Amazon is taking a private-label swing on the golf course. The online retail giant started recently selling golf balls under its Amazon Basics brand in mid-October. The balls showed up on my doorstep a day after ordering. Using each ball, the pros hit 10 shots with three different clubs: driver, 7-iron, and wedge. It wasn't a huge surprise to see both professionals generate more distance and higher ball speeds with the Taylormade and Titleist balls, particularly off the driver (about 10 yards on average). However, Yee said he wouldn't be opposed to a student using the Amazon Basics ball. And at the low price point, Nutt said it's “certainly not a bad option.” Popular YouTuber Rick Shiels said he was “blown away” by the value in his own test, while instructor Matt Fisher called the balls an easy buy for golfers who “lose a bunch.” The balls have a 4.5-star rating from nearly 600 reviews on Amazon. Shiels said they are supplied by the same company behind Costco's Kirkland Signature balls. Amazon's golf balls are USGA-approved, meaning they can be used during competitions. The balls are currently listed as out of stock on Amazon's site, but will be available again in early 2026. But I see the appeal for beginners, high-handicap golfers, and anyone more worried about losing balls than squeezing out extra yards down the fairway. The chips powering your smart TV, voice assistant, tablet, and car all have something in common: MediaTek Click for more about underwritten and sponsored content on GeekWire. Click for more about underwritten and sponsored content on GeekWire. Starbucks hires Amazon grocery tech leader as new CTO amid turnaround push This startup helped Bryson DeChambeau win the U.S. Open — can it improve my golf swing? Startup Radar: Seattle companies tackle ports, protein design, golf scorecards, and e-commerce returns Startup radar: Seattle founders tackle cooking, golfing, online shopping, and AI coding agents Seattle startup raises $1.25M for electric bike used on golf courses

For better or worse, everyone's been talking about the final season of Stranger Things, and its finale in particular. Reactions have been mixed across the board, but for creators Ross and Matt Duffer, things more or less ended as intended. Leading up to the finale, fans made a petition convinced there was unseen footage held hostage by Netflix, or even a secret episode. But the brothers told Variety that no such interference or hidden episode exists, with Matt saying they've made the show “[we] wanted to make. If the Duffers had their say, they'd just let Stranger Things speak for itself from now on. With Vecna, for example, they basically wrote the season like the First Shadow musical laying out his origin just didn't exist, since they didn't want to confuse anyone who hadn't watched the musical. But don't worry, they're “sure” Joyce and Hopper talked about their Vecna connection offscreen, which…is something, right? Likewise, they'd like audiences to determine for themselves whether young Henry embraced his own darkness or was ultimately manipulated by the Mind Flayer. At one point, though, they were interested in putting him in what Ross Duffer called “a Darth Vader-type situation” where he'd have reneged on the Flayer. As explained in a Netflix Q&A, that idea was scrapped after they talked with the writers and Vecna's actor Jamie Campbell Bower and settled on Vecna having to “justify everything he's done with, ‘I chose this, and I believe in this still.' And by having them believe in what could be a lie, “it was such a better way to end the story and represent the closure of this journey and their journey from children to adults,” continued Ross. Obviously, some Stranger Things fans don't think that onscreen coyness is actually intentional or even works in the finale's favor. But until (or if) a sequel series happens, it's on them to craft their own theories and fill any holes in the Duffers' narrative that they see fit, or at least until the Duffers go and explain or rationalize something else from it. Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. If Netflix has its way, a shorter-than-desired theatrical run could be in the cards for future Warner Bros. movies. 'Dungeons &Dragons' was the obvious reference, but Peter Jackson's fantasy trilogy also played a hand in how the Netflix series wrapped up its final episode. ‘The Rightside Up' brought the Netflix blockbuster to its end with a blend of action and agony—plus an epilogue stuffed with hazy happiness.

The chatbot, built by Elon Musk's AI startup xAI and featured on his social media platform X, posted an apology to its account earlier this week, writing, “I deeply regret an incident on Dec 28, 2025, where I generated and shared an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualized attire based on a user's prompt.” The statement continued, “This violated ethical standards and potentially US laws on [child sexual abuse material]. It was a failure in safeguards, and I'm sorry for any harm caused. It's not clear who is actually apologizing or accepting responsibility in the statement above. Defector's Albert Burneko noted that Grok is “not in any real sense anything like an ‘I',” which in his view makes the apology “utterly without substance” as “Grok cannot be held accountable in any meaningful way for having turned Twitter into an on-demand CSAM factory.” Futurism found that in addition to generating nonconsensual pornographic images, Grok has also been used to generate images of women being assaulted and sexually abused. “Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content,” Musk posted on Saturday. Some governments have taken notice, with India's IT ministry issuing an order on Friday saying that X must take action to restrict Grok from generating content that is “obscene, pornographic, vulgar, indecent, sexually explicit, pedophilic, or otherwise prohibited under law.” The order said that X must respond within 72 hours or risk losing the “safe harbor” protections that shield it from legal liability for user-generated content. French authorities also said they are taking action, with the Paris prosecutor's office telling Politico that it will investigate the proliferation of sexually explicit deepfakes on X. The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission also posted a statement saying that it has “taken note with serious concern of public complaints about the misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) tools on the X platform, specifically the digital manipulation of images of women and minors to produce indecent, grossly offensive, and otherwise harmful content.” You can contact or verify outreach from Anthony by emailing anthony.ha@techcrunch.com. Clicks debuts its own take on the BlackBerry smartphone, plus a $79 snap-on mobile keyboard Meta just bought Manus, an AI startup everyone has been talking about Sauron, the high-end home security startup for ‘super premium' customers, plucks a new CEO out of Sonos

These retro-analog designs showcase the firm's latest circular 1.5-inch and 13.4-inch OLED displays. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Samsung is teasing some intriguing new OLED products, ready to showcase at CES 2026 over the next few days. Samsung Display's press release highlights the flexible solutions that its latest OLED technologies can enable, by outlining “several speaker-type AI assistant concepts.” In addition to the (predictable) cute robot and mood lamps, it shared images of the eyebrow-raising AI OLED Cassette and AI OLED Turntable. What caught our attention in this latest news were the “Edge Device concept models that illustrate how OLED could elevate AI-driven lifestyles when applied to AI-enabled form factors.” There also seems to be a lozenge shaped display above these circular OLEDs with an interactive tuning dial, or something like that. The second of its retro-analog devices appears to be touch controlled. What the practical, or fun, use of such a large circular touch display is, in an AI OLED turntable device, isn't obvious at this time. We've had fun looking at Samsung Display's productized flights of fancy – even if it prefixes then all with ‘AI.' However, there's some really worthwhile advances highlighted in its PR. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. For example, the firm is also producing tougher than ever OLEDs, with durability demonstrated by its robot basketball test, steel ball drop test, and refrigerator (cold temperature) tests. In automotive, Samsung will also demonstrate multiple in-car displays such as an 18.1‑inch Flexible L‑shaped Center Display, a 30‑inch 32:9 Rear Seat Entertainment display, and - OLED tail lamp displays capable of showing warnings like ‘Accident Ahead.' Road warriors may also appreciate the new UT One (Ultra Thin) OLED, which promises “30% thinner and 30% lighter” panels for laptops, using hybrid thin‑film layers and Oxide TFT for 1–120Hz variable refresh. Color fidelity isn't neglected, with these 100% DCI-P3 color panels claimed to deliver “deeper blacks by eliminating the air gap between glass substrates.” Other new OLED monitors and TVs are set to offer new always-on modes and 4,500‑nits peak brightness levels. Last but not least, we'd like to highlight Samsung's new 1.4‑inch RGB OLEDoS. This XR microdisplay targets headsets with its compact 5,000 PPI display and wide viewing angles. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Windows 11 gets a bad rep in the community because of its higher baseline overhead, stringent hardware requirements, UI regressions, and more - not to mention the forced Microsoft hooks that keep getting worse by the day. Moreover, when placed in a rather unscientific test by TrigrZolt, comparing six different generations of Windows with each other, it placed dead last in pretty much every individual test, though the situation is a bit more nuanced. That setup alone should tell you how the methodology employed here is skewed toward favoring older software. Windows 11 isn't even officially supported on these components. Next up is RAM management where Windows XP is the winner once again, consuming only 0.8GB of system memory at idle, while Windows 11's appetite grew to 3.3GB on average; it jumped to 3.7GB at one point. Older hardware with less RAM, therefore, will be more susceptible to sluggishness on Windows 11. Keep in mind, TrigrZolt is also running a system with a hard drive, which are outdated at this point regardless of your operating system loyalties. Any modern system with a decent CPU and NVMe SSD will likely mask over the general inefficiency Windows 11 shows, plus options like debloat tools and Xbox FSE can further help here. Since Firefox and Chrome don't load webpages properly anymore on archaic Windows versions, a more widely-compatible browser called Supermium was used across all devices. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Once again, Windows 11 places dead last here, only being able to load a measly 49 tabs. Even the older Windows XP managed 50 tabs, and that's because it kept crashing past that number because of its paging file failing to keep up, not because it had hit the 5GB memory ceiling. Our fourth test is for battery life and, of course, Windows 11 died first here, while Windows XP walked away with the best endurance. Though, the delta between all the devices was only about two minutes so it won't make a difference in real-world usage. All the laptops had 100% battery health, too, and the same program was run to drain them as quickly as possible. Moving on, exporting an audio file in Audacity once again put Windows 11 at fifth place, only ahead of Windows Vista which was experiencing an unusual delay, otherwise all laptops finished around the same time. The same fate follows Windows 11 when it came to rendering a video, finishing in last, with Windows 10 taking first place. Here, Windows XP and Vista couldn't load the OpenShot Video Editor that was used, so they were disqualified. In application opening times, Windows 11 got last place across all five programs that were tested: File Explorer, MS Paint, Calculator, Adobe Reader, and VLC Media Player. Older versions of Adobe Reader and VLC were used to ensure compatibility with all six operating systems, so there's a bit of performance left on the table, but still the native apps didn't win any awards either. After so many consecutive losses, Windows 11 actually secured third place in one half of the web browsing test where it had to load an image, but fell to last place again when visiting the Google Images and Microsoft Account login websites. Finally, we arrive at our last test, which are benchmarks. All in all, this was a pretty devastating showing for Windows 11 where it couldn't even win a single test. However, the hardware is just so outdated at this point that it doesn't represent the Windows 11 experience faithfully. The laptops were never designed to run a modern operating system, neither does Microsoft's latest OS support this hardware. The omission of an SSD, especially, is strange since that's a component every edition of Windows will benefit from, and something that truly does hold back Windows 11 here. The YouTuber himself mentions that this test represents historic value more than practicality. He ended up giving the overall win to Windows 8.1, saying how fluid and fast it felt, despite being ridiculed at the time of its release. A better methodology would've been to use flagship — or even midrange, for that matter — laptops from every generation: custodians of that era of Windows, so that each version had the best shot at performing at its full potential. As it stands right now, while it's quite funny to see Microsoft's increasingly AI-riddled OS loose against legacy offerings, the test just wasn't set up fairly to begin with. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he's not working, you'll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. © Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York,

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. According to u/Gb2753's post on the r/pcmasterrace subreddit, they can only order up to five units per Nvidia RTX 5070 graphics card, while the Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti and higher models are completely unavailable. It has gotten so bad that some scalpers are now selling DDR5 kits for more than $2,000 on eBay. NAND chips used in SSD storage are also following suit, with a Kingston rep saying that prices have gone up by 246% in the last year alone. These price hikes will not stop at the RAM modules and SSDs, though. Instead, they will have a ripple effect on everything that needs memory and storage, with GPUs now being affected. Signs this would happen were first observed in late November, when Nvidia said that it will no longer supply VRAM alongside its GPU chips to board partners, meaning manufacturers need to source their own memory supply. This heavily affects higher performing GPUs that come with 16GB or more of GDDR7 memory. While we cannot verify the accuracy of the report on Reddit, we did share confirmed reports of GPU rationing in Japan. computer retailer based in Akihabara posted signs limiting customers to just one 16GB+ GPU per purchase, whether it's an Nvidia GeForce or AMD Radeon GPU. Other nearby stores had the same concerns, with some saying that their suppliers are unsure when they can deliver shipments again, if at all. With the memory shortage hitting RAM kits, SSDs, and GPUs, some Japanese shops have halted PC orders just before Christmas 2025 and won't deliver anything until 2026. But with the AI infrastructure's insatiable demand for memory and storage chips, it seems that consumers cannot do anything except wait out the storm until either memory and storage chip market falls back to normal levels or manufacturers build more fabs and production lines to catch up with the demand. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. But in general, research mathematicians don't need to think about it when they're solving their problems. This small community of mathematicians never stopped studying the fundamental nature of sets—particularly the strange infinite ones that other mathematicians ignore. Their field just got a lot less lonely. In 2023, a mathematician named Anton Bernshteyn published a deep and surprising connection between the remote mathematical frontier of descriptive set theory and modern computer science. He showed that all problems about certain kinds of infinite sets can be rewritten as problems about how networks of computers communicate. There's no reason why their problems should be related, much less equivalent. “This is something really weird,” said Václav Rozhoň, a computer scientist at Charles University in Prague. “Like, you are not supposed to have this.” “This whole time we've been working on very similar problems without directly talking to each other,” said Clinton Conley, a descriptive set theorist at Carnegie Mellon University. “It just opens the doors to all these new collaborations.” Bernshteyn was an undergraduate when he first heard of descriptive set theory—as an example of a field that had once mattered, then decayed to nothing. More than a year would pass before he found out the professor had been wrong. In 2014, as a first-year graduate student at the University of Illinois, Bernshteyn took a logic course with Anush Tserunyan, who would later become one of his advisers. “She should take all the credit for me being in this field,” he said. “She really made it seem that logic and set theory is this glue that connects all different parts of math.” Descriptive set theory dates back to Georg Cantor, who proved in 1874 that there are different sizes of infinity. Anush Tserunyan sees descriptive set theory as the connective tissue that holds different parts of mathematics together. At the time, mathematicians were deeply uncomfortable with this menagerie of different infinities. “It's hard to wrap your head around,” said Bernshteyn, who is now at the University of California, Los Angeles. Partly in response to that discomfort, mathematicians developed a different notion of size—one that described, say, how much length or area or volume a set might occupy, rather than the number of elements it contained. This notion of size is known as a set's “measure” (in contrast to Cantor's notion of size, which is a set's “cardinality”). Georg Cantor discovered that mathematical infinity can come in many different shapes and sizes. To study more complicated sets, mathematicians use other types of measures. Descriptive set theorists ask questions about which sets can be measured according to different definitions of “measure.” They then arrange them in a hierarchy based on the answers to those questions. At the top are sets that can be constructed easily and studied using any notion of measure you want. “The word people often use is ‘pathological,'” Bernshteyn said. This hierarchy doesn't just help set theorists map out the landscape of their field; it also gives them insights into what tools they can use to tackle more typical problems in other areas of math. Mathematicians in some fields, such as dynamical systems, group theory, and probability theory, need information about the size of the sets they're using. A set's position in the hierarchy determines what tools they can use to solve their problem. Their job is to take a problem, determine how complicated a set its solution requires, and place it on the proper shelf, so that other mathematicians can take note. Bernshteyn belongs to a group of librarians who sort problems about infinite sets of nodes connected by edges, called graphs. Most graph theorists don't study these kinds of graphs; they focus on finite ones instead. But such infinite graphs can represent and provide information about dynamical systems and other important kinds of sets, making them a major area of interest for descriptive set theorists. Start with a circle, which contains infinitely many points. Pick one point: This will be your first node. Then move a fixed distance around the circle's circumference. If you move one-fifth of the way around the circle each time, it'll take five steps to get back where you started. In general, if you move any distance that can be written as a fraction, the nodes will form a closed loop. You'll get an infinite number of connected nodes. But that's not all: This infinitely long sequence forms only the first piece of your graph. You'll end up building a second infinite sequence of connected nodes, totally disconnected from the first. Do this for every possible new starting point on the circle. Mathematicians can then ask whether it's possible to color the nodes in this graph so that they obey certain rules. Using just two colors, for instance, can you color every node in the graph so that no two connected nodes are the same color? Look at the first piece of your graph, pick a node, and color it blue. Do the same for every piece in your graph: Pick a node, color it blue, then alternate colors. Ultimately, you'll use just two colors to achieve your task. But to accomplish this coloring, you had to rely on a hidden assumption that set theorists call the axiom of choice. It's one of the nine fundamental building blocks from which all mathematical statements are constructed. According to this axiom, if you start with a bunch of sets, you can choose one item from each of those sets to create a new set—even if you have infinitely many sets to choose from. All those blue points formed a new set. Which leads to a problem when you color the rest of the nodes in alternating patterns of blue and yellow. You've colored each node (which has zero length) separately, without any understanding of how nodes relate to one another when they come from different pieces of the graph. Mathematicians can't say anything useful about them. And so they want to figure out a way to color the graph in a continuous way—a way that doesn't use the axiom of choice, and that gives them measurable sets. Soon, you'll have made it almost completely around the circle—meaning that you've assigned a color to all the nodes in your graph except for the ones that fall in a small, leftover segment. Say the last arc you colored was yellow. How do you color this final, smaller segment? You can't use blue, because these nodes will connect to nodes in the original arc you colored blue. You have to use a third color—say, green—to complete your coloring. You can calculate the lengths of these sets. Then, shortly after he finished his degree, he stumbled on a potential way to shelve them all at once—and to show that these problems have a much deeper and more mathematically relevant structure than anyone had realized. From time to time, Bernshteyn enjoys going to computer science talks, where graphs are finite and represent networks of computers. Nearby routers can interfere with each other if they use the same communication frequency channel. So each router needs to choose a different channel from the ones used by its immediate neighbors. But there's a catch: Nodes can only communicate with their immediate neighbors, using so-called local algorithms. First, each node runs the same algorithm and assigns itself a color. It repeats this step until the whole network has a proper coloring. Computer scientists want to know how many steps a given algorithm requires. For example, any local algorithm that can solve the router problem with only two colors must be incredibly inefficient, but it's possible to find a very efficient local algorithm if you're allowed to use three. One of the thresholds, he realized, sounded a lot like a threshold that existed in the world of descriptive set theory—about the number of colors required to color certain infinite graphs in a measurable way. To Bernshteyn, it felt like more than a coincidence. It wasn't just that computer scientists are like librarians too, shelving problems based on how efficiently their algorithms work. It wasn't just that these problems could also be written in terms of graphs and colorings. Perhaps, he thought, the two bookshelves had more in common than that. Bernshteyn set out to make this connection explicit. He wanted to show that every efficient local algorithm can be turned into a Lebesgue-measurable way of coloring an infinite graph (that satisfies some additional important properties). That is, one of computer science's most important shelves is equivalent to one of set theory's most important shelves (high up in the hierarchy). He began with the class of network problems from the computer science lecture, focusing on their overarching rule—that any given node's algorithm uses information about just its local neighborhood, whether the graph has a thousand nodes or a billion. To run properly, all the algorithm has to do is label each node in a given neighborhood with a unique number, so that it can log information about nearby nodes and give instructions about them. That's easy enough to do in a finite graph: Just give every node in the graph a different number. There's no way to uniquely label all their nodes. But that was fine so long as nearby nodes were labeled differently. Was there a way to assign labels without accidentally reusing one in the same neighborhood? Bernshteyn showed that there is always a way—no matter how many labels you decide to use, and no matter how many nodes your local neighborhood has. “Any algorithm in our setup corresponds to a way of measurably coloring any graph in the descriptive set theory setup,” Rozhoň said. The proof came as a surprise to mathematicians. Mathematicians are now exploring how to take advantage of Bernshteyn's discovery. In a paper published this year, for instance, Rozhoň and his colleagues figured out that it's possible to color special graphs called trees by looking at the same problem in the computer science context. “This is a very interesting experience, trying to prove results in a field where I don't understand even the basic definitions,” Rozhoň said. Mathematicians have also been working to translate problems in the other direction. In one case, they used set theory to prove a new estimate of how hard a certain class of problems is to solve. Bernshteyn's bridge isn't just about having a new toolkit for solving individual problems. It has also allowed set theorists to gain a clearer view of their field. There were lots of problems that they had no idea how to classify. In many cases, that's now changed, because set theorists have computer scientists' more organized bookshelves to guide them. Bernshteyn hopes this growing area of research will change how the working mathematician views set theorists' work—that they'll no longer see it as remote and disconnected from the real mathematical world. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences. 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