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28 May 2025

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Coco Gauff forgets racquets at French Open
Tennis star Coco Gauff caused a brief and amusing delay at the French Open when she stepped onto Court Philippe-Chatrier without her racquets.

Victim’s motorbike taken after fatal crash - police
Police say motorbike was removed from scene before emergency services arrived.

Power prices rise faster than rate of inflation
Powerswitch is worried that the current model is thriving on customer "confusion and inertia".

Transdev threatened to axe hundreds of Wellington trains over stoush with regional council
The train operator wanted the council to compensate it for increased leave payouts following law changes.

Retailers relieved at police commissioner's clarification on when to investigate crimes
An internal police memo told staff not to investigate crimes under a certain dollar value, but commissioner Richard Chambers has scrapped the controversial directive.

How many public sector jobs have really been axed?
Thousands of jobs have been cut as part of government cost-saving. But exactly how many have gone varies a lot depending on who you ask.

The good, the bad, and the apocalypse: Tech pioneer Geoffrey Hinton lays out his stark vision for AI
Geoffrey Hinton is known as the Godfather of AI. His greatest fear is that the digital beings we've created will grow smarter than us.

Gates, security systems affected by 3G shutdown
Consumer NZ has advice for people who purchased something in the past few years.

Sparkle’s ‘Thundermage’ concept pitches Thunderbolt as a GPU port
Traditionally, PC graphics cards have included two types of ports: DisplayPort and HDMI. Now, they may be adding a third: Thunderbolt. Sparkle showed what it called “Project Thundermage” this year at Computex, a prototype OPC graphics card that put HDMI, DisplayPort, and a pair of Thunderbolt ports onto the same graphics card. The tell, however, was the partner: Intel, whose “Battlemage” Arc GPUs were paired with the Intel “Barlow Ridge” Thunderbolt 5 controller. To date, graphics cards have taken advantage of either the latest DisplayPort or HDMI ports, which both offer the bandwidth necessary for gaming-class displays — such as in the graphics card above, which isn’t from Sparkle. Meanwhile, displays with integrated USB-C ports were typically paired with laptops with Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4 ports for laptop docking stations: perfect for productivity, but lacking support for the high-refresh-rate displays normally associated with gaming. Thunderbolt 5, however, alters that equation. Thunderbolt 5 offers 80Gbits/s upstream, and even 120Gbits/s in certain cases. That’s enough for both high-resolution content creation as well as high-speed gaming, provided that manufacturers support it. It’s not clear whether display makers will be willing to add yet another port to their displays, but Intel partner Sparkle is obviously making the case that it could. Videocardz, which noted a @akiba_ten_M’s photo showing off Sparkle’s booth, notes that Thunderbolt’s integrated power delivery could be used to power external displays, too. That seems less likely, but certainly could be a way to reduce the cost of an external display.

Teen killed in Run It Straight game was continuing celebrations from a 21st birthday
Ryan Satterthwaite suffered the serious head injury on Sunday. His life support was turned off on Monday night.

Homes gates, security systems affected by 3G shutdown
Consumer NZ has advice for people who purchased something in the past few years.

What's going on with the price of bitcoin?
Fifteen years ago, 10,000 bitcoin bought two pizzas. Now that amount would be worth more than US$1 billion.

Auckland FC scoop major prizes at A-League's awards night
There were also major awards for defender Francis de Vries and goalkeeper Alex Paulsen.

What is it like being a sketch artist in the P Diddy trial?
Dried and chapped fingers, blackened finger cots and eight hours of sitting on a wooden court pew - American artists are giving their all to cover intense trial proceedings.

MPs urged to 'lead by example' and trim superannuation subsidy
The decades-old scheme gives members a subsidy of two and half times what MPs contribute, up to a maximum payment of 20 percent of a backbencher's salary.

Senior Gisborne Hospital doctors on 24-hour strike, say hospital 'on the brink of collapse'
The Association of Salaried Medical Specialists says it's written to the government twice to express concern about the hospital being "on the brink of collapse".

The beloved Arc browser is in stasis, cast aside for an AI future
Don’t expect too much from the Arc browser in the future. The browser’s developer admitted over the weekend that while Arc is being maintained, new features are no longer in active development. The explanation, however, is convoluted. In a blog post, the company explained that while they concluded that the Arc browser was “incremental,” its novel features weren’t being used, either. For example, just under 6 percent of users took advantage of what Arc called a “space,” or workspace. “After a couple of years of building and shipping Arc, we started running into something we called the ‘novelty tax’ problem,” the company wrote. “A lot of people loved Arc — if you’re here you might just be one of them — and we’d benefitted from consistent, organic growth since basically Day One. But for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward.” For now, Arc seems to be in limbo. Because Arc runs on a custom infrastructure knows as the Arc Development Kit, it’s “too complex to break from Chrome,” the company wrote, and it’s the company’s “secret sauce.” Instead, the company has shifted work to Dia, which the company says will be an “AI-first” browser. That browser is currently in alpha testing. The problem, the company says, is that ADK is split between the two browsers, preventing the company from moving forward with Arc. “So while we’d love to open-source Arc someday, we can’t do that meaningfully without also open-sourcing ADK. And ADK is still core to our company’s value. That doesn’t mean it’ll never happen. If the day comes where it no longer puts our team or shareholders at risk, we’d be excited to share what we’ve built with the world. But we’re not there yet.” The Browser Company of New York said it still believes that the world will move on from the current browsers like Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, and that traditional web pages won’t be its foundation. “Imagine writing an essay justifying why you were moving on from your candle business at the dawn of electric light,” the company said. “Electric intelligence is here — and it would be naive of us to pretend it doesn’t fundamentally change the kind of product we need to build to meet the moment.” It’s certainly possible that the (sigh) The Browser Company of New York will end up being correct, perhaps even ahead of its time. But the metaphors being used here, which carried over into the Arc browser’s visual aesthetic, were too twee for me. Perhaps Dia will offer a helping hand to those of us who are still stuck in the past. Perhaps not. There’s certainly room for a product that simply wants to break with history and embrace an AI-powered future. Doing so, though, limits your market appeal and also locks you into a younger aesthetic that, incidentally, seems to be aggressively rejecting the use of AI. I’m happy to admit that I don’t quite understand what the company is going for. Maybe Dia will make it all clear, someday.