It remains to be seen if people really want to watch vertical content on horizontal TV screens, but many filmmakers and creators were confident that their latest projects would play well at Alza - New York City's first microdrama film festival. Founded by former Tribeca Festival chief operating officer Pete Torres, Alza, which took place October 16th through 18th, was billed as a showcase for the "the creativity, innovation, and growing cultural impact of stories made for the vertical screen." The festival featured a selection of microdrama and film premieres as well as industry-focused panels with executives who all seemed to genuinely beli …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple today updated its Apple Support app to add support for the iPhone Duo and iOS 27.1 (which the Duo ships with). Apple Support will now display properly on the ‌iPhone Duo‌'s wider screen, and it can be used alongside other apps in Split View.


‌iPhone Duo‌ reviews went live today, and poorly sized apps are a recurring complaint among reviewers. Apps that aren't updated for ‌iPhone Duo‌ are letterboxed, with thick black bars on each side.

Apple will continue adapting its apps for the device, and we should see plenty of third-party ‌iPhone Duo‌ app updates in the coming weeks. Any major change to screen size results in early hiccups, but a few months from now, ‌iPhone Duo‌ app compatibility will be largely fixed.

Apple Support is Apple's dedicated app for troubleshooting device issues and looking up support documents. It is a free download from the App Store. [Direct Link]
This article, "Apple Support App Updated for iPhone Duo's Larger Display" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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With You Can See Everything, Holmes joins other such high-profile subjects as Lance Armstrong, Imelda Marcos and Anthony Weiner to allow film-makers to document their lives. But do they ever come out well?

In You Can See Everything, convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes invites film-makers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim into her home in a supposed act of “radical transparency”. Holmes is filmed, along with her partner, Billy Evans, and their two young children, in the weeks before starting a prison sentence for defrauding Theranos investors. “The best way for people to see who she is,” Evans says, “is to give as much access as possible into our daily lives”. It may also be the best way to market “Theranos 2.0”, which the couple are working on during filming. But the documentary questions whether Holmes is presenting her authentic self or a manufactured persona. Fielder speaks for the audience when he asks Holmes in a tense exchange whether she’s “being real” with him. “I’m always being real,” she says.

That question of authenticity is at the heart of documentary film-making. You Can See Everything is as much about the ambiguous relationship between film-maker and subject as it is about Holmes herself. There is often a power struggle over narrative control in documentaries, with both sides of the dynamic wanting different outcomes from the final film. Watching You Can See Everything inevitably prompts the question: why would Holmes, days before she heads to jail, invite the scrutiny of a film crew?

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© Photograph: Courtesy of A24

© Photograph: Courtesy of A24

© Photograph: Courtesy of A24

As Elon Musk tries to save face by claiming he’ll give every American child a chunk of SpaceX stock, here’s a chilling reminder of what he did that affected millions of children the second he had a whiff of federal power.

In a new interview, the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, who directed a just-released four-hour look at the billionaire’s life titled “Musk,” discussed the staggering death toll of Musk’s cuts to USAID, calling it a “crime against humanity.”

“There was an estimate that what [Musk] did by so suddenly cutting USAID would cost through disease and starvation as many as 14 million lives,” he told journalist Katie Couric. “Even if you discount that by an enormous amount, we know that within about a year of those summary cuts — where they were literally burning food that had already been paid for that was going to starving children — 500,000 children died.”

Musk, to Gibney’s astonishment, even joked about the cuts by saying he’d “put USAID into the woodchipper.” 

“What he put into the woodchipper,” Gibney said, “were children.”

Gibney, whose documentary Musk called a “hit piece,” is drawing from a 2025 study published in The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals. It estimated the impact of Musk effectively neutering USAID by implementing a freeze on its foreign aid funding — which went to programs to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and to address food insecurities — and slashing nearly 10,000 employees. 

In sum, the researchers found that the “steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 million additional all-age deaths, including 4.5 million in children younger than age five, by 2030.”

Even conservative estimates concurred that the number of deaths would be staggering. A tracker created by Brooke Nichols, a professor and infectious disease mathematical modeler at Boston University, projects the 1-year death toll caused by the USAID cuts at 518,000 children.

It’s a touchy subject for Musk, who continues to bristle at accusations that his actions could’ve caused harm. This summer, he challenged his critics to “cite a single name of someone who died” as a result of him gutting USAID. Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, took him up on it and gave him a list of the specific children who had died directly from his policies, many of whom were in South Sudan and Liberia — places he had visited in person to talk to locals and healthcare workers.

Musk, rather than countering his arguments, called Kristof “evil.”

More on Elon Musk: Elon Musk Says It Was the Pentagon That Shut Down Starlink for the Ukrainian Military

The post Elon Musk’s Growing Death Toll: “What He Put Into the Woodchipper Were Children” appeared first on Futurism.

Flying cars are right around the corner, if Tesla CEO Elon Musk is to be believed.

Last week, he unveiled the automaker’s long-awaited Roadster by having it drive to the top of a ramp, flipping upside down in the process, then fling itself into the air before using its cold-fuel thrusters to gently land in style. Minutes later, another Roadster did its best Evel-Knievel-with-a-jetpack impression by blowing itself into the air and leaping over a row of six Tesla vehicles, including its Semi Truck cab.

Sure, the Roadster can “fly.” There’s no denying that it was an impressive stunt. But huge questions remain, such as whether regulators will ever deem it road — let alone air — worthy. Another is if the cars used in the stunt will remotely resemble the actual product that’s sold to consumers, if such a thing does ever come to pass.

Tesla says the “Rocket” version of its Roadster is loaded with 600 liters of compressed air, 10 directional cold-gas thruster nozzles, and a huge suction-fan system on the bottom. To make room for it all, Tesla says it removed the passenger seat.

But some observers are wondering if the car is even more stripped down than that, perhaps even lacking a full-sized battery so the engineers could save room and cut down weight. Meanwhile, screenshots of the car’s sparse looking underside taken while it was midair seemed to show it lacking a suction fan, fueling further speculation that Tesla hasn’t figured out to fully combine its capabilities as they’re being presented. The car that stuck upside down to the top of the ramp and then cushioned its landing was, some skeptics allege, equipped with different hardware from the one that leaped into the air to leapfrog the other cars.

Practical questions abound. Without a full-sized battery, the car obviously wouldn’t be able to drive around on roads even if it were allowed to.

None other than computer scientist and “godfather” of AI Yann LeCun derided the Roadster’s aerial acrobatics display, calling it a “marketing stunt” and questioning its authenticity.

“Even assuming that 50 percent of the mass of the car is the compressed air, that gives you less than 10s of useful thrust (with thrust-to-weight ratio larger than 1.0). Probably more like 5 seconds, actually,” he wrote on X. “So the car must be an empty, lightweight shell containing big compressed air tanks. Cute demo, but totally impractical.”

A little bit of misleading showmanship certainly isn’t below Musk. Tesla stunned the world in 2016 with a promotional video of its self-driving car puttering along public roads and dutifully stopping for red lights. Musk boasted that it was clear evidence that “Tesla drives itself.” But later, its engineers admitted the whole thing was staged. 

At its glitzy “We, Robot” event in 2024, Tesla tried to wow investors with its Optimus humanoid robots that poured drinks, danced on stage, and mingled with attendees while holding down a conversation. But it quickly became apparent that what Tesla had unleashed weren’t real-life C-3POs, because the seemingly autonomous robots were in reality individually teleoperated.

In any case, it’s impossible to verify what Musk’s showing off with the Roadster since Tesla isn’t allowing the public — journalists included — to take a peek under the hood.

More on Tesla: Tesla Bros Using AI to Dream Up Improbable Scenarios Where the Flying Tesla Roadster Would Be Helpful

The post Wait, Was Elon’s “Flying Car” Just an Empty Shell? appeared first on Futurism.

As the song goes, we all need a little help from our friends. And that applies to apps for our Macs and iPhones as well.

Fortunately, the apps in the spotlight this week all aim to lend a helping hand, whether it’s tracking down files to free up space on your devices, expanding text or storing clippings to save time or even doing things with the photos and screenshots you’ve accrued over the years.

Do you know of any helpful macOS and iOS offerings? Drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description. We won’t be able to respond to every email we receive, but we will give any and all suggestions a helpful once-over.

Crumb

I’m not as diligent about keeping my Mac free of detritus and cruft as I should be, to the point where gigabytes are often in short supply on my laptop’s drive. Crumb promises to do the hard work of freeing up space on your Mac, with some more sophisticated tools to help you track down the files that have outlived their usefulness.

At its most basic, Crumb clears out your caches, which can remove a surprising amount of filler if you’ve not used a cleaner app in a while. Running the app for the first time, I wound up with 2.4GB of cache and logs that could be safely jettisoned — I imagine that number won’t be as garish with more frequent cleanings, but anything that helps me keep my drive free of cruft is welcome.

Crumb has some other modes, like a Visualize tool that shows you what’s in different folders and how much space that folder takes up. An analysis tool can spot whether the content in the folder contains things you’ve created and, therefore, should be reviewed manually before deleting. You can also tap a shortcut button to head straight to a folder to review its contents.

I find Crumb’s Duplicate tool particularly useful, since I’m in the habit of downloading images, tweaking their sizes for stories and then keeping copies in multiple places. Duplicate tracks down the extras for purging, while an Uninstall feature helps you remove apps and any files they leave behind.

The free tier of Crumb entitles you to one full cleanup — a trial of the app, in essence. A one-time $9 payment unlocks unlimited cleanups as well as the Uninstall, Duplicates and Organize tools. (The latter feature sorts things into folders such as Images, Videos, Documents and more.) A Crumb license works on up to two Macs.

Klackey

Klackey is a multipurpose text expander that works on both Windows machines and Macs, though it’s only the macOS version we’re concerned with here. And while some may find the extensive toolset to be overkill — Klackey brings a lot to the table — the text expansion features certainly impress.

I get a lot of email submissions, as you might imagine, and I’ve been struggling with a way to send out a reply that doesn’t make responding to emails my full-time job. In Klackey, I can write a general reply and give it a simple code preceded by a semicolon — say ;reply — so that when I type that code into a Mac app that accepts text input like a mail client, my form letter shows up automatically. I can do that for any other frequently used text snippets I want to store in Klackey as well.

Klackey offers other features like a clipboard history for keeping everything you copy close at hand, a notes tool for organizing your thoughts and even an encrypted secure folder for storing items like passwords. I found the text expansion to be the real selling point, but you can decide for yourself with a free 14-day trial when you download Klackey. After that, a payment unlocks all the current features with a year of updates, with a cross-platform license covering up to two computers.

As I write this, Klackey is available for $35, a discount from the regular price of $49.

MemoryString

You’re not hurting for options when it comes to assembling your photos and videos into a movie that you can view or share with others. MemoryString is betting you’ll give this macOS offering a try for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s free.

That’s not “free” as in you get to assemble a video or two before you’re required to unlock the full app. MemoryString won’t cost you a dime to download — neither initially nor through any in-app purchases. Just grab the app, import some photos or videos and fiddle around with the transitions, titles and audio. (There’s a royalty-free library included with the app, or you can add your own music.) A MemoryString watermark does appear at the end of the finished video.

MemoryString looks to be an alternative to iMovie by getting you to the finished product faster, while also offering more control over your project than the Memory Movie feature included in Photos.

I found that the app works best when you import an image or folder, as MemoryString crashed when I tried dragging things directly from the Photos app on my Mac. However, MemoryString’s developer responded promptly to my bug report.

In other words, it’s a promising alternative if you’re looking for a tool that helps you turn the photos on your Mac and iPhone into moving pictures, and the free status means there’s no barrier to giving MemoryString a try.

Pixph

Just as there are lots of ways to assemble your photos into a video or slideshow, you also have many options for managing all the things you save to your clipboard. So why turn to the $10 Pixph as a place to stash text, URLs or anything else you care to copy? Besides the convenience of having a storage space on the side of your display — or wherever you choose to position the Pixph window — there’s also the matter of organizing all those clips.

It’s easy to copy something over to Pixph: just highlight and tap your shift button twice to capture it in the app. But Pixph also lets you organize clippings into projects, so that if you’re researching something, all the related text strings, links and images you’ve saved are all in one place, ready to move back into the window that you’re working in. Pixph lives in the menu bar of your Mac, and it’s easy to pivot between projects when you find a relevant clip to save.

I found Pixph’s commitment to the Liquid Glass interface a little bit distracting, though it was easy enough to open up settings and switch to dark mode so that the app behind the Pixph window wasn’t as visible. Pixph also treats your clippings as a checklist, with buttons for marking off items when you have no further use for them. Some may appreciate that approach, but it really didn’t fit into my workflow.

Nevertheless, the ability to organize items and even add your own thoughts via a note feature makes Pixph a useful tool for people to add a little structure to their projects.

DumpPixels

If you find yourself filling up your iPhone’s Photos app with screenshots — and then forgetting to delete those screenshots later on — DumpPixels can clean up your photo library without sacrificing the information you were looking to capture in the first place.

Anytime you capture a screenshot, it appears in DumpPixels, which also copies any text that appears within that screenshot. Say you capture an article in the News app because you spot an interesting snippet of text. Within DumpPixels, you can save a note containing that text to the app’s Notes tab. You can then delete the screenshot, freeing up space in your Photos library while retaining whatever information you wanted from the screenshot.

Or at least, DumpPixels will delete the screenshot after you’ve unlocked the app. The free download only lets you save copied text from screens, while a $20 in-app purchase unlocks the deletion feature.

If there’s a limitation to DumpPixels, it’s that it only works on screenshots. If you were to take a photo of a flyer with date and address info, that wouldn’t get copied into DumpPixels — unless you were to take a screenshot of the photo itself, of course. Still, if you find yourself snapping a lot of screenshots to collect data for later use, DumpPixels could be an effective way to better manage all the info and imagery you’ve collected.

Tesla’s newly unveiled Roadster can apparently fly and spin through the air for a few seconds, using thrusters that work like a giant jet-pack.

It feels more like a car you’d buy in “GTA Online” than from an actual dealership, and there’s pretty much no conceivable way that this would ever be street legal, let alone practical. Nonetheless, that hasn’t stopped Elon Musk fanboys from dreaming up improbable scenarios where being able to go airborne in their Roadster — which they’ll definitely be able to afford — would actually be helpful.

One even tried to prove his point using the tool of choice for all of those who possess a boundless imagination: AI. 

In a clearly AI-generated video, a Roadster is shown cruising down a bridge that spans a beautiful river valley. Using your car for a scenic roadtrip? That does sound useful. But no, that’s not what they’re getting at here. A part of the bridge instantly collapses ahead, so our quick-witted Roadster driver presses a big red button to activate its cold-gas thrusters and leap over to the other side in an epic slow-mo sequence.

“The Roadster could genuinely be a lifesaver in situations like these,” the Tesla fan wrote.

The Roadster could genuinely be a lifesaver in situations like these. https://t.co/iSNd2gGkgb pic.twitter.com/WDGI5CpIhQ

— Umesh Kumar (@itsumeshk) October 16, 2026

Let’s cut to the chase: there’s zero chance that something like this would happen, so using it to justify the Roadster’s existence is as feeble an exercise as thinking of comebacks you should’ve said after you lost an argument. Then again, as absurd as it is, we’re struggling of a better reason to have a briefly flying car. If it’s not to save your life, what’s it for?

There were other AI depictions of the Roadster’s aerial capabilities being put to good use. Some show it jumping over toll booths or flying over standstill traffic.

We hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but the Roadster is not going to be able to do any of this. The point is that these capabilities are a marketing stunt — an impressive tech demo, but nothing more. It’s not unlike how Musk heavily marketed the Cybertruck as “apocalypse-proof,” building it with (somewhat) bulletproof doors and windows and off-road capabilities. The reality, of course, is that it was hard to imagine an apocalypse where a car better known for easily breaking down and being held together with glue would be useful. Consumers agreed, and the expensive truck turned into an all-time flop.

The Roadster will almost certainly face similar struggles at finding a demographic who will want to buy it. But hey, you can always use AI to imagine an alternate reality where it turns out to be a best-seller, too.

More on Tesla: Tesla Bros Posting Videos Showing Them Hog Out on Decadent Meals While Careening Down the Road in Self-Driving Mode

The post Tesla Bros Using AI to Dream Up Improbable Scenarios Where the Flying Tesla Roadster Would Be Helpful appeared first on Futurism.

A Tesla slammed into a police cruiser after the driver said he fell asleep behind the wheel while the vehicle’s Full Self-Driving mode was activated.

According to the California Highway Patrol, KRON4 reports, the crash happened on the night of October 13 while the officers were pulled over to the side of Interstate 80 eastbound highway to investigate a fatal accident. 

Though the “lanes were closed with flares and cones, and several emergency vehicles were at the scene with emergency lights flashing,” police said, the Tesla veered into the clearly cordoned-off area and slammed into their patrol car. The impact sent their ride flying into another emergency vehicle, footage showed.

Both officers were hospitalized with serious injuries and have since been discharged from the hospital. The driver, a 22-year-old man, sustained minor injuries.

“The driver claimed he was asleep and that the vehicle was operating in Tesla’s Full Self-Driving mode at the time of the crash,” CHP said. “Despite its name, Full Self-Driving is not fully autonomous. It is an SAE Level 2 driver assistance system that requires continuous driver supervision.”

A self-driving Tesla crashed into a California highway patrol vehicle, seriously injuring two officers inside.

According to the officers, the driver said he was asleep at the time and using the car’s driver-assistance technology. pic.twitter.com/l36px6sqT4

— ABC News (@ABC) October 16, 2026

Drowsy driving is a common issue with Tesla’s FSD system, since it doesn’t require the motorist to be as engaged. To combat this, the vehicles have several safeguards to ensure drivers stay alert, including an in-cabin camera that monitors their eyes and face — but they don’t always work. 

Tesla has previously been investigated by federal regulators after an older version of its self-driving software, Autopilot, repeatedly crashed into emergency vehicles. In a 2024 report, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration linked Autopilot and FSD to hundreds of crashes, concluding that it misled drivers into a false sense of security and caused them to be “not sufficiently engaged in the driving task.”

More on Tesla: Tesla Bros Posting Videos Showing Them Hog Out on Decadent Meals While Careening Down the Road in Self-Driving Mode

The post Tesla Running FSD Slams Into Police Cruiser After Driver Falls Asleep Behind the Wheel, Hospitalizing Two Officers With Serious Injuries appeared first on Futurism.

In 2018, Elon Musk’s Tesla released a software update timed for the holidays that included a so-called “emissions testing” mode allowing Model S, 3, and X owners to play a variety of flatulent noises with the push of a button.

While the novelty of the prank feature has more than likely worn off for the vast majority of users, some Tesla employees continue to be haunted by it to this day.

As the San Francisco Standard’s Zara Stone experienced first hand, her Bay Area Tesla robotaxi seemingly got stuck in the mode, erupting in gaseous sounds during her ride. An Instagram video shows her bewildering encounter with far more flatulence than anybody could’ve bargained for.

When Stone asked the human safety driver — who Tesla is required to have behind the wheel as the company’s robotaxis are not licensed in California yet — why the car kept farting, he shrugged and replied “no idea.”

“That’s crazy!” a baffled Stone can be heard saying, while stifling laughter.

The driver said he was playing with the settings, only to lose control of the feature.

“It’s the first time I’m experiencing this,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Even the volume doesn’t control it,” the driver added, laughing.

The incident is particularly hilarious considering Tesla is trying to roll out a fully autonomous ride-hailing service in the country. Considering how controlling an eight-year-old prank feature is proving a little too challenging, it’s anybody’s guess what else could go wrong as the EV company lets software take the reins.

We’ve already seen plenty of reports of terrifying close calls, crashes, and shoddy service. Most recently, Musk admitted that the company’s software — which relies entirely on cameras, and not LIDAR or radar sensors — struggled not to “run over pets” at night.

More on robotaxis: Elon Musk Admits Why Tesla Robotaxis Can’t Be Trusted at Night

The post Passenger Disgusted When Tesla Robotaxi Gets Stuck on “Fart Mode” appeared first on Futurism.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been promising a next-generation Roadster for the better part of a decade. And while early promises that it will quite literally fly were met with incredulity back in early 2019, the EV maker has finally made good on its promise.

As demonstrated late Thursday evening, the new Roadster can indeed fly — briefly, at least — thanks to a “SpaceX package” made up of cold-gas thrusters. The company showed the company flipping around on stage, rotating on its own axis mid-air, leaping over the company’s entire EV lineup, and sticking to a vertical ramp thanks to a fan system that generates up to two Gs of downward force.

Good luck doing any of that on a public road, or even surviving on private property. And the flying car bears a striking resemblance to the company’s controversial Cybertruck, featuring extremely sharp body lines and flat panels. It’s a low-poly design approach that feels intimately familiar after a few years of the brutalist pickups.

And the similarities aren’t limited to the overall shape, either. The Cybertruck was and still is a major outlier in the automotive landscape — mostly for the worse. From rusting stainless steel body panels that were shoddily glued to the vehicle’s exterior and an excessive curb weight that greatly reduced range to a buggy steer-by-wire system, the Cybertruck was a major departure from design norms in the industry, much like Tesla’s latest Roadster.

While we don’t know if the Roadster will suffer from the same issues, its cold-gas thruster system is more than likely going to require some additional upkeep. Besides, considering the system can easily throw the car high into the air, anything going wrong could put any driver in severe danger. After all, Tesla has a long history of treating its customers as guinea pigs.

As Musk admitted during Thursday’s event, the bizarre rocket on wheels isn’t exactly going to be the next Honda Civic. It definitely won’t “move the needle in a major way financially,” the billionaire cautioned the audience, calling the Roadster a “small potato situation.”

As such, Tesla investors were left unimpressed, with shares bumping by less than two percent when the markets opened.

In other words, much like the Cybertruck, the latest Roadster is more tech demo than an actual consumer-facing product, a harsh lesson owners of the former are still learning as their vehicles continue to age like milk.

And whether we’ll ever see it gliding along mid-air at highway speeds on public roads is as unclear as ever. Tesla is looking to sell a thruster-less Performance variant, a “Race Ready” mid-tier version with rear-mounted cold-gas thrusters, as well an entirely not-road-legal and “invite only” model that can fly, as shown off on stage.

Even more so than the Cybertruck, the Roadster is the ultimate Tesla loyalty test. While the company has yet to release a price, the Roadster is undoubtedly going to cost a pretty penny — if you can even get your hands on one. Whether it will appreciate, like Musk has long promised about the company’s fleet, or turn into an expensive death trap after a short and likely terrifying stint of ownership, remains to be seen.

Perhaps it’s more of an attempt to warm up investors to the idea of merging Tesla and SpaceX, a high-stakes gamble that has investors unsettled.

More on Tesla: Tesla Robotaxi With No Driver Spotted Smashing Through Traffic Barriers

The post Tesla’s New Flying Death Trap Looks a Lot Like a Cybertruck appeared first on Futurism.

Welcome to Edition 9.15 of the Rocket Report! The launch I'm most looking forward to in the next few weeks is that of Japan's Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission. MMX is one of the marquee space science missions launching this year, and it's set to leave Earth as soon as Monday (US time) aboard a Japanese H3 rocket. The spacecraft will visit Phobos and Deimos, the two asteroid-like moons of Mars, deploying a rover and collecting specimens for return to Earth in 2031. Exploration at its finest.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Reflect Orbital looks to India for launch capacity. California-based Reflect Orbital, the startup attempting to offer sunlight on-demand with in-space mirrors, announced the purchase of two launches Wednesday from Indian launcher Skyroot Aerospace, Payload Space reports. One of the launches will use Skyroot's Vikram-1 rocket, which became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit in July. The other will fly on an upgraded rocket called the Vikram-1U.

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Now years into the US release of Tesla’s so-called “Full Self-Driving” mode, brand loyalists are becoming increasingly comfortable trusting their lives — not to mention those of others on the road — to the company’s software.

While there have been plenty of videos showing Tesla drivers answering emails, vibecoding, or even gaming from the driver’s seat, a new genre of Tesla content is emerging in which Tesla bros dine out on huge feasts from behind the wheel.

In a now-viral clip shared by the account Teslaconomics on X-formerly-Twitter, a Tesla driver presents the point of view from behind the wheel of what appears to be a Cybertruck. The driver in the video is going hog wild on a buffet of food, made up of sushi rolls, sausages, a fiery red stew, and what appears to be a tray of potato pancakes, biscuits, and peppers.

From the video, it’s immediately clear that the driver is careening down a busy roadway as they pick away at their potluck, drawing widespread ridicule from commenters.

“I don’t wanna share the road with people like this and I need them to start getting tickets, points on their license, all that good shit,” one user raged. “Healthy, normal societies don’t reward you for breaking the rules.”

Others pointed out that train riders have been able to do this for ages. “In China you eat while traveling 10 times faster,” another poster commented alongside a video of a Chinese high-speed train in action.

How I be eating on Tesla FSD pic.twitter.com/2MiMvUlf0f

— Teslaconomics (@Teslaconomics) October 10, 2026

“The comments and quote reposts of my video are pretty hilarious to me,” Teslaconomics carped in a follow-up comment. “First of all, I’m wearing Ray-Ban Meta glasses. They record exactly what I’m seeing, completely hands-free. I’m not holding a phone or a camera.”

“Second, this is Tesla FSD (Supervised),” the account continued. “That means I’m still responsible for watching the road, paying attention, and being ready to take over at any moment.”

Of course, the full tray of decadent foods between the driver’s hands and the steering wheel would make taking control difficult in a split-second emergency.

Teslaconomics is far from the only poster sharing clips like this. Another popular account with the handle Cyber_Trailer makes a point to share videos of Tesla owners eating while driving in a recurring segment called “What are you eating in your Tesla?”

One Reel shows a woman eating what looks to be a grape salad while her Tesla drives down the freeway. Another captures a Tesla driver carefully chowing down on a burrito, apparently more concerned about getting the fillings on herself than keeping her hands on the wheel.

Though the software has clearly given these drivers a false sense of security, it’s worth noting that Teslas operating in self-driving mode — even under close watch — can still cause enormous harm to pedestrians and other drivers, making the decision to pig out behind the wheel a selfish gamble with death.

More on Tesla: Tesla Argues in Court That the N-Word Is Acceptable Under Certain Circumstances

The post Tesla Bros Posting Videos Showing Them Hog Out on Decadent Meals While Careening Down the Road in Self-Driving Mode appeared first on Futurism.

It’s a real grab bag of apps in this week’s report, but that seems wholly appropriate somehow. After all, most of us turn to our Macs for a variety of reasons, so why not a selection of apps that speed up image processing, give you new controls over your tunes or help you keep a cleaner, better organized desktop? Oh, and there’s an iOS app in there, too, for the next time the travel bug bites you.

So why not reach in and see if any of the apps below grab you? And if there’s something we haven’t covered, drop us a line with the details at apps@sixcolors.com. We can’t respond individually, but rest assured that we take a look at every suggestion we get.

Freshly Squeezed

Each week I produce a weekly newsletter where I write about whatever’s on my mind — you should subscribe! — and one of the big production tasks is to take the images I’ve shot and convert them into 16:9 JPEGs cropped down to 2000 x 1125. It’s a job that would definitely benefit from batch processing, which is where an app like Freshly Squeezed comes into play.

Freshly Squeezed handles the jobs you’d expect from a batch image processor: It can resize, crop, compress and convert images to different files, all while retaining your originals. I’ve set up the app so that I can drop photos into it and get the right cropping and conversion, with Freshly Squeezed giving me the option to individually tweak crops if I want.

The app’s showcase feature is called Drop Folder, which you set up when you need to perform the same image processing over and over again. Once you’ve set up the parameters, just drop images into the folder, and Freshly Squeezed handles the rest.

You can download Freshly Squeezed onto your Mac for $7. A 7-day trial lets you try things out for free.

NepTunes

For another way to control music playback on your Mac, turn to NepTunes 4, which works with both Apple Music and Spotify. In fact, the Pro version of the app even lets you toggle between the two music services.

At its most basic, NepTunes lives in your menu bar, where it shows you whatever song is currently playing along with playback controls. You can also customize NepTunes to display additional info — I’ve got the app showing recently played songs, and if you link it to your Last.fm profile, you can see stats affiliated with that account. From the NepTunes interface, you can look up similar artists, while Pro users can find similar tracks to what’s playing. And all NepTunes users can set up hotkeys to control different playback features.

I keep mentioning the Pro version, which is a $10/year subscription. Besides the aforementioned features, Pro users can display their top albums in a grid. They can also download desktop widgets in various styles, such as one that displays the album you’re listening to like it’s a CD in a jewel case. You can peruse the 15 available widgets to get a flavor for NepTunes’ visual flair.

The Pro version comes with a 14-day free trial. Otherwise, NepTunes is a free download.

Tidy

It’s an occupational hazard that I have a lot of screenshots piled up around my Mac with names like Screenshot 2024-07-09 at 10.05.32 AM that tell me nothing about what’s actually contained in the screenshot. I imagine you might have the same problem with IMG files or PDFs or any file with an inscrutable collection of letters and numbers as its only means of identification.

Tidy is the answer to our organizational prayers. This $9 macOS download takes the screenshots, scans and other oddly named files from your Downloads folder, takes a look at them using its own built-in OCR feature and proposes readable names to help you better identify what the file actually contains. You approve the names, so nothing’s forced upon you, and Tidy only generates names using what it sees, so there are no hallucinations.

Even so, Tidy occasionally misses the mark. For example, a screenshot of the NepTunes app from up above got renamed “dutton-toster” because the font for singer Sutton Foster’s name proved too tricky to decipher. I was able to reject that suggestion, though, so no harm, no foul.

More often, Tidy proved to be on the money, as a photo of the ferris wheel looming over Disney’s California Adventure was retitled “blue-sky-land-amusement-park” — a much more decipherable moniker than IMG_435.HEIC.

Appricio

Appricio looks to be an indispensable travel companion by taking advantage of your iPhone’s location awareness. Fire up Appricio in a city included in one of the iOS app’s guides, and it can tell you what to do based on where you are, what the weather is and preferences shared in the settings.

You won’t just get a list of places to visit with Appricio, though. It’s a curated guide that makes specific suggestions, with a bias toward taking you off the beaten path (at least when you’re amenable to that). For example, Appricio detected that I’m near San Francisco and that the weather’s nice right now, so it steered me away from Pier 39 — which it dismissed as a tourist trap — and guided me to a day in Golden Gate Park instead.

Appricio would be a fine app if it just helped you in the moment, but it helps you plan trips, too. That feature is somewhat limited by the fact that the app only covers 50 cities at the moment, though I was able to do web searches for an upcoming visit to San Diego (currently not among the included cities) without the benefit of Appricio’s curation.

The app is free, though a $30/year subscription gives you a dozen more cities, a multi-day planning feature in which Appricio helps build your trip and an events calendar, among other bonuses.

Droppy

If you’ve looked at the notched display on your MacBook and thought, “I wish this worked more like the Dynamic Island on my iPhone,” Droppy is here to answer the call. At its most basic, this app lets you drag documents and files up toward the notch, where they can be stored for easy access until you find a more permanent home for them. But Droppy’s feature set doesn’t end there.

Droppy provides access to other features, like music playback controls, a clipboard that keeps the history of things you copy and paste and a five-hour weather forecast. Additional widgets — or Droplets, as the app dubs them — can be added to handle things like editing screenshots, file conversion, transcription and more.

While the app complements notch-equipped machines, it brings those Dynamic Island capabilities to other Macs as well. Droppy is free to try for three days; afterwards, a $10 payment unlocks the app for up to two Macs.

Welcome to Edition 9.14 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week, from our perspective, is that United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket appears to be close to launching. We've seen a no-earlier-than launch date for the return to flight mission of October 29 (an Amazon Leo flight), and the next rocket up after that, also an Amazon Leo mission, is also planned for this year. Assuming the solid rocket boosters work, Vulcan could be poised for a major breakthrough next year in cadence.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Nuri rocket notches another success. South Korea successfully deployed five satellites for its first domestically launched microsatellite constellation during the fifth flight of its homegrown Nuri rocket Wednesday, Yonhap News Agency reports. In addition to the primary payload of five New-space Earth Observation Satellite Constellation for National Safety microsatellites, nine of the rocket's 10 CubeSat secondary payloads were released as planned, according to the Korea AeroSpace Administration. PERSAT-02, developed by South Korean startup Quaternion, failed to separate from the rocket.

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© United Launch Alliance

Sometimes, putting these columns about intriguing macOS and iOS apps together feels a little like improvisational jazz — I’m not always sure where this is going or how it’s going to wind up, but hopefully there’s a note or two that someone gets some enjoyment out of. Well, this week, we’re going to look at an app that deals with actual jazz. How’s that for a tie-in?

Before we get to that offering, though, there’s a pair of Mac productivity boosters that caught my eye, particularly for research projects. And just so iPhone users don’t feel left out, we’ve got a couple of iOS entries, too, aimed at helping improve your sleep and your brain power, respectively.

Do you know of an app that makes your heart sing? Let us know by emailing apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description. Due to the large volume of tips we get, we’re not able to respond to each email, but rest assured if you send us a note about an app, we’re going to read it.

And now on to our first number…

Eno PDF

I’m of the mind that AI is best suited to perform repetitive tasks that might otherwise derail me from getting my main work done, and Eno PDF seems to be of the same mind. Billed by its developer as “AI for people who hate AI,” the app taps into artificial intelligence to dive into documents to find the information you might otherwise invest a lot of time to track down on your own.

Eno PDF doesn’t just expect you to take its word for it, though, as it summons up the exact part of the text that shows what you’re looking for, so that you can verify the result.

When testing Eno PDF, I loaded up four years of Apple SEC filings into the app and asked it to track down exactly how much revenue Apple made from iPhone sales last year. Eno PDF produced the right answer and even highlighted the part of the fiscal 2024 report that showed the number. (And yes, the 2024 fiscal year was the last full year of data I had Eno PDF search through.) More impressively, as it was searching, Eno PDF listed what documents it was poring over, further reinforcing the idea that its results aren’t being pulled out of thin air.

The searches take place natively on your Mac, so they’re relatively speedy depending on the size of the documents you’re having Eno PDF sort through. Nothing’s stored on external servers, though snippets of documents are sent out for AI analysis.

You can download Eno PDF for free, with 1,000 free credits available for you to test out the app. After that, it will cost you $15 to add 5,000 credits for future searches.

Not everyone’s going to need a tool like Eno PDF on their Mac, with the developers touting the app for professionals like lawyers and academics. But if you work on any project that requires research, Eno PDF can take a lot of the grunt work out of your hands while giving you the confidence that the results coming back to you aren’t some AI hallucination.

Caddy

Speaking of research projects, I’m a sucker for any app that can keep all my related ideas in one place. And Caddy, which adds a project tab to the side of your Mac’s screen, fits that description to perfection.

Caddy can hold whatever you need to have on hand for a particular assignment — notes, files, documents, images or what have you. I’ve set up a Caddy tab to contain research for a story I’m working on so that I can slide out the tab when I need to reference my notes without distracting from the app I have open. You can set up multiple Caddy tabs, using different colors to distinguish them.

The app is a free macOS download with a subscription-based Caddy Club ($3.99/month or $29.99/year) adding the ability to further customize tabs, collaborate with other people or send a copy of your Caddy to someone else so they can see what you’re working on.

Sessionography

I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial when I contend that the more specific your music tastes, the less you might feel well-served by streaming music apps built with general audiences in mind. Sessionography looks to bridge that gap, at least when it comes to appreciating jazz music.

Type an artist, album or song into the Sessionography app, and you can easily fall down a jazz wormhole. (Jazz Wormhole, incidentally, is the name of my poorly received second album.) Typing “Bill Evans,” for example, brings up a list of all the pianist’s albums, which you can then sort through by whether the artist was the leader or sideman. Speaking of sidemen, you can get a list of everyone who played on a particular album, delving into their catalog, too. Create a smart playlist with the tap of a button — assuming you’ve got an Apple Music subscription to also enjoy playing back your selections, that is.

The free version of Sessionography limits you to 10 taps per day for exploring artists and music along with three smart playlists, but a subscription (99 cents/week or $19.99/year) unlocks unlimited activity. It’s an ideal app for jazz enthusiasts to find new combinations and for the jazz-curious to find out what kind of tunes they like.

Wavelength

Like a lot of people reading this, I struggle to get a good night’s sleep, and while there are probably many factors at play, perhaps one I can take more control of is the quality and duration of the ambient light around me. That’s the notion behind Wavelength, an iOS app that taps into your iPhone’s camera to measure the light around you to see if it might be throwing off your body clock.

The first time you fire up Wavelength, you’ll enter in the time you woke up that morning along with your preferred wake-up time. Wavelength then charts out the times of day you should be out in daylight or at least bright light to boost your body clock and when you might want to steer clear of brighter lights, lest you throw off your body clock. Not only does this help with sleep, but it can help you stave off jet lag, too, the app’s developers claim.

If this sounds like hooey to you, Wavelength’s release notes point to the research all this is based on. So there’s some circadian science behind all the app’s recommendations on heading to the light.

Normally a $29.99 download for the full app, all of Wavelength’s features are currently free to all users through September 2027, according to the Wavelength App Store listing.

Geo Text

Part of my daily puzzle habit is to play the latest edition of MapTap online, where I have to drop a pin on a globe as accurately as possible to whatever city is part of that day’s game. Geo Text takes a similarly geographical approach to gaming, bringing a guessing game to the Messages app on your iPhone.

After downloading Geo Text to your iPhone, you access it in Messages, where you’re given a 360-degree photo of a place to scroll around looking for clues. You then tap the part of the globe where you think that photo was taken — the closer your pin to the right result, the more points you accrue.

Here’s where the Messages component comes in. Sharing your Geo Text result to a chat or group message lets everyone you’re chatting with play along — provided that they download Geo Text, too, of course. It’s a way to add a little friendly competition to your chats, as you battle friends for geographic supremacy.

There’s just one Geo Text game per day in the free version of the app, but $1.99 in-app purchases unlock separate games for the 50 U.S. states as well as soccer stadiums around the world.

Welcome to Edition 9.13 of the Rocket Report!

This week, SpaceX celebrated the first orbital launch of its new Starship rocket. I'm not sure many people, at least those outside of SpaceX, expected it to take 14 flights of Starship before it technically reached low-Earth orbit, but Monday morning's launch finally added that to SpaceX's list of accomplishments with its new super-heavy rocket. Starship had gone 99 percent of the way to orbit before, only held back by safety concerns around the possibility of stranding the huge rocket in space.

What was most notable for SpaceX with this Starship flight was that it unlocked a massive growth potential for Starlink, with the first 26 of the network's new-generation Starlink V3 satellites successfully deployed Monday.

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© SpaceX

Joe Rossignol:

Apple recently considered laying off about 5,000 support employees [to replace them with AI], but it has put those plans on hold indefinitely, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

[…]

Last month, we reported that customers who call the AppleCare phone number (1-800-APL-CARE) from the U.S. or Canada are now routed to an AI-powered support assistant.

Joe Rossignol:

The assistant can answer questions and troubleshoot issues with your Apple products, with it able to provide detailed step-by-step instructions. The assistant can still transfer you to a human advisor if it cannot answer a specific question, or if you ask to speak to a real person.

[…]

Apple has also been testing a new AI-powered chatbot in its Apple Support app, through a new “Ask” tab that has rolled out to a limited number of users.

I actually kind of like support chatbots in that they can be very fast for handling basic issues. As to the layoffs, it’s not clear to me whether this is Ternus reversing a Cook idea or something else.

The main problem I have (and I hear others having) with Apple’s support is that for more difficult problems you reach a ceiling where nobody can help you and it seems like nobody cares. Anything that can’t be addressed via a hardware swap is like filing a very time consuming Radar that goes into a black hole with no follow-up. Some software issues seem fixable in that they are more like server database entries than bugs. A sufficiently high level support person should be able to go in and edit the entry. But it seems like this only happens when there’s a major story in the press.

Scott:

Apple could probably lay off 5000 AppleCare workers if Apple programmers spent more time working on their operating systems and default apps for another 6 months before releasing them to the public.

Previously:

• Apple Vision Pro and Software Layoffs
• Castro’s Customer Support Lessons
• John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook
• AI Layoffs
• Locked Out of Apple Account Due to Gift Card
• Locked Out of Apple Developer Accounts
• Apple to Drop Customer Support via Social Media
• HomePod Late Adopter