ChatGPT Surpasses 900 Million Weekly Users as OpenAI Closes $110B Investment Round

OpenAI announced in late February 2026 that ChatGPT has surpassed 900 million weekly active users, making it one of the most widely used AI products globally. The company also reported over 50 million consumer subscribers, more than 9 million paying business users, and 1.6 million weekly users of its coding tool Codex. Alongside the user metrics, OpenAI disclosed a $110 billion investment round backed by partners including Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank to expand computing infrastructure and meet growing demand. OpenAI described ChatGPT as the primary entry point through which people first engage with AI, signaling its shift from a niche tool to a mainstream product. The figures suggest conversational AI has reached a scale where many employees, customers, and business stakeholders already have direct hands-on experience with it.

Naomi Campbell's 2009 McQueen look could sell for $1 million at auction

Turning Point USA Plans Major Midterm Spending Push in Key Swing States

Conservative organization Turning Point USA is preparing to invest tens of millions of dollars ahead of the upcoming midterm elections, according to sources familiar with the plans. The group intends to allocate funds toward advertising campaigns and voter turnout efforts. The spending strategy is reported to be concentrated in three battleground states: New Hampshire, Arizona, and Nevada. The initiative comes roughly a year after the death of Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk.

Debian 13 on Four Machines Reveals Sharp Gaps Between Bare Metal and Cloud Images

A hands-on comparison run on 2025-09-09 tested the same Debian 13 (Trixie) operating system across four machines — one Lenovo laptop and cloud instances on AWS, GCE, and Azure. The bare-metal laptop carried 1,923 installed packages, while the three cloud images ranged from just 328 to 350, reflecting fundamentally different assumptions about user needs. All four machines boot from NVMe storage, yet only two ship tools capable of reading NVMe health logs, and both AWS and Azure omit nvme-cli entirely. GCE stood out as the most complete cloud image, shipping both dmidecode and nvme-cli, and also auto-correcting a misaligned GPT header in the same boot it detected the warning — a fix AWS did not apply. Azure additionally reported a Retbleed CPU vulnerability that the other two cloud images did not flag, highlighting how platform-level choices, not just the shared kernel, drive meaningful differences in security visibility and disk management.

Debian 13 on Four Machines Reveals Sharp Gaps Between Bare Metal and Cloud Images

A hands-on comparison conducted on 2025-09-09 tested the same Debian 13 (Trixie) operating system across four machines — one Lenovo laptop and cloud instances on AWS, GCE, and Azure. The bare-metal laptop carried 1,923 installed packages, while the three cloud images ranged from just 328 to 350, reflecting fundamentally different assumptions about user needs. All four machines boot from NVMe storage, yet only two ship tools capable of reading NVMe health logs, and all three cloud images include zero firmware packages. Among the cloud providers, GCE stood out as the most complete, shipping both dmidecode and nvme-cli, while Azure flagged a Retbleed CPU vulnerability that AWS and GCE did not report. A GPT header mismatch warning appeared on both AWS and GCE, but GCE automatically corrected it during the same boot — highlighting how identical kernels and messages can produce opposite outcomes depending on the platform.

Apple CEO John Ternus Defends iPhone's Future in First Keynote Address

John Ternus has made his debut as Apple's new CEO, delivering his first keynote address to the public. In his opening remarks, Ternus firmly positioned the iPhone as a continued cornerstone of Apple's product strategy. His stance echoes an approach previously championed by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs roughly 25 years ago. The move signals that Apple's leadership transition will not bring a dramatic shift away from its flagship smartphone business.

£8.28M Grade II-Listed Cotswolds Manor Severely Damaged by Electrical Fire

A historic 17th-century mansion in the Cotswolds has been extensively damaged following a major electrical fire. Barton House, a Grade II-listed property located near Guiting Power, was valued at £8.28 million at the time of its sale. The manor had only recently changed hands, having been purchased by a private buyer in January 2025. Firefighters battled the blaze for nearly 12 hours before bringing it under control. The new owners described themselves as being in a state of shock following the devastating incident.

Four Threat Groups Exploited Same Chrome and Windows Zero-Day Kit

Four separate hacking groups were found using an identical exploit kit targeting vulnerabilities in Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows. The discovery highlights a concerning trend where multiple threat actors gain access to the same exploitation tools, amplifying the potential damage. Security researchers identified a 'patch gap' — the window between a vulnerability being exploited and a fix being deployed — as a key contributing factor. The accelerating pace of AI-assisted vulnerability discovery is also believed to have played a role in the wider spread of these exploits. The findings underscore growing risks as advanced hacking tools become more accessible to a broader range of malicious actors.

Emergency Slide Accidentally Deploys on Trump's Qatar-Gifted Air Force One

An emergency evacuation slide deployed unexpectedly aboard the Qatari-gifted aircraft designated as Air Force One for President Trump. The incident has renewed scrutiny over the safety and reliability of the plane. Safety concerns surrounding the aircraft have been raised repeatedly in recent months. The issue gained further attention after Trump reportedly switched to a different plane during a visit to Turkey due to undisclosed security concerns. The series of incidents has intensified questions about the airworthiness of the gifted jet.

Developer Launches ICU Studio, a Lightweight Desktop IDE for ICU Messages

A front-end developer has released ICU Studio, a standalone desktop application designed to simplify the creation and editing of ICU messages used in software internationalization. The developer built the tool after finding that existing editors like VS Code lacked proper syntax highlighting and structural recognition for ICU message formats. ICU Studio was built using React and Tauri, allowing it to launch in under two seconds while consuming minimal memory at idle. Currently at MVP stage, the app supports message parsing, syntax highlighting, formatting for improved readability, and multiple copy formats suited for both JSON files and component usage. The release addresses a gap in tooling for the ICU internationalization standard, which is widely used in multilingual web development.

Pixy Tool Records Visual Context So Coding Agents Implement UI Changes Accurately

A new developer tool called Pixy aims to reduce miscommunication between developers and AI coding agents during visual UI edits. When a developer makes a change on a live site, Pixy automatically captures the visual context — including the target element, CSS property, old and new values, viewport width, and scope of the change. This eliminates the need for developers to manually re-describe what they already did in a text prompt, which often leads to agent misinterpretation. The coding agent then uses this recorded context alongside the repository to determine the correct implementation, whether in Tailwind, a CSS module, or another stylesheet. The tool is designed for visual frontend work where the relevant context exists at the moment of change but is typically lost when converted to natural language.

Delhi CSE Student Vinayak Joins DEV to Document Real-World ML Debugging Lessons

Vinayak Garg, a computer science undergraduate from Delhi, has joined the DEV Community platform to write about his hands-on experience building and deploying machine learning projects. His completed work includes a network intrusion detection system with an F1 score of 0.991, a customer churn model, and a student performance predictor. During a two-month internship, he also developed a LangGraph-based WhatsApp campaign bot and a multi-tenant RAG chatbot using Qdrant and Groq. Vinayak says his writing will focus on the debugging and deployment challenges that standard tutorials typically leave out, such as Docker caching issues and silent exceptions in LangGraph nodes. He plans to cover topics including ML model deployment to AWS EC2 with GitHub Actions, sharing the specific mistakes he encountered along the way.

How One Developer Let an AI Publish 69 Articles Autonomously — With a Safety Framework

Every Thursday at 9am, an automated Azure pipeline pulls news sources, clusters stories, removes duplicates, rewrites articles in four editorial voices, generates images, and publishes to a live website — all without human oversight. The developer behind the system was making coffee when the first published articles went live, with a reader being the first human to see them. The pipeline also self-evaluates its output, scoring articles for groundedness, structure, and banned phrases, completing the entire run for $2.26. The developer explains this level of autonomy was not granted upfront but earned through a four-rung trust ladder — Shadow, Advisory, Assisted, and Autonomous — where each stage requires measured evidence before promotion. Critically, the framework mandates that demotion is always one config change away, because trust is treated as a continuously measured variable, not a one-time milestone.

How Sophie Cunningham and Caitlin Clark Forged a Strong WNBA Friendship

Sophie Cunningham and Caitlin Clark first connected during the 2024 WNBA All-Star Game, with their friendship deepening after they became teammates on the Indiana Fever. The two players share a relationship built on humor and mutual support. On the court, Cunningham has taken on a protective role for Clark, often stepping up in her defense. Their bond also extends well beyond basketball, reflecting a genuine off-court connection.

Apple explains how new Siri ambient listening features keep audio data private

At its Wednesday iPhone Duo launch event, Apple announced several new Siri Audio Intelligence features, including Siri Recap, Live Rewind, Sound Recognition, and Music Recognition. To address privacy concerns around ambient listening, Apple published a document detailing how user audio is handled. According to the document, raw audio from these features is processed within dedicated hardware and is never saved, nor accessible to the operating system, apps, or Apple itself. The privacy protections rely on the Secure Exclave within the S11 chip, which powers the new Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4.

New DEV Community Member Seeks Beginner-Friendly Accounts to Follow

A newcomer to the DEV Community platform has reached out asking fellow members for recommendations on who to follow. The user describes themselves as a complete beginner, finding most articles they have encountered so far too technically advanced for their current skill level. They are looking for creators or contributors whose content is more accessible to those just starting out in tech. The post invites community members to drop suggestions in the comments to help guide their learning journey.

Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 bring health upgrades at same starting price

Apple unveiled the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 at its 'Surprise and Shine' event. Both models introduce notable improvements to health sensors and tracking capabilities, along with support for audio transcriptions and summaries. The Series 12 also gains a new ceramic case option, while performance upgrades are driven by the new S11 processor. The new processor enables Apple Intelligence features across both models. Despite the added functionality, pricing remains unchanged, with the Series 12 starting at $399 and the Ultra 4 at $799.

Developer builds authenticated backend proxy to serve storage files without frontend changes

A software engineer migrated his website's static files from a local wwwroot folder to an external open-source storage service that required authentication even for GET requests. To avoid exposing authorization tokens to the browser or rewriting the frontend, he built a backend middleware that intercepts image and document requests and proxies them server-to-server using a securely stored token. The solution keeps URLs identical for end users while the backend fetches file bytes from the external storage and returns them with the correct content type. As a result, the project repository became significantly lighter, deployments faster, and the auth token never reaches the client side. Upload endpoints still write locally for now, with full decoupling from wwwroot planned as the next development phase.

How to Safely Automate AWS EBS Snapshot Cleanup Using Cloud Custodian

Large-scale AWS environments often accumulate thousands of EBS snapshots, making automated cleanup essential to control storage costs. Cloud Custodian offers a three-stage workflow: marking eligible snapshots, copying them as a safety net before deletion, and aging off the safety copies after a retention window. While the pipeline appears straightforward, developers face key pitfalls such as Lambda's 15-minute execution timeout, which can interrupt snapshot copy operations mid-batch, particularly for large or cross-region volumes. Additional risks include wasted polling costs when Lambda idles during copy waits, and misalignment between the three pipeline stages if timing is not carefully managed. Running dry-run tests with c7n-org before executing live policies is recommended to validate behavior across accounts and avoid unintended deletions.

Europe may finally have found a space entrepreneur who is meeting the moment

"We will not be relevant without a massive rocket at a massive cadence."