The Librarian's Notebook

technology

2 entries tagged technology. All writing.

TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 The Week the AI Labs Asked to Be Regulated In one week in September 2026: OpenAI shipped a model its president called the start of the AGI era, then asked Congress for mandatory safety rules it had spent two years opposing; it put its most prominent internal critic on the board, and he said the industry was not on track; Anthropic published a report saying its own model had been used to write missile-guidance software in Yemen and to run the largest data-theft campaign it had ever measured. I use one of these tools every day. This is an attempt to say what changed, and what the three explanations are. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Two Nanometres of Nothing: What Apple's New Chip Actually Changed The A20 Pro in the iPhone 18 Pro is the first phone chip made on a "2-nanometre" process. Nothing on it is two nanometres wide; the number stopped measuring anything about a decade ago. What did change is real and fourteen years overdue: the transistor's gate now wraps all the way around the channel instead of three sides of a fin. This is what that means, why the fin had to go, and why the label survives anyway.