Watch Argentina vs Australia live streams as the Wallabies travel to San Salvador de Jujuy for the first of two Tests against Los Pumas. The hosts come into the game on the back of a hard-fought loss against South Africa, while the visitors secured successive wins over Japan.

Argentina showed their quality earlier this month when they came agonisingly close to ending South Africa’s run of 11 straight wins. Los Pumas pounded the visitors for 15 phases as they looked to snatch a draw but a final pass to an unmarked Matías Moroni was dropped and they succumbed to a 17-10 defeat. They’ll hope for more luck against the Wallabies and will be confident of returning to winning ways having beaten Australia 28-26 last year in Sydney.

As my 20s are set to come to an end later this year, I’ve officially reached the age where sleeping in the wrong position or stretching just a little too far can cause aches and pains. I’ve always been somewhat skeptical of massage guns, mostly because I’ve tried a few off-brand ones and just assumed they’d eventually end up collecting dust in a drawer.

But after a few weeks of testing the Therabody Theragun Sense (2nd Gen), I was surprised. Turns out massage guns aren’t as gimmicky as I had thought.

The Theragun Sense, which retails for $299, is a wellness-focused massage gun that’s designed for everyday aches, muscle tension, relaxation, and soreness. It’s more of a gentle massaging and relaxation tool rather than a hardcore recovery massage gun.

If you’re looking for more of a deep-tissue massage, it might be worth checking out the Theragun PRO or Prime. But if you don’t need a super heavy-duty massage gun with features like heated therapy and deep- tissue capabilities, the Theragun Sense is a great option for everyday use. 

My favorite thing about the massage gun is that it features built-in visually guided routines. The device comes with four routines, and you can access additional routines through the Therabody app and sync your favorite ones to the device using Bluetooth.

The Theragun Sense has an LCD screen that walks you through routines step by step. Once you select a routine, the screen shows you exactly where to use the massage gun, how long to spend on each area, and how much pressure to apply.

As someone who never really had an idea of what to do with a massage gun other than pointing it to a sore muscle and hoping for the best, I liked that the Therabody Sense takes a lot of the guesswork out of using a massage gun. 

My favorite routine was the six-minute “Sleep” routine that’s essentially a quick full-body massage to get you ready for the night. The app lets you choose from many other routines, like “Pre-Walk Warm-up,” “Desk Relief,” “Lower Back Recovery,” and more. 

The massage gun features five speeds to fine-tune pressure to allow for a more relaxing touch, moderate pressure, or a deeper tension release. I liked having the flexibility to change the intensity depending on how sore I was feeling that day.

Since the device is designed to be lightweight, I found it easy to hold and get to those spots on my back and shoulders that are harder to reach.

For people who want more personalization, the Therabody app takes the guided experience a step further with Coach, the company’s AI feature that creates personalized recovery recommendations based on your goals and activity. Coach can recommend which part of your body to target, which settings or attachments to use, and when to fit a recovery session into your day. 

The relatively quiet motor was another feature I appreciated, as I could easily use the device while watching TV or relaxing without the sound of the massage gun acting as a distraction. 

The Theragun Sense comes with a USB-C charging cable, a travel pouch, and two massage attachments: the Standard Ball and the Dampener, which is designed to target knots and tender areas. Separately, you can purchase the “Supersoft” attachment for $35 for extra sensitive areas on the body. 

Overall, the Theragun Sense (2nd Gen) won me over. It’s easy to use, comfortable to hold, and notably takes the guesswork out of using a massage gun. At $299, it isn’t cheap, but I think it’s a great option for people who want an everyday wellness device that can help them relax and recover.

The big picture: The profits of DRAM and NAND manufacturers have skyrocketed since the AI boom drove up demand for memory. After SK Hynix and Samsung awarded their employees generous bonuses from the windfall, union members at Micron are now wondering when they will receive their share.

Taiwan-based media recently reported that Micron’s two primary unions are dissatisfied with worker compensation amid the company’s ballooning profits. The unions could threaten to strike, potentially disrupting an already strained global memory supply and worsening technology-related price increases.

Credit: App Economy Insights

Union chairman Lin Zherui highlighted Micron’s record-high profits stemming from the AI boom. Because data centers and other hardware powering large language models require large amounts of memory, data center operators and tech giants pursuing generative AI have reserved much of the DRAM and NAND production capacity from manufacturers such as Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung.

In response, the Big Three have hiked prices, passing higher costs on to consumers while boosting their profits to unprecedented levels. The boom has pushed Micron’s and SK Hynix’s market valuations above $1 trillion.

– Jukan (@jukan05) August 1, 2026

However, bonuses for Micron employees have not increased to match the windfall. According to an alleged union pamphlet circulating on a Taiwanese forum, bonuses remain capped at 200% of salary over a five-month period. The poster who shared the pamphlet claimed that Micron union membership has increased nearly tenfold this year as a result.

Micron employees likely view their counterparts at SK Hynix and Samsung with envy after the two South Korean giants awarded their employees hundreds of thousands of dollars earlier this year. SK Hynix paid out around $477,000 per employee, a figure that could increase to $900,000 next year, while Samsung narrowly avoided a strike by paying out around $340,000.

Even brief work stoppages at Micron’s plants could significantly hurt the company’s profits and create ripple effects across the supply chain, pushing consumer prices even higher. If the company’s unions threaten to strike, their demands could include increasing or removing bonus caps and overhauling retirement packages. Initial talks are expected to begin in mid-September.

Although uncertainty surrounds the sustainability of the AI boom, Nvidia’s surging profits have delayed fears of a bubble for now. Amid public pushback against data centers, construction delays, and concerns that AI giants are hiding massive amounts of debt, experts still estimate that memory price hikes will continue beyond 2027, with prices potentially remaining elevated past 2030.

from the today-in-what-the-everloving-fuck dept

Compliant Technologies probably would have preferred to keep flying under the radar. But a gaudy new no-bid contract with ICE (worth up to $20 million!) made it impossible.

Prior to ICE’s big purchase, it may as well have never existed. It only had a few clients, and those few clients purchased a few pairs for prison guards and jail staffers. That’s the sort of thing that kind of makes sense. Controlling inmates in enclosed spaces requires a bit more finesse than just beating them with batons.

Given the increased chance of losing control of a “compliance” option, turning gloves into quasi-stun guns made it easier to deploy force while simultaneously reducing the probability of losing a baton/Taser/OC canister to an inmate who’s stronger and faster than the average prison guard (i.e., most of them).

But ICE decided it wanted even more force to deploy, even though deploying force (a lot of it “excessive”) is basically all ICE does. Under-trained officers tend to underperform in the field, especially when they’re asked to do something more than seize the occasional website or find illegal substances hidden in cargo containers.

Here comes the shocker. Not only did a cop shop give officers some stun G.L.O.V.E.s (Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters), but it allowed them to deploy them in Omaha, Nebraska schools. With the G.L.O.V.E. backlash now fully engaged due to ICE’s interest in inflicting further unnecessary pain, an Omaha school district is “asking” cops not to use these gloves.

And the best thing we can say about this development is that the cops have actually agreed to stop glove-stunning students, without engaging in too much extracurricular bitching:

Omaha police agreed this week to stop carrying gloves that can deliver electric shocks to students in the halls of Nebraska’s largest public school district.

The Omaha mayor and police chief said in a joint statement Monday that the gloves were used twice in the last school year, including in a program for students with learning deficits.

Reread that last sentence a few more times. That’s extremely disturbing. While officers claim to have only used them “twice,” it did deploy them at least once to stun “students with learning deficits.”

And I only said there was a minimum of bitching by the cops. There was still some bitching, which arrived in the form of belated justification for stun-tech I can almost guarantee no parent was aware school resource officers (a fancy phrase for “school cop”) had access to, much less using on students.

“We believe it is the safest use-of-force option in the rare times when it is used,” the statement said.

“Safest?” As compared to what?!?! At what point do you decide a school discipline issue necessitates an ambush with literal shock tactics? Is this safer than NOT FUCKING DOING THIS AT ALL? I’m not an expert in “low voltage emissions” but I would like to believe any option that is less violent than stunning a student into submission is actually safer than any option that involves incapacitating someone with an electric shock.

What’s wild is that the school district actually had to make this request and then hope the cops would comply. And they had to hold onto this hope despite there being significant pushback from the community these cops are supposed to be serving. That it took the cops an entire day to simply agree to use the multiple violent force options they already have available to them doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

Destroying this minimal amount of confidence is the fact that this “agreement” (which hasn’t been made official) only extends to the Omaha PD. For some fucking reason, a bunch of Omaha-area cops “serving” Omaha schools apparently also have these gloves and aren’t promising to change a damn thing about how they handle policing schools.

However, the suburban Bellevue police department that patrols two Omaha schools and the large Bellevue district said its officers will continue carrying the gloves. Three other large school districts in the metro area that have Omaha school resource officers assigned to their buildings have not taken action to stop police from using the devices.

This agency saw the backlash and the semi-capitulation of the city’s largest law enforcement agency and then… did absolutely nothing. As far as the Bellevue PD is concerned, it’s still open season on students when it comes to SROs (school resource officers) and their stun gloves.

The schools in that district appear to be led by people who will never take issue with anything cops might do. Nothing to see here, says the district spokesperson, whose statement sounds like something delivered by someone who developed Stockholm Syndrome while undergoing a lobotomy:

Bellevue schools spokeswoman Amanda Oliver said the district has a great relationship with Bellevue police and doesn’t see a need to alter anything.

Oh, I’m sure the district has a “great relationship” with the cops. But we’re not worried about the administrators. We’re worried about the kids, who are the ones who will be subjected to violent force, including these novel stun gloves the kids at ICE keep talking about. And the Bellevue PD has used them just as often on students as the Omaha PD. And even though it was only “two” instances, the Omaha PD was at least willing to swear off using this tech in schools.

Meanwhile, in Bellevue, it’s apparently business as usual, even though no one (other than the PD and this weirdly cheery PR person) wants cops to have this option when patrolling schools.

At last week’s school board meeting, about 30 people spoke out against police using the gloves. Residents and board members alike said they were appalled at the practice. No one spoke in favor of it.

No one except the people who will never be subjected to the stun gloves, which the company helpfully points out won’t leave evidence “burn or contact marks” on the minors subjected to them. Bellevue schools — via its PR flack — said everything is fine. The chief of the Bellevue PD, Ken Clary, similarly claims to have a healthy relationship with the G.L.O.V.E.

“I am not comfortable having our officers give up a tool that has repeatedly proven to be safe, effective, and less harmful than the alternatives,” Clary said in a statement.

Again: as compared to what? You can’t just say this option is better than others without providing any evidence to support this statement. I mean, you can, but you shouldn’t expect anyone to believe you. This just sounds like a top cop claiming each new force option is more “effective” and “safer” than whatever the department is already using. Adding yet another option is never viewed as adding to the excess. It’s just folded in with everything else and glossed over in public statements until the public’s attention is focused elsewhere.

There’s no reason for ICE to have these gloves. Officers already have tons of force options, as well as the full permission/judicial immunity to use whatever option they feel will inflict the most pain at any given point. The G.L.O.V.E. may have started out as a prison option, but now it’s clear cops want this option whenever they’re dealing with… shall we say… captive audiences. And the defenders of this tech are making it clear they think inmates and students are interchangeable, at least when it comes to deploying force.

Filed Under: ice, nebraska, police misconduct, police violence, school resource officer, stun gloves, wtaf

Companies: compliant technologies

Nintendo and Sony spent the early nineties arguing over a Super NES compact disc attachment that never reached store shelves. Throaty Mumbo read that history and aimed lower, at the original front-loading NES, a console with no disc hardware and an expansion port that sat unused on the bottom of millions of gray boxes. His project page calls the result NESCD-001, an unofficial homemade compact disc add-on built for fun and documented in a build video plus a public GitHub repo.

His finished unit is a gray 3D printed slab that fits under the console in the same way as the old Famicom Disk System did. A white disk tray with glossy red lettering faces forward, accompanied by an eject button and volume knob. Inside, there’s a conventional 40-pin IDE compact disk drive (the Pacific Digital Mach 52, as seen in the movie), a custom circuit board, a PCM5102 converter, and an RP2350B microcontroller that communicates with both the drive and an Everdrive N8 Pro flash cartridge. The printable shell files and sticker art for that board layout are available in the same source as the board layout itself.

Games do not run directly from the disc in the same way as later CD consoles do. What happens is that the RP2350B reads the ROM from the disk, transfers it to the Everdrive over USB, and runs it. After things are up and running, the microcontroller monitors a CHR mailbox at memory address 0x21FF8 for any requests from the running game, which could be for additional audio or a chunk of full motion video. Frames of video are delivered over the same USB link and written into NES video memory using proprietary bitstream code from the Cyclone IV FPGA already installed on the Everdrive N8 Pro.

Then there’s the audio side, which has gone its own way on purpose. Compact disk sound exits the PCM5102 and enters the NES via the expansion port mixer pin, an input pin that Nintendo slipped onto American hardware but never seemed to use. That method prevents any additional sound from clogging the already congested USB link, while simultaneously allowing the front knob to do something. One Molex cable from a wall adapter supplies 5 and 12 volts to the drive and board. A buck converter then reduces the 12V to around 9.5V, allowing you to utilize a spare NES power plug to power the console from the top of the box, using only one outlet to power the entire stack. Of course, you can still use the original brick to power the NES.

Proof of concept can be found on a homemade disc labeled “Super Mario Bros. CD edition”. Yes, it’s still the 1985 platformer, but now the music comes from compact disc recordings and small cutscenes pop in. Mario and Luigi are talking about a picnic, while Bowser is checking into a local hotel. When you take the disk out, the extra layer stops working. Early tests also ran standard cartridge games through the Everdrive while the drive and board were being wired, including a sanity check to ensure Contra was still operational when some flash carts decided to cause problems.

The full motion video functionality is still very much in beta. Something Nerdy Studios already showed that an Everdrive N8 Pro can push Bad Apple across the full NES screen from an SD card by stuffing tiles into CHR RAM as fast as the machine will take them. Throaty Mumbo leaned on that work for a disc-fed version, then held the firmware back because parts of it were reverse engineered from that demo.