The drivers and teams react to all the action from Friday practice at the Hungaroring for the 2026 Hungarian Grand Prix.
Our expert betting writers have shared their top picks for Qualifying at the Hungaroring.
Kush Maini claimed the second pole position of his FIA Formula 2 season at the Hungaroring, setting a 1m 28.896s during Qualifying.
Oscar Piastri is optimistic about there being “a lot up for grabs” for himself and McLaren as the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend develops, with the squad’s upgrades “working as expected” on team mate Lando Norris’ car.
Gabriel Bortoleto believes that Audi can be best of the rest behind the leading teams in the Hungarian Grand Prix after a promising Friday in Budapest.
Ferrari dominated proceedings on Friday at the Hungarian Grand Prix, with Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton finishing on top in FP1 and FP2 respectively.
Roku has raised prices on several streaming devices, blaming memory and component shortages tied to the AI data-center boom. The Roku Ultra jumped from $100 to $150 and the basic Streaming Stick rose from $30 to $40. The Desk reports: In a phone call with The Desk on Friday, a Roku executive said the company made the tough decision to raise prices on its streaming hardware to address shortages in computer memory and other components caused by the artificial intelligence rush. [...] Still, the executive who spoke with The Desk on Friday said the company believes its hardware is still competitive against other streaming TV hardware because Roku devices are still priced aggressively compared to the Apple TV and other expensive streaming hardware, and the company remains focused on looking at ways to add value to its Roku platform before and after it enters a customer's home. "We are doing our best to have great deals like what we have going on right now," the executive said. "Roku is even upping the price for a bundle that includes a Streaming Stick Plus and a one-month subscription to Fox One," notes Ars Technica in a separate report.
"As recently as July 20, Roku listed the bundle at $60 with a sale price of $25, according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Now, the bundle carries an $80 MSRP and $45 sale price."
"As recently as July 20, Roku listed the bundle at $60 with a sale price of $25, according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Now, the bundle carries an $80 MSRP and $45 sale price."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, and more than 20 other tech companies signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose "premature restrictions" on open-weight AI models, warning that broad limits could "stifle competition or drive innovation overseas." CNBC reports: They wrote that open-weight models strengthen competition and ensure that the benefits of the technology are "broadly shared rather than concentrated in a few hands." "Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe: they can be breached, misused, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect," the letter said. "And concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk."
Elon Musk, who runs an AI business under his rocket company SpaceX, also applified the letter on social media, writing that it has his "full support" in a post on X. SpaceX did not officially sign the letter. Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, said Thursday that the company believes in broad access, and that he has not been involved in any conversations with the Trump administration about potentially banning Chinese open-weight models in the U.S.
"I think that, that fundamentally, AI and AI usage is something that is actually very important to democratize," Brockman told reporters during a briefing in New York City. "And so, for me, at a sort of deep level, I think that having more models, more usage, that is a good thing." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed the letter in a post on X on Friday, writing that he wants the U.S. to win with both open-weight and proprietary models, and that he is "glad to see this."
[...] In the letter on Friday, the U.S. tech companies said that concerns about unlawful distillation should be addressed through "targeted legal and commercial frameworks" instead of with "sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation." "Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector," the letter said. "This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country." The letter follows a separate appeal signed by nearly 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator, warning that restricting U.S. access to Chinese open-weight AI models could cripple the next generation of American startups. "American leadership requires two things: world-leading American open-weight models and continued access for U.S. builders to open models already available worldwide," the startup founders wrote. Instead of broad prohibitions, they argue the government should adopt targeted safeguards.
Of course, these signees "have an obvious economic stake in seeing open AI models flourish," notes TechCrunch. "Companies like Nvidia, Microsoft Azure, and other infrastructure providers have a vested interest in pushing for commoditized models: If models are interchangeable, people will buy more GPUs, rent more cloud capacity, and build more applications."
Elon Musk, who runs an AI business under his rocket company SpaceX, also applified the letter on social media, writing that it has his "full support" in a post on X. SpaceX did not officially sign the letter. Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, said Thursday that the company believes in broad access, and that he has not been involved in any conversations with the Trump administration about potentially banning Chinese open-weight models in the U.S.
"I think that, that fundamentally, AI and AI usage is something that is actually very important to democratize," Brockman told reporters during a briefing in New York City. "And so, for me, at a sort of deep level, I think that having more models, more usage, that is a good thing." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed the letter in a post on X on Friday, writing that he wants the U.S. to win with both open-weight and proprietary models, and that he is "glad to see this."
[...] In the letter on Friday, the U.S. tech companies said that concerns about unlawful distillation should be addressed through "targeted legal and commercial frameworks" instead of with "sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation." "Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector," the letter said. "This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country." The letter follows a separate appeal signed by nearly 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator, warning that restricting U.S. access to Chinese open-weight AI models could cripple the next generation of American startups. "American leadership requires two things: world-leading American open-weight models and continued access for U.S. builders to open models already available worldwide," the startup founders wrote. Instead of broad prohibitions, they argue the government should adopt targeted safeguards.
Of course, these signees "have an obvious economic stake in seeing open AI models flourish," notes TechCrunch. "Companies like Nvidia, Microsoft Azure, and other infrastructure providers have a vested interest in pushing for commoditized models: If models are interchangeable, people will buy more GPUs, rent more cloud capacity, and build more applications."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anthropic has released Opus 5, a new Claude model that it says comes close to its higher-end Fable 5 model at half the price while improving on Opus 4.8 in knowledge work, coding, and scientific research tasks. "At the same time, Anthropic says it has managed to make the model more resistant to being tricked," notes Engadget. Additionally, the company says Opus 5 "exhibits the lowest rates of deceptive behavior." From the report: One important distinction between Opus 5 and Mythos, which is currently only available to a limited number of vetted organizations through Anthropic's Project Glasswing initiative, is that the company has specifically avoided training the new model on cyber-related tasks. Due to more its powerful capabilities, Opus 5 is broadly better at those tasks than its predecessor, making it more useful for finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities, but the company says Opus 5 is "substantially behind" its flagship model at exploiting those vulnerabilities.
[...] Anthropic says "Claude Opus 5's safeguards are designed to allow beneficial uses of the model in both cybersecurity and biology." The company has strengthened some of the model's cyber-related guardrails, but notes it did so along a "narrow range" of specific tasks. "Based on our testing, we expect the classifiers to intervene around 85 percent less often than they do for Fable 5," Anthropic said. With Opus 5, Anthropic also isn't including it in its recently announced 30-day data retention policy, which the company introduced alongside Fable and Mythos 5.
As for pricing. Anthropic says API costs for Opus 5 will remain at $5 per one million input tokens and $25 per one million output tokens. Anthropic has also added an "effort" menu for Opus that users can tweak to tell the model whether they want it to be more thorough or fast and efficient to conserve tokens.
[...] Anthropic says "Claude Opus 5's safeguards are designed to allow beneficial uses of the model in both cybersecurity and biology." The company has strengthened some of the model's cyber-related guardrails, but notes it did so along a "narrow range" of specific tasks. "Based on our testing, we expect the classifiers to intervene around 85 percent less often than they do for Fable 5," Anthropic said. With Opus 5, Anthropic also isn't including it in its recently announced 30-day data retention policy, which the company introduced alongside Fable and Mythos 5.
As for pricing. Anthropic says API costs for Opus 5 will remain at $5 per one million input tokens and $25 per one million output tokens. Anthropic has also added an "effort" menu for Opus that users can tweak to tell the model whether they want it to be more thorough or fast and efficient to conserve tokens.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The vast majority of the documents people use to do business are really quite poor. Presentations that make your eyes glaze over, memos that are inscrutable or unclear, and all kinds of artifacts that say more about how they were created than whatever message they were ostensibly trying to communicate. It's been one of my great frustrations for years, and a big part of why I wrote Make Better Documents a while ago. That post captured a list of the suggestions I've been giving people for years on how to make better, more effective documents that can actually do work for you, instead of fighting at cross purposes to your larger goals.
To my great surprise, that list of suggestions on how to make better documents got a pretty huge response, and a lot of people told me they found it really helpful. So now, I've created a Better Documents skills.md file for people who use LLM tools like Claude to help assist them in creating business documents, to prompt their AI tools to make better documents by default.
If you're not familiar, agent skills are simple text files that describe new capabilities or processes that LLMs can take advantage of when carrying out tasks. (They're Markdown files — more proof of how Markdown is taking over the world!) The way this skill works is that it's distilled the broad principles I outlined in that post into a series of 5 tests, covering areas like whether you've properly considered your target audience, whether the overall structure is correct, if you've overdone things with your formatting, and if things are named clearly, and then either generates a new file that follows those rules, or reviews an existing document to make sure it is obeying best practices.
It's nothing too fancy, but I've been using it for a while, and shared it with a few friends, and people have told me they found it handy and it's improved some of their routine documents. I'm especially glad that people have found it useful even if they're the kind of folks who would never let an LLM generate a document on their behalf, but do think software tools are useful for things like spell check or grammar check. I see this as being a tool in that kind of category.
If you're familiar with skills, the install process is really simple and works just like any other skill. This skill is totally free and open source (if you have improvements, send along a pull request on GitHub, or if you're not a coder type, just email me or hit me up on social media and let me know what fixes/suggestions you've got), so there are no encumbrances or restrictions on its use. I am curious if it's useful to people, especially if you find it handy to use more broadly at a company, so don't be shy to get in touch if you find it valuable.
Here's to us all enduring fewer terrible presentations!
Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
Lower catch this year.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
NEW YORK (ANP) - Lidstaten van de Verenigde Naties hebben vrijdag ingestemd om de termijn van VN-mensenrechtenchef Volker Türk met vier jaar te verlengen. Dit ondanks kritiek van Israël, de Verenigde Staten en Rusland. Dat laatste land bracht eerder een voorstel in stemming om Türks termijn met slechts twee maanden te verlengen. Dat voorstel werd weggestemd.
Als topman van de mensenrechtentak van de VN spreekt Türk zich beroepshalve uit tegen (vermeende) mensenrechtenschendingen in de wereld. Niet zelden zijn actuele strijdtonelen zoals Oekraïne, Gaza en conflictgebieden in Afrika daarvan het onderwerp.
In een reactie op X schrijft de Nederlandse delegatie bij de VN blij te zijn met de vernieuwing van Türks mandaat. "We feliciteren de heer Türk en zullen de inspanningen die de Hoge Commissaris levert voor vrede, gerechtigheid en vooruitgang blijven steunen."
Türks termijn zou naar planning verlopen in oktober.