Amazon and Rivian are back together again.The e-commerce giant is collaborating with Rivian’s Also spinoff on a custom-designed, pedal-assisted, four-wheel cargo bike. The bike would likely be based on the TM-Q quad vehicle that was unveiled by Also today in San Francisco. Amazon says it wants to expand its fleet of micromobility vehicles with “thousands of quads” that it will deploy across Europe and the US. The deal signals the next phase in the partnership between Amazon and Rivian, which worked together on the EDV electric van for many years. For several years, Rivian’s van was exclusive to Amazon. But after that exclusivity ended, Rivian said it would sell the van to any commercial fleet owner who was interested. “Micromobility solutions like pedal-assist e-cargo quads allow us to quickly deliver to customers in dense, urban cities, while helping reduce traffic and noise,” said Emily Barber, Director of Amazon’s Global Fleet, in a statement. “Similar to our Rivian EDV partnership, working with ALSO provides an opportunity to continue to innovate in this space, building on our delivery logistics experience, paired with their advanced technology, safety, and performance features.”Amazon has been using electric cargo bikes for deliveries in cities across the US and Canada. The bikes are adapt at navigating dense cities where curb space is at a premium. The Also TM-Q shares many of the same features as the TM-B two-wheeled e-bike, including pedal-by-wire technology and removable battery that doubles as a mobile power bank.

Remember when word got out that Amazon was building smart glasses for its delivery drivers before possibly launching a version for consumers as well? Amazon has just revealed those “Amelia” glasses to the world — with a built-in display and an always-on camera to assist drivers as they go. They can help drivers find the right packages inside their delivery vans, give them turn by turn directions to the right address, and take a hands-free photo of a successful delivery instead of needing them to whip out a phone. (Ever had an Amazon driver tell you “please don’t take your package yet, I have to take a pic first?”) “If there are hazards, or a need to navigate complex environments like apartment buildings, the glasses will guide [drivers] safely to their destination,” Amazon claims, showing off mocked-up video clips of what drivers should see as they work. As you can see in the photo below, the glasses aren’t standalone — they’re paired with a vest that contains a swappable battery, and a button the driver can press to take a photo of each successful delivery. There seems to be a dial surrounding that button as well, and Amazon writes that the controller also has a dedicated emergency button to call for help. Amazon hasn’t said which sensors are inside the glasses, but images suggest they may have two cameras: one centered above the nose, and one above the temple.Amazon also says the glasses have transition lenses — they’ll tint stronger in sunlight, and get clearer without — and support prescription lenses as well. While the company isn’t saying exactly when or where the glasses might roll out, the company says hundreds of drivers have already tested early versions of the tech, and that it wants to put more AI features inside.“We anticipate future versions of the glasses will provide real-time defect detection, where the glasses can help notify drivers if they’ve mistakenly dropped a package at a customer doorstep that does not correspond with the house or apartment number on the package, detect hazards like low light and adjust the lenses, notify that there’s a pet in the yard, and more,” writes Amazon.The frames don’t seem particularly thick in these photos Amazon has released, but — like the Meta Display and other glasses with built-in screens — they don’t seem quite at the level of consumer eyewear just yet. The Information reported in September that Amazon’s glasses-with-a-screen for consumers, codename “Jayhawk”, might launch for consumers in 2026 or 2027. Reuters, which originally reported on the glasses for delivery drivers wrote that those were codename “Amelia,” and indeed some of Amazon’s images today have the word “Amelia” in their filename. Unsurprisingly, Amazon’s blog post doesn’t discuss any possible ethical concerns that workers or customers might have as these glasses monitor the “last mile” of the delivery process.

Building Raspberry Pi projects is an itch I can never scratch. There's always something new, something intriguing— a self-hosted service that can save my subscription money, or a cluster project that can integrate several Pis into a formidable unit. Whatever the case may be, building a Raspberry Pi project needs a lot more than you think. You need to attach several additional components to the tiny single-board computer. The situation becomes more demanding when you have multiple Raspberry Pis, each devoted to a single or multiple tasks.

Boxy can be beautiful. Lomography announced a new Lomo MC-A film camera, a 35mm format point-and-shoot with a fixed 32mm f/2.8 lens and metal body. It’s a charmer of a new film shooter, complete with a built-in flash, autofocusing glass lens, manual film advance lever, and an included CR2 battery that recharges via USB-C. The MC-A is available for preorder now for $549 in black or silver, and it’s going to be made in small batches with the first delivering “before December 24th.”Lomo cameras have a reputation for being mostly toy-like and choosing fun over features or tech specs. But the MC-A seems a very competent point-and-shoot for street photography or everyday slice-of-life type pictures. It has full manual exposure control, as well as auto and aperture priority modes, and the option for manual zone focusing. You can even do multi-exposure captures to get extra artsy. It reminds me a lot of the Pentax 17 I reviewed last year, though its full-format 35mm instead of half frame and costs just $50 more. While the Pentax’s charm came from its small, compact stature and how it could get up to 72 shots per roll, the Lomo MC-A will have more resolution and only weigh around 42 grams more. And though both are powered by CR2 batteries, the fact that the Lomo comes with a rechargeable one circumvents a slightly annoying pain point of using old-fashioned cameras. Though, in a pinch, you can still use disposable CR2s. And because Lomo seems unable to help itself from being quirky, the MC-A includes its Splitzer lens attachment for splitting multiple exposures onto the same frame and flash gels for giving the built-in flash a bold and colorful look. The camera body itself is also emblazoned with a well-meaning but fairly cringey mantra of “Everybody is equal before the lens — and behind it.”But quirks, novelties, and cheesy slogans aside, the Lomo MC-A looks like a very well-rounded package for a modern film point-and-shoot.

If you’ve never used it before, you may think Home Assistant is a platform for managing smart devices. But between the myriads of integrations, community add-ons, and the offerings on Home Assistant Community Store, you can interface a ton of cool gizmos with your HASS server. With the right integration, you can even control self-hosted services and home server distros from your HASS dashboards.

NotebookLM has plenty of obvious strengths, like summarizing sources, connecting ideas, highlighting key points, pulling insights, and more. Most of this lies in its surface-level usage when uploading your sources and then prompting the AI. Once you go beyond that and start playing with NotebookLM Studio, you’ll find a feature that can change how you learn and work.

It's very strange that if I had a dollar for every time someone claimed that every major PlayStation exclusive game tells the same story for the past two generations, I could probably afford the next two first-party games the company is bringing out. The truth, however, is that this take feels misguided, at best. We do have Kratos mourning, Joel with his regrets, and Ellie with her pain, but to call all these games the same? That's missing what they actually are.

As the proud owner of a new OLED monitor, you probably know how to prevent burn-in on your precious new display. Burn-in might have become less of a bogeyman compared to a few years ago, but OLED displays still require a fair bit of babying if you want them to last long. However, burn-in is just one of the many necessary evils you need to deal with on OLED monitors. As they're more fragile than other panels, you need to be more careful when it comes to positioning and cleaning them. Also, depending on the kind of OLED display you have, reflections could destroy those perfect blacks that you paid a fortune for.

A New York Times report on Tuesday cited internal Amazon documents touting how its shift into automation could help it sell more products without hiring more people, but today the company has issued a PR blast about robotics and delivery tech that is much sunnier. Along with a tease of AI-connected augmented reality smart glasses and VR training for its drivers, Amazon showed off 10 robots it’s using or testing right now (it didn’t mention whether any of them had issues during the recent AWS outage).In one post, Amazon highlighted Blue Jay, a robot it calls “an extra set of hands that helps employees with tasks that involve reaching and lifting,” and its agentic AI system Project Eluna, which “acts like an extra teammate, helping reduce that cognitive load” while optimizing sorting to reduce bottlenecks.Blue Jay can move 75 percent of the types of items Amazon stores, and is eventually supposed to be a “core technology” powering Same-Day delivery sites. The company says it developed Blue Jay in just over a year based on AI, digital twins, and data from robots already in use, creating a system that “coordinates multiple robotic arms to perform many tasks at once, collapsing what used to be three separate robotic stations into one streamlined workspace that can pick, stow, and consolidate in a single place.”Amazon Robotics chief technologist Tye Brady says in the company’s post that, “The real headline isn’t about robots.. It’s about people—and the future of work we’re building together.” The blog post also reiterates a spokesperson’s response to the Times report, saying that “no company has created more jobs in the U.S. over the past decade than Amazon,” and touting plans to fill 250,000 positions for the holiday season. CEO Andy Jassy’s June letter to employees about the impact of efficiency is a bit clearer. He wrote about generative AI, saying, “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”The Times report suggests a similar plan for robotics and automation, citing Jassy’s push to cut e-commerce costs and showing examples of how its warehouse overhauls are creating facilities that process more items with fewer employees who increasingly will focus on taking care of the robots.

The 15.6-inch Espresso Pro monitor will change your flow. Most gadgets are iterative in the value they bring to our lives. The 15.6-inch Espresso Pro portable monitor is different, having utterly transformed the way I work remotely over the last month of testing. See, I spend a lot of time working from my van, which makes me miss my dual-monitor setup at home - it's hard to adapt to a single 14-inch laptop display after regularly working on a pair of 27-inch monitors. Espresso lets me approximate that setup in tight spaces with a display that's thinner and much lighter than the Mac or Windows laptop it enhances. And it connects over a single USB-C cable.I'm writing this from my van's "office," …Read the full story at The Verge.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted the company would be able to remove the safety monitors from its robotaxis "by the end of the year." He also said Tesla would launch a robotaxi service in 8-10 new markets also before the end of 2025. "We are expecting to have no safety drivers in at least large parts of Austin by the end of this year," Musk said in an earnings call with investors. "So within a few months, we expect to have no safety drivers at all, at least in parts of Austin. We're obviously being very cautious about the deployment."Tesla's robotaxis in Austin and San Francisco include safety monitors with access to a kill switch - a fallb …Read the full story at The Verge.

After six years as Fandom’s CEO, Perkins Miller is parting ways with the popular wiki hosting platform.While there has yet to be an official announcement, The Verge has learned that Miller is no longer working for Fandom as of last week. In a statement sent to The Verge on Fandom’s behalf, Katie Schroeder confirmed Miller’s departure and noted that, while the company is currently being overseen by interim leadership, “we have not announced a new CEO as of yet.”After leaving StubHub to join Fandom in 2019, Miller oversaw the company’s $50 million acquisition of a number of entertainment content platforms from Red Ventures including TV Guide, Metacritic, GameSpot, and Giant Bomb. At the time, Miller said that the deal was meant to “expand our business capabilities and provide immersive content for our partners, advertisers and fans.” The deal also led to multiple rounds of layoffs for the editorial staff at some of Fandom’s newly-acquired properties. During an all-hands meeting last October, Miller pointed to corporate restructuring and missed revenue targets as some of the causes of the layoffs.While Fandom’s IP-specific wikis are popular, they have become widely known for being difficult to navigate due to a preponderance of aggressive ads that often make pages unstable to the point of being nearly unusable. When asked about Fandom’s user experience during a Decoder episode back in 2023, Miller said that he thought “we’re doing our best to make it as elegant as we can, and yet, we need to drive the economics.”Though Fandom hasn’t named who might replace Miller, the PlayOn! Sports Network — which aggregates videos of high school organized sports — announced today that he has signed on as its new CEO.