United States soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke has been arrested and charged for placing bets on prediction marketplace Polymarket using classified information he had access to related to the capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. The US Army Special Forces master sergeant, who was directly involved with the planning and execution of the operation, allegedly made $409,881 in profits.
According to the Department of Justice, Van Dyke created a Polymarket account around December 26, 2025 and made 13 bets related to Maduro from December 27 to January 2. He took the “Yes” position on several Polymarket wagers, including “US Forces in Venezuela… by January 31, 2026,” “Maduro out by… January 31, 2026, “Will the US invade Venezuela by January 31” and “Trump invokes War Powers against Venezuela by… January 31.” The US military captured Maduro and his wife on January 3.
Van Dyke allegedly bet a total of $33,034 and made over ten times that amount from his winnings. He withdrew his money from Polymarket on the day Maduro was captured and then sent it to a foreign crypto vault before depositing it to a new online brokerage account.
Shortly after Maduro’s capture, reports came out about how an anonymous gambler made almost half a million dollars before it was announced, raising concerns that someone had profited off insider military knowledge. The Justice Department says Van Dyke tried to cover his tracks. After reports about the potential insider bets were published, he allegedly asked Polymarket to delete his account, falsely claiming that he lost access to the email he used. He also changed the email address linked to his crypto account to another one not associated with his name.
Van Dyke has been charged with three counts of violation against the Commodity Exchange Act, with each one carrying a max sentence of 10 years in prison. He has also been charged with one count of wire fraud with a max penalty of 20 years in prison, as well as one count of unlawful monetary transaction with a max sentence of 10 years.
Prediction marketplaces have been struggling with insider trading problems, and this is far from the first incident. Recently, Kalshi took action against three political candidates, accusing them of insider trading related to their campaigns. Matt Klein of Minnesota and Ezekiel Enriquez of Texas face a fine of less than $1,000 and suspensions of up to five years. Meanwhile Mark Moran of Virginia faces disciplinary action, a five year suspension and a fine of more than $6,000.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/us-soldier-arrested-for-allegedly-making-over-400000-on-polymarket-with-classified-maduro-information-014531367.html?src=rss
There’s a quiet tension in how most furniture is still designed. Sofas are built to stay put, claiming floor space indefinitely, whether you need them there or not. Meanwhile, the way people actually use their homes has shifted considerably, moving between indoors and outdoors, hosting spontaneously, clearing space for workouts or kids, and treating balconies and terraces as proper extensions of their living areas.
That’s the gap Airmaan’s M Sofa is designed to fill. Rather than asking you to choose between comfort, portability, and design, the M Sofa brings all three together in an inflatable sofa that looks and sits like proper furniture. It can serve as your primary home setup year-round and then disappear into a bag the moment you need the space cleared or want to take it somewhere else entirely.
One of the more underrated things it does is give space back. Fixed furniture occupies a room all the time, even when you’d rather use that area for something else. With M Sofa, a terrace can be a lounge one afternoon and completely open the next morning. The same goes for living rooms and balconies. You can deflate it, pack it away, and reset the space in minutes.
Of course, an innovative sofa would be pointless if it didn’t offer comfort, and thankfully, the M Sofa delivers. The seat and backrest are set at a natural resting angle, with smooth, rounded edges and no pressure points, giving you enough support for extended stretches. There’s a subtle firmness to the inflated structure that feels more like a well-tuned mattress than a balloon, and you can adjust it simply by changing the air pressure.
Despite preconceived notions about inflatable sofas, the M Sofar is at home indoors and outdoors. In fact, it thrives on moving between spaces. It can sit on a garden terrace for a lazy morning, get moved poolside for the afternoon, and come back indoors for the evening without any real effort. That kind of fluidity isn’t something traditional outdoor furniture can offer, especially not without the weight, bulk, and maintenance that come with most permanent garden setups.
With inflatable furniture, durability is naturally a major cause for concern. To that end, the M Sofa was designed around a high-strength inflatable structure rooted in dropstitch technology, the same kind used in marine and aerospace applications. Its outer shell is fully waterproof, resistant to UV exposure, salt, sand, and temperature extremes, and the bonded, airtight construction keeps the air in for weeks at a time rather than days.
M Sofa’s portability also goes beyond deflating and rolling up some heavy and cumbersome material. It packs down into a bag compact enough to carry by hand or throw in a car trunk, which means it can go to the beach, a mountain setting, or a camping spot just as easily as it moves from your garden to your living room.
The M Sofa is part of a broader collection that includes the N Club Chair and a matching side table, so you can put together a proper lounge arrangement rather than a single seat. That modular nature means you can expand for a gathering or pare things down for a quieter setup, without having to own separate furniture for separate occasions.
What makes the M Sofa worth paying attention to has less to do with the inflation angle and more with what it says about furniture design broadly. The more interesting question isn’t whether an inflatable sofa can look good; it’s whether furniture should still be the heaviest, most permanent object in a room. For a growing number of people, the honest answer is that it probably doesn’t need to be, and the M Sofa proves it.
A watched pot may never boil, but an unwatched one seems to do so with a special kind of enthusiasm. That familiar kitchen truth highlights a basic challenge; the cook must serve as the constant monitor for every vessel on the stove, standing guard against the sudden surge of a boil-over or the sharp, bitter smell of a sauce beginning to catch and burn. With its new M-Sense system, Miele proposes a more cooperative arrangement, one where the cookware itself takes over the job of watching for trouble.
By integrating sensors and communication hardware directly into its cookware, Miele creates a live feedback loop between the pot and the induction hob. This connection allows the vessel to detect the telltale temperature spikes that precede a messy boil-over or the localized hot spots that lead to scorching. It then signals the hob to regulate its power automatically, transforming the simple pot from a passive container into an active, intelligent partner in the cooking process. It is a sensible and deeply practical innovation aimed at creating a calmer, more forgiving kitchen.
Designer: Miele
The appeal of that idea becomes obvious the moment real food enters the picture. Caramel demands close attention because it can move from amber to acrid in seconds. Milk rises fast, stocks foam unpredictably, and sauces have a habit of catching at the base just when your focus shifts elsewhere. M-Sense is built around those ordinary kitchen disasters, which makes it feel refreshingly grounded. There is a lot of smart kitchen technology that promises convenience in abstract terms, but this system is easy to understand because it targets problems almost every home cook has experienced firsthand.
Miele is showcasing at least two pieces, a brushed stainless steel saucepot and a frying pan with a dark non-stick interior, and both reveal how carefully the interaction has been considered. The saucepot carries a compact touch interface integrated into the side of the vessel, while the frying pan places its controls directly into the handle where the thumb naturally lands. In both cases, the controls feel embedded into the object rather than added on as an afterthought, which helps the cookware read as premium kitchenware first and connected hardware second.
The induction hob at the center of the system is the KM 8695 FL MattFinish, a full-surface model finished in scratch-resistant MattFinish ceramic glass. Full-surface induction means the cookware can sit anywhere on the hob while maintaining the communication link, which matters considerably for a system built on continuous sensor feedback. Miele states the promise with welcome directness: No Burn. No Overboil. No Problem. Both outcomes trace back to a single cause, a vessel with no way to communicate with the heat source beneath it. M-Sense addresses that by making the cookware itself the sensing layer, so power adjustments happen before smoke or overflow enters the picture.
The Miele app extends the system beyond the counter, enabling remote monitoring, direct program transfer to the hob, and a recipe library that maps dish choices to actual hob settings. The cookware can connect to the app before it even reaches the hob, arriving on the induction surface already configured for the task at hand. That pre-loading capability closes a gap most connected kitchen products have only gestured toward. Working across hob, cookware, and app simultaneously, M-Sense operates as a coordinated platform rather than a loose set of individual smart features. It is a more coherent model than the kitchen tech category has typically managed to deliver.
For all the talk around smart homes, this is the kind of intelligence that feels worth having because it addresses a genuine friction point in daily life. Cooking often demands divided attention, especially in real homes where dinner happens alongside conversations, children, emails, and the dozens of small interruptions that shape an evening. A system that can sense trouble early and quietly intervene before a sauce burns or a pot boils over feels less like novelty and more like relief. Miele is showing the M-Sense collection in the EuroCucina section at Salone del Mobile, where visitors can see the cookware paired with its compatible induction setup as part of the brand’s broader vision for a more responsive kitchen.
Hurricane season doesn’t announce itself with a calendar invite. It builds quietly offshore, gathers speed, and by the time a named storm is tracking toward your zip code, the window for thoughtful preparation has already closed. For anyone living within reach of a coastline, the months between now and June 1st aren’t a countdown — they’re a design problem. What gear do you actually trust when the power is out, the roads are flooded, your signal has dropped, and your phone is sitting at 8%?
The smartest coastal preparedness kits aren’t built around bulk. They’re built around precision. Tools that work without electricity. Radios that function when networks collapse. Lights that require no batteries, no charging, no maintenance. Blades that deploy on physics rather than springs that quietly corrode in salt air. What follows are five designs that solve real coastal emergencies without adding clutter to your go-bag or guilt to your preparation plan.
1. NoxTi Titanium Tritium Keychain Light
Tritium is a hydrogen isotope with a 12.3-year half-life. As it decays, beta particles strike a phosphor coating and produce continuous light — no battery, no charging, no maintenance required. The same physics used in emergency exit signs and military watches is packaged into the NoxTi: a 45mm Grade 5 titanium cylinder weighing 10.7 grams that glows reliably for 25 years. For coastal homeowners facing multi-day outages, that guarantee is worth more than any lumen count.
The tritium vial sits inside a precision quartz tube with 92% light transmission, held inside a CNC-machined body that resists salt-air corrosion. A ceramic glass breaker at one end handles vehicle-escape emergencies — one of the most critical scenarios during coastal flooding. When the vial dims after two decades, you push it out and slide in a replacement. Six color options, two titanium finishes, tritium pricing from $45.
What We Like
25 years of passive illumination powered entirely by material physics, with zero maintenance
Ceramic glass breaker turns an everyday keychain accessory into a genuine flood-escape tool
What We Dislike
The glow is intentionally faint — it orients you in the dark, it doesn’t light a room
Tritium is regulated in certain countries, worth confirming before you order
2. RetroWave 7-in-1 Radio
When a hurricane makes landfall, cell towers flood, lose power, or get overwhelmed. The RetroWave 7-in-1 Radio receives AM, FM, and shortwave broadcasts — infrastructure that operates completely independent of internet providers and remains live when everything digital has collapsed. Shortwave is the detail that separates it from a novelty: international emergency transmissions reach you even when every local tower in your county is offline.
Beyond its radio identity, the RetroWave functions as a Bluetooth speaker, MP3 player, LED flashlight, SOS alarm, hand-crank generator, and solar charging unit. That crank-plus-solar pairing is the decision that makes it genuinely coastal-ready. During a multi-day outage with no infrastructure in sight, a radio that generates its own energy isn’t a clever feature — it’s the only communication device in the room still working.
Hand-crank and solar charging mean it never fully runs out of operational power
Shortwave reception works completely independent of the internet and cellular networks
What We Dislike
Seven integrated functions mean a single point of failure affects the entire device
The retro aesthetic may cause buyers to underestimate it as decor rather than serious emergency hardware
3. Edgelet SpearEdge Titanium Folder
Hawks don’t cut with force — they cut with geometry. Their curved talons guide material naturally into the cutting path while the arc concentrates force exactly where it needs to land. That principle is what Edgelet has brought into the SpearEdge: a 66.3mm titanium folder with a hawk-talon blade profile built for the pull-cut motions your hand already makes naturally. Through cordage, packaging, and emergency sheeting, it demands less effort than a straight edge in a high-stress moment.
The finger ring adds slip resistance when handles are wet — a coastal reality worth designing around from the start. The titanium body resists the salt-air corrosion that quietly destroys conventional carry gear over a coastal season, and the open keyring slot at the tail means tool-free attachment to any go-bag loop.
Hawk-talon geometry reduces pull-cut effort through cordage and wet materials under pressure
Full titanium construction resists the salt-air corrosion that degrades conventional coastal carry gear
What We Dislike
The curved blade profile is a specialist shape — it won’t feel as universal as a straight edge for every task
4. TriBeam Camplight
Most emergency lighting treats light as binary. The TriBeam Camplight approaches illumination the way good design should — with modes built to match the moment. A 5-lumen ambient glow for navigating interiors without destroying night vision. A diffused camping mode for shared spaces. A focused 180-lumen beam for moving through flooded exteriors or searching in the dark. All three live inside a 12.8cm, 135-gram form factor that disappears into a jacket pocket without negotiation.
The TriBeam’s coastal value is its coherence across the full arc of a storm event. Ambient light for the final hours before landfall, flashlight mode for immediate tasks during the storm, and a 50-hour battery life that outlasts the extended outages that follow a major hurricane without a single recharge. It earns a permanent shelf position long before the season arrives, which is precisely the kind of preparedness tool that actually makes it out the door.
Three distinct modes adapt fluidly across pre-storm, during-storm, and post-storm scenarios
50-hour battery life comfortably outlasts most extended post-hurricane power outages in coastal zones
What We Dislike
180-lumen maximum output is solid for camp-scale use but limited for long-distance emergency signaling
Single-button mode cycling may slow down switching for users who need to change modes quickly under pressure
5. Cubik
Most EDC knives fail the coastal environment test quietly. Springs corrode. Bearing systems fill with salt residue. The Cubik solves this at the mechanical level: press the trigger, tilt the knife downward, and gravity deploys the blade. Release, and it locks solid. No springs, no bearings, no hidden pivot mechanisms accumulating salt. In a marine environment, removing every rust-prone component isn’t minimalism — it’s engineering honesty applied to a real problem.
The blade locks solidly enough to pierce hardwood, proving that restraint and functional strength aren’t at odds. The tungsten carbide glass breaker integrated into the rear handle adds a vehicle-escape capability inside a format most people would read as a refined daily carry — the same critical function the NoxTi covers from the keychain end. Two glass breakers across a coastal kit means redundancy, which is the structural principle every good preparedness strategy is built around.
What We Like
Gravity deployment eliminates springs and bearings — the primary corrosion vulnerabilities in any coastal carry knife
Tungsten carbide glass breaker adds a high-stakes vehicle-escape function inside an unassuming daily carry format
What We Dislike
Gravity deployment requires a learned wrist motion that takes deliberate practice to make instinctive under stress
The stripped-back mechanism may read as feature-light to buyers who equate knife quality with mechanical complexity
The Best Coastal Kit Is the One You’ll Actually Carry
Preparedness fails most often not because people lack the right gear, but because the right gear never made it into the bag. These five designs earn permanent carry not by stacking features, but by removing the ones that fail under salt air, dead batteries, and sustained pressure. The best coastal kit isn’t the most expensive — it’s the one built around tools you trust completely before the season ever starts.
Hurricane season 2026 begins June 1st, and the window for deliberate preparation is narrower than it feels from the other side of spring. Each tool on this list solves a specific coastal failure mode — lighting without electricity, communication without infrastructure, cutting without corrosion, illumination without recharging, and emergency signaling without a signal. Put them together, and you have a kit that performs at the precise moment every conventional backup stops working.
Anthropic is expanding its directory of connected services for its Claude AI chatbot. The platform can now link up with your accounts on AllTrails, Audible, Booking.com, Instacart, Intuit Credit Karma, Intuit TurboTax, Resy, Spotify, StubHub, Taskrabbit, Thumbtack, TripAdvisor, Uber, Uber Eats and Viator. Additional services will be added in the future.
More and more AI companies are trying to up their third-party integrations in a pitch to make their services as useful as possible. The benefit of having multiple apps connected means that a chatbot can theoretically execute more complicated tasks on your behalf. This expansion takes that capability from the professional and educational settings, where Anthropic’s connectors have been focused for the past year, to a personal one. So, for instance, Claude can now help plan a hike on AllTrails and then pull up a Spotify playlist that will last for the duration of your trek.
Anthropic noted that it is also reframing how apps are showing up so that an appropriate service is suggested for the task you want to perform. The apps should appear dynamically within the Claude conversation rather than needing a user to swipe between programs. As with most AI actions, Claude is supposed to check with its user before actually taking any actions like securing a reservation or making a purchase.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/claude-can-now-connect-to-lifestyle-apps-like-spotify-instacart-and-alltrails-225510552.html?src=rss
At some point, the bottom rack of a dishwasher stops being a minor inconvenience and starts being a genuine daily difficulty. For older adults and people who simply cannot bend for extended periods, loading the lower basket, which is where the heaviest cookware lives, means repeated stooping, reaching, and straightening back up with full hands. It is the kind of accumulated physical effort that kitchen appliance design has historically ignored entirely. Electrolux brought a direct answer to Milan Design Week: a lower basket that rises 25 centimetres on reinforced hinges at the squeeze of a trigger handle, meeting the user at a comfortable standing height. The feature is called ComfortLift, and it anchors the 800 series dishwasher at the heart of the brand’s Salone showcase.
The mechanism raises the lower basket to the upper basket’s level for faster, easier loading and unloading, with reinforced hinges tested to lift a fully loaded lower basket to that same height. The 800 series behind this feature delivers the cleaning power to completely remove baked-on or dried food residues on as little as 8.4 litres of water. At a fair saturated with conceptual objects and material experiments, what Electrolux demonstrated was something considerably more personal: a change to a small, daily physical struggle that millions of people live with quietly. The brand built serious cleaning performance around that ergonomic premise rather than treating accessibility as a secondary concern. Running at 42 dBA, with a noise class rating of B, the machine is also one of the quieter options in its segment.
Designer: Electrolux
The stainless steel handle integrates a trigger that initiates the lift in a single squeeze, making the operation one-handed and deliberate. Electrolux engineered the ComfortLift basket to carry up to 22 kilograms at the raised height, covering everything from a full load of dinner plates to a cast-iron braising pot. The reinforced hinge mechanism was tested to lift a fully loaded lower basket to the level of the upper basket, so the structural promise holds under real kitchen conditions rather than just showroom demonstrations. Pull the rack out, squeeze, let the basket settle at waist height, and load without contortion. The basket retracts just as smoothly, with none of the mechanical inconsistency that tends to undermine features which perform better on a spec sheet than in a kitchen.
DualZone runs two cleaning zones through the same cycle without changing water or increasing energy use, directing more water pressure at pots and pans in the lower basket while reducing it on delicate items above. A double-rotating spray arm with two nozzle types, one circular and one straight, delivers water simultaneously from multiple angles to break up stubborn residue. Electrolux had this independently tested by a third-party German institute using detergent tablets and a 90-minute cycle on a casserole with lasagna residues, with complete removal as the result. A water sensor detects the level of dirt and adjusts water consumption accordingly, while the AquaControl Waterstop System handles flood protection. Eight wash programmes span the range from a 60-minute express run to AUTOClean, which calibrates the cycle to the load automatically.
The smooth-gliding FlexiMax Plus upper basket has three folding rows for flexible loading, with anti-slip rubber grips and spikes to secure stemware and glasses and reduce the risk of collisions. The cutlery drawer has a deep middle section for cooking tools and an integrated knife holder, keeping flatware properly separated from the main wash zones. The QuickSelect display shows how energy use changes depending on the cycle length, and a slider lets the user choose the duration and see the energy graph update in real time, turning an invisible efficiency metric into something immediate and interactive. AirDry technology opens the door automatically at the end of the cycle, venting steam and drying dishes passively without a heating element. These details add up to a machine that rewards the kind of cook who treats the kitchen seriously, the same person most likely to own the cast-iron Dutch oven that ComfortLift was built to accommodate.
The controls sit on the lip of the door handle, positioned for direct visibility whether the user is standing in front of the machine or reaching across a counter. A sliding interface sets the cycle duration, and that choice governs energy and water consumption simultaneously, with the ECO programme activating at the longest end of the range. Electrolux made a deliberate decision to present time in 30-minute increments rather than the oddly specific figures that populate most dishwasher interfaces, the kind of readout that tells a user a cycle takes 68 or 52 minutes without explaining why. The shortest cycle runs at 30 minutes, while ECO extends to 3 hours and 30 minutes, drawing as little energy and water as the machine can manage across that duration. Rounding to half-hour intervals turns cycle selection from a guessing exercise into something legible, honest, and genuinely quick to act on.
Electrolux’s Design Week showcase, titled “The Swedish Home,” is running at Via Melzo 12 in Milan’s Porta Venezia neighbourhood through April 24th. The live format suits ComfortLift especially well, because no product photograph conveys the mechanism as clearly as watching it move once with a full rack. Across a week dominated by material experiments and future-facing concepts, Via Melzo 12 is presenting something built around a very specific, present-tense problem: that the most physically demanding daily interaction in the kitchen has gone largely unaddressed by appliance design for decades. ComfortLift is Electrolux’s argument that the most consequential design decisions in the home are often the least glamorous ones. It is a strong argument, and a well-engineered one.
There’s always been a theatrical edge to Gunther Werks’ reinterpretations of the Porsche 911 (993), but Project Endgame pushes that idea into full cinematic territory. Conceived as a one-off Speedster commission and effectively the closing statement for the California-based restomod specialist’s open-top series, it fuses extreme performance engineering with a design language. Something that openly channels Iron Man’s energy in both form and function.
Built on the bones of a 993-generation 911, Project Endgame undergoes a complete transformation. Its most radical element is the twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter air-cooled flat-six, developed in collaboration with Rothsport Racing. Producing an immense 840 horsepower and 660 lb-ft of torque, the engine delivers its output through a six-speed manual transmission. This preserves the tactile, mechanical connection that defines analog driving, which purists absolutely value.
This combination of old-school air cooling paired with modern forced induction in more ways than not mirrors Iron Man’s own blend of legacy ingenuity and futuristic power. A classic example of how engineering evolves into something far more advanced. Weight reduction is equally obsessive with the experienced tuner. Extensive use of carbon fiber throughout the body keeps the car at roughly 2,600 pounds, creating a power-to-weight ratio that borders on hypercar territory. The aggressive stance, widened bodywork, and sculpted aerodynamics echo the armored silhouette of Iron Man’s suit.
The mirrored ethos of a machine that’s muscular, purposeful, and unmistakably engineered for speed and impact. The Speedster configuration, with its low windscreen and open cockpit, adds a sense of exposure that parallels the vulnerability beneath the armor, reinforcing the duality between raw human control and overwhelming machine capability. The Iron Man influence becomes even more explicit in the detailing. The exterior’s red-and-gold finish directly mirrors the superhero’s iconic suit, but it’s not just cosmetic.
Functional components such as intercoolers receive gold plating, a detail that reflects both performance optimization and visual storytelling—much like Tony Stark’s tendency to fuse engineering necessity with stylistic flair. The interplay of metallic tones across the bodywork gives the car a glowing, almost reactor-like presence, as if energy is constantly pulsing beneath its surface.
Inside, the cabin is a symphony of narrative space. A central design element between the seats evokes the arc reactor, the fictional energy source that powers Iron Man’s suit. This sculptural feature isn’t merely decorative; it anchors the interior’s identity, turning the cockpit into a symbolic command center. The gear shifter, embedded with gemstone accents, subtly references the precision and complexity of Stark’s technology, while bespoke materials and finishes throughout the cabin create an environment that feels engineered rather than assembled. Every surface, control, and accent appears intentional, reflecting the meticulous craftsmanship associated with Stark Industries.
Despite its dramatic theme, Project Endgame remains grounded in performance authenticity. The chassis, suspension, and braking systems are all engineered to handle the immense power output, ensuring that the car’s capabilities extend far beyond its visual impact. It’s not a static showpiece; it’s a fully realized driver’s machine that demands engagement and rewards skill.
As the final evolution of Gunther Werks’ Speedster program, Project Endgame serves as both a technical milestone and a creative culmination. It demonstrates how far the restomod concept can be pushed when engineering excellence meets narrative ambition.
Microsoft is planning to get rid of more US employees via its first voluntary buyout program, CNBC reports. The buyout program will reportedly be offered to US employees at "the senior director level and below whose years of employment and age add up to 70 or higher," and could cover up to 7 percent of the company's US workforce.
With around 125,000 employees in the US as of June 2025, that could mean up to 8,750 will be offered a paid exit when Microsoft begins its program in May. That's a smaller figure than the 15,000 or so employees the company laid off in May and July of 2025, but still significant, particularly if the majority of employees do take the buyout.
"Our hope is that this program gives those eligible the choice to take that next step on their own terms, with generous company support," Microsoft's executive vice president and chief people officer Amy Coleman shared in a memo viewed by CNBC.
Engadget has contacted Microsoft to confirm the existence of the voluntary buyout program and other details CNBC reported. We'll update this article if we hear back.
Microsoft used its 2025 layoffs to streamline layers of management and its video game business, but these new cuts may have a lot more to do with AI. Not necessarily because the company's adoption of AI tools has made employees redundant, but rather because Microsoft continues to aggressively spend on AI infrastructure. The company said it spent $37.5 billion in capital expenditures during Q2 2026, much of which went toward data center buildout.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/microsoft-is-reportedly-offering-voluntary-buyouts-to-up-to-7-percent-of-its-employees-200050484.html?src=rss
Meta is making another steep cut to its staff, this time to the tune of a 10 percent reduction in its workforce. About 8,000 people will be laid off and about 6,000 open jobs will also be eliminated, according to Bloomberg.
In an internal memo from Janelle Gale, Meta's head of human resources, the latest cuts are "part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making." Those "other investments" are likely in artificial intelligence. Meta is building its own models and apparently training them on its own staff. Its smart glasses are also leveraging ever-more AI capabilities.
Today's layoffs likely don't mark the end of Meta's current contraction. A report from March suggested that Meta was planning to downsize by up to 20 percent, although no timeline was given. The company cut hundreds of jobs, primarily in its Reality Labs division, shortly after those claims circulated. It also kicked off 2026 by slashing its metaverse operations with the closure of three VR studios.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-downsizing-by-about-10-percent-192658099.html?src=rss
Most chairs do their job quietly. They hold weight, fill space, and if we’re lucky, look decent in a photo. The Metal Affaire by Minimal Studio is not most chairs. It’s the kind of piece that makes you stop mid-scroll and wonder if someone just decided that furniture needed to be a little more daring.
The Metal Affaire is an armchair made almost entirely of transparent laminated glass, supported by a metallic mesh base. Yes, glass. The kind of material you typically associate with windows and coffee tables, not with the thing you sit on during a long Sunday. But that counterintuitive choice is precisely what makes this design so compelling. It doesn’t try to blend in. It asks to be noticed, studied, and maybe even argued about.
Minimal Studio is a multidisciplinary design studio based in Mallorca, Spain, founded by David Martínez Jofre. The studio brings together architects, engineers, and interior designers, and their philosophy is rooted in one clear belief: simplicity is not the absence of thought. It’s the result of a lot of it. Their signature look leans into clean lines, neutral tones, and materials that let a space breathe, which is exactly what the Metal Affaire does visually. The glass shell gives the chair an almost weightless appearance, like it’s barely occupying space at all, while the metallic mesh base grounds it with enough structure to remind you it’s very much real.
The design concept comes from mimicry. The shape of the armchair echoes and mirrors its own materiality, the glass structure and the mesh base informing each other as if they grew into their final form together. That kind of design intention, where the form and material feel genuinely inseparable, is rarer than it should be. A lot of furniture design today prioritizes the photograph over the experience, optimized for an Instagram carousel rather than a living room. The Metal Affaire feels like the opposite impulse. It’s meant to be looked at closely, touched, questioned.
Of course, it raises the obvious reaction: can you actually sit in a glass chair comfortably? That’s a fair question, and it’s not one this design tries to brush off. The laminated glass is structural and load-bearing. The proportions (80cm high, 60cm wide, 60cm deep) are those of a proper armchair, not a sculptural prop. But to be honest, I don’t think comfortable seating is the only thing the Metal Affaire is asking you to think about. It’s asking whether a chair can be beautiful in the way a sculpture is beautiful, functional and considered and worth looking at from every angle.
The name itself is a bit of a wink. “Metal Affaire” suggests something indulgent, a rendezvous between industrial materials and refined design sensibility. And Minimal Studio leans into that duality without apology. The metallic mesh doesn’t try to hide itself or disappear behind the glass. It asserts its presence, and the contrast between hard structure and transparent surface is the entire point. Industrial and elegant at once, which is a balance that is genuinely difficult to achieve without one quality undermining the other.
There’s also something to be said about how the Metal Affaire interacts with light. Transparent glass in a room doesn’t behave the way solid furniture does. It shifts depending on the hour, the season, the angle. The chair you see at noon isn’t quite the same chair you see at dusk. That quality, the way it refuses to be static, gives it a liveliness that most furniture simply doesn’t have. It becomes part of the room’s atmosphere rather than just an object placed inside it.
Minimal Studio has been quietly building a body of work that challenges what “minimalism” actually means in furniture design. The Metal Affaire is the clearest expression of that challenge yet. Not minimal in the sense of boring, but minimal in the way that a perfectly constructed sentence is minimal. Nothing wasted, nothing missing, and somehow, exactly what it needed to be.
