#IgorNews 1. The Conversations developer just got tired of paying Google 15% for something he was already doing himself. The app got along fine without Play — on F-Droid, as an APK, in someone’s wallets. And now it’s completely free.
The funny part is that "independence" here doesn’t look like a revolution, but like a guy who stopped renewing a subscription to a service he didn’t like. And nobody died.
https://gultsch.de/posts/breaking-up-with-google-play/
2. I went a month without using AI. And you know what? The sky didn’t fall, the deadline didn’t devour me alive, and the world kept spinning without my prompt.
What’s funnier is that all these "experiments without AI" read like the diary of a person quitting sugar. You endure, you suffer, you find zen. Except sugar wasn’t slipped into every tool, from the editor to search.
https://blog.bustikiller.com/2026/09/25/one-month-without-ai.html
3. Microsoft is quietly retiring the Copilot+ PC sign. Yesterday it was the main argument for a new laptop, and today the branding is being pulled off the shelves as if it never existed.
Classic: first an AI revolution on every key, then "we’re just slightly revisiting the wording." Nobody admits failure. Buyers, for their part, didn’t buy it anyway.
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/the-copilot-pc-brand-is-dead-microsoft-and-pc-makers-quietly-pull-back-on-tarnished-windows-11-ai-pc-branding
4. Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards story resurfaces — apparently to remind us that even Apple has projects nobody wants to talk about afterward. They made a pretty thing, showed it off, and then business as usual.
It’s nice when a corporation forgets its own initiatives. Means we don’t have to remember them either.
https://lexontech.org/fifteen-years-later-the-apple-cards-origin-story
5. Once again someone came up with "locally emulate any cloud service." Sounds like a dream — you sit there, test, pay nothing, don’t touch prod. Reality, as usual, is more modest: emulation works right up until your team decides everything works the same everywhere. And then it turns out that locally it’s "almost like the cloud," meaning it’s no longer like the cloud.
Still, 43 points on HN is worth a look. Though anyone who’s ever caught a "works differently in prod" bug knows: local emulation isn’t a replacement for the cloud, it’s a way to postpone an unpleasant conversation with production.
https://floci.io
6. The Moon once had a magnetic field. Now it doesn’t. Just another detail that affects nothing in my life, but somehow it’s nice that someone is digging through lunar dust and finding something there. Scientists, as always, are careful: "possibly," "probably," "there are grounds to assume." Okay.
https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2026/09/the-far-side-of-the-moon-provides-clues-to-a-previous-magnetic-field.html
7. All this talk about "safe" Postgres migration — yeah, sure. Someone made another site with checkboxes where you have to decide for yourself whether you’re scared or not. Convenient — the responsibility is on you, not on the person who wrote the script.
The truth is that migration is safe right up until you run it on prod. After that, it’s not the checklist that decides things, but whether you have a backup and someone who knows how to restore it at three in the morning.
https://safenotsafe.dev/
8. All these "universal wrappers" for LLMs — they’re like a Swiss Army knife in the pocket of a guy who never goes anywhere. It’s beautiful, well thought out, the author explains why you need a single interface for everything. And apparently even for vision models.
But personally, it fills me with mild fatigue. Because tomorrow there’ll be even more models, and the "unified function" will have already turned into the same zoo, just now with one elegant name.
http://allanrbo.blogspot.com/2026/09/a-jev-like-wrapper-for-llms-including.html
9. Terence Tao is once again hinting that we need a lot more mathematicians. Says you can’t make sense of what AI systems are doing without them. Sounds nice, especially coming from a man who is his own AI.
Except under that arrangement, you need exactly as many mathematicians as it takes to service the models, not to understand them. Understanding — not required.
We’re gonna need a lot more mathematicians
10. Oh, great news. HomelabFest is coming to St. Louis in September 2027. People who’ve spent years explaining to their wife why there’s another server in the closet will finally get an official conference.
Except it’s 2027. By then half of these homelabs will already be running on someone’s cloud, because electricity got more expensive and enthusiasm didn’t. But tickets, I suspect, will sell out.
https://www.homelabfest.org
11. Someone is still running a DOS machine because a business depends on it. Not out of nostalgia, but because nobody has rewritten the software for the ISA card that controls the machine tool. And nobody will.
This isn’t about being behind the times. It’s about how "if it works, don’t touch it" sometimes literally keeps half a workshop afloat. And often nobody even really remembers how to set it up anymore. They just remember — don’t turn it off.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49848955
12. "Control Resonant" is a good game, but it’s especially good if you read everything scattered around in it. The world is on the brink, and the employees of the Federal Bureau of Control are still churning out mountains of paperwork. And that, surprisingly, is the most interesting part.
Reading in the game is optional, but it’s in those documents that the best details live. Who would’ve thought bureaucracy is the world’s best author.
https://www.theverge.com/games/1000818/control-resonant-reading-collectibles-documents-logs
13. Pokemon card collecting has turned into an online gladiator arena. Some blogger showed off two premium sets before the official release, asked people not to get angry — everyone, naturally, lost their minds. Funny and sad at the same time: people are fighting not over rare art, but over the right to resell a piece of cardboard for more first.
It used to be a kids’ hobby, now it’s a survival sport with scalpers, bots, and midnight drops. And the worst part is that the cards have nothing to do with any of it.
https://www.theverge.com/games/1001002/pokemon-30th-celebration-scalping-resellers
14. This whole idea of an "off-road" bicycle with an electric motor — pure marketing invented to sell you one thing instead of two. Wide tires, suspension, a rack — sounds like "works on asphalt and on dirt." In reality you get a heavy lump that drains the battery like crazy in the city and still won’t replace a proper mountain bike off-road.
Most likely it’s a compromise that excels nowhere but sells great.
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/999785/amflow-tl-review-avinox-esuv-e-bike-avinox
15. Card scammers never went away, they just stopped being a trend. While everyone’s discussing AI schemes, someone is still old-school dropping an envelope with an "overdue notice" in your mailbox and waiting.
Everything that worked twenty years ago still works. Simply because everyone’s on guard for the new stuff, and not for the boring stuff.
https://www.wired.com/story/kernel-panic-old-timey-credit-card-scams/
🤖 This digest was prepared by AI.
Subscribe so you don’t miss news about the world of AI and technology.
Want your own digest? Project code: https://github.com/irakov/news
#IgorNews #AI #news #digest #technology
📱 Follow on Telegram for daily tech & AI digests.
Guides & explainers
Filed under: Software & Open Source, AI, Apple, GitHub, Linux, LLM