TECH NEWS
In Brief 12:01 PM PDT · August 20, 2026 Castelion, a missile startup founded by former SpaceX executives, has raised a $1 billion Series C at a $13 billion valuation. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, Carlyle, and JP Morgan Chase. Founded in 2022, Castelion set out to manufacture
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Silicon Valley is trying to make sense of the growing backlash against artificial intelligence, but so far, it’s not going that well. The inconvenient truth is that a significant portion of the world is not optimistic about the technology they’re building. But recent attempts to diagnose the root
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The Meta CEO’s real estate portfolio now includes a 440-acre estate in Ireland. by Jay Peters Aug 20, 2026, 6:50 PM UTC Jay Peters is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. Meta CEO Mark
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The HP OmniBook X Flip 16 gives you considerably more flexibility than a conventional laptop. Its 16-inch touchscreen can be folded all the way back for tablet use or positioned at different angles for presentations, streaming and creative work. In its 60th Anniversary Sale, the HP OmniBook X Flip 16
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* Unisoc system-on-chip (SoC) devices – usually budget smartphones – are vulnerable to a video call-based exploit * Any smartphone can be used to place the call, with malicious code sent in call setup messages * Despite attempts, Unisoc did not respond to the disclosure Security researchers have demonstrated a weakness in several Unisoc SoC-based
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Ammonia is one of the most important chemicals produced in the world, ranking second only to sulfuric acid in the total volume produced each year. It is used mostly to make fertilizer, which is essential to feeding the world’s population. Yet its production accounts for up to 2 percent
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Adding an AI agent to Slack sounds appealing to many enterprises — but, as VentureBeat has experienced ourselves first hand — the reality is often far more complex and clunkier than it first seems. Now NanoCo., the company behind the hit open source, enterprise-friendly, autonomous AI agent harness NanoClaw (a more sandboxed,
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TL;DR Taco Bell has expanded voice AI to 890+ restaurants across 38 states. But the more telling data comes from independent mystery-shopper testing: Bojangles (powered by Hi Auto) recorded a 3% employee intervention rate versus 30% at Taco Bell and 33% at Wendy’s. Hi Auto processes 100M+ orders
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Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have bought Strancally Castle and its 440-acre estate in County Waterford as an Irish base. He is the third tech billionaire to buy a large Irish country estate since 2021, after Stripe’s John Collison and James Dyson. Mark Zuckerberg has bought a castle in
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Sponsor Posts Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens. Most carriers track everything. Cape doesn't. — Unlimited talk, text &
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Sponsor Posts Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens. Most carriers track everything. Cape doesn't. — Unlimited talk, text &
TECH NEWS
When to watch the BMW Championship 2026 * The tournament runs from Thursday, Aug. 20, to Sunday, Aug. 23. Where to watch * The BMW Championship 2026 will stream in the US on Paramount Plus and ESPN Select. The battle to reach the top 30 of the FedEx Cup standings reaches its
