Auralink is seeking funds to accelerate product development and engage with visually impaired communities.

Founders behind the University College Dublin (UCD) student start-up Auralink have won the annual NovaUCD accelerator programme competition for emerging student entrepreneurs.

Auralink is developing an AI-powered assistive technology (AT) platform that allows visually impaired people to use smart glasses for better independence and safety. The platform is being developed by undergraduate student in economics and history Scott Nagle, and graduate entry medicine student Suyun Zheng.

Auralink combines smartphone software with smart glasses to provide users with real-time environmental sensing, object recognition and navigation support through audio feedback. UCD said that Auralink is being developed for 24/7 use across daily activities at home, as well as navigating public transport and unfamiliar environments.

The two students won the ‘One to Watch’ award from NovaUCD following the four-week-long accelerator programme for budding student entrepreneurs from the university.

The team, who were judged by a panel including Atlantic Bridge investment manager Dominik Leisi, New Frontiers programme manager Susanne L’Estrange and senior advisor for start-ups at Enterprise Ireland Michael O’Dea, also won €3,000 alongside the award.

“While existing solutions provide valuable support for people with visual impairments, they offer limited information about the surrounding environment,” said Zheng.

“Public transport, for example, remains challenging, especially when identifying platforms and reading timetables.

“We are focused on addressing this gap with software that runs on smartphones and smart glasses to make assistive technology more accessible, in line with the UN SDGs (sustainable development goals) of good health and well-being, and reducing inequalities.”

Physical and digital accessibility is far from being universally available across Ireland. Despite advancements in technology, including various AI tools and products such as smart glasses, some estimates say hundreds of thousands in Ireland could be living without the AT support that they need. AT users-turned-digital-coaches are attempting to bridge some of these gaps.

Auralink is seeking funding to help accelerate product development, user testing, pilot deployments and engagement with visually impaired communities in Ireland and internationally, Nagle said.

“We are also seeking mentors, industry connections and introductions to accessibility organisations, healthcare providers, transport operators and potential commercial partners,” he said.

The annual accelerator programme – now in its 12th year – supports the university’s undergraduate and postgraduate students in developing and growing business ideas into start-ups. The programme offers workshops, mentoring and pitching sessions.

This year’s cohort was made up of 13 early-stage student ventures and 17 participants. Over the last 12 years, some 105 early-stage ventures and 240 students have completed the programme.

Simon Factor, senior manager for new ventures at NovaUCD, said: “A key focus of this annual UCD accelerator programme is to provide the participating undergraduate and postgraduate students with the skills, the confidence and the opportunity to further refine their ideas, and hopefully in time launch start-ups at home and further afield.

“The pitches delivered at NovaUCD by the enthusiastic students, on a range of business ideas – from AI-powered assistive technology to ed-tech, to medtech, to sustainability, to robotics – were all excellent, and I would like to congratulate all the participants for successfully completing this year’s programme.

“I would especially like to congratulate Auralink on being named the overall winner, and I wish Scott and Suyun every success as they progress their new venture in the months ahead.”

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Artificial intelligence is the transformative, strategic technology of the early 21st century. It is significantly reshaping practically every aspect of our lives, including in ways that probably no one anticipated. Its rate of adoption and impact have been unprecedented when compared with other technologies.

AI as a distinct field was formally established in 1956 at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, proposed by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. In their August 1955 proposal for the research project, the scientists introduced the term artificial intelligence and envisioned machines capable of simulating human intelligence.

AI is the “science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men,” as defined by Minsky. The professor received the ACM Turing Award, which is often called the “Nobel Prize in computing.”

Since AI’s humble beginnings 70 years ago, it has evolved significantly in its capabilities, gained prominence, and earned widespread adoption across many areas including business, education, finance, health care, industry, and the military.

IEEE’s contributions to the progress and adoption of AI throughout its journey are substantial and multifaceted.

As we celebrate AI’s 70th birthday, understanding its history, current status, limitations, and concerns is key to harnessing it for good.

The technology’s roller-coaster evolution

Although AI emerged as a distinct field in 1956, its intellectual roots extend back further. The ideas and theories that underpin AI predate modern computers such as the ENIAC, unveiled in 1946.

In 1943 Warren Sturgis McCulloch, a neurophysiologist and cybernetician, and Walter Pitts, a logician working in computational neuroscience, were inspired by the human brain. The two devised mathematical models of artificial neurons, demonstrating that artificial neural networks could perform logical computation.

Frank Rosenblatt, a Cornell psychologist, later advanced those ideas by developing the perceptron, an early neural network that laid the foundation for modern machine learning and deep learning.

A major milestone came in 1950, when celebrated computer scientist Alan Turing posed the question, “Can machines think?” In his 1950 landmark paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” published in Mind, he explored the nature of machine intelligence. He introduced the “imitation game,” later known as the Turing test, as a practical means of evaluating it. The test remains an influential concept in AI and the philosophy of intelligence, as I discussed in my article “The Turing Test at 75: Its Legacy and Future Prospects,” published in IEEE Intelligent Systems.

Claude Shannon, recognized as the father of information theory, explored the potential of machines for complex reasoning tasks in his 1950 article “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” published in Philosophical Magazine.

In 1956 AI became a formal discipline, inspiring scientists to explore and advance it further. John McCarthy developed Lisp in 1958, and it became the dominant programming language for AI research and development. In 1959 Arthur Lee Samuel, a computer science professor at Stanford, introduced the term machine learning to describe programs that could improve their performance through experience.

In the early 1980s, renewed enthusiasm and government funding fueled the development of symbolic AI, a rule-based expert system (also known as a knowledge-based system) that encodes domain-specific knowledge as sets of rules. A notable example was MYCIN, designed to diagnose infectious diseases.

Although successful in limited domains, expert systems’ inherent limitations have restricted their broader adoption. Expert refers to a computer system that mimics human experts in a specific domain. It was popular in the early days of AI, and subsequently disappeared with advances in AI such as neural networks and machine learning.

AI’s journey was marked by periods of soaring expectations and disappointing progress, known as “AI winters,” during which funding, interest, and confidence declined. Analyses of the episodes revealed recurring causes and insightful lessons for the field.

A new phase of growth—often described as “AI spring”—emerged in the 2010s with advances in deep learning, the rise of large language models, the transformer architecture, and generative AI (GenAI).

“The imperative before us today is not only to advance AI’s capabilities but also to ensure that it remains human-centered, trustworthy, ethical, and dedicated to enhancing human well-being and societal progress.”

Unlike earlier approaches that processed information sequentially, a transformer model analyzes an entire sequence of text or audio, assessing the importance of each word or component relative to others, enabling dramatic advancements in GenAI and its applications.

Ashish Vaswani, a former computer scientist at Google, and his colleagues at Google Brain introduced the transformer architecture that underpins today’s generative AI systems in their influential 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need.” Vaswani and Sam Altman—chief executive of OpenAI, which offers ChatGPT—are widely regarded as the masterminds behind the GenAI revolution.

AI reached new heights with the public release of ChatGPT in 2022, followed quickly by a wave of chatbots and generative AI tools that accelerated global interest.

More recently, the rise of agentic AI systems capable of increasingly autonomous operation has expanded AI’s capabilities and impact.

AI’s 70-year journey reflects an extraordinary interplay of vision, experimentation, setbacks, innovation, and impact.

For further information and diverse perspectives on AI history, check out my curated collection of articles.

Strengths and promises

AI’s pragmatic strength lies in its ability to process information, recognize patterns, and perform cognitive tasks at an unprecedented speed and scale. It can analyze vast amounts of data, extract insights, and identify trends or anomalies that are difficult for humans to detect. The programs can automate routine tasks and repetitive knowledge work, improve productivity, and reduce costs.

Chatbots and other forms of GenAI can answer queries and rapidly create text, images, videos, music, software code, educational materials, and other content on the fly in response to a user’s prompts, accelerating information-gathering, innovation, and decision-making. AI summarizes, translates, and rephrases text effectively and can assist in idea generation. It also facilitates natural-language interactions, making technology more accessible to nonexperts and the diverse global community. Its multimodal capabilities enhance its usefulness across diverse domains. Additionally, it can serve as a powerful collaborator, augmenting creativity and problem-solving capacity rather than replacing human intelligence.

AI is transitioning from standalone tools to autonomous, goal-driven systems. Agentic AI systems that can plan, act, and adapt with minimal human oversight are on the rise, enabling large-scale impact.

The 400-page AI Index 2026, published by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, reveals the technology’s enhanced capabilities and unprecedented adoption rates, outpacing those of the telephone, the television, the personal computer, and the Internet.

For a deep exposition on the current state of AI, read this analysis from IEEE Spectrum, which also published the “Great AI Reckoning” special report.

Weaknesses and concerns

Along with its benefits, AI presents significant risks and concerns. They include biased, discriminatory, and harmful responses; a lack of transparency and explainability in decision-making; privacy violations from data collected for AI training; and cybersecurity vulnerabilities including AI-powered attacks.

AI systems can hallucinate, generating confident but incorrect or fabricated information. Moreover, AI can facilitate and amplify the spread of misinformation, deepfakes, and manipulated content, undermining public trust and driving the algorithmic manipulation of public opinion. The flattering, people-pleasing, or affirming behavior known as AI sycophancy can be harmful as well.

Overreliance on AI could erode human judgment, critical thinking, and decision-making skills. And autonomous systems can make errors with serious consequences in critical domains including defense, health care, and transportation.

The technology’s development and deployment, therefore, must be guided by informed understanding, sound judgment, and responsible governance. In assessing AI’s suitability for any application, its capabilities, advantages, limitations, and risks must be carefully and holistically considered.

IEEE’s contributions

IEEE has not merely documented and disseminated AI’s progress. It has actively fostered, standardized, and guided it toward further advances and responsible use for the benefit of humanity. IEEE maintains a hub for information on its AI activities that is a valuable resource for researchers, developers, regulators, and users.

IEEE publishes 11 AI-focused journals that advance the frontiers of knowledge, including IEEE Intelligent Systems. In its AI at 70 commemorative issue, Intelligent Systems identified the 10 most influential AI articles published since 2000. The magazine, produced by the IEEE Computer Society, has inducted 10 pioneers into its AI Hall of Fame, honoring their contributions and impact on technology and society.

To foster AI research and development, since 2006, the magazine has recognized the field’s rising stars through its AI’s 10 to Watch awards. The biennial awards spotlight outstanding contributions of young researchers and professionals. Nominations for this year’s awards are open until 1 July.

Since the early days of AI, the IEEE Computer, Computational Intelligence, and Systems, Man, and Cybernetics societies have been among those that have fostered AI research and practice. The Computer Society offers a guide to becoming an AI developer.

IEEE and its societies sponsor more than 100 AI conferences annually. The conference archives are available in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

The IEEE Learning Network offers more than 200 courses across AI-related areas.

The IEEE Standards Association has developed more than 100 AI-related standards. Its CertifAIEd program promotes ethical design and deployment of autonomous intelligent systems.

The Institute has featured several IEEE members who have developed AI-driven applications, such as Abhishek Appaji, who has created tools to help detect psychiatric disorders.

Shaping AI’s future

The history of AI helps us understand the motivations behind developments and inspires and guides us toward the next phase of the technology’s innovation and revolution. AI’s trajectory is bound to be shaped by the collective choices we make now and in the future.

As Turing wrote in his 1950 landmark article, “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

The imperative before us today is not only to advance AI’s capabilities but also to ensure that it remains human-centered, trustworthy, ethical, and dedicated to enhancing human well-being and societal progress.

The AI-driven memory shortage has now reached the oldest DRAM standard still in production. DDR2 contract prices rose 55 to 60 percent in the second quarter of 2026, according to Taiwanese market intelligence firm TrendForce, with a further 35 to 40 percent increase forecast for the third quarter.

The price surge is being driven by hardware makers downgrading their memory specifications to secure supply. TrendForce says some manufacturers are replacing DDR4 designs with DDR3, while others are swapping DDR3 components for DDR2, a standard that first shipped in 2003. The downgrades are a response to continued shortages in mainstream DRAM and rapidly rising contract prices across every memory generation.

The Register, which first reported TrendForce’s findings, noted that it is difficult to imagine modern PC processors supporting memory types this old. The downgrades are more likely affecting embedded systems, industrial equipment, networking hardware, and other devices where older memory standards remain in use.

The root cause is the same one that has been reshaping the entire memory market since late 2025. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have redirected wafer capacity from consumer and commodity DRAM to high-bandwidth memory for AI data centres, where margins run at 70 percent or higher. Every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to a consumer laptop, a smartphone, or an industrial controller.

The shortage cascaded downward through memory generations. DDR5 and DDR4 prices rose first, and as those components became scarce, buyers turned to DDR3. Now that DDR3 supply is tightening, the pressure has reached DDR2, a product so old that most of the industry had written it off as a low-margin afterthought.

The supply picture for DDR2 is especially fragile because only a handful of companies still make it. Taiwan’s Winbond and ESMT are the key suppliers. Winbond is gradually winding down DDR2 production and reallocating its capacity toward higher-margin products including DDR3, DDR4, and LPDDR4, according to TrendForce.

ESMT is moving in the opposite direction. The company plans to maximise DDR2 production within its existing wafer allocation at foundry partner Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, concentrating resources on the segment to capture the demand that Winbond is leaving behind. The divergence means Winbond is removing DDR2 supply faster than ESMT can replace it.

The consequences of the broader memory crisis are already visible across consumer electronics. GoPro issued a going-concern warning after memory prices rose 80 to 115 percent, and PC prices have climbed by double-digit percentages. IDC projects that smartphones, PCs, and tablets could see price increases of 10 to 20 percent by the end of 2026.

Some relief is being planned, but it will arrive slowly. SK Hynix aims to double its silicon wafer output capacity over the next five years, a timeline its chairman announced at Computex in June, while Micron expects what it calls meaningful new capacity at its Virginia fabrication plant in 2027 and 2028. Neither commitment addresses the immediate shortage.

Chinese manufacturer CXMT has begun supplying DDR5 to Western brands including Corsair, offering a potential alternative source for mainstream memory. But CXMT is also converting roughly 20 percent of its own capacity to HBM because the margins are too attractive to resist, limiting how much consumer relief it can provide.

The fact that 2003-era memory components are now experiencing 60 percent quarterly price jumps illustrates how deeply the AI reallocation has distorted the semiconductor supply chain. The shortage is not confined to cutting-edge products. It has reached the bottom of the technology stack, affecting components that most of the industry assumed would remain cheap and abundant indefinitely.

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a floating stand for smartphone FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, and Bluetooth earbuds. With its versatile foldable design, MagStack also folds into a space-saving single-device charger for your phone or earbuds. It’s on sale for $45.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Cybersecurity researchers have identified nearly 7,000 fraudulent Amazon-themed domains registered in the six months leading up to Prime Day 2026, which begins on 23 June. Check Point Research tracked 6,843 new domains created between December 2025 and May 2026, with registrations peaking at 1,446 in April and remaining elevated at 1,267 in May.

Of the total, 9.2 percent were classified as malicious or suspicious. The rate accelerated sharply in early June: during the first week of the month, one in every 13 newly registered Amazon-themed domains was flagged, according to Check Point’s analysis.

Prime Day 2026 runs from 23 to 26 June across 22 countries, with four additional markets joining later in the summer, according to Amazon’s official event page. The extended four-day window and global reach make it a high-value target for phishing operations, which follow the same seasonal playbook that researchers documented around the FIFA World Cup, where over 13,000 fraudulent domains appeared in the months before kickoff.

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The phishing infrastructure includes fake Amazon storefronts designed to harvest credit card numbers, spoofed login pages that steal account credentials, and email campaigns with subject lines such as “Refund Due, Amazon System Error” that direct recipients to counterfeit sites. Check Point flagged one campaign using a sender address mimicking Amazon’s customer service domain closely enough to bypass casual inspection.

A notable cluster targeted Spanish-speaking shoppers. Check Point identified 46 domains registered under the “amazoncredito” pattern, all linked to a single registrant and aimed at Latin American markets where Amazon has been expanding its Prime membership. Five of six “amazon-prime” top-level domain variants were already classified as malicious at the time of the report.

The tactics are not new, but the scale keeps growing. Google recently sued a Chinese cybercrime ring that used AI to generate phishing code and operated one million fraudulent domains, illustrating how cheap and automated domain-based fraud has become. Check Point’s findings suggest that Amazon-themed operations are following the same industrial pattern, with thousands of domains registered months in advance and activated as shopping events approach.

Check Point recommended that shoppers type amazon.com directly into their browser rather than clicking links in emails or ads, enable two-factor authentication on their Amazon accounts, and treat any unsolicited refund notification as suspicious. The company also advised looking for HTTPS and padlock icons, though it noted that fraudulent sites increasingly use valid SSL certificates to appear legitimate.

The timing is significant because Prime Day has become one of the largest online shopping events globally, generating billions in revenue and drawing millions of first-time deal hunters who may be less familiar with phishing tactics. Amazon has not publicly commented on Check Point’s findings.

from the more-lazy-slop-from-slop-incorporated dept

The Trump Organization still hasn’t shipped their promised Trump “made in America” phone to most of the customers who laid down a $100 deposit a year ago. But they did recently start to ship early review copies to a handful of outlets and preferred cultists. What outlets generally found wasn’t surprising: it’s a pretty substandard smartphone pre-loaded with Trump propaganda apps like Truth Social.

But reporters working with iFixit have also confirmed something that was speculated for a while. Namely that the phone is just a lazy rebrand of the two-year old Taiwanese-made HTC U24 Pro with a garish coat of yellow paint (here’s a non-paywalled iFixit exploration):

“The Trump Mobile T1 phone, originally marketed as “Made in the USA,” is nearly identical to the two-year-old HTC U24 Pro, a phone made by the Taiwanese company HTC using Chinese parts, according to a technical analysis the repair-guide and parts company iFixit conducted in partnership with NBC News.”

As is pretty typical for Trump business ventures, this entire affair is the laziest slop imaginable.

Trump Mobile launched last year with a lot of fanfare. But as we noted when it was unveiled last year, even calling it a mobile company was being generous: the company is really just a lazy rebrand of an existing MAGA-friendly MVNO provider, Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service (Patriot just got caught up in an interesting influencer marketing dust up, if you missed it).

A cornerstone of the venture was a “made in America” “gold” “Trump phone” named the T1 that was supposed to launch last August. Though shortly after launch the Trump Organization eliminated all the “made in America” claims, shifting to promises that it was “made with American values in mind.”

If by “American values” we mean lazy, poorly secured slop preloaded with spyware and propaganda and slathered with half-assed branding logos and ugly paint then dramatically marked up to exploit suckers, then sure, okay.

The knockoff phone with Chinese internals of course arrives as the Trump FCC pretends to be cracking down on Chinese gear in hardware, routers, and other electronics. It’s also worth noting that the HTC U24 Pro was priced $469.99 retail when it launched two years ago. The Trump Mobile T1 is selling for $500, and they’ve hinted that the price could be going up.

It’s also worth pointing out that before the Trump Organization could even get phones into peoples’ hands, they suffered a significant data breach. A breach that not only revealed customer names, email addresses, mailing addresses, cell numbers, and order identifiers, but also that they’d likely only sold around 30,000 phones, a far cry from the 600,000 they had claimed.

The curious part is that it really shouldn’t have taken even the Trump Organization this long to get a sloppy rebrand into consumers’ hands. It’s not like they even had to manufacture new phones at meaningful volume. Maybe their plans were upended by ignorant tariffs and unnecessary wars? Anyway, it’s just hard to really overstate how very much on brand this all has been.

Filed Under: knockoff, mobile, telecom, trump mobile, wireless

Others Tested

Photograph: Pete Cottell

Lifeboost Mindflow for $40: The flavor of this instant powder is snappy and astringent at first, then it mellows into a warm middle ground after a few sips and a short cooling period. By the middle of the cup I forgot I was drinking something other than coffee, and the mild acidity on the finish–likely a product of the CognatiQ Coffee Fruit Extract that’s lauded on the back of Mindflow’s mylar pouch–tastes similar to a nice cup of Ethiopian or Rwandan coffee if you close your eyes and pretend for just a moment. Regarding its potency, if mushroom supplements were attendees at a state college keg party, Lifeboost would be the unremarkable guy pacing himself in the back while everyone else is getting blitzed like the world is ending. It’s unassuming yet self-assured, patiently waiting for all other entrants to crap out so it can make its move. I copped a mild buzz just a few sips in, and I felt alert and wide-eyed for a good two hours after the silty final sips of the cup were consumed. Electrolytes are uncommon in this space, which means this is a rare entry in the mushroom supplement world that purports to be a good pick if hydration is a trivial concern.

Photograph: Pete Cottell

Four Sigmatic Organic Coffee for $20: Four Sigmatic’s Focus blend is labeled as a dark roast, but it’s missing the cigarette-butts-and-bowling-alley aftertaste that looms on the finish of similar blends. Despite my preference for lighter beans, this hit like a hug from an old friend after weeks of sipping murky silt. The caffeine buzz normalized after two days of using Think in lieu of more standard shroom-based coffee replacements, so I added a three-quarter-teaspoon hit of the powdered Focus blend to my daily cup to see what would happen. Within 10 minutes I felt an overwhelming urge to sort my finances spreadsheet in preparation for tax season, then I set up a new template in Loopy Pro to accommodate a friend who planned to join my basement jam session that evening. He bailed, but I was jacked on Genius Adaptogens so I played all the instruments myself into the wee hours of the night.

North Spore Functional-5 Mushroom Coffee for $18: Most mushroom-infused ground coffee blends are filed under the “Medium Roast” category, which is typically a safe catch-all that grocery store brands and discount purveyors describe their preground product as to avoid pissing off discerning light-roast aficionados such as yours truly. Nine times out of 10 they hit like a dark roast, with an ashy taste and a healthy dose of the oil that seeps out of the beans during the elongated roasting process, shimmering and swirling around the top of your cup like a puddle in a parking lot. This coffee from North Spore, which makes our favorite mushroom-growing monotub and spray-and-grow mushroom kit, lacks all of those off notes while still retaining a sturdy, earth flavor that’s far enough removed from the citric and buttery notes I love most about classic high-end light roasts to stand up as its own unique thing. There’s a hint of mushroom flavor on the swallow if you really look for it, but you could easily swap this in for someone’s morning cup of Folgers or Illy medium roast and they’d be none the wiser.

Ryze Superfoods Mushroom Coffee for $65: One could consider two different approaches to how purveyors of mushroom coffee dial in the flavor profile of their product: They can go all in with a bombastic brew filled with spices and overtones, or they can play it safe and concoct the base of a beverage that tastes more like memories of other drinks than a beverage with an identity of its own. The underwhelming flavor of Ryze falls in the latter camp. In fairness, there are plenty of folks who have no interest in savoring their morning beverage and instead need to put the liquid inside them as fast as possible so they can “adult” that day. Twenty-one-year-old Pete thought people who claimed to enjoy espresso were insane, yet here I am, two decades later wishing I could sip bitter bean water instead of this sour cup of forgettable swill that curdled the whole milk I tried to cut it with. A week with Ryze did little to boost my mood, focus, or energy. It mostly made me cranky and sad.

Cuppa for $30: Like the friendly foreigner who calls his daily cup of tea or coffee his “cuppa,” this newcomer is polite, congenial, and inoffensive. The first sip brought to mind a really good cup of coffee at a nameless diner, with a light body and very mellow acidic notes on the swallow. The small dose of ruddy powder pulled from the bag with the included plastic scoop dissolved thoroughly with a few stirs, and the pristine lack of sediment in the cup was exactly as advertised. The boost of energy is also unassuming and easy to relegate to the background, which could be a welcome respite from the blast of caffeine many coffee addicts think they need right when they wake up every morning. After a week with Cuppa I started to enjoy easing into my daily brain vibrations rather than white-knuckling it off the rip at 7 am on the dot every morning.

Not Recommended

Photograph: Pete Cottell

MUD/WTR Original Blend for $51: The packaging of MUD/WTR isn’t quite as unhinged as a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s, but it’s definitely in the same realm. The spicy dust inside the can is a maximalist circus of weirdness as well, with herbaceous stalwarts like turmeric and masala chai holding it down alongside the usual shroom suspects. It took me a few days to realize that properly emulsifying this ruddy power per the suggested instructions—1 tablespoon with ¾ cup of water, battered thoroughly with the included handheld immersion blender—is an impossible task, so I started experimenting with supplemental ingredients in hopes that some blend of milk, fat, and sugar would minimize the gritty aftertaste that overwhelms the palate. I landed on 1 tablespoon of simple syrup and 4 ounces of whole milk frothed in my trusty Subminimal NanoFoamer Pro. The final result hits somewhere between a chai latte and the kind of hot cocoa you’d order at a coffee shop with boring ’90s music, mean baristas, and a dirty bin full of stale vegan + gluten-free snacks next to the register. I didn’t hate it, but the bottom quarter of the cup is an undrinkable gunky mess. And don’t get me started on the chunky brown lacing that clings to the edge of the cup. The physical and mental effects of MUD/WTR felt more like a facsimile of a boost than a visceral kick in the pants, but a placebo high is better than nothing, right? Combine that with the amount of adjunct ingredients required to make this drinkable and I ended up with a beverage I would only drink every now and then as a treat on a chilly day rather than a daily sipper I can rely on for increased focus, energy, virility, and the million other things this product promises within the wall of text that adorns its packaging.

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As someone who often wears contacts, but defaults to my prescription glasses most days of the week, Ray-Ban Meta glasses with see-through (but not prescription) lenses haven’t made much sense to me. I get that having transition lenses can make an expensive pair of glasses useful in more situations, but I’ve generally preferred the sunglasses form factor because it tends to be a better fit for the situations when I most want to reach for a pair of smart glasses.

That said, I’ve always wondered if I would feel differently if I had my own prescription in a pair. After wearing the Ray-Ban Meta Optics as my primary glasses for two weeks, I’m starting to see the appeal. The glasses are very similar to the second-generation frames, but have a few upgrades that make them easier and more comfortable to wear throughout the day.

One issue I’ve had with just about every pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses is that the slightly oversized frames tend to slip down my nose. With the Optics lineup, Meta made the inner nosepads swappable so you can get a more secure fit. I changed the “universal fit” pads that came on out of the box for the “high bridge” pads and immediately noticed less slippage. There’s also a low bridge option included if you need it.

Karissa Bell for Engadget

The “Scriber” style frames I tested were still oversized, but they stayed on my face better than the Gen 2 Wayfarers I tested last year. The tips of the glasses are also moldable (at a Meta store or optician’s office) so you can get an even more precise fit, though I didn’t have this done with my pair. I found that the overextension hinges helped a lot with overall comfort, and I didn’t have issues with the glasses pressing uncomfortably around my ears like I do with many other frames.

I also appreciated that the frame styles felt a bit more subtle than previous versions. The “Scriber” frames I tested were still larger than the glasses I would normally choose for myself, but the color scheme felt more natural than the brightly-colored or super-dark styles Meta has had in other lines. I had multiple people tell me they had no idea I was wearing smart glasses rather than “regular” Ray-Ban frames.

Meta has also improved the battery life slightly compared with the other Gen 2 glasses. While the older Gen 2 model gets “up to 8 hours” of battery life, according to Meta, the Blayzer and Scriber frames are rated for “more than 8 hours.” Battery life in general is very dependent on what you’re doing, some features will drain it a lot quicker. But I found I was easily able to wear my Scriber frames for well over 8 hours without charging. That’s with intermittent audio from the open-ear speakers and occasional Meta AI use.

Karissa Bell for Engadget

The other big change with the optics line is the addition of an action button, a customizable button that acts as a shortcut for frequently-used commands. The feature first debuted on the Oakley Meta Vanguard sunglasses, which had the button on the bottom side of the frames. On the Optics-branded glasses, it’s now a tiny extra button on the end of the main capture control.

When I reviewed the Vanguard shades I never really landed on one “ideal” use case for the button. But after some more time with my latest frames, I think I’ve figured out the best setup.I use the “custom prompt” setting (you can adjust it in the Meta AI app) to “read my latest text message.”

This is ideal because while I appreciate that my glasses can announce when I get an incoming text (a lot like how Siri will with AirPods), I don’t always want Meta AI to just start reading them by default. It can be extremely disruptive if I’m in the middle of a conversation or concentrating on a task. But with the action button, I can just give it a quick push to hear my texts, with no need to say “Hey Meta.” It’s even more subtle than glancing down at my phone.