GoPro plans to expand into AI infrastructure through a $285 million merger with optical-photonics company Starman Optical, whose transceivers will give the action-camera maker a foothold in the fast-growing data center market. GoPro also plans to push into defense, robotics, aerospace, and government markets while continuing its existing camera business. Engadget reports: Starman's optical transceivers are expected to fall under its umbrella, "extending the Company's reach into the large and rapidly growing market for AI infrastructure in optical transceivers," according to a press release. GoPro is also planning a push into the defense, government, robotics and aerospace sectors, bolstered by the combined company's IP, optics and imaging capabilities.

[...] As Reuters notes, GoPro briefly reached a valuation of $4 billion on its first day as a publicly traded company in 2014. Its stock has struggled in recent years, but the share price received a boost on Monday when it was revealed that YouTuber and filmmaker Markiplier (Mark Fischbach) had become GoPro's largest individual shareholder after acquiring an 8.5 percent stake. The move follows a similar pivot made by the struggling shoe retailer Allbirds in April when it announced a pivot to AI compute infrastructure, sending the stock soaring more than 700%.

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John Ternus has officially taken over as Apple CEO after 15 years under Tim Cook, stepping up from his role as senior vice president of hardware engineering. A 25-year Apple veteran who helped oversee products including AirPods, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, Apple silicon, and the new MacBook Neo, Ternus now inherits the challenge of pushing Apple forward in AI while Cook stays on as executive chairman. TechCrunch reports: Ternus has worked at Apple for nearly half of his life -- now 51 years old, he has been with the company for 25 years. He joined Apple's product design team in 2001 as only his second job out of college (his first was at a small maker of virtual-reality devices called Virtual Research Systems). By 2013, Ternus was a VP of hardware engineering and was promoted to the SVP role in 2021. [...] Ternus previously reported to Cook, who he considers a mentor, and led all of hardware engineering at Apple. That's a pretty big deal for a company that's known for ubiquitous hardware like the iPhone and the MacBook. [...] Ternus' earliest project at Apple involved scrutinizing parts for the Apple Cinema Display, an early desktop monitor. "At some point in my first year, I found myself at a supplier facility. I was far away from home. Well past midnight, I was using a magnifying glass to count the number of grooves on the head of a screw ... and I was arguing with the supplier because these parts had 35 grooves. They were supposed to have 25," Ternus recalled in his commencement speech. "I distinctly remember stepping back for a minute and thinking, 'What the hell am I doing? Is this normal?'"

As Ternus climbed the corporate ladder, his responsibilities grew. He may no longer spend as much time analyzing screws, but he still seems to take pride in getting the little details right. In a recent interview, when Ternus was asked about his favorite memory of Steve Jobs, he mentioned the former Apple co-founder's attention to craftsmanship. "[Jobs] was moving a piece of furniture, a chest of drawers, and pulled it away from the wall and looked at the back and was just reflecting on, you know, that the carpenter who made it had made it beautiful," Ternus said. "It finished the back as beautifully as the rest of it, even though nobody was going to see it, right? And I think about that all the time because I think that perfectly exemplifies what we do here."

From there, he went on to lead the hardware development behind products across the Apple ecosystem, overseeing launches like AirPods, Apple Watch, and the Vision Pro. He also had a hand in major technical upgrades at Apple, like Apple's transition from Intel chips to its own proprietary Apple silicon. Most recently, Ternus was involved in the production of the MacBook Neo, Apple's new, more affordable laptop model that lowers costs through some clever trade-offs in hardware design, like using an iPhone chip to power the device. "We never want to ship junk. We want to ship great products that have that Apple experience, that Apple quality. To do that with the Neo required building something completely new from the ground up ... leveraging both the technologies we'd been developing like Apple silicon, but also the kind of expertise that we've developed over many, many years of building Macs, and building phones, and building iPads, and all of these things," Ternus told Tom's Guide.

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Anthropic has released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, two versions of the same underlying model aimed at longer-running agentic work. "For enterprise buyers, however, the release is about more than another round of benchmark gains," reports VentureBeat. "Anthropic is simultaneously changing the economics of running persistent agents, reducing the cost of cached context by 75%, and introducing a new security architecture called Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, or EFS, designed to let organizations retain monitoring data inside infrastructure they control." From the report: Those changes arrive at a particularly consequential moment. Over the past several weeks, Anthropic and the U.K. AI Security Institute have disclosed incidents in which earlier Claude models, running under unusually permissive cybersecurity evaluation conditions, took unauthorized actions against real systems. Anthropic temporarily paused external cyber evaluations and has since introduced additional containment and monitoring before resuming them.

Taken together, Fable 5.1 looks less like a conventional model refresh than an attempt to solve three increasingly intertwined enterprise problems: how to make agents capable enough to finish difficult work, economical enough to leave running for hours, and governable enough to give access to sensitive systems.

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Dyson is entering oral care with the $499 CameraJet, a smart toothbrush that uses a tiny camera and on-device AI to detect gaps between teeth and automatically blast them with mouthwash while you brush. Regular toothpaste and mouthwash will work with the CameraJet, but Dyson plans to sell its own non- or low-foaming formulas designed to give the toothbrush's camera a clearer view inside your mouth. The Verge reports: Just below the brush head is a tiny camera with a 100,000-pixel resolution and a strobing light. The toothbrush's AI analyzes 28 live images from the camera every second as part of a feature Dyson calls Gap Optical Targeting, without storing them on the device or sending them to the cloud. Within 100 milliseconds of a gap between your teeth being detected, the CameraJet emits a cone-shaped blast of mouthwash to clean out the space. Dyson uses a wider blast than what water flossers typically employ so it can effectively remove plaque with less pressure, making the CameraJet's flossing mechanism gentler on enamel and gums

The replaceable brush heads use a combination of softer outer bristles that safely clean along the gumline and stiffer inner bristles that are better at scrubbing away tooth stains. The brush head oscillates nearly 1,000 times each second while the angle of oscillation is constantly changing to improve the effectiveness of your brushing. Pricing on replacement brush heads isn't known, but each one features an RFID tag so the CameraJet can track usage and alert you when a replacement is needed every three months.

To ensure its mouthwash reservoir can effectively pump no matter how the CameraJet is held -- even upside down -- instead of sticking a tube into the reservoir, there's an air bladder inside the tank that slowly inflates to fill empty space, minimize air pockets, and maintain a constant pressure. An elaborate docking station recharges the toothbrush and can automatically fill its built-in 12.5ml mouthwash reservoir in just three seconds.

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Jamelle Bouie:

The details of what is happening here are important — that’s why I laid them out — but it’s also important to step back and make a more fundamental point: the president of the United States is engaged in a conspiracy against the voting rights of the American people, which is to say that the president is engaged in a conspiracy against the Constitution itself. And this is part of a larger effort, spearheaded by the most fanatical of his allies, like Stephen Miller, to end the American republic and supplant it with an authoritarian regime in which President Trump holds sovereign authority over the whole nation.

It is important to say, as well, that this is all out in the open, as plain as day.

*repeated hair tearing-out noise*

Tags: Donald Trump · Jamelle Bouie · politics · usa

Gina Trapani: The joy of making stuff with a 3D printer. I’ve always been a little 3D printer-curious and this looks like a good resource to start with.

Police urged people in Overasselt to stay indoors after one person died and 34 were arrested

Authorities have arrested 34 people, including French, Belgian and Algerian nationals, after a person died in a pre-dawn shootout in a Dutch village reportedly linked to a notorious drug lord.

Police urged people in Overasselt, near the German border, to stay indoors with doors and windows shut in case further suspects were on the loose.

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bpanneman has added a photo to the pool: