Will Lawrence is one of the founders of the Sunrise Movement, a grassroots climate activism group. Now, he’s running for Congress in a Michigan swing district, one of a growing handful of candidates around the country calling for a moratorium on data center development.

Senator Bernie Sanders has endorsed him, calling Lawrence a candidate who will “demand real accountability for big tech and AI companies.” And the backlash to data centers, Lawrence says, is helping him understand rural resistance to another kind of large-scale industrial project in the state: utility-scale renewable energy.

Lawrence’s campaign sees data centers as a potent topic to rally voters to his side in the Democratic primary in Michigan’s 7th district, to be held in August. Internal polling conducted by Data for Progress of likely Democratic primary voters in the district shared with WIRED shows that more than 40 percent of respondents were “much more likely” to vote for a candidate who opposed data centers. The message resonated even more with respondents under 45: Almost 80 percent of younger voters said they’d be much more likely or more likely to support an anti-data-center candidate. (The 7th district includes the college town of Ingham.)

Data centers “certainly [weren’t] the issue I expected to be talking about on the campaign,” Lawrence tells WIRED. Voters, he says, started organically approaching him at town halls and other meetings after he announced his candidacy last summer, asking for his advice as a longtime organizer about how to channel the anti-data-center energy among their neighbors into something productive.

“People feel like they’re being utterly disrespected by the companies and the local officials who are welcoming them into town,” he says.

The Data for Progress poll put Lawrence ahead of both his opponents in the primary. Another poll commissioned by one of his opponents and released in April shows Lawrence winning the primary, though it also shows the vast majority of voters remain undecided. Lawrence also remains a distant third in fundraising.

There are at least 11 data centers planned throughout Michigan, according to the clean-energy database Cleanview. Significant local pushback in two townships in the 7th district have stalled at least two planned projects over the past year. But data center developers have found ways around local opposition elsewhere in the state. After a township in the 6th district voted against an Oracle data center earlier this year, the company sued, and the town let development begin rather than engage in a costly court battle.

Earlier this month, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer appeared at the opening of the Oracle data center, where she was photographed smiling next to OpenAI’s Sam Altman and praised the $16 billion investment.

“Any candidate worth their weight knows that these data centers are toxic,” says Cooper Teboe, a Democratic strategist based in California. Candidates that don’t recognize this, Teboe says, “are not candidates that are going to win.”

Christy McGillivray, the executive director of Voters Not Politicians, a Michigan-based democracy reform organization, says that Whitmer’s appearance at the opening was a major misstep for the governor, who’s been floated as a 2028 presidential contender.

“It literally blew my mind,” she says. “I was like, ‘Are you trying to hurt the entire Democratic party?’”

While on the campaign trail, Lawrence says that he met with data center protesters who differed significantly with him politically. These included people opposed to data center construction who were also opposed to solar and wind projects being built on farmland.

Michigan is a hotbed of resistance to renewable energy projects. A 2025 review ranks it as the state with the largest number of local restrictions: More than 60 local governments in Michigan passed ordinances, moratoriums, or other restrictions on wind and solar development between 2011 and 2024. Local opposition, the report found, had stalled or blocked at least 28 projects across the state.

While the bulk of innovation in the over-the-counter hearing aid market revolves around more modern in-ear models, a new brand called Yeasound is proving there’s still some life left in the traditional behind-the-ear (BTE) hearing aid space. The company is relatively new, but it’s actually a subsidiary of Yealink, a Chinese telecom producer that’s been making headsets and phone hardware for 25 years.

Yeasound’s BTE hearing aids currently come in two versions. I tested the higher-end RIC800 model, which includes AI-powered noise reduction, an automatic speech-focusing system, and support for Android in addition to iOS. (The RIC700 is Apple-compatible only.)

Photograph: Chris Null

The units otherwise look identical and even weigh the same; I measured a single unit at 2.76 grams, which is only slightly heavier than some of my favorite BTE hearing aids, like the Jabra Enhance Select 700. Physical controls are limited to two buttons on the back side of each unit. These are mainly used to control volume (independently for each ear) but can also be used to interact with phone calls via a streaming connection.

Onboard Audiogram

ScreenshotiYeasound app via Christopher Null

The first stop for most users will be the iYeasound mobile app, which offers a simplified home screen that puts all the essentials front and center. The in-app hearing test sets a baseline for how frequencies are adjusted. I rather enjoyed Yeasound’s hearing test, which is quite expedited in comparison to others on the market. While the test works the same way, delivering pings of various frequencies and volume to each ear, it eschews lengthy and unnecessary pauses between each test, so you can finish the entire test in about five minutes instead of 10 or more. The results are plotted on a traditional audiogram for posterity; my results were slightly more aggressive than my canonical audiogram suggests, but they were close enough for an OTC product and an informal, in-home test. Unfortunately, if you already have an audiogram in hand, it can’t be imported, and Yeasound’s testing results can’t be manually edited aside from taking another test.

With the hearing test done and my audiogram loaded, I was ready to embark on the Yeasound user experience in earnest.

The main screen of the app offers five environmental modes: Adaptive, General, Noisy, Music, and Outdoors, all largely self-explanatory. Volume controls for each ear appear below the mode selector. You won’t find any noise cancellation options here, though. For those you need to drill into the Sound Setting system, which is unique for each of the five modes except Adaptive. Here you can roughly adjust low, mid, and high frequencies (though nothing more refined than that), opt for one of three noise reduction levels, and choose between using an all-around microphone, a forward-facing mode, and an even tighter focus mode.

ScreenshotiYeasound app via Christopher Null

The Adaptive mode is where the RIC800’s AI features come into play, and if you enable it you forgo all of the additional controls mentioned above, with volume the only modification offered. This sounds liberating, but I preferred using the General mode much of the time, with my own fine-tuning proving more effective than the algorithm’s, especially after pushing noise cancellation to its maximum level. This mode had a little less hiss—a noticeable problem in the Adaptive mode when the volume level creeps up—and it felt less boomy, especially when testing with closed ear tips. With open ear tips, the two modes were about a draw. (Open, closed, and hybrid ear tips are included in the box in various sizes for you to experiment with.)

On the whole, I found the units’ audio assistance to be effective if imperfect. Mid-level frequencies often felt a little muddy and muffled, a problem that extended to a lesser degree to lower-frequency tones. Noise cancellation was surprisingly good, however, and the units can be pushed to very loud levels without introducing significant distortion.

Jay Li doesn’t recommend getting sued by Tesla if you’re trying to get a startup off the ground. But he does think his company, Proception, might be better off for having endured the experience.

“I think it’s kind of like a resilience test, or pressure test,” he told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “People say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?”

Li, who was a technical lead on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program, was accused by his former employer last year of absconding with trade secrets to start Proception. But after months of trading legal blows, he finally reached a settlement with Tesla, which dismissed the lawsuit earlier this month. (Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.)

Now Li is free to tackle what he thinks is an even harder problem: making robot hands work like a human’s.

To help do that, Proception announced Monday that it has raised an $11 million seed round led by First Round Capital, with contributions from Y Combinator and early stage fund BoxGroup.

Proception also announced Monday that it is shipping the first batch of its “high-dexterity robotic hand” to “researchers and robotics companies,” while opening up to wider orders. The goal, Li said, is to become the top hand supplier to other companies that don’t want to spend the time or resources developing what’s known in the industry as “dextrous manipulation.”

While there’s been an avalanche of money and attention rushing into the world of robotics, Li believes not enough of that has gone to making robotic hands truly mimic a human’s hands.

One of the loudest voices talking about this challenge has actually been his old boss, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has said robot hands are one of the biggest engineering problems yet to be solved.

While Musk has maintained that Optimus robots could start working in factories in a matter of years, the consensus view is that making robotic hands equivalent to a human’s is still many years away. Kevin Lynch, the director of Northwestern University’s Center for Robotics and Biosystems, told the Wall Sreet Journal last year that his team believes it will be a decade until they are “functional and useful and able to do some of the things that humans do.”

Li thinks Proception can do it much faster, in large part because of how they’re collecting data.

Most companies training humanoid robots right now are using teleoperators to train their systems. A human wearing a virtual reality headset is able to see what a robot sees and manipulate what’s in front of that robot, then the robot can learn from the commands given by the human.

A big drawback to this approach, according to Li, is that the teleoperator is not receiving feedback from the objects the robot is touching. This approach is also limited to the number of robots a company has available at any given moment, Li said.

Proception’s solution is a glove laden with sensors. With human testers wearing the gloves (and a headset), Proception and its customers can capture “human hand interaction data without requiring a robot in the loop,” according to Proception’s press release.

This same glove also goes on the hand Proception is developing, acting as its sensor-packed “skin.” The hand has 22 degrees of freedom and multiple joints per finger to enable a “wide range of dexterous motions,” according to Proception.

Li said this approach will also let Proception and its customers gather finer, more task-specific data that can allow its robotic hands to more accurately resemble a human’s. He also thinks it is better suited to scale up.

“You need both hardware and data, and those need to come hand-in-hand to get [dextrous manipulation] to work. A lot of companies solely focus on hardware, or like hardware plus non-scalable data [collection],” he said. “We’re working on this highly dexterous hardware plus highly scalable data. We believe that’s a key combination to solve this problem.”

First Round partner Bill Trenchard, who led the investment in Proception, said this was a big reason why he backed Li.

“We think they will have the best hand in the market, maybe the most sophisticated hand today, and the underlying data and models to support that,” he told TechCrunch. “Dexterous manipulation is a very, very, very important part of the whole humanoid story going forward, and as many people have said, it’s sort of the last mile of getting these robots to be truly performant.”

Trenchard also praised Li’s ability to keep a cool head while being sued by his former employer.

“He was very upfront with us when this came out, and I think the team did an amazing job of keeping their heads down,” Trenchard said. “Jay’s a very strong leader.”

Li is also confident. After facing down Tesla’s “hardcore litigation department,” he told TechCrunch that he wouldn’t be surprised if the company comes calling for help as Proception grows.

“I think it will happen,” he said.

If there’s one thing that annoys me about using a smartwatch outdoors, it’s squinting at the screen under bright sunlight. Whether I’m checking directions on a walk or glancing at a notification while cycling, a dim display can quickly turn a premium smartwatch into a guessing game.

That’s why the latest Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 leak immediately caught my attention. But after reading through it, I couldn’t shake one nagging thought: all these upgrades probably won’t come cheap.

Finally, a smartwatch that can outshine the sun?

According to a new leak from tipster Ice Universe, Samsung’s next flagship smartwatch could arrive with a display capable of hitting an eye-watering 5,000 nits of peak brightness. If that figure holds up, it would be a meaningful leap over the current Galaxy Watch Ultra and one of the brightest smartwatch displays we’ve seen. The leak also suggests Samsung will use its newer On-Cell Film (OCF) OLED technology. Beyond making the screen brighter, the newer panel is designed to be more power efficient while taking up less space inside the watch. That’s the kind of upgrade I like seeing because it improves the everyday experience.

But there’s more to it! The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 is also rumored to receive an IP69K rating, offering enhanced protection against high-pressure water jets and harsh environments. Most people may never intentionally blast their smartwatch with hot water, but tougher protection is never a bad thing on a wearable that’s meant to accompany you almost everywhere.

Every upgrade comes with a price tag lurking nearby

The leak doesn’t stop there. An 800mAh battery is also reportedly in the cards, a sizeable jump from the original Galaxy Watch Ultra’s 590mAh cell. Pair that with a more efficient display and whatever processor Samsung chooses next, and the result could be noticeably longer battery life. That’s exactly what I want from an Ultra smartwatch.

Still, there’s one reason I’m keeping my excitement in check. Bigger batteries, brighter displays, and tougher hardware rarely arrive without affecting the final price. Samsung has steadily pushed its Ultra branding toward the premium end of the market, and these rumored upgrades only reinforce that direction. Of course, this is still a leak, so it’s worth taking every detail with a healthy dose of skepticism until Samsung makes things official. If recent rumors are accurate, we won’t have to wait long: the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 is expected to debut alongside the Galaxy Watch 9 lineup and Samsung’s newest foldables at its next Unpacked event. For now, I’m all for a smartwatch that’s easier to read in the sun. I just hope my wallet doesn’t end up feeling the heat instead.

Bridges are a part of our constructed landscape that we take for granted. And bridges by themselves aren’t especially important. What is important is that bridges let you get from one place to another. Technology is often the same. We get from point A to point B through some bridge technology that, probably, most normal people never even notice.

Years ago, point A was commercial 3D printing. Industry had stereolithography, selective laser sintering, fused deposition modeling, and other rapid-prototyping technologies. These were not toys. They were expensive industrial systems used by companies that needed prototypes badly enough to pay serious money for them.

Fast Forward to Today

Today, you can go to a big box store and buy a 3D printer for well under $1,000, and often far less. Modern machines are almost plug-and-play and tend to do all the hard parts for you. That’s point B. How we got between points is a story of hackers who had a dream, and many Hackaday readers lived through it and even played a part in that bridging.

For a long time, RepRap was synonymous with hobby-level 3D printing. The project, started by [Adrian Bowyer] at the University of Bath in 2005, was built around a powerful idea: a machine that could print many of its own parts, thereby helping make more machines. RepRap Darwin reached its early self-replicating milestones in 2008, and the movement produced a thicket of descendants, variants, and arguments about rods, belts, bearings, extruders, firmware, and what “self-replicating” really meant. Of course, the machine could only print some of the parts you needed, but it was still impressive how much of a printer you could make with one printer.

Without RepRap, the desktop 3D printer boom would have looked very different. It created a common pool of ideas: Cartesian frames, printed brackets, hobbed bolts, heated beds, RAMPS boards, Marlin firmware, and a whole common vocabulary. It also created the expectation that a 3D printer was something you could understand, modify, repair, and improve. That expectation would not survive everywhere, but it defined the early culture.

Kicking Kickstarter

By the early 2010s, 3D printing had the right ingredients for a crowdfunding explosion. The technology was visible enough to be exciting, but not yet mature enough to be boring or attract big players. Hackerspaces were multiplying. Arduino had made embedded tinkering feel approachable. Laser-cut plywood, stepper drivers, and commodity motion hardware were easy to source. There were enough RepRap veterans to know what worked, and enough newcomers to believe the next machine would finally make 3D printing simple.

Kickstarter was a perfect amplifier. A desktop 3D printer looked good in a campaign video. It moved. It made things. It appeared to turn imagination directly into plastic. Printrbot was one of the defining examples. [Brook Drumm’s] original Printrbot campaign launched in 2011 and became one of the notable early 3D printer crowdfunding successes, raising far beyond its initial goal. The pitch was seductive: a printer you could afford, build, and actually use. Not an industrial system, not a laboratory instrument, but your first 3D printer.

I had a Printrbot Plus built from a kit, and that experience says a lot about the period. It was not a toaster. It was not even quite a drill press. It was more like buying a small CNC machine from a bright, optimistic friend who assumed you owned calipers, weren’t afraid of firmware, and could recognize when a machine was racking itself out of square. You can see some very old YouTube videos of my machine below.

The Printrbot was charming because it was so direct. There was very little mystery in it. It was made from wood! Even some of the gears were wooden. You could see the rods, belts, pulleys, endstops, and wiring. You could also see the compromises. The Printrbot used LM8UU linear bearings that were, in some cases, held in place with zip ties. This was not necessarily as terrible as it sounds; zip ties are a valid engineering material if your tolerance stack and expectations are sufficiently charitable. But the bearings could be a little loose. The folk remedy was equally period-correct: jam a bit of 3 mm filament in there as a wedge to keep the bearing from wiggling.

That little trick captures the mood of the time. The printer came from a factory, or at least from a company, but it still expected you to meet it halfway. It was full of these tiny bits of tribal knowledge. Blue tape on glass. Hairspray. Kapton. ABS juice. Tighten the belts, but not too much. Level the bed with a piece of paper, unless you had a feeler gauge, unless the bed was warped, in which case all bets were off. If the extruder skipped, maybe the nozzle was clogged, or the filament was too fat, or the hot end was too cold, or the hobbed gear was packed with dust, or the phase of the moon was affecting your controller board. Ok, maybe not the last one.

Solidoodle

Solidoodle was another emblem of that period. Founded in 2011 by [Sam Cervantes], the company pushed hard on affordability, with early machines such as the Solidoodle 2 attracting attention partly because they promised a usable enclosed printer at a price that seemed startling at the time. Wired covered the Solidoodle in 2012 as an assembled $499 machine, which was exactly the sort of price that made people start thinking desktop 3D printing might jump from hackerspaces to ordinary homes.

The Solidoodle story also shows the danger of that moment. The market wanted cheap, reliable, attractive, assembled, easy-to-use machines. The technology could supply maybe three of those at once. Companies were trying to scale production, support beginners, improve hardware, and hit aggressive prices while the entire field was still learning what “reliable” even meant for a low-cost filament printer. Solidoodle eventually suspended operations in 2016, a fate that befell more than one early desktop 3D printing company.

Part of Solidoodle’s problem was that they were too invested in the original RepRap idea. I almost bought a Solidoodle because I was fearful of trying to put a kit together with so many mechanical parts. Why didn’t I? Because RepRap lead times were enormous. At least part of the problem was that they were using Solidoodle printers to produce parts for Solidoodle printers.

Say you have ten printers. You get orders for 100. Great, right? But getting parts for those 100 printers done on your ten printers will take a long time. Of course, you could take the first ten to help, but now you can only ship 90 printers. If you only had 100 orders, you’d be fine. But in the printer-starved 2010s, a cheap printer like Solidoodle or Printrbot would get orders faster than they could fill them, and had to decide if they’d fill orders faster or try to make do with their existing printer farms. There really isn’t a right answer to that question. We heard that [Brook], for example, expected to sell 50 printers through Kickstarter. They wound up with a backlog of over 1,000 printers. Within a year they had $2 million in sales and it went up from there. Until, of course, it didn’t.

MakerBot

MakerBot deserves mention here, too, although it occupies a slightly different lane. It started in the open-source maker world and became the company most associated with the dream of consumer 3D printing. For a while, it seemed like MakerBot might become the Apple II of 3D printers. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about trying to turn a hacker tool into a mass-market appliance too quickly. The machines got slicker, the company moved away from its open-source roots, and the consumer revolution failed to arrive on schedule. By 2016, even mainstream coverage was asking what happened to the 3D printing revolution that had been promised.

But failure is too simple a word. The Kickstarter-era machines did not fail in the way that, say, a fad diet fails. They moved the ball down the field. They trained a generation of users. They revealed what mattered: rigid frames, better motion systems, predictable extrusion, heated beds that stayed flat, slicers that didn’t require a sacrificial offering, and firmware that could recover from ordinary user behavior. They also created demand. People who bought a Printrbot or a Solidoodle might have cursed it, modified it, and eventually replaced it, but they knew what they wanted next.

And what they wanted next was cheaper and better. That leads to the next wave: the low-cost commodity printers. The Monoprice Select Mini was one of the machines that made people do a double-take (see the video below). It was small, inexpensive, and not especially glamorous, but it was also a complete 3D printer at a price (around $200) that, up to that point, had seemed impossible. The Anet A8 represented another branch of the same tree: a very cheap kit printer, descended in spirit from RepRap machines, that put a large-ish build volume within reach of people willing to accept risk, tinkering, and sometimes questionable electrical design.

The End?

These machines were not the end state either. The cheap printers democratized access, but many still required an operator rather than a mere owner. The Anet A8 in particular became infamous not just for its low price but for the upgrades people considered mandatory: better firmware settings, frame braces, MOSFET boards, power supply caution, and general fire-safety paranoia. Still, it mattered. A rough kit at $150 or $200 changes a market. It lets students, hackers, model builders, repair-minded homeowners, and the merely curious take a chance. My A8 is unrecognizable today with an aluminum frame and a 32-bit controller board, a proper 24V power supply, a custom hot end mount, and other enhancements.

You can see my original A8 (and a peek at the Printrbot in the background) in the video below.

A few years later, it looked like this video.

The real consumer-ready printers came later, after years of iteration. Auto bed leveling became common. Filament paths improved. Machines got stiffer. Slicers became far better. PEI spring steel sheets replaced a lot of glass-and-hairspray rituals. Direct drive and better Bowden setups reduced extrusion drama. Enclosed CoreXY machines brought speed without quite so much ringing and finagling. Companies learned that the printer had to be a system: hardware, firmware, slicer profiles, materials, documentation, and support.

Right, Yet Wrong

Looking back, the funny thing is that the early hype was both wrong and right. Desktop 3D printers did not become like inkjet printers, and they certainly did not become like microwave ovens. Most people do not need to manufacture a plastic bracket before breakfast. Most people do not want to think about layer adhesion, nozzle wear, or whether that weird clicking noise is the extruder eating the filament.

I lived through the time when the hacker dream was that every home would have a computer. Most of us didn’t see what would really happen. Every person has at least one computer; every home has dozens. But we were on the right track; most of us just didn’t see what would drive it. But I never really thought 3D printers would become as common as personal computers.

I did think it might become like a drill press. Not everyone has a drill press. In fact, most people probably do not. But no one is amazed to learn that you have one. It is a normal thing for a certain kind of person to own. If you fix things, build things, make brackets, or restore equipment, a drill press is not exotic. It is just one of the tools that may live in the shop.

That is where 3D printing has largely landed. Not universal, but ordinary. A decade ago, saying you had a 3D printer was a conversation starter. People wanted to see it move. They wanted to know if you could print a wrench, a phone case, a toy, or, inevitably, another printer. Today, in technical circles, saying you have a 3D printer is more like saying you have a bench vise. The interesting question is not whether you have one, but what you use it for.

That normalization is the real legacy of the awkward Kickstarter era. Those machines were crude, but they were legible. They let us see the process. They forced us to learn what mattered. They converted 3D printing from an industrial service into a shop skill. A Printrbot with zip-tied LM8UU bearings and bits of filament jammed in as shims was not a consumer appliance. It was a bridge.

And like many bridges, it was not the destination. It was the thing that got us there. Of course, things continue to move. Maybe one day we will look back on the current generation of printers and wonder how we ever used them. But, like the personal computer, we probably can’t imagine what is going to drive the adoption of those new machines.