The CEO of a flying car company backed by Larry Page has left the company.

Ken Karklin, who was Pivotal’s CEO for more than four years, left the role this week, according to a press release. Pivotal said Karklin is “pursuing new endeavors” but didn’t offer any other information about the executive’s departure from the electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) firm.

“Leading Pivotal has been the privilege of my career. Together, we’ve moved beyond the promise of light eVTOL and proved it out in practice,” Karklin said in a statement. “This industry has moved past prototypes and press releases; it’s now operating in the real world, under real constraints, with real consequences for the future of Advanced Air Mobility. As I turn to new endeavors, I do so knowing the foundation we built here will help carry this industry forward.”

Karklin will be replaced on an interim basis by Mike Ross, an aviation executive who joined Pivotal’s board of directors in November 2025. Karklin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Karklin’s departure comes two years after Pivotal started sales of Helix, its first lightweight electric personal aircraft. The single-seat aircraft doesn’t require a pilot’s license to fly and starts at around $200,000.

“Ken’s leadership over the past four years has been instrumental in bringing Pivotal to where it is today. Our team, our priorities, and our roadmap remain steady through this transition,” Ross said in a statement. “I’ve had the honor of working closely with Ken as a Board member and watching Pivotal’s disciplined approach to safety, engineering, and accessibility deliver on the vision of electric VTOL flight. I look forward to working with the team and guiding the company forward as we bring our fourth-generation Helix aircraft to market.”

Pivotal has also spent years developing an aircraft called BlackFly that is aimed at defense and first-responder use cases. Last month, BlackFly was used to respond to an emergency in North Carolina for the first time ever. The company says it beat an ambulance responding in parallel to the call by 20 minutes. BlackFly has flown more than 10,000 times, according to Pivotal.

Pivotal is one of a number of companies in the space that was selected for the Federal Aviation Administration’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, which was created to increase testing of these types of aircraft around the country.

from the starting-from-the-most-helpless-and-working-their-way-up dept

The “worst of the worst” are coming for the “worst of the worst.” Of course, this administration has completely given up on this pretense, despite sending out lots of noisy messaging otherwise every time an immigration officer murders a person.

For the entirety of Trump’s anti-migration surge, it’s been obvious that it’s all about expelling certain people and has nothing to do with ridding this nation of criminals. But there are quotas to meet. Trump is awful enough on his own, but he can’t read a spreadsheet. That’s why Stephen Miller exists: to apply the pressure Trump simply can’t stay awake to do himself.

For years, law enforcement officers at every level have abused their power and positions to violate the rights of regular people. That alone is a crime, even if it’s usually just considered a civil violation. Guess what else is a civil violation? Being in this country without having the proper paperwork or processes in place to comply with immigration law.

To keep up with demands for ever-increasing arrests, this administration has also engaged in hiring surges. The people responding to huge signing bonuses and the simultaneous lowering of training standards tended to be the people you expected them to be. And, as the DHS soon discovered, stripping standards and all but eliminating training that would be useful to new ICE/CBP officers, its pool of applicants ran from the sub-par to the absolutely criminal.

Given what else we’ve always known about how those with power seek out the weakest people to exploit and abuse — combined with the free pass courts now give to federal officers when they’re only violating civil rights — this new report that’s based on hundreds of criminal cases against immigration officers makes it clear a lot of the “worst of the worst” are employed by the federal government.

A new report by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, released today, pulls back the curtain on a stunning level of sexual criminal behavior within ICE and CBP. Out of 152 cases of identified immigration officials or contractors accused or convicted of criminal behavior, 131 of them, or 86.2 percent, were charged with sex offenses. Seventy-eight of them—51 percent of the entire cohort—”committed sex offenses against children—the single largest category on the list,” the report states. Cases involving a CBP officer, the report finds, “are more likely to involve underage victims” than those of an ICE officer. Yet fully half of ICE officers accused or convicted of sex offenses (12 of 24) had a minor as their victim.

As bad as this looks, it’s probably even worse. As the Ohio Immigrant Alliance report [PDF] notes, this only covers immigration officers who have actually been caught and are facing criminal prosecutions.

This means there are many more who just haven’t been caught yet. And the chances of them being caught has been drastically reduced in recent months. ICE’s OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility) has always been tasked with investigating complaints filed against ICE officers. It’s not just history. It’s the directive handed down by law, which now seems to be something the OPR can just ignore because it would rather investigate critics of Trump’s anti-migrant activities.

If you’re wondering how it gets so bad that most criminal allegations against immigration officers involve the sexual abuse of children, this is how we’ve reached what we can only hope is an inflection point.

First, there’s the Supreme Court, which has made it all but impossible to sue federal officers for rights violations, many of which include clearly criminal acts. Added to that is this administration’s absolute refusal to perform internal investigations, much less punish officers for excessive force, child molestation, or murdering US residents and citizens.

Now, I’m sure there will be dishonest comment brokers arriving to fill the comments with stupid stuff like “well, 152 officers is only X% of immigration officers, so this is actually a good thing.” They can fuck right off. I guarantee any commenter thinking this sort of thing is acceptable because it only involves a small minority of officers is also in favor of letting internet vigilantes beat/maim/murder anyone these amateurs happen to think might be seeking to harm minors. The Venn diagram of “get all the pedos” and “whatever Trump wants to do is fine” is pretty much a full eclipse.

In other words, it’s forgivable if a few ICE/CBP officers do this while engaged in God’s/Trump’s work. But anyone asking for gender-neutral bathrooms should be executed immediately because the only reason a trans person would ask for this is because they want to rape children.

And, in case you’re wondering, of course this isn’t all Trump’s fault. The lack of oversight and accountability has been a problem for years, reducing the deterrents from zero to less than zero. That being said, it’s been getting a lot worse since Trump took office for a second time:

All this, the report finds, is accelerating. Nearly 25 percent of examined criminal offenses tied to ICE and CBP happened during the second presidency of Donald Trump. More occurred in 2026 (22 so far) than in 2025 (14). Both years outperformed the previous peak year of 2024 (11). Still, the fact that the previous peak occurred during Joe Biden’s presidency testifies to Biden and the Democrats’ unwillingness to confront ICE and CBP.

To sum up, this situation was fucked from the get-go and it’s exponentially getting worse under the current [cough] “leadership.” And no one truly thinks Trump or anyone in his administration will look at this report and see a chance to improve things. Trump could try to beat Biden at his own “molested by an immigration officer” game, but this administration has already written off anyone subjected to violent acts (including sexual violence) by immigration as subhumans who just got what the deserved.

Expecting him to care about the steadily-increasing number of molestations by ICE or CBP officers is to expect the sun to rise in the west tomorrow. No one cares, because they never have. And this administration is capable of not caring at levels we’ve never seen before, to cop a favorite phrase of our current president.

Filed Under: cbp, ice, law enforcement misconduct, mass deportation, worst of the worst

OLED screens run the biggest risk, but with a little common sense you can mitigate the issue.

What is burn-in and what causes it?

An OLED display is made up of millions of tiny organic light-emitting diodes — hence the name OLED. This is unlike an LCD, which relies on a backlight to illuminate its pixels. This means that each pixel in an OLED generates its own light and can be dimmed or turned off independently. But while this granular control provides excellent contrast and deep blacks, it also means that individual pixels can wear out independently of each other.

Each time you use an OLED display, these individual pixels undergo some infinitesimal amount of degradation. In the real-world, this wear translates to a dimmer light output. To further complicate matters, each pixel is actually made up of several smaller sub-pixels that produce different colors, typically red, green and blue. These sub-pixels don’t necessarily age at the same rate, either.

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Practically speaking, the OLED display is continuously varying the brightness of each pixel and sub-pixel to reproduce the colors you see on the screen. Over time, though, this can cause some pixels can experience more wear than others and become dimmer. Eventually, the difference in brightness can become noticeable enough to our eyes.

Put simply, burn-in occurs when some pixels appear brighter than those that have experienced greater wear, creating a persistent outline or ghosting of previously displayed content.

Static elements like channel logos have a higher potential to cause OLED burn-in, since the sub-pixels in that region wear out unevenly. This is why OLED displays aren’t the best choice if you exclusively watch news or sports channels for several hours each day. Playing the same game for hundreds of hours can also have the same effect, as on-screen text and other fixed elements can accelerate burn-in in certain localized spots.

Is burn-in still a risk for modern OLED TVs?

Do LCD TVs suffer from burn-in?

A group of executives and entrepreneurs led by Starcloud co-founders Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean and Ezra Feilden teamed up to develop humanity’s first interstellar spacecraft. If everything goes according to plan, it will launch in 2029, headed for Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our solar system. But it won’t reach its destination for about 80,000 years. 

Known as Fermi Explorer, this non-profit mission aims to build a 10cm cube weighing about 1 kilogram (about 2.2 pounds). Once the cube is built, they plan to attach it to a propulsion system, take it to space and launch it toward Alpha Centauri. It’s the technological equivalent of taking a hefty rock into space, throwing it at Alpha Centauri and waiting for it to get there. 

“The mission is intended to make the idea of interstellar travel real, and to encourage more people to confront one of humanity’s biggest unanswered questions when we look beyond our planet,” the group said in a post on X. The post is accompanied by a video showing the Fermi Explorer being overtaken by hundreds of faster spacecraft also bound for Alpha Centauri.

The wait for this mission to go interstellar is unreal. The exact wait to mission completion is 79,800 years, according to the Fermi Explorer mission calculator, which means once this thing gets underway, it won’t be the problem of anyone currently living, or anyone else, for a few thousand generations. 

Just getting out of the solar system will take longer than any road trip any human has ever taken. The spacecraft is expected to circle the sun for 12 years in an oval orbit. The boosters will fire when the spacecraft gets closer to the sun, a process called the Oberth maneuver, thereby gaining speed through multiple orbits as it approaches escape velocity. Once done, it’ll launch itself and keep going, and going, and going. The Fermi Explorer’s technical feasibility assessment says it should leave the solar system by the early 2040s. 

It’s quite a different mission from what Starcloud’s co-founders usually work on: putting data centers in space to power AI. The company plans to launch its first such full commercial data center, called the Starcloud-2, in 2027, but it did send an Nvidia H100 GPU into space via Starcloud-1 in 2025.

More symbolic than scientific

Interstellar travel takes so long that humanity has focused far more on speeding up the journey than actually making it. One of the big projects addressing this was Breakthrough Starshot, a multi-billion-dollar initiative that would’ve used laser-based propulsion to propel a ship to another star in a matter of decades rather than millennia. That project collapsed in 2025 with no launches. 

The only other interstellar missions ever conducted, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively, over four decades after their launches. 

According to the non-profit group, the purpose of the Fermi Explorer is to just toss something into the cosmos and see what happens. It sounds silly, but it’s the truth. The group’s thinking is based on the Fermi Paradox, which seeks to explain why there are so many stars and planets yet no signs of extraterrestrial life. 

One potential reason is the Fermi Great Filter, which suggests a barrier so hard to cross that intelligent life rarely survives long enough to be detected.

There are dozens of potential filters, ranging from the various steps of abiogenesis — the natural process by which life arises from non-living matter — to technological filters such as the inability to get into space, or, once there, the lack of motivation to search beyond a species’ host star. 

“By launching the Fermi Explorer mission, we can for the first time tick two possible Fermi Great Filters off the list,” the group wrote on its website. “That it is impossible for an intelligent species to leave their nearest stars (and) that all intelligent species decide not to leave their home star for some reason.”

The goal is to fund and build this entire project for about $15 million, using existing technology and piggybacking on a commercial rocket, such as SpaceX’s, to reach orbit. This project exists only to prove that humans can and are willing to do it, even if it’s something no one alive today is ever going to witness.

Joe is a freelance journalist. It all started with a long-running affection for building his own PCs, which he did for the first time as a teenager. It evolved into a lifelong enjoyment of putting words on the internet about the subject. He’s written for CNET, PCMag, Mashable and SlashGear as a freelance writer, and worked as a Senior Editor at Android Authority for 10 years. When he’s not writing about tech and science, he’s learning the ins and outs of DIY home repair, gaming, playing his bass guitars and posting help on PC building and gaming subreddits. He is a staunch believer that orange juice should have pulp.

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Having first seen it at MWC earlier in the year – in a strictly hands-off demo – I have finally got my first proper close-up look at Honor’s wild Robot Phone. 

The headline feature is that mechanical camera arm on the back. Effectively tucking what looks like a DJI Osmo Pocket 4 gimbal inside the back of the phone. It’s an impressive feat of engineering for something so small, and it looks much better in person than it does in press pictures online.

Read through Honor’s press release for the Robot Phone, and you’ll find all sorts of bold claims about the number of manufacturing steps, patents and speeds at which it moves.

Each little feature is also seemingly given its own brand name – but the important thing here is that it’s designed to be durable, and move quickly and accurately.

The addition of the gimbal is there to give you super steady footage without relying on algorithms and electronic stabilisation. But it also offers the ability to manually pan the camera across the scene. It also supports some pre-programmed cinematic movements to help you capture really impressive footage that’s dynamic with very little effort.

It can also use AI to automatically track, or follow, a subject, panning and tilting itself to keep you in the frame. It’s all very clever, and during my time with the phone it worked surprisingly well, aside from a few teething issues caused by the device being built solely for the Chinese market.

The camera sensor boasts 200MP resolution, with a wide f/1.6 aperture. One thing I definitely missed back at MWC is that it’s joined by a telephoto zoom lens, which also has a 200MP sensor, and a 50MP ultrawide camera, to give you a very versatile camera system for video.

For pro video lovers, there are lots of promising features here: RAW processing 14-bit data, the ability to shoot in Log, and you can also preview ARRI looks in real time. 

Powering all these features is the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, along with Honor’s H1 chip, and an effective cooling system designed to let you keep shooting for long periods. There’s also a 7060mAh battery that supports 120W wired and 50W wireless charging.

The gimbal works as expected, and the footage really does look good – even if I was only able to view it on the slightly chunky device’s screen.

Where things are less positive for me is in the AI and Robot aspects. The gimbal can dance, act as a personal assistant and answer questions while it looks you in the face. These are gimmicks, pure and simple, and not a reason anyone should buy this phone.

The Robot Phone is actually on sale in China right now. So if you want to get hold of one, you won’t find it in Western retail stores. It doesn’t seem like a wider release is planned either. However, I’d guess that we will see this tech, in some form, hit Honor flagships in the future.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens on Aug. 18 as its new artificial intelligence (AI) platform for users ages 13 to 17.

According to the firm, teens will be automatically placed into the new platform based on their estimated age, where they will encounter “an experience designed to help [them] learn, think critically, deepen understanding, and use AI with confidence,” OpenAI said in its product announcement. 

ChatGPT for Teens offers safety measures for its younger users, with tools designed to encourage balanced usage habits while giving parents more oversight. 

“We have been guided by four commitments,” OpenAI wrote. “Put teen safety first, encourage real-world support, treat teens like teens, and be transparent about how our systems should behave.”

The new product specifically targets students with several features:

• Study Mode, which uses guiding questions and step-by-step support to help teens understand the material they’re learning.

• Homework Reminders, which can recognize when a teen appears to be trying to shortcut an assignment and will redirect them to Study Mode for collaborative problem solving.

• Quizzes and Learning Visualizations, which give teens more ways to practice, gauge their knowledge, and see difficult concepts more clearly.

• Study Hours, which lets teens or parents choose times when Study Mode is on by default.

An Educator’s View of ChatGPT for Teens

Laura Yeager, an elementary school principal in Oklahoma’s Frederick School District, says there are several reasons to like ChatGPT for Teens, theoretically. “To start, this technology places a large burden on both parents and teachers to be as well-informed about the tool, or better than, the teens using it. Off the bat, they’re at a disadvantage compared to a native user,” Yeager explains.  

While managing this oversight may be challenging, Yeager sees one advantage to ChatGPT for Teens. She says it could serve as a resource for students struggling with difficult concepts who might not have access to help at home due to circumstances like working parents or family members being less familiar with the materials a teen brings home from school.

“In a perfect world, students could access sample problems or quizzes or be prompted with thoughtful questions intended to promote higher-order thinking and independent learning,” Yeager says. “Highly motivated students could benefit greatly from using this tool to further their reasoning skills by analyzing the answers, verifying sources, and challenging their own thinking.”

Yeager appreciates how ChatGPT for Teens steers teens away from potentially harmful situations. For example, posing as a 15-year-old, she entered a prompt about making money quickly in an attempt to see how the technology would respond. “It answered with age-appropriate odd jobs, babysitting, and the like,” she says. The tool offered a plan to save money, and issued repeated warnings to avoid people enticing teens with quick cash for illegal things (without naming them).

ChatGPT for Teens also earned high marks from Yeager for steering prompts about studying toward critical thinking rather than creating a document of facts to memorize. For example, when she asked it to create a study guide on “Of Mice and Men,” instead of creating the study guide, “I was prompted to consider the relationships among the characters and the meanings of certain events,” Yeager says. 

A Student’s Perspective 

Interestingly, high school student Annie (last name withheld), an 11th grader from Auburn High School in Alabama, likes ChatGPT for Teens for some of the same reasons as Principal Yeager.

“I think it can be very useful, especially for students who do not have a tutor or someone available to help them with a subject,” Annie explains. “ChatGPT is particularly good at teaching foundational material in subjects such as math, physics, and languages. For example, it can explain grammar rules in much more detail if a student does not understand the first explanation.”

Annie likes that Study Mode teaches the user systematically, step-by-step. When she used ChatGPT to study Spanish, it started with the most basic concepts to gauge her level of knowledge, such as how to conjugate verbs, before moving on to more difficult material. It also provided practice problems and revealed patterns to help her remember the rules. 

“I especially liked the encouraging tone, which made studying feel less intimidating and allowed me to make mistakes without being afraid of getting something wrong,” Annie says.

One thing that Annie says she does not like: “ChatGPT sometimes seems to forget how I asked it to teach me as a conversation gets longer. At the beginning, I might ask it to teach me in a certain way or format, with different sections and a specific style of explanation. However, after a long conversation, the responses can become shorter or stop following the same teaching style.”

A Fan of the Product — to a Point 

Despite her approval of some features, Yeager says she is not totally on board with ChatGPT for Teens.

“I understand the intention of this platform is to teach students to use AI responsibly and to leverage technology effectively as a skill, which is noble, but it is also to reduce liability and to attempt to place some responsibility back on the parents and guardians,” Yeager explains. 

“The brutal truth is: there are many AI programs out there, and if students want to find information, they will. ChatGPT for Teens has some merit, but teens who want to will still find ways to plagiarize and take shortcuts in schoolwork, rather than develop and use critical thinking skills.”

If she were still teaching in the classroom, Yeager says she would not use it. Test scores across the nation reveal that students are struggling in critical reading and writing skills. “Worksheets don’t teach. Teachers do,” Yeager argues.

“It is the same with any tool,” Yeager adds. “Nothing replaces the mental modeling of a skilled classroom teacher delivering explicit instruction. Students need to hear another person verbally work through difficult concepts and scaffold ideas. They need evidence that it can be done without a computer program and that they are capable of hard things.”

Areas Where ChatGPT for Teens Is Helpful 

Annie sees that struggle a bit differently.

“I would especially use it for studying Spanish, because no one in my family speaks Spanish, so I do not always have someone available to practice with,” Annie explains. “ChatGPT gives me a way to practice writing and speaking and to ask questions when I do not understand a grammar rule.”

Annie does not think ChatGPT for Teens necessarily discourages creative thinking. She says it is most useful for establishing a strong foundation in a subject, which can eventually help students develop their own ideas. 

“It is difficult to think creatively about a subject without first understanding its basic concepts,” Annie says. “However, students still need to use what they learn to develop their own conclusions and ideas rather than relying on ChatGPT to do all of their thinking for them.”

Ultimately, ChatGPT for Teens illustrates the promise and the limits of AI in education. Tools like Study Mode can fill a genuine gap for students who lack resources. But as both Yeager and Annie point out, the technology is not a substitute for teachers. ChatGPT’s true value may depend less on its safety measures than on how teens and teachers choose to use it.

In a nutshell: There’s a huge number of accounts on Instagram that feature AI-generated characters, but identifying these as non-human isn’t always that simple. As such, the social media giant is changing its current “AI creator” label to the clearer “AI generated profile.” It will also limit the reach of any of these accounts that don’t use this designation.

It’s not just AI-generated slop content sweeping across Instagram these days. There are also countless personas that are entirely AI-generated – many of which appear to be influencer-style accounts – and not all of them make it clear that the person isn’t real.

Instagram previously allowed creators of these accounts to add an “AI creator” label, but it was optional and could still suggest that the persona is a real human who simply “creates” with AI.

The new “AI-generated profile” label is a lot clearer, and should help the many men who engage with AI-generated women on the site understand they’re not real.

Being optional means some account creators won’t add the disclaimer to their AI personas, of course. Instagram says that if it detects an unlabeled AI account in these cases, the account’s reach will be limited. That means non-followers won’t see the posts as recommendations in the Explore section or in Reels.

A lot of these personas are essentially influencers, selling products for legitimate brands. There are no specific rules requiring brands to tell consumers when advertising content has been created using AI, and many companies would rather go down this route than pay a real person to advertise their goods – they tend to be very defensive when they’re called out, too.

Instagram said it introduced the changes because its users “don’t like seeing a profile that seems human, only to find out later that the person featured is AI-generated.”

Unfortunately, Instagram is pretty specific about this applying only to profiles featuring an AI-generated person rather than a human. This won’t apply to the seemingly millions of accounts that pump out AI-generated content all day, every day, which Instagram pleasantly describes as “creators who simply use AI tools as part of their creative process.”

That type of AI content can still be labeled separately, though Meta’s system is hardly foolproof. Across Instagram, Facebook and Threads, the company adds an “AI info” label when an image, video, or piece of audio contains technical signals showing it was generated using AI, or when the uploader admits it. If AI was only used to edit something, the label is hidden in the post’s menu, while photorealistic images made using Meta AI are marked “Imagined with AI.”

Ultimately, both systems still depend on Meta detecting the content or the person behind an account being honest enough to label it themselves. The company admits that the technical markers it relies on can be removed, so it seems unlikely that every fake influencer is suddenly going to announce itself. But making these accounts easier to identify – and harder to push in front of unsuspecting users – is at least a start. Even if it won’t stop thousands of men from asking a collection of pixels whether she’s single.