I came across possibly one of the weirdest official automotive accessories this morning, courtesy of a friend’s social media feed. It’s called the “Truckle,” and it’s a hand-crafted silver and bronze belt buckle that might be the envy of every other cowboy out there, since this one has a place to keep your F-150’s key fob without ruining the lines of your jeans.

The Truckle was designed by Utah-based A Cut Above Buckles, with a hand-engraved F-150 on the bump in the front. Behind the truck? Storage space for a Ford truck key fob, which should fit any F-150 from model year 2018 onward.

“You can put your key fob in the buckle—all your remote features work while it’s in the buckle,” designer Andy Andrews told the Detroit Free Press. “Once you have it in there, you’re not going to lose that key fob. You’re not going to be scratching your head (wondering) where it’s at. It’s right there with you in the Truckle.”

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week, sounding like a digital media consultant, Pope Leo XIV urged reporters to avoid “the degrading practice of so-called clickbait.” He was addressing global news agencies at a gathering in Vatican City about the risks of a post-truth world, with a speech that also doubled as a severe societal warning about the dangers of AI.

“Artificial intelligence is changing the way we receive information and communicate, but who directs it and for what purposes?” the pontiff said, according to Reuters. “We must be vigilant in order to ensure that technology does not replace human beings.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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OpenAI is hungry for as much compute power as it can get its hands on, and the company has signed another deal with a chipmaker to help make that happen. This time around, it’s teaming up with Broadcom to make custom chips and systems for use in both OpenAI’s infrastructure and its partners’ data centers. 

OpenAI is designing the “AI accelerators” and systems. Broadcom will start deploying those racks in the second half of next year, the companies said. The aim is to complete the rollout by the end of 2029. The two companies are said to have started working together 18 months ago.

The deal is for 10 gigawatts of chips and it’s worth “multiple billions of dollars,” according to The Wall Street Journal. It was reported last month that OpenAI and Broadcom were making custom chips together. For what it’s worth, the latter’s CEO said recently that a new, unnamed client had put in an order worth $10 billion.

The Broadcom deal follows agreements that OpenAI recently struck with both NVIDIA and AMD. NVIDIA is investing $100 billion into OpenAI and will provide it with 10 gigawatts of AI infrastructure. The deal with AMD is for six gigawatts of compute power. OpenAI is said to be paying AMD tens of billions of dollars under that agreement and it could ultimately take up to a 10 percent stake in the company. As with the Broadcom rollout, both the NVIDIA and AMD deployments are expected to start in the second half of 2026. OpenAI also inked a deal with Oracle in July for 4.5 gigawatts in data center capacity as part of its Stargate Project.

According to recent reports, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees that he wanted the company to build out 250 gigawatts of compute power over the next eight years, significantly up from the 2GW it’s expected to have by the end of this year. (For context, 250GW is about a fifth of the energy generation capacity of the entire US, which sits at around 1,200GW.)

As things stand, it would likely cost around $10 trillion to buy that much capacity. Altman said OpenAI would have to develop new financing tools to make that happen, but he hasn’t elaborated much on what those might look like. Even its current deals have OpenAI on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars.  

While the likes of NVIDIA and Microsoft have invested heavily into OpenAI, there isn’t a backer on the planet that can plow $10 trillion into the company. As things stand, OpenAI is very, very far away from making up the difference in revenue too. It’s reportedly expecting to make $13 billion in revenue this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-is-making-its-own-ai-chips-with-broadcoms-help-142242231.html?src=rss

Owners of some Jeep Wrangler 4xe hybrids have been left stranded after installing an over-the-air software update this weekend. The automaker pushed out a telematics update for the Uconnect infotainment system that evidently wasn’t ready, resulting in cars losing power while driving and then becoming stranded.

Stranded Jeep owners have been detailing their experiences in forum and Reddit posts, as well as on YouTube. The buggy update doesn’t appear to brick the car immediately. Instead, the failure appears to occur while driving—a far more serious problem. For some, this happened close to home and at low speed, but others claim to have experienced a powertrain failure at highway speeds.

Jeep pulled the update after reports of problems, but the software had already downloaded to many owners’ cars by then. A member of Stellantis’ social engagement team told 4xe owners at a Jeep forum to ignore the update pop-up if they haven’t installed it yet.

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OpenAI and Broadcom are working together to develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI chips and computing systems over the next four years, a high-profile partnership aimed at satisfying some of the startup’s immense computing needs. From a report: OpenAI plans to design its own graphics processing units, or GPUs, which will allow it to integrate what it has learned from developing powerful artificial-intelligence models into the hardware that underpins future systems. As part of the agreement announced Monday, the chips will be co-developed by OpenAI and Broadcom and deployed by the chip company starting in the second half of next year. The new agreement will be worth multiple billions of dollars, people familiar with the matter said.

Broadcom specializes in designing custom AI chips that are specifically tailored to certain artificial-intelligence applications. It began working with OpenAI on creating a custom chip 18 months ago, and the companies broadened their partnership to include work on related components, including server racks and networking equipment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Young people are always finding new ways to blur the lines between irony and sincerity, the public and the private, and every thing else: TikTokers are using a caveman schtick to tell sad romantic stories; a Twitch streamer broadcast the birth of her daughter to her adoring chat; and young people are meeting a deadly serious political moment with colorful animal costumes. There’s also a new cartoon, for some reason, from Nintendo, and the rise of slopcore.

The Portland Frog and Chicken

The young people in Portland are changing the idea of what “protesting” means. In the days since the President declared Portland a “war zone” and a “never-ending disaster,” more and more young people have been showing up to protests dressed in colorful costumes. Frog guy was first. You can see him here, bravely facing down a cadre of heavily armed men:

before being pepper-sprayed for his trouble.

And then there’s the chicken guy, whose presence in front of an ICE facility provided important context to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s recent rooftop photo opportunity. “Our reality is beyond satire at this point,” Chicken Guy (aka Jack Dickinson) told The Atlantic. “So meeting it with absurdity…I guess that’s the idea.”

Frog and Chicken seem to have inspired others to meet ICE and the National Guard with absurdity (and colorful costumes), which might be the sign of a growing movement.

Protestors have been using ridiculousness to make their point since protests began, but the instant, worldwide dissemination of videos from Portland’s “front line” is fairly new. Images of heavily armed and armored law enforcement officers staring down Portland weirdos in unicorn and panda costumes makes a more compelling point than would clashes with radicals in ski masks—you don’t have to think very hard to know which side you’re on. And there’s something so Portland about the whole thing.

Twitch streamer Fandy livestreams her child’s birth

Austin based Twitch streamer Fandy is known as much for letting her 300,000 followers in on her personal life as she is for playing Overwatch, but the 30-year-old influencer cranked it up to 11 last week when she livestreamed her daughter’s birth. Fandy started streaming as soon as she went into labor, with 30,000 or so concurrent visitors on Twitch alone watching her deliver another human into the world. She even joked around with her chat in between breathing and contractions, and Twitch CEO Dan Clancy stopped by to offer congratulations. After a routine eight-hour labor, Fandy showed her child off to the world.

Her fans seem mostly happy to be included but some are questioning whether a live birth is in keeping with the streaming platform’s terms and conditions, and more importantly, if it was fair to the child who didn’t ask to be born and definitely didn’t ask to be livestreamed.

On the other hand, Fandy’s stream takes parasocial relationships to a new level, her fans seemed happy to be included, and who wouldn’t want to have 30,000 godparents?

Why are so many TikTokers talking like cavewomen?

It’s becoming cool on TikTok for young women to talk like cavewomen. Over videos labeled “POV: We’re Cavewomen and I’m Telling You About My Ex,” folks are spilling their guts about past relationships, while replacing “I” with me and generally leaving out articles.

The trend seems to have started when @em.brdly posted this video about she (sic) disastrous introduction to polyamory:

Others followed, detailing they bad experiences with young men:

But talk like caveman old! She make video talk like cavewoman “Karen” 2024:

He talk caveman 1991:

Like me say, more things change, more stay same.

What is “slopcore”?

Slopcore is the slang term for the countless 100s of millions of cheesy-looking, unsettling, AI-generated images, videos, and songs that have hit the internet since AI was given to the masses a couple of years ago. It also describes the uncanny, dreamy, slightly menacing vibe of all that slop. I did a deeper dive here, if you want to get further into the slop with me.

Viral video of the week: Nintendo teases…something

On Oct. 7, Nintendo posted this video on X with the caption “Close to You”:

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

and no one knows why. There are no credits; there’s no logo. It’s just a baby chasing a pacifier. But because it’s Nintendo’s baby, the video has been streamed over 16 million times on X alone, and everyone seems to have a guess. Some theories:

• It’s a teaser for a new Pikmin game.

• It’s teasing a new Earthbound game.

• It’s teasing a new Chibi-Robo game.

• It’s teasing a new Elebits game (even though Elebits was from Konami)

• “Nintendo Baby” is being introduced as a character in Smash Brothers.

• Its the first look at a new Nintendo intellectual property involving babies and pacifiers.

• It’s a short meant to show off what Nintendo has been doing with its new animation studio.

• Nintendo wants to show its fanbase an experience that they will never have.

The point is there’s no way to know and it could be anything. (But it’s Pikmin, because Nintendo has released a Pikmin game for every console since the GameCube.)