Author: The Tech Guy

Enlarge Image I especially dig the Sportage’s new boomerang-shaped LED light signature. Antuan Goodwin/CNETThe latest iteration of the Kia Sportage  gets a major glow-up. Kia has been aggressively pushing the design of its vehicles to the point that this muscular 2023 Sportage Hybrid SX Prestige looks of a completely different lineage to the cute, small SUV it replaces. (Heck, it’s barely recognizable as a Kia’s .) And behind that wild styling is a sweet new hybrid powertrain, vastly improved cabin tech and the automaker’s latest driver-assistance technology. Like Head-turning, spacious design Smooth and efficient new hybrid system Excellent mix of…

Finding genuinely useful Android apps shouldn’t feel like a chore, but too often it does. Most mainstream tools either lock core features behind paywalls or push ads so hard that you end up frustrated, forcing you to either buy the app or uninstall it. Still, there are a few free apps that I genuinely find useful. I’ve been using them for quite some time now, and they’ve quietly become part of my daily routine without demanding constant attention or updates. These three apps stood out because they’re refreshingly straightforward. No lengthy tutorials, no premium tiers hiding the useful features, and…

The England vs Australia live stream kicks off the Autumn Nations Series 2025 on Saturday and has all the makings of a classic between the two old foes. Both teams are fast-improving after an inconsistent few years and Steve Borthwick’s hosts will be determined to put right a late defeat in this fixture last year.Borthwick has kept faith with the majority of the touring side that won a series in Argentina earlier this summer, which means the England coach has named six British & Irish Lions on a stacked bench, including Test match animal Tom Curry and hooker Luke Cowan-Dickie,…

Researchers at Nvidia have developed a novel approach to train large language models (LLMs) in 4-bit quantized format while maintaining their stability and accuracy at the level of high-precision models. Their technique, NVFP4, makes it possible to train models that not only outperform other leading 4-bit formats but match the performance of the larger 8-bit FP8 format, all while using half the memory and a fraction of the compute.The success of NVFP4 shows that enterprises can continue to cut inference costs by running leaner models that match the performance of larger ones. It also hints at a future where the…

Elon Musk predicts that traditional smartphones will evolve into lightweight edge nodes optimized for AI inference rather than standalone hardware. This is a broader architectural transformation driven by AI advancements. Musk describes the future device (formerly known as a phone) as an edge node for AI inference particularly for AI video inference. It would feature minimal hardware—essentially a screen, audio output, radios for connectivity and on-device AI processing to handle local computations. The heavy lifting happens via seamless communication between on-device AI and massive server-side AI models. The device will generate real-time video of anything that you could possibly want.…

If you buy a flagship on launch day, you get perks like more memory or freebies, but if you wait, you get discounts instead. And you don’t necessarily need a flagship either, not when premium mid-rangers are this good. Let’s look at both options. The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip7 price has hit a new low – it’s now under €800. This puts it between the vanilla Galaxy S25 and the S25+. The flip foldable offers a new form factor experience, unlike the S-phones, which haven’t changed much in the last few years. The Z Flip7 has a 4.1” cover and…

Document databases are an increasingly important type of technology in the gen AI era.A document database is a type of NoSQL database that doesn't rely on rows and columns like a traditional relational database, instead it uses the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format. There are multiple vendors that develop document databases including MongoDB, which now has a proprietary closed source technology. In an effort to open up the market, Microsoft began developing its own document database known as DocumentDB and made it open source in January of this year. This week, DocumentDB is moving to the Linux Foundation where it…

Mint Mobile has made a name for itself as one of the most recognizable prepaid carriers in the US, thanks in part to Ryan Reynolds’ ads and its simple approach to mobile plans. It runs on the T-Mobile network, but as an MVNO, it already undercuts the big three networks by a wide margin. However, a new offer that you won’t see advertised on the site makes its 12-month plans even cheaper.For a limited time, new customers can get 30% off all 12-month fixed-data plans using the code YEAROFMINT. That drops the 5GB plan from $15 to $10.50 per month, paid…

Presented by ElasticAs organizations scramble to enact agentic AI solutions, accessing proprietary data from all the nooks and crannies will be keyBy now, most organizations have heard of agentic AI, which are systems that “think” by autonomously gathering tools, data and other sources of information to return an answer. But here’s the rub: reliability and relevance depend on delivering accurate context. In most enterprises, this context is scattered across various unstructured data sources, including documents, emails, business apps, and customer feedback. As organizations look ahead to 2026, solving this problem will be key to accelerating agentic AI rollouts around the…

As far back as 1980, the American philosopher John Searle distinguished between strong and weak AI. Weak AIs are merely useful machines or programs that help us solve problems, whereas strong AIs would have genuine intelligence. A strong AI would be conscious.Searle was skeptical of the very possibility of strong AI, but not everyone shares his pessimism. Most optimistic are those who endorse functionalism, a popular theory of mind that takes conscious mental states to be determined solely by their function. For a functionalist, the task of producing a strong AI is merely a technical challenge. If we can create…