passing him and teammate Andrew with 500 meters to go:
One ramp to go. I eased a bit on the flat road leading to the final ramp, but then Grosso flew past with 180m to go! It was now or never. I went all in to catch him, channeling my inner Pogi with a seated sprint. Glancing up from my sweaty top tube, I saw I was getting closer to Grosso. But where was the finish arch?
Another glance up and it appeared Grosso had sat up early. With 20m left, I flew past as he dropped his power to 2 W/kg. I beat him to the line! For… 15th place.
Coming across the line, I saw that teammate David had taken 1st overall. Well done, sir!
Unfortunately, our overall team performance didn’t place us on the top step this week. We tied for 3rd, and team TSE took first:
That dropped us from a tie for 1st to a firm 2nd overall. Ladies and gentlemen, the final standings for the Lime B1 Open Development Division, Round 2:
Well done, TSE!
As for my personal performance? Once again, I think I played this as well as I could. Heck, I was even doing some VO2 max training in the weeks leading up to this race!
In the end, I used all my W’ weebles, according to intervals.icu:
That final climb was almost exactly 5 minutes long, which let me (almost) set a new 5-minute power PR for 2025. (I did 379W to finish this race, but did 387W in an FTP ramp test in September.) So I feel I gave it all I had. Which is all anyone can ever do.
Good work, Coalition Delusion. And chapeau to all our competitors as well. See you next round! (Watch for details of ZRL 2025/26 Round 3 to be shared here on Zwift Insider next Tuesday.)
How did your final race of round 2 go? Share below!
OpenTofu 1.11 introduces ephemeral resources, safer temporary data handling, and language updates for more secure, flexible infrastructure automation.
The UK government has just announced multi-year funding for active travel in England outside London, worth £626m. Active Travel England, the agency responsible for allocation of active travel funds in England, says this is enough for 500 miles of new cycling and walking routes.
Active Travel England is headed by national active travel commissioner, Chris Boardman, who states: “The aim of Active Travel England is to give people more everyday choice in how they get around, by creating safe, accessible and welcoming streets.
“We are not just building infrastructure – together, we are creating communities: places where parents feel confident letting children travel independently, and where older people can reach local shops with ease. We are building life back into our streets.”
But, as reported by The Guardian on 7 December, 50 organisations involved in transport and public health, including British Cycling and Cycling UK, have recently written to Heidi Alexander, the transport secretary, calling for specific targets to be set for active travel, claiming that proposals must “move from good intentions to a clear, long-term, fully deliverable national plan comparable to other strategic transport programmes”.
The letter highlights a frequent short-term and piecemeal approach to active travel and calls for a national strategy and joined-up routes to key destinations such as hospitals, schools and railway stations.
In November 2023, the Public Accounts Committee, which oversees government spending, reported disappointingly slow progress and that the government was not on track to meet its targets for active travel.
It further stated that the impact of the £2.3bn spent between 2016 and 2021, including £2bn of emergency funding during the Covid epidemic, was unclear and that a £233m reduction in funding for active travel made by the Treasury in March 2023 could adversely affect achievement of active-travel targets. The report cited, in particular, the lack of certainty for councils on available funding, late notice of allocations and its short-term availability.
Earlier this year, the Court of Appeal ruled that the Treasury’s March 2023 cut was unlawful, underlining the government’s short-termism in active travel funding.
Alongside the funding announcement, Active Travel England has published ‘active travel capability’ ratings for 2025, which show nine councils improving their ranking.
Councils are graded from 0 to 4. A 0 rating denotes no plan, while 4 shows:
“Established culture of active travel with successive increases in walking, wheeling and cycling, underpinned by a dense integrated network in place and highly supportive policies to give more people the choice to walk, wheel or cycle.”
Only 11 out of 80 local authorities are graded 3, denoting “very strong local leadership and organisational capability, comprehensive plans, and a significant network in place with a growing number of people choosing to walk, wheel and cycle”.
None has achieved level 4, although since 2023 no local authority has been graded 0 either.
You can read the full rankings and see how your council performs here.
Qualcomm is the undisputed sovereign of mobile connectivity. For over a decade, Snapdragon has been the heartbeat of the Android ecosystem, a technical marvel of efficiency and integration. Yet distinct from Qualcomm’s mobile triumphs, it has a haunting history of struggling to break out of its cellular silo. As the company pivots toward the lucrative AI cloud data center market, the writing is unfortunately already on the wall.
By analyzing the historical playbook of successful market disruption—and Qualcomm’s recent inability to execute it in the laptop space—it becomes clear that its data center effort is likely destined for the same underwhelming fate as its AI PC initiative.
To understand why Qualcomm is struggling, we must first look at what success looks like. Displacing a dominant market leader is not about matching specifications; it is about changing the gravity of the ecosystem. History provides clear examples of how this is done, and in every case, it required a “killer app” available at launch.
When Microsoft decided to enter the console market, Sony’s PlayStation was an unstoppable juggernaut. Microsoft didn’t just ship a box with a hard drive; it secured Bungie and Halo: Combat Evolved. It understood that hardware is merely a stage for software. Without Halo, the Xbox would have likely been a footnote. Microsoft ensured that on day one, there was a compelling, exclusive reason to abandon the incumbent.
Apple followed a similar trajectory with the iPod and iPhone. The iPod was not the first MP3 player, but it was the first to launch with the iTunes ecosystem, solving the music acquisition problem that plagued early rivals. Later, the iPhone’s dominance wasn’t secured by the touchscreen alone, but by the rapid deployment of the App Store. Apple ensured that developers had a lucrative reason to populate its hardware with utility. In both cases, the “newcomer” didn’t just offer an alternative; it offered a complete, superior reality that the incumbent couldn’t immediately replicate.
Conversely, the tech graveyard is littered with companies that ignored the importance of timing. The most pertinent warning for Qualcomm is the saga of Transmeta.
In the late 1990s, Transmeta promised to revolutionize computing with chips that were drastically more power-efficient than Intel’s, using software “code morphing” to translate x86 instructions. However, Transmeta made a fatal error: it announced its revolution far too early and generated years of hype before it had a shippable product or a verified ecosystem.
This premature celebration gave Intel the one thing a monopoly should never be gifted: time. Alerted to the threat of low-power computing, Intel pivoted, pouring resources into what eventually became the Centrino platform. By the time Transmeta finally shipped, Intel had neutralized the advantage. Qualcomm appears to be suffering from this same “announcement-itis,” telegraphing its punches at NVIDIA years before it can land them, giving the AI giant ample time to fortify its CUDA moat.
Qualcomm’s current struggle to gain traction with the “AI PC” and Copilot+ initiative is the smoking gun for future cloud struggles. This should have been the easy win, particularly if it had (which it didn’t) leveraged its connectivity advantage.
Consider the landscape: The modern laptop market is incredibly similar to the tablet market where Qualcomm already shines. The customers are identical; the person buying a high-end iPad Pro is the same demographic buying a Dell XPS or Surface Laptop. The channels are identical; these devices are sold in the same Best Buy aisles, the same carrier stores and arguably have the same supply chain logistics. Even the form factors—slabs of glass and metal with keyboards—are converging.
Despite these massive advantages and the “home court” feel of consumer electronics, Qualcomm’s AI PC launch has been fraught with compatibility issues and consumer apathy. It launched without a “Halo” moment. There was no single application that ran so much better on Snapdragon than on Intel/AMD that it forced a switch. Instead, users were asked to tolerate emulation layers and gaming incompatibilities for the sake of battery life—a trade-off the market has largely rejected.
If Qualcomm cannot leverage its massive mobile dominance to succeed in a market that is 90% identical to its core business, the prognosis for a market that is 100% different is grim.
This brings us to the data center. If the AI PC was an adjacent neighborhood, the AI data center is a different planet.
The similarities that existed in the PC market—channels, customers, form factors—are non-existent here. Qualcomm cannot sell AI server chips at Verizon or Best Buy. The customers are not consumers, but hyperscalers like AWS, Google and Azure, along with CIOs of Fortune 500 companies. These buyers do not care about “all-day battery life.” They care about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), software stability and developer velocity.
The barrier to entry here is not hardware; it is NVIDIA’s CUDA. CUDA is the operating system of AI. It is a fifteen-year-old fortress of libraries, tools and optimized kernels. For Qualcomm to win, it doesn’t just need a chip that is 10% faster or cheaper; it needs a software stack that allows a developer to switch from NVIDIA to Qualcomm with zero friction.
Currently, Qualcomm’s data center offering lacks this. It’s trying to sell a standalone hardware solution to a software problem. Just as it failed to ensure top-tier games ran perfectly on its AI PCs at launch, Qualcomm seemed unprepared to ensure that the sprawling landscape of AI frameworks runs flawlessly on its cloud silicon. It’s walking into the most hostile market in tech without a map.
If Qualcomm hopes to break this losing streak, it must undergo a radical philosophical shift.
First, it must learn silence. Stop announcing “NVIDIA Killers” three years out. Develop in the dark, build the alliances and launch only when the strike can be fatal.
Second, Qualcomm must prioritize software over silicon. The reason the iPhone worked was the App Store; the reason Xbox worked was Halo. Qualcomm needs to pay developers, acquire software firms and build a library of optimized models that makes its hardware the only logical choice for specific workloads. It cannot rely on open-source goodwill to build its drivers.
Qualcomm is a titan of mobile, but its repeated inability to translate that success into adjacent markets points to a fundamental misunderstanding of how ecosystems are built. It’s attempting to replicate the “Transmeta” model—hype and hardware specs—rather than the “Xbox” model—ecosystem and killer apps. The AI PC was the test run, a relatively simple transition that Qualcomm is currently fumbling. The data center is the final boss, a market with zero leverage points for a mobile-first company. Unless Qualcomm can fundamentally alter its DNA to become a software-first ecosystem builder, its cloud efforts will likely dissolve into the same vaporware history as its predecessors.
KDE Gear 25.12 is out today as the collection of the latest KDE desktop/mobile applications for running nicely on the Plasma 6 desktop…
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