Privacy will be a major theme when Apple unveils a new version of Siri at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

The Siri relaunch is widely seen as Apple’s big chance to reestablish its relevance in artificial intelligence. As part of that effort, company executives will argue that they’re taking a more privacy-friendly approach than most other AI companies, Gurman said.

Apple will reportedly launch the first standalone Siri app, powered by Google Gemini and offering users a chatbot experience reminiscent of ChatGPT.  But compared to those other chatbots, the app is supposed to have more limitations on how long user information can be used and stored.

For example, Gurman said Siri could include a feature similar to the Messages app, allowing users to automatically delete conversations after 30 days or one year — or to keep them indefinitely.

Gurman also suggested that Apple might be emphasizing privacy as a way to excuse Siri’s shortcomings compared to competing products — and that this emphasis might obscure the fact that Google is handling some the security.

Google‘s March Pixel drop included a bunch of new features for its smartphones. One feature that wasn’t mentioned is a new Pixel Desktop mode when you connect your phone to an external display.

The idea of connecting a smartphone to a monitor to instantly transform the interface into a desktop-like experience is nothing new, though. Samsung‘s phones and tablets have had DeX for years. Motorola phones offer Smart Connect, which turns even its low-end phones into a desktop experience.

LinkedIn said a Reuters report suggesting a 5pc headcount reduction is ‘inaccurate’, but did not provide any further details.

78 Irish jobs are reportedly at risk at LinkedIn as the Microsoft-owned company becomes the latest to announce sweeping layoffs.

Reuters reported yesterday (13 May) that LinkedIn was readying to cut about 5pc of its headcount, although a company spokesperson told SiliconRepublic.com that the figure mentioned in Reuters’ report is “inaccurate” but did not provide any further details.

The Microsoft-owned company employs 17,500 people globally, with around 1,800 workers based in Ireland. A 5pc headcount trim could lead to around 875 job cuts at the company.

The layoffs are reportedly expected to support LinkedIn as it focuses on areas where its business is growing. “As part of our regular business planning, we’ve implemented organisational changes to best position ourselves for future success,” the company spokesperson said.

A source told Reuters that the layoffs are not related to AI. However, these cuts come at a time when AI-related job cuts have become commonplace, with tech leaders increasingly admitting to this reasoning.

In just the past few months, companies including Cloudflare, Coinbase, Meta, Block, Amazon, Atlassian and Snap have collectively cut tens of thousands of jobs – with the trend largely attributed to changing technology at the workplace.

Earlier this week, General Motors announced that it is cutting 300 jobs, with 30 Irish jobs reportedly affected in the move. Layoffs at Oracle placed as much as 150 Irish jobs at risk this April, while around 300 Ireland-based workers feared for their jobs in January after Amazon announced that it was cutting 16,000 jobs.

According to Layoffs.fyi, tech companies have shed nearly 109,000 workers so far this year – with the number fast approaching the roughly 124,000 that were laid off in the whole of 2025.

2023 was an especially challenging year for workers, with the tech industry announcing more than 264,000 job cuts. That number was down to around 153,000 in 2024.

Job cuts at LinkedIn come as the company announced a 12pc growth in revenue in the quarter past. Parent company Microsoft recently announced that its quarterly revenue was up 18pc, with its annual revenue run rate going up 123pc to $37bn.

Ireland’s media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, launched an investigation into LinkedIn last December over suspicions that the platform’s content reporting mechanisms were not up to code.

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Engineers at Ouster just released a fresh lineup of color LiDAR sensors called the REV8 OS family. These devices shoot out laser beams to measure distances and build detailed three-dimensional views of the world around them. What stands out right away comes from a new chip inside each one. Developed together with Fujifilm, this L4 chip adds accurate color information straight to every measurement point during the scan itself.

Previous versions of these 3D sensors returned clear but colorless point clouds, each with a set of spatial coordinates and the most rudimentary idea of how strongly the light reflected back. REV8 entirely flips it on its head, and each point now receives full color data. The end product appears to be a high definition photo wrapped around a flawlessly accurate 3D model in one incredibly smooth pass, rather than something painstakingly put together after the fact.

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The highest-end sensor is known as the OS1 Max. This one has 256 different laser channels at its disposal and can travel a considerable distance, up to 500 meters under optimal conditions or 200 meters if the target only reflects 10% of the light. It has 45 degrees of vertical coverage and can spin 360 degrees horizontally. It is spitting out data at a stunning 40,000 measurements each second, providing the system a whopping 10 million points per second, more than double the range and detail of the previous iteration.

Color appears as a result of some clever magic occurring deep within the technology. The laser pulse leaves the sensor, bounces off an object, and returns with not just timing data for distance but also the subtle combination of light wavelengths that constitute color. The L4 chip does its job, processing those photons at the blink of an eye, or at the rate of picoseconds. Meanwhile, Fujifilm’s color science handles the conversion immediately on the chip, resulting in 48-bit depth and a dynamic range that spans from near black (one lux) to direct sunlight (2 million lux). There’s no need to bother about getting a camera to align with the scan or matching pixels to points later; it’s all included from the start.

That built-in method effectively addresses some of the common issues that sensors bring with them. A self-driving car may now discern the color of a traffic light or the glow of brake lights without waiting for a second device to corroborate what the laser has already detected. Warehouse robots sorting goods can distinguish between a red and a blue label while still measuring the box’s measurements. Survey teams mapping streets can obtain topographic data that already includes features such as building colors and signpost information, ready for use immediately in planning or simulation.

The REV8 series consists of four different models. The high-end OS1 Max is accompanied by updated versions of the small OS0, flexible OS1, and wide-angle OSDome. They all use the same L4 silicon, either in 128- or 256-channel configurations. Developers can switch between them without having to rewrite large amounts of code. It’s worth noting that production plans extend for 10 years, and to top it all off, these sensors surpass automotive safety standards for reliability in vehicles and heavy equipment.
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AI companionship among asexual people is “not a particularly widespread phenomenon,” says Michael Doré, a board member at the Asexual Visibility and Education Network. “Between us, we’ve come up with about two people we know of who use an AI companion. The vast majority of aces we know don’t, as far as we know. There’s no reason to think aces need to use AI more than any others.”

Doré says he has never used an AI as “an emotional support mechanism” and stresses that most asexual people “actually desire some form of human companionship,” whether that’s through close, platonic friendships or in community. “Some aces do have romantic relationships, whether with asexual people or otherwise, and some asexual people have sex, some don’t, and some are aromantic,” he says, warning against generalizations due to the vast range of preferences within the community which span from never having sex and not being interested in it, to having sex for reasons aside from strong sexual attraction. “Many aces have fulfilling relationships with other people, whether romantic or platonic or otherwise.”

Ashabi Owagboriaye, an asexual educator who runs the Ace in Grace page on Instagram, says she has seen only one person in one of her groups talk about an AI companion. “That caused a lot of controversy in the comments,” she says. “A lot of people who are asexual are really looking for face-to-face interactions. So when this person came up and said, ‘Yeah, I’m using AI as a way to connect and as a relationship,’ everyone was like, ‘Why are you doing that? What’s going on here?” An AI, Owagboriaye says, “essentially mirrors you” and cannot be said to be a true companion. Moreover, the chatbots are designed to sustain emotionally compelling, often never-ending interactions.

For Ari, a 25-year-old accountant from Mexico who identifies as aromantic asexual and experiences some romantic or sexual attraction to others, the break-up from her fiancé after a decade together and the resulting solitude led her to download the AI chatbot Chai in October 2024. For more than six months, she treated it “as if he were my ex-fiancé,” she says, without wishing to provide her surname for privacy reasons.

“I talked to him day after day, and then, without realizing it, I was talking to him during work hours,” she says, explaining that she was “smitten” until the AI started getting confused, talking about made-up things and occasionally trying to argue. “Little by little, I began to realize how I ended up feeling even lonelier than I already was.”

Whether or not the characters in Kor’s fantasy world qualify as true companions remains an open question.

Now they only spend two or three hours a day immersed in AI role-play after finding the all-day experience “too consuming.” They began limiting their use after noticing entire evenings disappearing into role-play sessions and getting irritated if they were interrupted.

“Being able to have exactly what you want, when you want it,” they say, “is a dangerous drug for humans.”

To start things off, we’d like to extend a special thanks to everyone who joined us for Hackaday Europe this weekend in Lecco, Italy. It was 48 hours of fascinating talks, incredible badge hacks, and some of the greatest company you could hope for. For those who couldn’t make it in person, we didn’t forget you — expect to hear more about what went down once we get a chance to catch our collective breath.

That’s not the only thing to keep an eye out for in the coming days. This is your reminder that Amazon will be officially ending support for older Kindles in a few days. After May 20th, any of the megacorp’s e-readers that were introduced before 2012 will be persona non grata, so you should plan accordingly.

The biggest change is that these older devices won’t be able to buy digital books from Amazon, but you can still use them offline, and the fantastic Calibre makes it a breeze to load up content from other sources. To be perfectly honest, we’d advise any Kindle user to decouple their device from the Amazon mothership by using Calibre or even jailbreaking it and installing KOReader, so the end of official support is fine by us. In fact, if a surge of unsupported Kindles brings more attention and users to those projects, that suits us just fine.

We’ve also heard that Microsoft is removing the “Together” feature from Teams on June 30th. We actually had to look this one up — apparently, it was a mode added during the pandemic that made it look like you and the other people in the call were all sitting together in a virtual conference room of sorts. Sounds an awful lot like a dystopian nightmare to us, but to be fair, things got kinda weird there when we were all sheltering in place, so it’s hard to judge. In any event, we don’t think too many people will miss this particular feature in 2026.

While on the subject of products the world seems to have forgotten about, Electrek reports that Tesla has all but given up on their once promising solar roof tiles. The company won’t say just how many installations they’ve completed since the camouflaged panels hit the market in 2016, but estimates suggest the number may be as low as 3,000. It will probably come as little surprise to find that cost seems to be the biggest factor: a roof full of Tesla’s swanky tiles could run you six-figures, while traditional panels are only getting cheaper every year.

From end-of-life to the latest and greatest, today also marks the release of Linux 7.1-rc4. If you’re in the business of running release candidate kernels, you probably don’t need to be told what’s new, but for everyone else, Phoronix has a rundown on some of the changes. Highlights include improvements to hardware support (including a fix for the Framework Laptop 13 Pro), security fixes, and new guidance about the use of AI-generated code.

Finally, if you want a time-waster, there’s Halupedia. According to the site’s GitHub: An infinite, hallucinated encyclopedia. Every link leads to an entry that does not exist yet — until you click it, at which point an LLM pretends it has always existed and writes it for you, in the deadpan register of a 19th-century scholarly press. For example, you can read about “The Ministry of Slightly Wrong Maps,” or, if you prefer, “The Ministry of Terribly Wrong Maps.”

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.