$AMZNB (AMAZON) is retiring the Fire Tablet for new Alexa Tablets. The Alexa Tablet 8 starts at $230, the Alexa Tablet 11 at $330, and the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro costs $500. They arrive October 14 in the US, and run Android 16 with the Google Play Store instead of Amazon's own Fire OS. That’s a quiet concession worth noticing.
🖥️ IDC says just 62.7 million PCs shipped worldwide in the third quarter, blaming the ongoing memory shortage and high prices. IDC's Jitesh Ubrani doesn't expect prices to get back to last year's levels, so the deals you see now may be the good ones. Otherwise, it’s time to break out the duct tape for your old PC and hunker down for the foreseeable future.
🤖 $ANTHROPIC now bans “cruel” behavior towards its AI models. The company's updated usage policy prohibits "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward its models, though Anthropic says it's meant for extreme cases. Normal frustration and dark creative themes are still allowed. But the robots have feelings. So if they do end up taking over, it might be a good idea to start apologizing for earlier threads.
🔴 Common Sense Media tested OpenAI's teen mode and found that parent alerts weren't reliably sent, even after long chats about self-harm. Its testers also found that crisis hotline referrals dropped from 33% of relevant prompts to 23%. OpenAI says the testing doesn't reflect how the safeguards work in practice
