As someone who writes about the AI industry relatively frequently for this site, there is one question that I find myself constantly asking and being asked in turn, in some form or another: What do you actually use large language models for?
Today, OpenAI’s Economic Research Team went a long way toward answering that question, on a population level, releasing a first-of-its-kind National Bureau of Economic Research working paper (in association with Harvard economist David Denning) detailing how people end up using ChatGPT across time and tasks. While other research has sought to estimate this kind of usage data using self-reported surveys, this is the first such paper with direct access to OpenAI’s internal user data. As such, it gives us an unprecedented direct window into reliable usage stats for what is still the most popular application of LLMs by far.
After digging through the dense 65-page paper, here are seven of the most interesting and/or surprising things we discovered about how people are using OpenAI today.
Remember Tensordyne, who promised to slash AI GPU power consumption with a new way of doing things? That entire pitch was basically predicated on the power predicament that the industry finds itself in. Put simply, there’s just not enough electricity to scale out the world’s AI compute demands. That’s likely why NVIDIA is reportedly willing
Yesterday, eager eyes noticed that Rockstar Games had made a job listing for Lead Software Engineer, claiming within that Grand Theft Auto 6 would be “the largest game launch in history”— but just a day later, the text within that job listing has changed, omitting the entire paragraph and combining the surrounding two in its stead. This struck
UEFI secure boot was designed to block malicious code from sneaking into your PC’s BIOS boot-up process. However, a newly discovered ransomware dubbed HybridPetya somehow found a way to circumvent this. Cybersecurity firm ESET discovered the threat and revealed that it had not been observed in any active attacks just yet.
You don’t have to look far to find reports of people who have used VR headsets and then felt ‘off’ after removing them. While motion sickness is surely the most well-known post-VR symptom, a subset of people say they have experienced feelings of being ‘stuck in VR’ after taking off their headsets. It’s tempting to brush off such reports as someone having seen The Matrix (1999) one too many times, but it turns out there is a clear scientific basis for the sensation.
I’ve been professionally reporting on the XR industry for nearly 15 years, and along the way I’ve come across many reports of users who described some vague sensation of still being in virtual reality after removing their headset. I queried my social media community recently and was surprised at the response. Across more than 100 replies, people shared their experiences with the feeling. Here’s a sampling:
It happened to me when I was new to VR and had just played Boneworks for hours. Looking down at my body, my hands didn’t feel like they belonged to me. I was trying to grab a knife and fork for dinner and that required a huge concentrated effort, where I was staring at my hands. – @Edward1370
After my first session with Gorilla Tag. Movement felt strange, like my legs weren’t there. Surreal experience, loved it. – @greenlig
In the early days I used DK1 on my Mac and there was a crazy latency. After using it for 2 hours my brain fully adapted to the latency. Taking off the headset was surreal. It was as if the real world had “tracking” issues. – @robinhuse
It’s only happened to me once. After I wore the vision pro for around 24 hours. Super weird feeling, but fascinating as well. – @RoberJALA
In a sense yes, but more so I went upstairs to eat after a longer VR session when I first got the Quest 1 in 2019 and I stopped myself suddenly because I thought my boundary lines were going to show up. Then I realized I was irl. – @OpalStar3
I played 2 hours of Walkabout Mini Golf just before going to a real Mini Golf course with my friends. Standing on the hole gave me a weird feeling that I was in the game. It did also help me to comfortably win. It was strange though. My eyes kept pixelating the course. – @TheNeoism
Yeah, my hands felt fake for a couple of days but it passed pretty quick, like the brain adapted to the perspective change. – @OneMoreBenjamin
It happens from time to time, where things feels “off” when I’m out of VR, like the body feels sluggish, not my own or out of place for a while. – @KathielRayna
Many struggle to articulate the feeling, but clear themes emerge: an altered perception—a vague sense that the real world, or their own body, doesn’t seem quite as ‘real’ as usual.
The phenomenon may be rare, but it’s certainly real. Fortunately it’s also temporary, as far as we can tell.
The primary cause of feeling ‘stuck in VR’ relates to proprioception. Proprioception is your brain’s model of where your body is in space. The model is essentially an intuition that’s constructed through visual and tactile feedback. And it can be thought of as a ‘real-time’ model that’s constantly updating itself as new feedback is observed.
The proprioceptive model lets you close your eyes and still touch your nose, elbows, or knees with high accuracy. You maintain a remarkably precise sense of your body relative to itself and the world, even with no visual feedback.
VR headsets might be incredibly good at convincing us that we’re standing in another reality, but the simulation is imperfect.
Consider VR motion controllers: they track quickly and accurately, yet there is always some latency and inaccuracy. Many experiences even manipulate controller position deliberately to boost immersion.
These inaccuracies (inherent or intentional) tend to fluctuate throughout the course of using the headset, but they are largely hidden because instead of seeing your real hands, you only see your virtual hands. And since your brain perceives the virtual hands as your own, it starts to incorporate the inaccuracies into its proprioceptive model.
For instance, if you’ve ever played Beat Saber, you’ll know it’s a high-motion game that requires accurately swinging your hands to cut blocks. If you play the game on a system with twice the latency of another headset, you’d expect to be thrown off; however, with practice most people compensate as the brain updates its model to match the imperfect world it sees.
This isn’t limited to controllers. Headsets themselves also have imperfect tracking and a certain degree of latency. That can cause your brain to think that turning your head just takes a little longer than you’re used to.
Or consider the case of a VR game that makes you one foot taller than you are in real life. And what about a game that makes your arms twice as long as normal? At first it would feel very strange and it would be hard to accurately grab things.
With enough time, your brain feels as if you really are that tall—or that your arms are that long—because that’s the reality you see inside the headset. Your brain incorporates the new information in order to make you feel ‘normal’.
Then, when removing the headset, the very same thing happens. Your brain gets new feedback (ie: you’re a different height and your arms are different length than when you were in virtual reality). So now the real you (and by extension, the real world) feel ‘weird’, until you get used to the real world again.
If your arms felt longer a moment ago, your sense of reaching may suddenly feel shorter than expected, forcing more conscious effort to grasp objects—like snagging a coffee cup from the peripheral vision—making the real world feel slightly off.. like somehow you’re still in VR.
I tend to call this weird feeling (as it pertains to perception and VR) ‘proprioceptive-disconnect’, and it’s the root of the feeling of ‘being stuck in VR’. The broader phenomenon that this sensation falls under is called depersonalization-derealization disorder, though it is not exclusive to VR.
Ironically, this feeling of ‘being stuck in VR’ after removing the headset comes from a combination of modern headsets being able to fool our visual system so effectively, while at the same time still having imperfections like tracking latency and inaccuracy. We also have the impressive ability of our brains to adapt to new feedback to thank.
Fortunately the feeling of proprioceptive-disconnect is temporary and generally fades away in an hour or two. Some people are more sensitive to this feeling, and whether or not it will happen to you can equally depend on the capabilities of the VR hardware you are using, and even the specific VR game or app you’re using.
Note: For completeness it’s worth mentioning that there are other factors which can contribute to the feeling of being ‘stuck in VR’ after taking off a headset; two major ones are mismatched IPD setting of the headset (leading to a change in the sense of scale) and the vergence-accommodation conflict (an eye-related artifact caused by modern VR headsets lacking varifocal displays).
Researchers have actually studied and quantified the phenomenon of VR-related proprioceptive-disconnect.
Our brain’s plasticity rapidly adapts our senses in VR, a phenomenon leveraged by techniques such as redirected walking, hand redirection, etc. However, while most of HCI is interested in how users adapt to VR, we turn our attention to how users need to adapt their senses when returning to the real-world. We report cases where, even after leaving VR, users experience unintended, lingering side-effects: distortions in proprioception or memory that may pose safety or usability risks.
To investigate, we conducted two studies examining (1) proprioceptive side-effects from altered hand movements (retargeting), and (2) memory distortions arising from spatial mismatches between the virtual and real-world locations of the same object.
In one part of the study, the researchers intentionally exaggerated the position of the hand-tracking (unbeknownst to the subjects of the experiments), a common technique used in VR design called hand retargeting. After the users removed the headset they were asked to perform pointing tasks, which allowed the researchers to quantify how the use of VR impacted the users’ real-life motions after removing the headset.
The researchers found that, “after leaving VR, participants’ hands remained [inaccurate in pointing tasks] by up to 2.75 inches (7 cm), indicating residual proprioceptive distortion.”
In another part of the study, the researchers showed that peripheral awareness of a virtual environment could alter a person’s memory of that environment.
For this experiment the researchers placed a handful of objects in a room, including a seemingly irrelevant fire extinguisher that was placed off to the side. The researchers cleverly began the experiment by asking the subjects to collect a number of pre-positioned balls in the room, which gave the subjects a peripheral awareness of the seemingly irrelevant objects in the room.
Then the subjects were placed in a VR headset which showed a virtual replica of the room. But in the virtual replica, some of the objects were altered (unbeknownst to the subjects); for instance, the position of the fire extinguisher was moved to the other side of the room.
The virtual recreation of the study room was almost identical, but with some objects intentionally repositioned | Image courtesy Antonin Cheymol & Pedro Lopes
Now in the virtual replica of the room, subjects were asked to repeat the same ball-gathering task as before. After leaving the room and then removing the headset, the subjects were asked to recall where various objects were in the room. The researchers found that a significant portion of subjects misremembered the position of the real fire extinguisher, and instead remembered the location of the virtual fire extinguisher.
While the study didn’t directly address the feeling of being ‘stuck in VR’, it quantified how the use of virtual reality can indeed have lingering side effects that can temporarily alter a person’s proprioception and memory.
The paper’s authors, Antonin Cheymol and Pedro Lopes, stress that these seemingly small effects could lead to potentially dangerous edge-cases.
Consider the use of VR for training emergency personnel using virtual replicas of real spaces. The intent of the training is to familiarize the trainee with emergency procedures, but if the virtual replica that’s used isn’t a careful copy of the real situation that’s being trained for, it could lead to costly mistakes.
While potential dangers from these VR side-effects are definitely edge-cases, such edge-cases will definitely occur once a sufficient number of people are using VR headsets.
The authors emphasize the need for more study in this area, especially considering there’s already millions of headsets out in the world.
While our work suggests that VR can induce side-effects in relatively unconstrained scenarios, more research should follow to broaden our understanding and better assess their risks. First, in this study, we only focused on a limited subset of the large variety of perceptual manipulations that can be presented to a VR user. Therefore, future work should investigate the potential of VR side-effects of other perceptual manipulations, such as walking curvature, speed alteration, or alteration of one’s virtual body structure are likely to reveal similar to the side-effects induced by hand retargeting that we observed in our studies. Altering the perception of an object’s physical properties (e.g., its weight, its tangibility, etc.) could also lead users to adopt mis-adapted, potentially dangerous, behaviors (especially if they incorrectly learn to interact with a fragile or harmful object). Moreover, as previously mentioned, more factors might be hiding at play. For example, the duration of exposure in VR, should be investigated, as it might impact a side-effect’s magnitude and lingering duration. Moreover, the intensity of perceptual qualia, such as presence or embodiment might be interesting predictors to the emergence of VR side-effects.
A regulator has accused NVIDIA of violating China’s antitrust laws over its acquisition of chipmaker Mellanox. In its preliminary findings of an investigation it commenced in December, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) claimed that the company breached both national regulations and the conditional terms China outlined when it rubberstamped the $6.9 billion takeover. The SAMR hasn’t announced any penalties yet, as the investigation will continue.
The SAMR is said to have determined its preliminary findings several weeks ago. According to Financial Post sources, the regulator held off from releasing its statement until now, as trade talks with the US take place in Madrid, with the idea of giving Chinese officials more leverage. (Those talks have so far resulted in a framework agreement for TikTok.)
NVIDIA and Mellanox announced the buyout back in 2019. China approved it in April the following year on the condition that NVIDIA continued to supply GPUs and interconnect products to the country and adhere to “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory principles,” per the South China Morning Post.
Last month, it was reported that China was discouraging companies in the country from buying NVIDIA’s H20 chips pending a national security review. Officials were said to have taken offense at remarks from Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary. After the US allowed NVIDIA to start offering chips to China again in July following a three-month ban, Lutnick said the company wasn’t going to be selling its most cutting-edge tech there.
“We don’t sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best. The fourth one down, we want to keep China using it,” he told CNBC. “The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own. You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips. You want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/china-says-nvidias-mellanox-acquisition-violated-antitrust-law-200409929.html?src=rss
Lead times for high-capacity hard drives have exceeded 52 weeks as AI workloads drive unprecedented demand for warm storage that sits between fast SSDs and offline tape archives, according to TrendForce. Western Digital notified customers of price increases across its entire hard drive portfolio citing demand for “every capacity” in its product line.
The shortage stems from AI infrastructure requirements including training datasets, model checkpoints and inference logs that consume petabytes of storage space. These files are too large for primary SSD storage but must remain accessible for quick retrieval. Hard drive manufacturers have not significantly expanded production capacity in approximately a decade. Cloud service providers are evaluating QLC SSDs for cold data storage despite costs remaining four to five times higher per gigabyte than mechanical drives. Memory suppliers are developing SSD products specifically for this intermediate storage tier.
Spotify is finally giving its free-tier customers a feature that’s been requested since the music streaming platform launched nearly 20 years ago: the ability to listen to any song they choose. That’s right: The days of searching for a song, then hitting “skip” until it rolls around on a Spotify-generated playlist are over.
Free-tier users can choose songs in three ways: through the search function, by clicking on any song from the Spotify interface, or by clicking on a link shared by other users. Free-tier users can also listen to podcasts through Spotify, and create and listen to playlists too. Spotify’s previous “six skips per hour” rule also appears to be no more.
There are still limitations to Spotify’s free accounts, of course. The most obvious is that you still have to listen to ads. Free users will also face a cap on how many minutes of music they can listen to on demand, won’t be able to queue tracks, and won’t be able to access Spotify’s “AI DJ” feature. (No great loss; trust me.)
They also won’t have access to another new Spotify feature exclusive to paid accounts: lossless audio.
Premium Spotify customers to get lossless audio
“Premium” Spotify perks are improving too. The first, most important upgrade in the long-awaited launch of lossless audio on the service. Lossless audio (streaming files that are bit-for-bit copies of the source material) is rolling out to over 50 Spotify markets from now through October.
Premium users will also be able to send private messaging, to make music-sharing easier, and add and customize transitions between songs within a playlist.
The changes make Spotify more competitive
The upgrades to both levels of Spotify’s service aren’t really about making life better for users; they’re about staying relevant and profitable in a crowded and ever-changing marketplace. The hope from Spotify is to increase ad revenue by increasing the number of ears listening to ads, entice more free users to upgrade to pay services, and shed fewer customers who leave for other services.
Until the change, Spotify’s free tier was close to a radio service—you could listen to music that you kind of wanted to hear, maybe, if you also put up with frequent ads. This model may have made sense when streaming was newer, but more and more younger users are turning to YouTube, where you can listen to whatever song you want (and see a video for it) on demand, and for free. And young people are discovering music on TikTok, not on Spotify.
Changes to Spotify’s premium service are aimed at the more “mature” listener. Lossless audio doesn’t make a ton of difference without decent headphones or speakers. But “our music is lossless” has long been a selling point for Apple Music and Tidal, but it won’t be anymore.
Last year, New York joined the wave of states passing legislation aimed at protecting minors using the Internet, particularly social media. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act and the New York Child Data Protection Act in June 2024. Today, the state’s Attorney General Letitia James released more specifics about what the SAFE for Kids Act will entail in practice. Public comment is open until December 1 and the rules must be finalized within a year from that date.
In particular, the rule will require online platforms to confirm the ages of users before showing them algorithmically-curated feeds or sending them notifications at night. The Attorney General’s approach allows sites to choose their method of age verification, as long as the approach “are shown to be effective and protect users’ data.” New York will also require an age confirmation method that does not rely on having a government-issued ID.
There is also a component of parental consent in the SAFE for Kids Act. Minors must request a social media network to seek parental permission for accessing algorithmic feeds or receiving nighttime notifications. If parental consent is not granted, the platforms may not block minors from generally accessing their service or content. Both the minor and their parent may revoke their consent at any time.
“The proposed rules released by my office today will help us tackle the youth mental health crisis and make social media safer for kids and families,” James said in the announcement. “This is an issue that affects all of us, and I encourage parents, educators, young people, industry groups, and others to review the proposed rules and submit a comment during the public comment period.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/new-york-details-its-plans-for-online-age-verification-rules-195223379.html?src=rss
Meta’s smart glasses plans were already one of the worst kept secrets, as there have been more than a year of leaks and reports about its work to add a heads-up display to the product. Now, just days before their unveiling at Connect, a promotional video of the new frames seems to have leaked.
The video, reported and reposted by UploadVR, shows the new “Meta Ray-Ban Display” frames as well as a new model of camera-enabled Oakley sunglasses. The clip mainly features the new Ray-Ban glasses, and shows a pair of black frames with clear lenses that look similar to the company’s previous Wayfarer frames.
Meta’s new smart glasses lineup.
Screenshot
The glasses also include a small display that’s able to show info like a map preview, chats with friends and information related to what you’re looking at. As reported, it also shows a dedicated wristband for the device. The video briefly shows someone swiping with their fingers in order to type out a reply to a message in a chat app.
The clip also shows a new pair of Oakley frames that don’t have a display. The sunglasses seem to be based on the company’s wraparound Sphaera frames and show a camera in the center directly over the nosepiece. That would line up with prior reporting about the glasses that suggested Meta planned to market the glasses to cyclists and other athletes.
UploadVR reports that the video briefly appeared on Meta’s official YouTube channel as an unlisted clip but was quickly removed. We’ve reached out to the company for comment.In the meantime, you can read more about the company’s new smart glasses lineup and what to expect at Connect here. Engadget will be reporting live from the event beginning September 17.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/video-of-meta-ray-ban-display-glasses-surfaces-ahead-of-connect-194713365.html?src=rss
Earlier this month, Ars sat down with the Consumer Technology Association’s vice president of international trade, Ed Brzytwa, to check in and see how tech firms have navigated Donald Trump’s unpredictable tariff regimes so far.
Brzytwa has led CTA’s research helping tech firms prepare for Trump’s trade war, but during our talk, he confirmed that “the reality has been a lot more difficult and far worse, because of not just the height of the tariffs, but the variability, the tariffs on, tariffs off.”
Currently, every tech company is in a “slightly different position,” depending on their specific supply chains, he explained. However, until semiconductor tariffs are announced, “it’s impossible” for any tech company to make the kind of long-term plans that could help keep consumer prices low as Trump’s negotiations with foreign partners and investigations into various products drag on, Brzytwa said.
The Chromium 140.0.7339.80 security update has rolled out across major Linux distributions, delivering critical vulnerability fixes that strengthen browser security for millions of open-source desktop users. Released on September 12, 2025, this latest Chromium browser update addresses four significant security flaws while maintaining the performance and compatibility that makes Chromium the foundation for numerous web browsers in the Linux ecosystem.
Apple’s iOS 26 drops today, and with it comes a bunch of small tweaks and improvements to how your iPhone works. The catch? A lot of them are opt-in, so you need to turn them on before you can reap their benefits. Here are the settings you should turn on after updating your iPhone to Apple’s latest operating system, although note that some of them require an iPhone 15 Pro or later, as they rely on Apple Intelligence.
Adaptive battery mode
If you’re like me, you can never decide whether it’s worth it to swap your phone over to Battery Saver mode. Now, if you have an iPhone 15 Pro or above, your iPhone can make the decision for you.
Apple’s new Adaptive Power mode uses Apple Intelligence to intelligently determine when your battery usage is running higher than usual, and makes small tweaks to bring it back under control. These might include slightly dimming your display or slowing down less important tasks, like those that are running in the background or are particularly intensive. Then, once your phone’s been on an even keel for a while, it’ll start turning things back to normal. Think of it as a less aggressive “low power” mode that only affects certain processes, and can make adjustments based on more than your phone’s remaining charge. To try it out, simply navigate to Settings > Battery > Power Mode. Just don’t forget to turn it back off if you find its compromises aren’t worth the extra battery life.
Turn on call screening
Credit: Apple
I’ll be honest—I barely pick up phone calls anymore. Instead, I usually prefer to wait until after the call, and then call back if the caller was someone I knew or if it was important enough to leave a message. This usually works out for me, but I’ll admit, sometimes I do feel a bit bad for leaving people who call me in the lurch, especially if it turns out they had a good reason to dial me up. That’s where Apple’s new Call Screening feature comes in.
This one doesn’t require Apple Intelligence, so it’ll work on any iPhone running iOS 26. Simply open your Settings, then under Apps, tap Phone and look for the Screen Unknown Callers option.
You’ll have three choices. Never will work just like before, with calls ringing for a bit before they go to your Recents list. But now, you’ve got two additional options you can choose instead.
First is Silence, which will turn off your ringer for calls from unsaved numbers, then send them to Voicemail and display them in the Recents list. Essentially, it just cuts out the middle-man of having to wait for the caller to give up before you move on with figuring out what they wanted.
But the more exciting addition is Ask Reason for Calling. Choose this, and your iPhone will pick up calls from unsaved numbers for you, then ask the caller a few questions about their reason for calling. You’ll see a transcript of their answers on screen, and then you’ll be able to choose whether you want to pick up.
It’s a clever trick, and should make me feel a little less bad for anyone who tries to chat with me over the phone. I do wish it worked for Contacts as well, to be honest, but I can understand why my family might not be enthused to call me and get a robot secretary instead.
Try out the new ringtones
With iOS 26, Apple’s added a few new default ringtones to pick from. Six are variations of the classic “Reflection” ringtone, but there’s also a new one called “Little Bird.” You can find them all under Settings > Sound & Haptics > Ringtone, or check out the embeds below to hear them for yourself.
Personally, “Bouyant” is probably my favorite, although my colleague Jake Peterson likes “Dreamer” the most. I’ll probably still stick with my custom ringtone, but if you’d rather not bother downloading a ringtone manually, you now have more choice than ever.
Fix Liquid Glass
This next one is technically about turning a feature off instead of turning it on, but I couldn’t ignore it. With iOS 26, Apple’s redesigned its design language to focus on transparency, and not everyone’s a fan. If you remember the transparent bezels Microsoft added to app windows in Windows Vista, it’s a lot like that, but more aggressive. Essentially, instead of showing a solid background, many buttons and overlays will now appear clear, allowing a blurred version of whatever is underneath them to bleed through.
Luckily, there’s a pre-existing accessibility control that essentially sets your iPhone back to how it was before. Simply navigate to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size, then toggle on Reduce Transparency. This will bring back solid background across your entire iPhone, which you can see in effect here. Notice how the play button no longer allows blurred album artwork to bleed into it? If you prefer that flatter, more contrast-y look, this could be for you.
Custom backgrounds in iMessage
This one’s just fun. Now, in iMessage, you set custom backgrounds for your conversations and group chats on a per-chat basis. These include presets, like Water and Sky, but you can also pick solid colors, choose a photo from your library, or if you have an iPhone 15 Pro or above, generate a background using Apple Intelligence.
To get started, open a chat, click its title towards the top of the page, then choose Backgrounds.
Note that your chosen background will appear for everyone in the chat, but if you don’t like a background someone else set, you don’t have to live with it. Go to Settings > Apps > Messages and disable Conversation Backgrounds to turn the feature off.
Notification summaries for news
If you have an iPhone 15 Pro or above, Apple is actually bringing back a previously deleted feature with iOS 26: Notification summaries for news and entertainment apps.
These initially launched in the iOS 18.3 beta, but were quickly pulled after Apple’s AI had misrepresented some major BBC headlines, including one about United Healthcare shooting suspect Luigi Mangione.
Now, Apple is confident enough to bring these notification summaries back, although with a new warning that says “Summarization may change the meaning of the original headlines. Verify information.”
If you’re comfortable with that, according to my colleagues over at CNET, you don’t have to do much to turn them on. Apple will actually greet you with a splash screen once you download the iOS 26 update, which will ask your preferences for which apps will get notification summaries. You’ll have three options, and you can select as many as you wish. All other apps will summarize notifications from non-social apps, like Maps, while Communication & Social will throw in notification summaries for apps like TikTok and Mail. These were available already. What’s new (again) is the News & Entertainment option, whichwill add notification summaries for apps including BBC or Netflix.
Simply make your choices, and you’re good to go. If you change your mind later, you can adjust your summaries under Settings > Notifications > Summarize Notifications. You can also adjust notification summaries on a per-app basis here, which isn’t available in the splash screen you get after installing iOS 26.
Get clear icons in iOS 26
Credit: Apple
Let’s say you actually like Liquid Glass, but think it doesn’t go far enough. In that case, you might want to turn your icons clear too, so you can see your background through them. I promise I won’t judge.
To turn your app icons clear in iOS 26, simply long press on your home screen’s background until your apps start jiggling. Then, tap Edit in the top-left corner, followed by Customize. Then, choose Clear. You can also choose between Clear Light or Clear Dark, with the dark mode opting for a more subdued tint.
This will make your app icons look like frosted glass, similar to iOS 26’s new lock screen clock. You do you.
(If you’re like me, you might prefer the new Tinted Light Mode option instead, which finally allows you to set a custom color for your app icons’ graphical elements alongside a bright background. You can find it in the Tinted option next to Clear while selecting your app icon appearance).
New ways to customize your lock screen
iOS 26 gives you more control over how your phone looks while locked than ever before. To get started, lock your phone, then press the power button, tap and hold on the lock screen, and tap Customize.
First off, you can now adjust the size of your clock by grabbing one of its corners and dragging it down, although this will only work with certain fonts.
Second, you can now justify your widgets box to the bottom of the lock screen, as well as add an Apple Music search widget to it, if you like. If you actually start playing something, you’ll notice it’ll enable a large Now Playing interface that shows album art.
Finally, there’s support for Spatial Scenes. When selecting a Photo wallpaper, you can now tap on a small icon of a mountain and a sun to separate the photo’s subject from the background. Now, when moving your iPhone, the subject will move with it, to help them pop. Your clock might also move to fill up space in the photo, including slightly behind the subject, to help give an illusion of depth. Or, your widgets might automatically shift to the bottom of the screen if placed elsewhere, to better frame the photo subject.
Other settings you can enable
There’s plenty more you can do to make iOS 26 truly yours. If the above changes aren’t enough for you, here are 36 other tweaks you can make to get the most out of your iPhone’s new operating system.
To no real surprise given the happenings (or there the lack of) the past few months, AMD formally announced publicly today that their open-source AMDVLK driver has been discontinued in favor of the Mesa RADV driver for Vulkan needs on Linux…
President Donald Trump called Monday for companies to report earnings every six months instead of quarterly. Trump posted on social media that semi-annual reporting would save money and let managers focus on running companies. The SEC mandated quarterly reports in 1970. Trump made similar comments in 2018 that prompted SEC public comment but no regulatory changes.
Critics argue quarterly reporting increases costs and encourages short-term thinking. Supporters say frequent disclosures maintain investor trust and reduce market manipulation risks.
Further reading: The Renewed Bid To End Quarterly Earnings Reports.
Brooke Deuson is the developer behind
Trafficking Free Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization that
produces free software to help law enforcement combat human trafficking. She is
a survivor of human trafficking herself.
She spoke at RustConf 2025 about her
mission, and why she chose to write her anti-trafficking software in Rust.
Interestingly, it has nothing to do with Rust’s lifetime-analysis-based memory-safety —
instead, her choice was motivated by the difficulty she faces getting police
departments to actually use her software. The fact that Rust is statically
linked and capable of cross compilation by default makes deploying Rust software
in those environments easier.
– 
