Gen Z Reinvents Phone Greetings in the Age of Caller ID

Generation Z has largely abandoned the traditional 'Hello?' phone greeting, a change driven by the ubiquity of caller ID technology. Since incoming calls now almost always display the caller's identity, younger users see little reason to answer with uncertainty. In response, many Gen Z users have developed personalized or unconventional opening phrases when picking up calls. Some go further by skipping a formal greeting entirely, diving straight into conversation. This shift reflects a broader generational change in communication habits shaped by smartphones and digital culture.

Marvel Releases Official 42-Hour Watch List Ahead of Avengers: Doomsday

Marvel Studios has released an official list of films fans should watch before the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. The curated catch-up guide totals approximately 42 hours of content. The list was released ahead of the film's scheduled December release. The move is intended to help audiences get up to speed with the storylines and characters leading into the new installment.

Why AI-Generated Nginx Configs Still Need Manual Verification Before Going Live

A developer used a coding assistant to draft an Nginx configuration for a Laravel app hosted on an Ubuntu VPS, finding the output usable but not production-ready. The AI had no knowledge of the server's actual PHP version, PHP-FPM socket path, directory structure, or DNS setup, meaning its assumptions could silently break the site. Key checks included verifying the correct document root points to Laravel's public directory, confirming the exact PHP-FPM socket file present on the machine, and ensuring the configured domain names match live DNS records. The developer also highlighted that leaving Nginx's default site enabled can cause incoming requests to bypass the app's config entirely, masking real errors. The broader takeaway is that AI-generated infrastructure configs can be a useful starting point, but every assumption they make must be validated against the actual server environment before deployment.

Jumia Kenya Data Analysis Reveals Discounts Alone Do Not Drive Customer Engagement

A data analyst built an interactive Excel dashboard using a scraped dataset of 112 products from Jumia Kenya, covering prices, discounts, ratings, and review counts. Before analysis could begin, significant data cleaning was required, including converting price strings to numbers, extracting numeric ratings from messy text fields, and handling invalid negative review counts. A key decision was to label the 49% of products with no reviews or ratings explicitly rather than discarding them, as their absence was itself a major finding. The completed dashboard, featuring pivot tables, slicers, and KPI cards, revealed near-zero correlations between discount levels and customer engagement. The analysis concluded that heavy discounting is not a substitute for product quality or visibility, with 90% of deeply discounted products showing low or no customer engagement.

badblocks crashes instantly on large drives: how the -b 4096 flag fixes it

The badblocks disk-testing tool fails immediately on drives larger than roughly 4.4 TB because it stores block counts in a 32-bit integer, which overflows when using its default 1 KiB block size. Adding the flag -b 4096 increases the block size to 4 KiB, reducing the block count to fit within the 32-bit limit and extending coverage up to approximately 17.6 TB. The issue is particularly deceptive when badblocks is run in the background via nohup, as the instant failure is logged silently and the drive is never actually tested. Sysadmins at Finnish storage provider Pulsed Media discovered the problem during a batch burn-in of refurbished drives, where a silent failure could mean a faulty disk reaching customers undetected. The recommended fix is to use -b 4096 as a default for all large drives and to verify the process is still running a few seconds after launch.

Ten Vue.js Performance Pitfalls That Emerge Only Under Enterprise-Scale Load

A technical analysis identifies ten common Vue.js performance mistakes that remain harmless in small apps but become costly as data, components, and user interactions scale up. Key issues include rendering all DOM nodes for large datasets instead of virtualizing visible rows, and making massive API payloads deeply reactive, which burdens Vue's proxy-based tracking system. Other problematic patterns include overly broad watchers, monolithic components, unstable list keys, and heavy computed properties that hide expensive operations. Additional pitfalls involve storing temporary UI state in global stores, eagerly loading all routes and assets, over-shipping data in SSR state, and failing to clean up listeners, timers, and subscriptions. The article recommends prioritizing fixes based on visible user impact, starting with DOM virtualization and reactive data scoping before addressing loading and cleanup issues.

As a third LJP (RV) legislator lands in row, Chirag says ‘would want probe’

A 15-Minute Daily Log Habit Helps Developers Stick With Side Projects

A developer shares how a simple end-of-session logging habit helped prevent side projects from being abandoned. The method involves writing just three lines in a plain markdown file after each coding session: what was completed, the next single step, and any blockers. No special tools or apps are required — only a basic text file. The 'Next' entry eliminates the blank-slate problem when reopening a project, while the 'Blocked' entry converts vague anxiety into a concrete, searchable question. Over time, the log also serves as a changelog and a source of motivation.

10 days in the dark, Nepal tunnel survivor lives

Chinese National Pulled Alive from Nepal Tunnel 10 Days After Deadly Floods

A Chinese national was rescued alive from a collapsed tunnel in Nepal, ten days after being trapped. The disaster was triggered by floods on August 26, believed to have been caused by a glacier collapse. The floods resulted in the deaths of at least 1,300 people across the region. More than 5,000 individuals remain missing in the aftermath of the catastrophe.

Nepal floods: Chinese national rescued alive from hydropower tunnel on Day 10

GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, Gemini 3.8 Flash: How the Three Models Compare

Three major AI models — OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.1, and Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash — launched within the same week in September 2026. On vendor benchmarks, Astra led in areas like math, abstract reasoning, and computer-use tasks, while independent indices from Artificial Analysis ranked Fable 5.1 slightly ahead in both overall capability and coding. All three models share a 1-million-token context window, but pricing diverges sharply: Astra and Fable 5.1 are priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, whereas Gemini 3.8 Flash is available at a promotional rate of $0.75 and $3.75 respectively. At a moderate workload of 1,000 daily requests, that gap translates to roughly $80 per day for the premium models versus about $6 for Flash. Analysts suggest the three models serve distinct use cases — Astra for research and science tasks, Fable 5.1 for complex agentic coding, and Gemini Flash for high-volume, cost-sensitive applications.

Developer Builds Lightweight Website Tech-Stack Detector Using Plain HTTP Requests

A developer has released an open-source tool that identifies a website's technology stack — including CMS, ecommerce platform, JS frameworks, CDN, and analytics — using a single plain HTTP fetch, with no headless browser required. The tool, built on Crawlee's CheerioCrawler, inspects response headers, script sources, and HTML meta tags against a hand-written signature table covering around 30 technologies across seven categories. It is designed to return empty results rather than incorrect guesses when no signature matches, prioritising accuracy over coverage. The project draws conceptual inspiration from Wappalyzer but intentionally stays smaller and more precise, with each new technology requiring just one additional function. The tool is available on GitHub and also runs as a hosted Apify actor requiring no local setup.

FIR against Subhash Chandra in ₹1,322 cr fraud case

How to Build AI-Controlled Automation Systems Using n8n and MCP

Combining n8n's deterministic workflow automation with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows AI assistants to discover and trigger approved business processes in a structured, controlled way. The key principle is limiting AI agency to predefined, validated actions rather than granting open-ended access to automation systems. Practical use cases range from read-only workflow catalogs and support ticket triage to incident response coordination and document intake pipelines. A recommended architecture places an MCP server as a policy-enforcing gateway between the AI client and n8n workflows, ensuring business-critical side effects remain within well-defined processes. Developers are advised to start with low-risk, read-only tools before gradually introducing controlled execution and operational coordination capabilities.

'A complaint & a warning': Supporters of Swatantra Bhardwaj stage protest in Delhi

Why Your Job Title May Matter Less Than the Problems You Solve

A technology professional reflects on how their early career role quietly disappeared over several years — not through layoffs, but through gradual obsolescence as tools and systems evolved. They note that competence can mask decline, since shrinking domains still reward skilled workers until the work simply vanishes. The author observes that procedural, repeatable tasks are the first to be automated or eliminated, while harder-to-quantify skills — like judgment and stakeholder awareness — tend to endure. Rather than anchoring identity to a job title, they now focus on the underlying problems they are equipped to solve. Their key takeaway is that professionals who navigate these transitions successfully are typically those who engage with emerging technologies early, before it becomes necessary.

Delhi Court Grants Police One-Day Custody of Influencer Swatantra Bhardwaj

Social media influencer Swatantra Bhardwaj has been arrested by Delhi Police following an alleged assault incident. He was apprehended in Uttar Pradesh and brought to Delhi in connection with the case. Bhardwaj is accused of assaulting the father of a minor activist, leading to a fresh FIR being registered against him under the POCSO Act. A Delhi court subsequently remanded him to one day of police custody. Security was heightened outside the police station as protests broke out in the area.

Seven Laravel Patterns to Build Reliable, Auditable AI Agents in Production

A technical guide published on DEV Community outlines seven design patterns for building production-grade AI agents using the Laravel PHP framework. The patterns address common failure points such as silent retries, untracked state mutations, and budget overruns that make AI agents unpredictable in real-world deployments. Key recommendations include persisting every agent run as a database-backed record, offloading execution to queues outside the HTTP request cycle, and enforcing strict contracts and risk levels on every tool the agent can call. Additional patterns cover validating model output before acting on it, managing context with token budgets and data redaction, and requiring human approval before destructive or costly actions are taken. The guide also emphasizes observability and evaluation as prerequisites before any prompt or model changes are shipped to production.

Texas Teen Builds 750 Birdhouses to Fight Habitat Loss and Inspire Conservation

Texas teenager Aamir Tinwala launched a bird conservation initiative after adopting a pet cockatiel, which sparked his interest in protecting local wildlife. His project centers on building birdhouses to address habitat loss faced by birds in the region. Tinwala has personally constructed more than 750 shelters, while also motivating community members to participate in habitat stewardship. The initiative has helped raise awareness about local biodiversity and demonstrates how individual action can drive meaningful environmental change.