The week tech got thinner than my patience, chattier than your uncle on Facebook, and somehow still needs more electricity than a small country

Apple did the September ritual: new phones, same seams showing. Yes, the Air is gloriously wafer-thin, like someone hit an iPhone with a rolling pin and called it design. The iPhone 17 family is here, and Apple insists we all needed a ProMotion display on non‑Pro phones like it’s 2017 and we just discovered 120 Hz. Preorders, colors-with-marketing-names, titanium-but-maybe-not, and a strap so your phone can cosplay as a purse. I appreciate the audacity. We used to complain that phones were getting too big; now we’re cheering that one is 5.something millimeters thick, which is basically a Dorito. Preorders went live on Friday with retail this coming Friday, because of course they did. The keynote had exactly the amount of “Awe” you’d expect from a company that looks at a supply chain crisis and says, what if... thinner. (theguardian.com)

Meanwhile, Siri still has senioritis. The “do things across apps” brain transplant keeps missing ship windows and now some of it’s punted into 2026. Exec shuffles aren’t helping, and Apple’s “AI, but private, but also not today” approach feels like a yoga pose you can only hold if you have trillion‑dollar quads. If your phone doesn’t suddenly become a personal butler this fall, that’s not a bug; it’s a vibes‑driven roadmap. (cnbc.com)

Speaking of vibes and roadmaps, the EU’s AI Act just did that thing where a PDF quietly changes the industry more than a keynote ever could. Prohibitions kicked in February 2, and as of August 2 the obligations for “GPAI” models are live—meaning if your model can hallucinate a tax code, you owe the public a summary of what you fed it. That “training data summary template” is going to be the most litigated Word doc since the U.S. Constitution, but hey, progress. Full applicability lands August 2, 2026, with some stuff stretching to 2027 because regulation moves on geologic time. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu)

On the opposite end of geologic time, NVIDIA just memory‑hoarded the future. Rubin CPX dropped as the chip specifically for long‑context AI—the “I read an hour of video and wrote a movie about your meeting” kind. It packs 128 GB of GDDR7 like it’s casually picking up milk on the way home, and participates in this disaggregated inference cosplay where one GPU does the thinking and another does the singing. There’s even an NVL144 CPX rack that flexes exaFLOPs like a gym selfie. Translation: if your model doesn’t remember what you said at the top of the call, the problem is no longer the hardware. It’s your prompt. Or your life choices. (tomshardware.com)

And just to keep your wallet nimble, Meta’s about to hold Connect this week, where rumor has it the “glasses with an actual display” finally materialize alongside a wristband that listens to your wrist’s electricity like a cyberpunk palm reader. Expect monocular displays (cheaper, lighter, less migraine), some very earnest dev demos, and a promise that this is definitely the year smart glasses stop being a punchline. If you see me at a coffee shop squinting into a tiny floating rectangle while flexing my thumb to click, no you didn’t. (androidcentral.com)

Also in “we’re doing this again?” news: TikTok’s American Schrödinger’s Cat routine continues. The Supreme Court upheld the law that says “sell or be gone,” and now the deadline keeps getting rolled like a software feature after someone discovered it’s welded to ten other features. If you’re keeping score: law upheld in January, and—shock—another extension looks likely this week. The only thing more immortal than TikTok dances is U.S. administrative process. (bbc.com)

SpaceX, meanwhile, is speedrunning rocket adolescence. Starship’s tenth flight did the “pez‑dispenser dummy satellites” trick and a dramatic water‑landing kaboom like a Marvel post‑credits scene. The FAA also quietly redrew the hazard doodle on the map to “please avoid a 1,600‑nautical‑mile strip of ocean while we yeet a stainless‑steel grain silo to space.” It’s chaos, sure, but it’s productive chaos—the best kind—where every explosion cashes out as delta‑learn. (reuters.com)

All of this new compute needs power, and the grid is out here wheezing like a 2012 MacBook trying to run Chrome tabs. Enter fusion’s “we’re actually building a thing now” era: Helion broke dirt on a plant in Washington that’s supposed to deliver juice to Microsoft by 2028. Yes, fusion. Yes, 2028. No, I don’t have your cold‑fusion PDF from Reddit. If this pans out, the energy curve for AI goes from “utterly doomed” to “maybe we don’t boil the oceans with inference.” Microsoft joining nuclear trade groups and inking long deals isn’t a press‑release hobby; it’s survival. (reuters.com)

The Safety Bureaucracy Expanded Universe is also busy. NIST is running a GenAI pilot to grade both the little gremlins that generate stuff and the bigger gremlins that detect the gremlins—basically a science fair where the judges are like “please stop lying to grandma’s eyes.” There are also draft guidelines on managing misuse risk for dual‑use models, which is government for “we noticed your model can write a poem and also a bioweapon protocol.” We are firmly in the era where benchmark scores are less interesting than “what does your red‑team budget look like?” (ai-challenges.nist.gov)

And because climate doesn’t care about any of this, the Pacific just dropped a marine heat wave off California the size of my unread emails. Warmer ocean, weirder weather, hotter nights, algae blooming like it’s auditioning for a villain arc, and whales wandering into shipping lanes where they absolutely did not RSVP. If your coastal forecast reads “sticky + weird,” that’s the blob. No, not the 1958 one—the 2025 one. (sfchronicle.com)

Threads that shouldn’t connect, but do:

Anyway, I’m off to practice wrist‑twitch gestures so I can close a notification in 2026 without touching anything, while a GPU named after an astronomer summarizes my meeting for a regulator reading a training‑data summary about a model that wrote the memo telling me to write fewer memos. We did it, everyone. Progress.