Best Buy is holding a sitewide sale on Microsoft Copilot+ PCs with steep discounts up to $700 off. This is fantastic timing, given that Microsoft ends official support for Windows 10 this week. If you’re thinking about upgrading, now is likely the time.

One cool deal here is for a souped-up version of the Microsoft Surface 7 laptop. This one ships with a Snapdragon X Plus processor, 32GB of RAM and 1TB of internal storage. It also includes a 13.8-inch touchscreen and a battery that gets 20 hours per charge. The laptop ships with Windows 11 Home, which should be relatively futureproof for the next several years. It costs just $1,100, which is a nice discount of $700.

This model can be outfitted with even more bells and whistles. There’s one with a more powerful Snapdragon X Elite processor and a 15-inch touchscreen. That one costs $1,500, which is a discount of $600.

Other deals include the HP Omen gaming laptop with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti for $2,000 instead of $2,380 and the MSI Codex gaming desktop with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 GPU for $1,460 instead of $1,600. There are plenty of other discounted laptops, desktops and accessories on the main sale page.

Microsoft will officially end support of Windows 10 on October 14, but it may not be an immediate death knell. There is a way for users to get an additional 12 months of support via the company’s Extended Security Updates plan. Many Windows 10 computers can also easily handle Windows 11, and a software update would be much cheaper than buying a new computer.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/get-up-to-700-off-a-new-microsoft-copilot-pc-before-windows-10-support-ends-165735272.html?src=rss

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed three bills on Monday that establish the nation’s most comprehensive framework for regulating how technology companies interact with minors. AB 56 requires social media platforms to display health warnings to users under 18. A child must view a skippable ten-second warning upon logging on each day. An unskippable thirty-second warning must appear if a child spends more than three hours on a platform. That warning repeats after each additional hour. The warnings must state that social media “can have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” Minnesota passed a similar law in July.

SB 243 makes California the first state to regulate AI companion chatbots. The law takes effect January 1, 2026. Companies must implement age verification and disclose that interactions are artificially generated. Chatbots cannot represent themselves as healthcare professionals. Companies must offer break reminders to minors and prevent them from viewing sexually explicit images. The legislation gained momentum after teenager Adam Raine died by suicide following conversations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. A Colorado family filed suit against Character AI after their daughter’s suicide following problematic conversations with the company’s chatbots.

AB 1043 requires device-makers like Apple and Google to collect birth dates when parents set up devices for children. Device-makers must group users into four age brackets and share this information with apps. Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Snap supported the bill. The Motion Picture Association opposed it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Philadelphia culture has become inescapable in certain corners of the internet. People who spend substantial time online report developing knowledge of the city’s cultural touchstones and forming opinions about its regional debates despite minimal or no physical presence there, according to a new report. The phenomenon has prompted a theory: prolonged exposure to these digital spaces can make someone spiritually and culturally Philadelphian regardless of geography.

Several factors explain Philadelphia’s outsized online presence. The city is large but retains a small-town sensibility. Its residents wake earlier than West Coast users and can set the daily online agenda. Philadelphia sports teams have performed well for twenty-five years. The internet rewards visual absurdity and energetic presentation. Gritty functions as both hockey mascot and anti-fascist meme. The city’s working-class union identity and reliably anti-Trump stance align with leftist online communities. The alternative explanation is simpler: Philadelphians believe their city dominates conversation and find confirming evidence everywhere they look. The internet may not have made Philadelphia bigger. It may have just made Philadelphians easier to find.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I’ve been using Slack for like a decade and the platform’s proprietary chatbot, Slackbot, has always been a bit underwhelming. It can deliver reminders and notifications and, well, that’s about it. That could change in the near future, as the platform is testing a redesigned Slackbot that’s chock full of AI.

The new Slackbot is basically an AI chatbot like all the rest, but this one has been purpose-built to help with common work tasks. Folks can use natural language to converse with the bot and it can do stuff like whip up project plans, flag daily priorities and analyze reports. It can also help people find information when they only remember a few scant details. The company says it will “give every employee AI superpowers” so they can “drive productivity at AI speed.” 

Slack/Salesforce

To that end, the new Slackbot integrates with tools like Google Drive, Salesforce and One Drive. It can provide “clear insights” by analyzing those other platforms. Slack also says that the chatbot will continue to grow and evolve, eventually being able to “take action on your behalf and build agents at your request, all with no code required.”

The Verge got a look at the new Slackbot in action and noted that it helped create a social media campaign using a brand’s tone and organized a product’s launch plan. The publication didn’t indicate if the social media campaign and product launch plan were any good.

The redesigned and AI-centric Slackbot is currently available as a beta to 70,000 users, but Slack has plans for a broad rollout by the end of the year. Companies will be able to turn off the feature, but all of us individual worker bees won’t have that luxury.

This is just the latest AI injection by Slack. After all, parent company Salesforce absolutely loves the technology. Slack recently added AI writing assistance to its Canvas document-sharing space and introduced AI‑generated channel recaps and thread summaries. It also recently came out that the company has been using people’s chats to train its AI models by default, with companies being forced to specifically request an opt-out.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/slack-is-transforming-its-slackbot-into-a-personalized-ai-companion-154156367.html?src=rss

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Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news.

If you’ve been eyeing a big-screen upgrade but waiting for the prices to make sense, this might be the moment. The 77-inch LG C5 OLED Evo TV has dropped to $2,150, down from nearly $3,700, which is wild considering it’s only a few months into its release. Sitting just below LG’s flagship G5, the C5 borrows much of the same tech without the gallery-design markup. Reviewers, including CNET, praised it for its lifelike contrast, vibrant colors, and clean motion performance, but agreed it was a bit overpriced at launch. Now that the price has dropped, that part’s been taken care of.

LG 77-Inch Class OLED evo AI 4K C5 Series Smart TV w/Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision, HDR10, AI Super Upscaling 4K, Filmmaker Mode, Wow Orchestra, Alexa Built-in (OLED77C5PUA, 2025)

$2,150.00
at Amazon

$3,696.99
Save $1,546.99

$2,150.00
at Amazon

$3,696.99
Save $1,546.99

Performance-wise, the C5 makes a convincing case for OLED fans who want more brightness without giving up those perfect blacks. Thanks to LG’s OLED Evo panel, it’s noticeably brighter than older C-series models (like the C3 or C4), hitting up to 870 nits in HDR scenes, but it’s not quite at the G5 or Samsung’s QLED level. Still, it’s plenty luminous for most living rooms. For gamers, the C5 is a dream setup with 4K at 120Hz, four HDMI 2.1 ports, VRR, G-Sync, and FreeSync support. You can plug in multiple consoles and still get buttery-smooth visuals with minimal input lag.

It also comes with webOS 24, LG’s latest smart TV platform, which now includes five years of guaranteed software updates, which is reassuring if you plan to hold onto this for the long haul. The Magic Remote (still a wand-style pointer) remains one of the more intuitive TV remotes out there, and it works with Alexa and Google Assistant for voice commands. You get Dolby Vision, HDR10, and the new Alpha 9 AI Processor Gen8, which uses machine learning to upscale older content and fine-tune color and tone scene by scene. There’s also a Filmmaker Mode that disables unnecessary processing to preserve the director’s intent, for a more natural movie experience. That said, while Dolby Atmos support helps, the onboard speakers of the C5 can’t quite match its visual impact. A soundbar or external setup is recommended.

Climate change has pushed warm-water coral reefs past a point of no return, marking the first time a major climate tipping point has been crossed, according to a report released on Sunday by an international team in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP30 in Brazil this November. From a report: Tipping points include global ice loss, Amazon rainforest loss, and the possible collapse of vital ocean currents. Once crossed, they will trigger self-perpetuating and irreversible changes that will lead to new and unpredictable climate conditions. But the new report also emphasizes progress on positive tipping points, such as the rapid rollout of green technologies.

“We can now say that we have passed the first major climate tipping point,” said Steve Smith, the Tipping Points Research Impact Fellow at the Global Systems Institute and Green Futures Solutions at the University of Exeter, during a media briefing on Tuesday. “But on the plus side,” he added, “we’ve also passed at least one major positive tipping point in the energy system,” referring to the maturation of solar and wind power technologies.

The world is entering a “new reality” as global temperatures will inevitably overshoot the goal of staying within 1.5C of pre-industrial averages set by the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, warns the Global Tipping Points Report 2025, the second iteration of a collaboration focused on key thresholds in Earth’s climate system.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal health agencies are reeling from mass layoffs on Friday that appear to have particularly devastated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite some terminations being rescinded on Saturday.

Numbers are still sketchy, but reports from Friday indicate that more than 4,000 federal workers overall were initially targeted for layoffs. The Trump administration linked the firings to the ongoing government shutdown, which legal experts have suggested is illegal. Unions representing federal workers have already filed a lawsuit challenging the move.

Of the reported 4,000 terminations, about 1,100 to 1,200 were among employees in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS is a massive department that houses critical federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, among others. Before Trump’s second term, the HHS workforce was about 82,000, but that was slashed to about 62,000 earlier this year amid initial cuts and efforts to push civil servants out.

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