Damian Pickett · No. 58
Saturday 31 October 2026
F1’s Mexican Grand Prix qualifying is today, and the Patriots play the Dolphins in Miami on Sunday.
Apple’s new MacBook Pro introduces the company’s first laptop touchscreen, alongside new M6, M5 Pro and M5 Max chip options. Full pricing and configurations were published this week ahead of its release.
Rian Johnson has released an iPhone camera app built on the image-processing techniques from his Knives Out films, letting anyone shoot footage with a similar look.
Developer Drew Breunig built a working Nintendo Entertainment System emulator inside the weights of the Qwen3.5-4B AI model, letting anyone play NES games through it. The project was inspired by a similar one called qwenputer.
Read · Lenny's Newsletter
Lessons from Lyft, Thumbtack, Rover, Snackpass, Peerspace, Shef, Good Dog, and Udemy
AI agents are starting to transact on people’s behalf, from Zest’s restaurant-booking bot to DoorDash’s AI orders, which makes this older look at how marketplaces earn trust worth revisiting.
Listen · Founders
With Apple’s touchscreen MacBook Pro leading today’s news, this episode on how SpaceX actually builds and operates is a fitting companion on hard engineering made to look simple.
Listen · David Senra
Today’s AI pick is an agent that books restaurant tables, so it pairs well with the Carbone and Torrisi restaurateur talking about the craft of hospitality behind those tables.
Listen · Acquired
With three separate Meta stories in today’s technology section, from an AI fashion app to privacy scrutiny over AI glasses, this interview with Zuckerberg himself is a useful rewind.
Google’s first data-centre satellite is in orbit, running a DeepMind Gemma 4 model that writes poetry from space. It is an early test of moving AI computing off Earth.
Zest has launched an AI concierge that combines a group’s food preferences, puts restaurant options to a vote over text, then books the table. It is aimed at people who cannot agree where to eat.
OpenAI will honour a shared robots.txt signal so website operators can tell participating AI companies whether their content may be used for training. It is a step toward a common opt-out standard.
OpenAI is expanding violence-prevention safeguards in ChatGPT, adding earlier interventions for at-risk users and a new commitment to public safety reporting, with particular focus on protecting teenagers.
Bluesky has added a dedicated moderation inbox in beta, making it easier for users to track reports and account strikes in one place rather than hunting through notifications.
Satlyt has completed a test moving it closer to turning satellites into orbiting data centres, a step toward offloading some computing into space.
Waymo will begin testing self-driving Toyota bZ4X vehicles in Japan next year, part of a wider partnership with the automaker that also covers the UK.
Runware is building a factory to produce prefabricated AI data centres on an assembly line, aiming to deliver them within 48 hours of an order. Whether it can do so at scale is the real test.
Meta has quietly launched an AI fashion app, Style Sketch, that lets people virtually try on clothes. It is currently available only in Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand.
Apple has released HomeView Software 27.2, the operating system for its new HomeView device, which launches on 13 November. The update brings new wallpapers, Control Center changes and other refinements ahead of release.
Apple says the first iOS 27.3 developer beta will arrive next week, bringing Apple Intelligence features such as Writing Tools and Genmoji to users in China for the first time.
Apple Music 7.0 is rolling out on Android with a Liquid Glass redesign and a new app icon, following a month of beta testing of the streaming service.
WhatsApp is rolling out four new features to make group chats easier to manage, according to a blog post this week, aimed at helping people keep track of what is happening in each group.
Patrick Stewart, who brought a Shakespearean depth to Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard and X-Men’s Professor X, has died at 86. Tributes have poured in from across film and television for his five-decade career.
Martin Scorsese says his planned Cleopatra film with Angelina Jolie was never made because of the Sony hack, which he blames partly on Seth Rogen. Deadline reports he is still frustrated more than a decade later.
Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Artificial’, written by Simon Rich, has been submitted to the Golden Globes as a comedy despite dealing with dark subject matter, resolving one of the last big questions ahead of Friday’s deadline.
Léa Seydoux is to receive an American Cinematheque retrospective honouring two decades of work across independent and studio filmmaking, Variety reports exclusively.
Woody Harrelson is backing his first short film as executive producer: Mary the Widow, a live-action short written and directed by Ryan Noufer, starring Julie Ariola and Stephen Tobolowsky.
Payton Pritchard scored 30 as the Celtics beat the Bulls 125-111 at home, their first game of NBA Cup group play and a bounce-back after a slow start to the season.
Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla says he has been finding ways to use artificial intelligence tools to work more efficiently and effectively as a coach.
A.J. Brown is officially questionable for Sunday’s game against the Dolphins after sitting out New England’s final two practices this week with an ankle and knee issue.
Drake Maye leads all NFL quarterbacks in passing yards on scramble drills this season, and the Patriots have built parts of their offence around his ability to extend plays.
Max Verstappen and Liam Lawson were both given one-place grid penalties after an “unacceptable” collision in second practice for the Mexico City Grand Prix.
Charles Leclerc topped both Friday practice sessions in Mexico City for Ferrari, while team-mate Lewis Hamilton’s day was dented by a technical failure in the second session.
Lewis Hamilton says he intends to keep racing in Formula 1 ‘for the foreseeable future’ if he stays competitive, while still ruling out extending his career into the 2030s.
The Red Sox have started trimming their 40-man roster, dealing away Nate Eaton and Tsung-Che Cheng in two separate trades as the offseason begins, with the roster’s rules forcing further moves.
DJ Ralph Lawson has unearthed an hour-long mixtape that Daft Punk sent him in 1997 for his Trans Europe Express radio show, a time capsule from early in the duo’s career.