There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with wireless keyboards, and it always arrives at the worst possible moment. Mid-sentence, mid-meeting, mid-game, the low battery warning blinks, the charging cable is nowhere nearby, and the whole appeal of going wireless suddenly feels like a poorly negotiated deal. The TH80 V2 and TH80 V2 Pro from Epomaker were built with that specific frustration in mind.
Both boards share a compact 75% layout, keeping the function row and dedicated arrow keys while shedding the numpad bulk that full-size keyboards carry everywhere. They are available in two switch flavors: the Creamy Jade linears for a smooth, consistent keystroke, and the Sea Salt Silent V2 switches for anyone sharing a space with people who would rather not hear every word being composed out loud.
Underneath each keystroke is a gasket-mount structure paired with a five-layer sound-dampening system. The polycarbonate plate adds some flex to the mix, and the result is that soft, cushioned thud the keyboard community has taken to calling “creamy.” It is one of those things that sounds like marketing until the first time a finger lands on a well-tuned gasket board, and then it just sounds like a very good reason to keep typing.
The battery is where both boards make their most persuasive argument. The TH80 V2 carries an 8,000 mAh cell rated at 200 hours with the RGB off, and the TH80 V2 Pro steps that up to 10,000 mAh. Most wireless keyboards in this price range ship with cells a quarter that size, which means charging becomes a weekly ritual rather than a distant afterthought. Both boards support 2.4 GHz, Bluetooth, and wired USB-C connectivity, remember up to five paired devices, and switch between Windows, Mac, and Android without any fuss.
TH80 V2 Pro
The TH80 V2 Pro goes a step further with a 1.06-inch glass-covered TFT color screen tucked beside the rotary knob. It shows time, battery percentage, and connection status at a glance, which is genuinely handy. It also supports custom GIF uploads through Epomaker’s browser-based driver, so the screen can carry a small personal detail for anyone who treats their desk as a considered space. No software installation needed, either, which removes a step that should have been dropped from this category a long time ago.
Picking between the two is a fairly straightforward exercise in priorities. The TH80 V2 covers the gasket mount, the massive battery, hot-swappable switches, full per-key RGB, and a side-lighting bar, available in a subtle Black Grey or a composed White Grey Yellow. The TH80 V2 Pro adds the LCD screen, the larger battery, the browser-based driver, and more expressive colorways, including a striking translucent black and a fan-favorite Pink edition.
What the TH80 V2 series gets right is the part that rarely makes it onto spec sheets: the sense that someone thought carefully about what actually makes a wireless keyboard annoying to live with, and then addressed those things one by one. Good typing feel, a battery that lasts long enough to stop being a concern, and enough room for personalization that the board can feel like yours rather than just a peripheral you settled for.
The 2026 escape is no longer a simple departure. It is an architectural arrival. Cabin designs have evolved into spaces for sensory realignment, where design shapes the experience itself. Light, stillness, and proportion now define luxury. The way a space holds the fading glow of sunset has become central to how it is felt and remembered.
This shift demands material honesty and a closer dialogue between built form and landscape. When architecture responds with restraint and intent, it becomes a biophilic cocoon, reducing carbon impact while elevating well-being.
1. Polygonal Spatial Cabins
The dominance of the rectilinear box is giving way to faceted architectural forms inspired by mineral geometries and fractured landscapes. Polygonal structures introduce a more dynamic spatial language, where walls and planes are angled with intent rather than symmetry. These forms create a constantly shifting play of light and shadow, allowing the architecture to change character throughout the day and feel visually alive.
Beyond aesthetics, angular geometry reshapes perception. By moving away from rigid right angles, compact footprints feel larger and more layered. Circulation becomes experiential, as movement through faceted corridors reveals framed views, unexpected pauses, and a heightened awareness of the surrounding terrain.
Cabin A24 is a 21-square-metre prefabricated tiny cabin designed for peaceful escapes among forests and mountain valleys, offering all the essentials for short, comfortable stays. Created by DDAA (Dev Desai Architects and Associates), the cabin stands out with its distinctive pentagonal form and strong architectural identity, without sacrificing everyday functionality. Fully furnished, it includes a living area, sleeping space, kitchenette, and bathroom, all carefully planned to make the most of its compact footprint while maintaining a sense of openness and privacy.
The layout is divided into two efficient zones, with a generous bedroom and lounge on one side and the bathroom and kitchenette on the other. A floor-to-ceiling glazed window brings natural light into the sleeping area, while walnut flooring and matte interior finishes create a warm, contemporary feel. With integrated service areas that support self-sufficient living, Cabin A24 is designed to fit effortlessly into wooded, mountainous, or coastal landscapes, offering comfort without disturbing the calm of its surroundings.
2. The Living Roof Cabin
The green roof has evolved beyond a sustainability add-on into a critical architectural layer that binds building and landscape. It becomes a living surface, softening the structure while improving performance. The depth of soil acts as a thermal buffer, naturally enhancing insulation and reducing dependence on mechanical heating and cooling across seasons.
Equally important is its long-term value. Indigenous planting transforms the roof into a suspended ecosystem that supports biodiversity while absorbing carbon. Over time, the system protects the waterproof membrane from UV exposure and extreme temperature shifts. This significantly extends roof life, making the return less about immediate savings and more about durability, resilience, and lasting architectural intelligence.
Homes carved into mountainsides always spark the imagination, offering sweeping views and a sense of calm that feels worlds away from everyday life. In southwestern Iceland, architectural studio KRADS has completed a secluded holiday home overlooking Lake Þingvallavatn, the country’s second-largest natural lake. Designed for musicians Tina Dickow and Helgi Jónsson, the retreat is carefully positioned to capture expansive views of the lake and surrounding wilderness while remaining quietly anchored within the rugged terrain. The design prioritises intimacy and comfort, making it an ideal escape that balances dramatic scenery with a warm, sheltered interior experience.
To achieve this harmony, KRADS built the home on three staggered concrete planes that follow the natural slope of the land. Each level aligns with the shifting topography, allowing the structure to feel embedded rather than imposed. The accessible rooftop extends the living experience outdoors, offering uninterrupted views of sky and the forest. Covered with moss, grasses, and native shrubs, the green roof further blends the home into its environment, reflecting a strong commitment to preserving the landscape.
3. Rustic Modern Material Cabin
Rustic Modernism defines the new language of rural luxury, balancing industrial precision with organic warmth. It is rooted in material honesty, where finishes are chosen for what they are rather than how they imitate. Board-formed concrete sits confidently alongside reclaimed timber, creating a dialogue that feels both contemporary and deeply grounded in place.
The experience is tactile as much as visual. Cool stone, textured concrete, and live-edge wood invite touch and slow engagement. Regional sourcing strengthens this connection, reducing transport impact while anchoring the building to its landscape.
Iniö is a prefabricated log home by Pluspuu, designed as a holiday retreat for a Finland-born couple now living in Switzerland, who wanted to reconnect with their roots in Heinola. Known for its mastery of log construction, the Helsinki-based company worked with Ollikaisen Hirsirakenne Oy to create a home that blends rustic charm with modern clarity. Chosen from Pluspuu’s catalogue, Iniö stands out for its clean-lined form, light-filled interiors, and expansive floor-to-ceiling windows that frame the surrounding forest while keeping the interior warm and inviting.
Planned as a two-level, three-bedroom home, Iniö features deep eaves and a wraparound patio that extends living spaces outdoors. The couple customised the interior with a traditional Finnish rimakatto ceiling, adding texture and softer acoustics. Thick spruce logs, wood-fibre insulation, triple-glazed windows, and geothermal heating ensure year-round comfort, delivering a retreat that feels timeless, grounded, and quietly contemporary.
4. Hobbit-Inspired Cabin
Hobbit-inspired subterranean homes are being redefined as a sophisticated response to privacy, climate, and belonging to the earth. These earth-sheltered dwellings act as biophilic cocoons, where the surrounding ground becomes a protective envelope. The thermal mass of the soil stabilizes interior temperatures throughout the year and reduces energy demand while enhancing comfort.
Drawing from ancient troglodyte traditions and principles of grounding, these homes offer a sense of refuge that elevated structures rarely achieve. Carefully choreographed spatial sequences introduce light through glazed openings and sunken courtyards, ensuring interiors feel open and serene. The result is a luminous underground sanctuary rooted in performance and imagination.
Tiny homes have a special kind of magic, and this cabin captures it with a form that feels straight out of a storybook, yet firmly rooted in modern design. Set on a sloping site, the structure rises organically from the ground, with its surface folding upward to shape both the exterior and the interior. The result is a home that gives subtle hobbit-like charm, reinterpreted through smooth lines and contemporary architecture. A vertical glass strip runs from floor to ceiling, visually stitching the space together and creating a strong connection between levels.
At the entrance, two existing trees frame the volume, softening the transition between nature and architecture while guiding you inside. Being slightly elevated improves natural ventilation, keeping the space fresh and comfortable. The contrast of black finishes with warm timber stands out against the forest, yet the flowing form helps the cabin blend into its surroundings. Inside, the mood is minimal, refined, and spa-like, with the bedroom’s glass detailing creating a striking floating effect.
5. Cantilevered Cliff Living Cabin
Clifftop architecture represents the boldest expression of contemporary luxury, where design engages directly with gravity and exposure. Cantilevered forms extend living spaces into open air, creating a suspended relationship between structure and landscape. Steel and post-tensioned concrete enable this architectural daring, allowing the building to hover with precision rather than force.
Performance is as critical as poetry. These homes are engineered to withstand extreme wind loads and seismic movement, making resilience part of the design narrative. Floor-to-ceiling glazing transforms the interior into a viewing instrument, capturing shifting light and distant horizons. The reward lies in rarity, offering a perspective that feels elevated in every sense.
Perched on the dramatic cliffs of Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, Casa Yuri appears almost carved into the coastline. Completed in 2023, this expansive oceanfront home reinterprets traditional Mexican architecture through a contemporary lens, creating a space that feels striking and deeply personal. The arrival experience builds anticipation, with a landscaped ramp rising from the motor lobby and gradually revealing the house across a vast, nearly 3,000-square-metre site. Designed by Daniel Zozaya Valdés and Enrique Zozaya with full creative freedom, the residence unfolds as a sequence of open, fluid spaces shaped by the surrounding sea and sky.
At its heart is a monumental 17-metre-wide palapa, the largest the firm has built for a private home, forming a shaded social hub where indoor and outdoor living seamlessly merge. A dramatic cantilevered pool extends over the rocks, creating the sensation of floating above the Pacific. Beyond its visual impact, the house is thoughtfully sustainable, using passive cooling, water-recycling systems, and native stone and wood. By blending time-honoured coastal building traditions with bold modern gestures, Casa Yuri captures a refined vision of contemporary Mexican living by the sea.
In 2026, weekend retreats are less about escape and more about return. Architecture becomes a place of alignment, not distance. Through polygonal forms, living roofs, and honest materials, these sanctuaries deliver lasting value in well-being. When buildings respond to landscape, they create spaces that quietly restore the human spirit.
We’re used to devices and gadgets that have all complicated buttons and controls. But what if it wasn’t that way always? The gesture is almost embarrassingly simple. Pull a zipper open and sound plays. Pull it shut and the room goes quiet. No tapping a screen, no asking a voice assistant, no hunting for a button that somehow always ends up on the wrong side of the device. Just the same physical action you’ve been doing since you were old enough to dress yourself.
That’s the entire premise of ZIP, a concept speaker designed by Korean designers Taeyang Kim, Dugyeong Lee, Yejin Na, and Gijeong Shin. It’s one of those ideas that, once you see it, makes you wonder why it took this long. The concept draws directly from the universal expression “zip your lips,” mapping the act of silencing onto the most tactile and satisfying closure mechanism we use in everyday life. The zipper isn’t decorative here. It isn’t a style nod or an ironic wink. It is the interface. And that commitment is what makes ZIP genuinely interesting rather than just aesthetically clever.
Designers: Taeyang Kim, Dugyeong Lee, Yejin Na, gijeong Shin
Physically, the object is composed and self-assured. A compact rectangular body in brushed silver aluminum sits below a band of dark fabric bisected by a metal zipper, the kind of heavy-duty hardware you’d find on a quality jacket, not a flimsy fashion detail. The lower half houses the speaker grille: a grid of evenly punched dots that reads like something out of a Dieter Rams archive, which is very much a compliment. The visual language is minimal without being cold, functional without being dull. It looks equally at home on a credenza beside art books and on a desk next to a keyboard.
The prototype photos on Behance pull off something a lot of design projects fail to do: they make you feel the weight of the thing. The exploded component layout is especially good. You can see the actual speaker driver, the PCB, the battery, the zipper hardware, all laid out like a dissected argument for why this object should exist. It’s a working prototype, not a render, and that matters. Renders are promises. A functioning prototype is a proof.
What I keep coming back to is the conceptual integrity. A lot of tech and industrial design right now is obsessed with reducing interfaces to nothing: invisible touch surfaces, gesture sensing, proximity triggers. The instinct is understandable, but there’s a real cost to removing physicality from control. You lose feedback. You lose certainty. You lose the tiny neurological satisfaction of knowing you actually did a thing. ZIP goes in a different direction by betting that a familiar mechanical action can carry more meaning than a capacitive button ever will.
The “zip your lips” metaphor also does something a lot of design thinking misses. It’s cross-cultural in its clarity. You don’t need to read a manual to understand what zipping something shut means in relation to silence. The designers describe it as proposing “a new interface that controls sound, inspired by the gesture of closing your mouth.” That isn’t just product language. It’s a considered philosophical position on what intuitive design actually means. Intuitive doesn’t mean invisible. It means immediately understood.
The styling throughout the Behance project reinforces this with a dry, confident visual wit. The image of someone holding the zipper module over their mouth says everything the project text says, but in about half a second. It’s the kind of visual shorthand that designers spend entire careers trying to achieve.
Whether ZIP ever becomes a commercially available product is, frankly, beside the point right now. What it demonstrates is a design team that understands the difference between novelty and concept. Novelty fades. Concept compounds. And the concept here, that the best interface is the one that already lives in muscle memory, is solid enough to carry a lot more than a speaker. It’s rare to look at a design concept and feel like the people behind it already know something important. ZIP is that kind of rare.
A month after Seedance 2.0's launch in China sparked cease-and-desist letters from Disneyand Paramount Skydance over its use of copyrighted materials, its developer ByteDance has reportedly hit pause on the release of the AI video tool in other regions. According to The Information, which spoke to two anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter, ByteDance has suspended Seedance 2.0's global rollout. Engadget has reached out to ByteDance for comment and will update this story if we hear back with more information.
Seedance 2.0 caught heat from Hollywood studios almost immediately upon its release, after user-generated videos including a viral AI clip of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise sparked concerns that copyrighted works were used in training the model. In February, ByteDance told the BBC that it is "taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorised use of intellectual property and likeness by users." It's unclear when exactly ByteDance planned to release the tool more widely.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/bytedance-has-reportedly-suspended-the-global-rollout-of-its-new-ai-video-generator-212326112.html?src=rss
The motorhome has always had an identity problem on wheels. It is supposed to feel like home, but most of the time it looks and feels like neither a proper vehicle nor a proper house. It sits awkwardly in that middle ground, too big to be elegant and too cramped to be genuinely comfortable. RE:BURO, a studio that defines itself as a bureau of technical aesthetics, decided to take that problem seriously, and the result is HYTTE, a mobile home concept that genuinely earns the word “home.”
The name comes from the Scandinavian tradition of the hytte, a simple countryside cabin. That cultural reference is not decorative. It is the philosophical backbone of the entire project. RE:BURO’s stated goal was to create a mobile dwelling that is utilitarian and practical, but that also blends seamlessly into the natural environment without compromising its aesthetics. That is a harder brief to execute than it sounds, and the fact that HYTTE largely pulls it off is what makes it worth discussing.
From the outside, HYTTE looks nothing like the motorhomes lining the highways. The exterior is compact and barrel-shaped, finished in dark matte tones, with a signature octagonal face that gives the whole vehicle an almost architectural quality. The red LED ring framing that face is the one moment of drama in an otherwise restrained design, and it works precisely because everything else is so controlled. Viewed from the side, the proportions feel more like a piece of land architecture than a road vehicle, which is exactly the intention. RE:BURO described the project as creating a vehicle similar to modern architecture that blends seamlessly into the natural environment while remaining a functional mobile home, and looking at the renders placed against those raw, rocky landscapes, that ambition holds up.
The structural platform is one of the more inventive aspects of the concept. The chassis uses two clamp-like grippers, similar in principle to a crab’s claws, that bind the living compartment on both sides using cables and fasteners. That modular logic means the platform is not locked into one configuration. It can be adapted to different use scenarios, which pushes HYTTE beyond a single-purpose vehicle and into something more like a system.
The interior is where the design thinking becomes most layered. RE:BURO chose to work within a simple geometric form and let those constraints generate solutions rather than fight them. That kind of design discipline is genuinely rare. The result is an interior that feels intentional rather than improvised. The dominant feature is an electric heater styled as a modern fireplace, which does more than provide warmth. It anchors the space psychologically, reinforcing the idea that this is a home rather than a vehicle cabin. The team noted that this element emphasises the idea of the object both visually and ideologically, creating an atmosphere of warmth and comfort, and that framing makes complete sense. A fireplace, even a reimagined one, signals rest and permanence in a way that no amount of clever storage ever could.
The rest of the interior follows that same ethos. Parts of the space are designed to transform into different structures for different usage scenarios, making the limited footprint feel versatile without feeling cluttered. The concept also includes dedicated spaces for houseplants and pets, details that seem minor but signal a design team that thought about how people actually live rather than just how spaces photograph in renders.
What RE:BURO has done with HYTTE is essentially make the case that the motorhome category has been underselling itself for decades by defaulting to the same visual and functional template. The concept draws on Scandinavian ideas of lagom, of getting the balance exactly right, and applies them to a vehicle type that has historically leaned toward excess or compromise. Neither approach tends to produce good design.
HYTTE is still a concept. But as a piece of thinking about what mobile living could look like when someone genuinely applies architectural rigour to it, it is one of the more compelling proposals I have come across in a while. The motorhome industry could learn a great deal from it.
The best furniture tends to ask a quiet question. Not loudly, not with a press release, but through the way it sits in a room and dares you to interact with it differently. Manuela Hirschfeld’s Tilt chair does exactly that, and the fact that it comes from a student project makes it all the more interesting.
Hirschfeld is an industrial design student at Germany’s Hochschule Pforzheim, and her Tilt chair is exactly what the name suggests. Built from bent plywood with a minimalist silhouette, it’s a chair that shifts between two modes: upright for sitting and reclined for lounging, all with a single gentle forward tilt. No levers, no mechanical parts, no instructions needed. Just physics, balance, and good design doing the heavy lifting.
Designer: Manuela Hirschfeld
The concept is almost disarmingly simple. Hirschfeld describes it this way: “Tilt transforms from a chair to a lounger in seconds with a gentle forward tilt. Intuitive and perfectly balanced. Two moments arise from a single piece of furniture: arriving upright or relaxing and letting go.” That last line is the one that stuck with me. Arriving upright or relaxing and letting go. It reads more like a small philosophy than a product description.
What I find genuinely impressive here is the restraint. A lot of student design work goes big. It reaches for concepts that are hard to produce, materials that don’t yet exist, or ideas that require ten slides of explanation before they make sense. Tilt goes the other direction. It strips everything down to the point where the idea can stand entirely on its own. One material, one gesture, two functions. That’s it.
Bent plywood as a material has a rich history in furniture design. Charles and Ray Eames made it iconic. Alvar Aalto built a whole vocabulary around it. Choosing it for a student project isn’t a lazy shortcut; it’s actually a high bar. The material has been done so well, so many times, that doing something genuinely new with it means you have to think carefully. Hirschfeld has clearly done that thinking, because the Tilt doesn’t feel like it’s borrowing from those references. It feels like it belongs to the same conversation without trying to imitate anyone in it.
The two-position function also taps into something real about how people use furniture. We don’t sit the same way all day. Anyone who works from home, eats at their desk, or uses their living room for everything from Zoom calls to Sunday afternoon napping already knows this. The idea that a single well-designed chair could accommodate those different physical and emotional states is more practical than it first appears. It’s a simple answer to a genuinely complicated question.
What makes this worth paying attention to, beyond the design itself, is that Hirschfeld apparently maintains no online presence. Core77, who featured the project, noted it with a certain curiosity. No portfolio, no Instagram, no LinkedIn footprint to trace. That’s almost radical for a design student right now, when visibility tends to be treated as a prerequisite for being taken seriously. It raises the question of whether the work should be enough on its own. Looking at Tilt, you’d have to say it is.
Student design work often gets dismissed as theoretical, as something that sounds good in a studio critique but would never survive contact with manufacturing, retail, or real life. Tilt doesn’t read that way. It reads as resolved. The kind of thing that could sit in a well-edited apartment or a design-forward hotel room without anyone questioning whether it belongs there. Whether it ever goes into production is anyone’s guess. But that’s almost beside the point. What Hirschfeld has done with Tilt is prove that the clearest ideas are sometimes the hardest to arrive at, and that a chair doesn’t need to reinvent itself to be worth talking about. It just needs to do two things well.
You're responsible for your own Spotify algorithm now. On stage at SXSW, Spotify's co-CEO, Gustav Söderström, announced the Taste Profile feature, which allows users to personally customize exactly what they want to listen to, whether it's music, audiobooks or podcasts. This AI-powered feature is still in beta, and it will be available to Premium users in New Zealand in the coming weeks.
From its short video demo, Spotify's Taste Profile feature will show you a summary of your listening habits and offer a "Tell us more" prompt at the bottom. With the new prompt, users can inform the AI what they want to see more of or if they want to get rid of a genre that keeps popping up in their algorithm. Spotify said that the Taste Profile will take into consideration more ambiguous prompts, too, like if you're training for a marathon and want upbeat music or want to listen to news podcasts during your commute to work. Spotify added that Taste Profile is an optional feature, and unwilling users can "leave it and enjoy Spotify as usual."
With Taste Profile, Spotify is continuing its momentum of offering AI features, like the Prompted Playlist feature that was made available last month. Unlike the existing AI Playlist feature, Prompted Playlist lets you put in specific requests to generate a playlist, like only including songs from a specific TV show. Like Taste Profile, the Prompted Playlist feature saw beta testing in New Zealand first, before expanding to US and Canadian users a month later.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/spotifys-new-taste-profile-feature-lets-users-fine-tune-their-algorithms-recommendations-191104626.html?src=rss
You're responsible for your own Spotify algorithm now. On stage at SXSW, Spotify's co-CEO, Gustav Söderström, announced the Taste Profile feature, which allows users to personally customize exactly what they want to listen to, whether it's music, audiobooks or podcasts. This AI-powered feature is still in beta, and it will be available to Premium users in New Zealand in the coming weeks.
From its short video demo, Spotify's Taste Profile feature will show you a summary of your listening habits and offer a "Tell us more" prompt at the bottom. With the new prompt, users can inform the AI what they want to see more of or if they want to get rid of a genre that keeps popping up in their algorithm. Spotify said that the Taste Profile will take into consideration more ambiguous prompts, too, like if you're training for a marathon and want upbeat music or want to listen to news podcasts during your commute to work. Spotify added that Taste Profile is an optional feature, and unwilling users can "leave it and enjoy Spotify as usual."
With Taste Profile, Spotify is continuing its momentum of offering AI features, like the Prompted Playlist feature that was made available last month. Unlike the existing AI Playlist feature, Prompted Playlist lets you put in specific requests to generate a playlist, like only including songs from a specific TV show. Like Taste Profile, the Prompted Playlist feature saw beta testing in New Zealand first, before expanding to US and Canadian users a month later.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/spotifys-new-taste-profile-feature-lets-users-fine-tune-their-algorithms-recommendations-191104626.html?src=rss
There may have been some extra incentive for the Trump administration to get the TikTok US deal done. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is set to receive a total of $10 billion in the deal that allowed TikTok to remain in the US. The new investors who acquired stakes in the US entity of TikTok already paid a $2.5 billion fee to the administration when the deal closed in January, but WSJ's latest report noted that the group of investors would continue to make payments until the total hits $10 billion.
After a group of investors, which includes Oracle along with the Silver Lake and MGX investment firms, acquired stakes in the US-based TikTok entity called TikTok USDS Joint Venture, the WSJ previously reported that the administration would receive a "multibillion-dollar fee" for its work on the deal. To better contextualize the recently-revealed $10 billion fee the Trump administration is receiving, the US entity of TikTok was valued at $14 billion by Vice President JD Vance.
The Trump administration has previously involved itself in major deals with other US corporations. Last year, the administration invested $8.9 billion into Intel and received a nearly 9 percent equity stake. In terms of unprecedented windfalls, the Trump administration also received a Boeing 747-8 as a gift from the Qatari government in May.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/trump-administration-will-reportedly-get-10-billion-for-brokering-the-tiktok-deal-180954979.html?src=rss
Need something new for your reading list? This week, we recommend A.D. Sui's The Iron Garden Sutra, a meditative horror sci-fi/fantasy and murder mystery.
I don't typically gravitate toward locked room mysteries, but the description of this book ticked all the right boxes to win me over: "a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding." It has all the makings of a compelling murder mystery, which is fine on its own, but thanks to the philosophical musings of its main character, Vessel Iris, and a setting that almost demands existential contemplation, it becomes something much deeper.
Vessel Iris is a monk some time in the far future whose mission is to perform funeral rites for the dead so their souls may reach their ultimate destination, according to the beliefs of his religion, the Starlit Order. "Vessels" like Iris share their mind with an AI companion, which creates a really interesting dynamic for the reader, as there is a constant dialogue going on between the two from the start (carrying a tone that sometimes verges on "old married couple," which I quite enjoyed). Iris shows up to an ancient ship called the Counsel of Nicaea expecting to perform his duties for the long-deceased on board and instead finds himself facing a group of researchers who are very much not dead — and a jumbled mess of bones from the hundreds of bodies they disturbed by moving, which he'll have to sort in order to properly bless.
Despite being a ghost ship in most respects, it turns out the Nicaea is alive with vegetation and gardens that would have once supported the humans that lived there. And, there's seemingly something else, as Iris' AI begins to pick up strange pings from a presence on the ship, and one by one the team of researchers starts getting picked off. As everything unravels, Iris begins to question his faith and his purpose.
This was such a great read, and I was excited to learn it's the first in a two-book series, The Cosmic Wheel series. Fans of horror sci-fi/sci-fantasy should definitely check this one out.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/what-to-read-this-weekend-locked-in-with-the-iron-garden-sutra-172342019.html?src=rss
