Pavan Davuluri only spoke at one Ignite 2025 session, and it did not deserve the hate he got. But what did he really say?

Google today issued the second interim update to Android 16, called Quarterly Platform Release 2 (QPR2), starting with supported Pixel devices. The post Google Begins Rolling Out Android 16 QPR2, Starting with Pixel appeared first on Thurrott.com.

As 2025 is coming to a close, YouTube, Apple Music, and other services are starting to deliver personal activity recaps to all of their users. The post YouTube, Apple Music, Amazon Music, More Launch Yearly Recaps appeared first on Thurrott.com.

AI deniers and critics have latched onto the term “AI slop” for obvious reasons, but human error is a far more serious problem, one that has led to countless disasters and untold loss of life. If you want to remove “slop” from the world, then the goal should be to automate everything with technology. And that technology will most certainly utilize AI. Some of the best (worst?) examples of human error include the sinking of the Titanic, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But human error leads to disaster literally every single day in the form of automobile crashes. It is by far the biggest factor in airplane disasters and maritime accidents. And it plays a significant role in medical procedural errors too. How many sporting events have been decided by a missed call from some human referee or umpire? Too many, and that’s why each sport is increasing the use of video reviews. But let’s keep this to technology. From the CrowdStrike disaster to almost every single Microsoft security incident we’ve seen, it usually comes down to one thing, human error. And if you factor in indirect human error, as in the coder who wrote the buggy software that failed, as we should, then it’s even worse. Inserting a person into the chain of decision making is arguably one of the biggest mistakes one can make. And yet, that is what we’re calling for with AI. It’s like the feeblest person in the room demanding to make decisions for everyone else. We need to let go. I have been a car enthusiast for my entire life, and I stuck diligently to small, manual-shift vehicles for as long as I could despite the obvious downsides. I still believe that I’m a better driver than virtually everyone I encounter on the roads, especially here in Pennsylvania. But with our streets and highways now crowded with traffic at all hours, it’s pretty clear that no combination of laws, enforcement, and collective driving skill will ever solve this mess. What will solve it, of course, are autonomous vehicles. Which is precisely what an enthusiast like me would resist. Sometimes it’s difficult admitting that you’re part of the problem. We're so human. To head off the obvious counterpoints, yes, AI still has a way to go. I’m not sure that anyone watching the first Wright brothers flight could or would have foreseen prop airplanes, jets, or spaceships, but they certainly would have gazed in wonder at a thing that they had previously thought to be impossible. Today, you don’t need much of an imagination to see how AI will transform our lives. In some ways, you need more of an imagination to claim that it won’t. No matter. Despite ongoing improvements, AI will still make mistakes, it’s inevitable. As we rely on it more in ever more critical ways, lives will be lost. And each time this happens, the deniers and critics will explode like cockroaches from under the wood pile and complain bitterly that this is exac... The post From the Editor’s Desk: Slop ⭐ appeared first on Thurrott.com.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a 'code red' alert on Monday, as the company feels increasingly threatened by Google's rapid progress with its Gemini AI models. The post Report: OpenAI Declares ‘Code Red’ Alert in Face of Increasing Google Gemini Threat appeared first on Thurrott.com.

On this episode of First Ring Daily, it snows, AI glows, and coding is the AI of last resort. The post First Ring Daily 1878: Snow for the Road appeared first on Thurrott.com.

Mortal Kombat 1, the second reboot in the popular fighting game franchise is coming to Game Pass on December 10. The post Mortal Kombat 1 Headlines December’s New Game Pass Additions appeared first on Thurrott.com.

On this episode of First Ring Daily, NAS shuffling, Google Photos annoyances, and it's December.

The Galaxy Z Trifold is a new premium folding smartphone with a multi-folding design and a 10-inch internal display. The post Samsung Announces the Galaxy Z TriFold appeared first on Thurrott.com.

Yes, it's December, but the holidays have predictably messed with the usual schedule, which I think we can all agree is rarely regular anyway. The post Microsoft Finally Releases the November Week D Preview Update for Windows 11 appeared first on Thurrott.com.

Widely blamed for the problems Apple had adding AI to Siri, AI executive John Giannandrea is leaving the company. The post John Giannandrea is Leaving Apple appeared first on Thurrott.com.

Netflix is in the process of discontinuing Google Cast support on its mobile apps as it now wants users to use their TV remote to navigate its smart TV apps. The post Netflix is Discontinuing Google Cast Support on Most Devices appeared first on Thurrott.com.

Opera announced today that it is partnering with Google to integrate Gemini into its web browsers. The post Opera Partners with Google on AI appeared first on Thurrott.com.

On this episode of First Ring Daily, NAS shuffling, Google Photos annoyances, and it's December.  The post First Ring Daily 1877: NASonomics appeared first on Thurrott.com.

In this update, a little code cleanup, a "Need to be Saved" indicator, and new minimum app window width and height settings. Remember, the latest version of the code is available on GitHub. A little code cleanup Given all the refactoring work I'd done on the WPF version of this app (.NETpad), I was never super comfortable with the quick and dirty approach I was taking to WinUIpad. But this was born of necessity: The Windows App SDK isn't just new to me, it's terrible, all kinds of terrible, and lots of things that just work in WPF don't work here. So this really is a rewrite in so many ways, and I've pushed forward in my unsophisticated way, hoping to brute force this thing into a basic app that actually works. But the goal has always been to clean up the code once it does work. And I've been trying to stamp down that annoying part of my brain that doesn't want to wait on doing that. But after I posted the previous update, timo47 provided me with some very useful feedback, some of which touches on my quick and dirty approach with the Windows App SDK. (And thanks again for that.) I would have gone through it regardless, but because this had been bothering me anyway, I was more eager to do so than I might have been otherwise. To be clear, I haven't cleaned up the entire program. But before I pushed the previous code update to GitHub, I had been experimenting with different types of state checks (it's possible I'm obsessed with app state), and though I knew that an unnecessary App-level state property I had created and then used in several places was still in there, I had let it go, figuring I would simply remove all that on the next pass. In making that change, I discovered that my use of this new property in the FileOpMenu_Click() event handler had caused an error that prevented the user from opening a document. So I pushed that change to GitHub as soon as I was sure I had reverted it correctly. Among other things, timo47 asked me why I was calling the (Main) Window's Close() event handler from the AppWindow's OnClosing() event handler. I wish I could answer that accurately, but it came out of what is now a familiar experience when working with the Windows App SDK: Nothing ever works, and so I find myself adding more and more code to try to get around whatever issue. And then I forget why I went down that particular rabbit hole. In this case, I was hoping to just create a single method that ran each time the user tried to close the app window, one that would check whether the document needed to be saved and, if so, then save (or save as) the document as needed or back out if the user cancelled. This proved impossible as I wrote in the previous post. And so I settled on two primary event handlers for app closing: OnClosing() in AppWindow and ExitMenu_Click(). I went through too many permutations of each to count or remember, but I did temporarily leave some commented out code in each that was from previous attempts. An... The post WinUIpad: Code Cleanup, “Needs to Be Saved” Indicator, More ⭐ appeared first on Thurrott.com.

The Google project that will merge Android with ChromeOS is called Aluminium OS internally. The post Google’s Aluminium OS to Bring Android to the PC appeared first on Thurrott.com.

Leo, Richard, and Paul discuss the Windows 11 agentic evolution, more earnings, AI, Xbox and gaming, and much more. The post Windows Weekly 960: Snow & Claus appeared first on Thurrott.com.

We can learn everything we need to know about AI and the workplace by studying Queen's 1970s stance on synthesizers. The post From the Editor’s Desk: No Synthesizers! ⭐ appeared first on Thurrott.com.

The EU Commission announced yesterday that it has 45 days to determine whether Apple Maps and Apple Ads are core platform services that need to be regulated under the DMA. The post EU Commission May Give Apple Maps and Ads Gatekeeper Status Under DMA appeared first on Thurrott.com.

I was hoping to keep this to weekly updates, but two weekends came and went with me struggling to figure out why WinUIpad was crashing on app exit in certain conditions. So another few weeks with the Windows App SDK and WinUI 3 was another few weeks of frustration, as always. But that’s the job, and this new update includes basic implementations of the Word count and Line and column position displays, plus one of the dumbest and most difficult tasks to do properly with this framework, app shutdown. Here’s what’s new. Word count Looking over my WinUIpad to-do list, I decided to tackle a few of what I felt would be the easier tasks. But as is so often the case with the Windows App SDK, I had mixed results. The simplest, perhaps, is the Word count display in the status bar: As the user types, I just need to update the count. This is a feature I added to the first, Windows Forms-based versions of .NETpad dating back to perhaps 2019. And it’s been in each version ever since. For this version of what’s now called WinUIpad, I decided to look at the code I had written or, in this case, obtained previously. And I found a March 2020 update to .NETpad that uses a regular expression to output the word count. Which is how I know I didn’t write it. You’ve heard the phrase that the best phone is the one you have with you. In a similar vein, the best code is often the code you don’t need to write. And though I’m sure I will revisit this later as part of an app-wide refactoring, the goal for now it not get stuck on details and to just get it done. So I went back to the well. As with previous versions of the app, a lot of the action takes place in the TextChanging() event handler for the main TextBox. Three things now happen when this event handler fires: It changes the Document object instance’s TextChanging property to True, changes the Document object instance’s Contents property to the TextBox’s Text contents, and, now, it also runs a new helper method called UpdateCount(). As for the new UpdateCount() method, this is based on the aforementioned 5+ year-old code. That TextBox has two event handlers (the other is SelectionChanged() and is discussed below), but UpdateCount() only needs to be called from here. So that’s that. For now. Line and column position This I haven’t completely solved, though I’ve left the code I have so far in there for now. The issue is that the Windows App SDK/WinUI 3 TextBox control doesn’t support WPF’s GetLineIndexFromCharacterIndex(), CaretIndex(), and GetCharacterIndexFromLineIndex() methods, and so you have to do all that work yourself. I know, crazy. Since WPF is open source, it’s possible to look at the source code for those three methods, but for now I am trying to just figure it out using GitHub Copilot, which is an endless circle jerk of errors when it comes to Windows App SDK/WinUI 3, and my own limited capabilities. Anyway, as per the Upda... The post WinUIpad: Word Count, Text Cursor Position, App Shutdown appeared first on Thurrott.com.

Amazon's Black Friday Week deals are live, and tech enthusiasts can save big on phones, tablets, laptops, smartwatches, home appliances, and more. The post Black Friday 2025: The Best Electronics Deals on Amazon appeared first on Thurrott.com.

Opera issued a major set of updates to its Neon agentic web browser that it created with its partner community. The post Opera Neon Get One-Minute Deep Research, Gemini 3 Pro, Nano Banana Pro, and More appeared first on Thurrott.com.

WhatsApp users will soon lose access to the ChatGPT and Copilot chatbots that arrived in the messaging app in late 2024. The post WhatsApp is Losing its ChatGPT and Copilot Chatbots appeared first on Thurrott.com.

I wish I could say that I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. But I'm just tired of it all. Tired of the enshittification, tired of the products and services that I rely on getting worse and worse, and more expensive, over time. But most of all, I'm tired of paying again and again for products and services that I either don't use at all, don't use enough, or are just too expensive when viable alternatives exist. And so a big focus of this coming year will be scaling back on all that whenever and wherever possible. The solution to this kind of problem typically takes the form of Little Tech companies and solutions. There are no good options in the hardware space thanks to the strangleholds that Apple and Google have in mobile and Microsoft and Apple have with computers. Here, one can simply use these platforms for what they are and ignore upsells where possible. And there are specific solutions, like Tiny11Builder, that can nicely de-enshittify OS platforms, in this case Windows. But you may lean more into a Mac or even Linux if you’re adventurous enough. How we got here I can’t even recall what my outlook was like as 2025 began, but at the end of January, Google unceremoniously cut me off from the Thurrott.com YouTube account, triggering some major rethinking of my relationships with Big Tech and technology in general that continues to this day. And with 2025 now drawing to a close, it is clear to me that I have become somewhat radicalized by what I see in this industry and how the changes that have been thrust on us--enshittification, basically--are almost universally negative. There’s the obvious, like ever-increasing prices on services that used to be so inexpensive that they were no brainers. There’s the subtle, like the subscription creep that led to higher and higher overall costs each month. There’s AI, of course, which Big Tech sees as a chance to not just charge us even more but to charge us almost exponentially more. There are financial shenanigans that might be described as a pyramid scheme if they were only that simple. And there are the overt money grabs as best exemplified by Apple’s disgusting 30 percent app store fees and $20+ billion in silent payoffs from Google for Search placement. This industry sucks. And I’m a part of it. A small part, to be sure, but with an obligation as an individual with empathy for others and, more to the point, a (small) soapbox that I use to the benefit of consumers, or users, and not the companies that should be serving them but are, instead, using them. We’re like the human bodies powering the Machines in The Matrix movies, helpless victims stewing in our own filth while being fooled into believing that our existence is somehow meaningful. Only an unthinking, morally bankrupt cad would defend Big Tech. But some do. I try to be more clear-headed, but with the usual mixed success. And I certainly don't have the meme-generating skills of a Cor... The post Online Accounts 2025: Saying No to Renting Software ⭐ appeared first on Thurrott.com.