🤖 They shrunk an AI model in half and it got smarter

Multiverse Computing took OpenAI's GPT-OSS — 120 billion parameters — cut it to 60 billion, compressed memory to 4-bit, and the smaller version _outperformed_ the original on 7 of 9 benchmarks.

The trick: normally you teach the shrunken model using a halfway copy, which is already worse than the original. Their method, Quantization-Aware Healing, just points the small model at the full uncompressed original instead. That swap apparently makes all the difference.

The result uses a quarter of the memory — gap between a data center and a decent desktop. The model, Hypernova-60B, is free on Hugging Face, though the compression tool itself stays proprietary. Decrypt has more.

📌 Daily Recap · Aug 27

🚀 SpaceX's $100B Louisiana Starbase is alarmingly ambitious
🎮 Witcher 3 Remastered drops September 29, free for owners
🧙 CDPR gave Witcher 3 a full combat and skill overhaul
🖥️ Apple finally fixed its confusing Mac Studio chip situation
🤖 Halving an AI's size somehow made it smarter

Tag whoever spent today in meetings — they clearly needed this more than a fourth coffee

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $79,705 📈 +1.2% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,496 📈 +0.2% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 73 — Greed

🧠 The price of the game

CTE — a degenerative brain disease from repeated head impacts, diagnosable only after death — has always been hard to measure for the obvious reason: the subjects aren't around to ask.

A new study in the British Medical Journal tracked 878 former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021. Of the 235 who donated their brains, 215 tested positive for CTE. The upper-bound estimate across all deaths: 97.7%.

The Harvard-led team added an inconvenient detail: most of those hits happened in high school and college. The NFL just collected the damage — and already paid $1 billion to settle claims from over 5,000 former players in 2016.

The sport knew. The sport paid. The sport continued.

BBC Sport

🥊 Bella Mir upset by Apodaca on Contender Series

Bella Mir, daughter of former UFC heavyweight champion Frank Mir, entered Dana White's Contender Series as a heavy favourite. Alex Apodaca won by unanimous decision, all three judges scoring it 29–28.

Dana White addressed the odds after the fight.

"This sport's too crazy to be that big of an underdog"

Apodaca, 32, was awarded a UFC contract. Mir, 23, suffered the first loss of her professional MMA career in five fights.

Also on the card, Scotland's Sean Clancy Jr stopped American Gary Balletto in round two with unanswered ground strikes and earned a UFC contract of his own. Clancy, 23, is the Cage Warriors welterweight champion; his record moves to 9–0.

BBC Sport has the full report.

💸 OnlyFans by the numbers

Over ten years, the platform has paid creators more than $30 billion — $6.3 billion in the last fiscal year alone. The count of million-dollar earners now exceeds 5,000: a recognisable economic tier, not a handful of outliers.

Fenix International, the parent company, runs on 47 employees against $1.55 billion in revenue and 437 million registered accounts — a lean intermediary taking its 20% cut.

Ownership shifted in early 2026 after founder Leonid Radvinsky died at 43; his widow now controls Fenix, and a 16% stake sold to Architect Capital values the business at $3.15 billion. A string of Hollywood names joining the platform suggests the reputational barrier has quietly come down. According to Variety, OnlyFans has paid over £600 million in UK corporate taxes to date — a different standing with regulators than the platform had at launch.

🔥 Crypto just swung from panic to euphoria faster than the market could blink

The Crypto Fear & Greed Index hit 81 on Sunday — "extreme greed" for the first time since late 2024. A month ago it sat at 36 (fear), a week ago 41 (neutral). That's +45 points in 30 days: the fastest swing between extremes in Coinmarketcap's history, and the only move ever from extreme fear straight to extreme greed.

The trigger was concrete: the U.S. Treasury doubled its long-bond buybacks from $2B to $4B per operation. The dollar softened, Bitcoin jumped ~24% in a week, and over $4B in shorts got liquidated. Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs together pulled in roughly $2.3B.

In February, traders were writing obituaries. In July, they're counting profits. The market, as always, didn't send a calendar invite.

Decrypt

🍎 Apple sets September 9 for its next launch event

The event takes place at Apple Park in Cupertino, California, at 10 a.m. PT, under the tagline "Surprise and Shine."

It will be the first Apple event led by incoming CEO John Ternus, who takes over from Tim Cook on September 1.

The company is expected to unveil a long-rumored foldable iPhone, along with the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. The standard iPhone 18 is reportedly pushed to next year. Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra, and new smart home hardware are also on the expected lineup.

Software announcements — including release dates for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate — may follow.

The Verge reported the event date.

TechCrunch

📌 Daily Recap · Aug 28

🧠 NFL deaths reveal CTE's brutal hidden toll
🥊 Bella Mir loses to underdog Apodaca on Contender Series
💸 OnlyFans quietly minted 5,000 millionaires in a decade
🔥 Crypto fear flipped to extreme greed in 30 days
🍎 Apple's September 9 event is Ternus's first big moment

Someone in your life had a long day and missed all of this — you know what to do.

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $77,478 📉 -2.8% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,435 📉 -2.4% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 68 — Greed

💤 The Long Sleep

Six Bitcoin wallets dormant since 2011–2014 moved a combined $40.15 million in ten days, per Galaxy Research.

Coins bought at $14 — or as little as $5 — logged gains from +461,981% to +1,535,911%. The best of the batch: 40 BTC from May 2012, sent straight to German custody bank Boerse Stuttgart Digital.

Two wallets carry "Salomon Client Dusted" tags, linking them to the Noah Doe case — a New York lawsuit trying to have 39,069 dormant addresses declared abandoned property. The other four fit no theory. They just moved.

Somewhere there's a hard drive, a file of old keys, and eleven years of patience. Turns out patience compounds.

Decrypt

💸 $9.6 billion for the Seahawks

The NFL has approved the sale of the Seattle Seahawks — reigning Super Bowl champions — for $9.612 billion. A record for American football, and the second-largest franchise sale in North American sports history.

The team belonged to the estate of Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder who bought the club in 1997 and died in 2018. His instructions: sell and donate the proceeds to charity. The buyer is venture billionaire Vinod Khosla, who had to give up his minority stake in the 49ers to close the deal.

Only the Lakers fetched more — $10bn earlier in 2025, per BBC Sport. And they're already changing hands again.

🎬 Disney+ caught the Gallagher reunion on camera

The moment Liam and Noel Gallagher ended 15 years of silence was filmed — and it's in the upcoming documentary *Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger*. Angela Jain, Disney+ EMEA head of content, confirmed it at the Edinburgh TV Festival. No release date yet.

Variety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9sIYLtgc_s

💸 Abu Dhabi royals back World Liberty's trust bank

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan's group is behind StringZ Holding RSC, which holds 49% of WLTC Holdings — the company behind World Liberty Financial's proposed US trust bank. A Trump family-affiliated entity owns another 38%, the Wall Street Journal reports. The OCC granted preliminary conditional approval on Aug. 14; final sign-off is still pending.

Cointelegraph

⚡ Dos Santos just broke the 400m hurdles world record

So this actually happened — Alison dos Santos ran 45.80 seconds in Zurich tonight at the Diamond League meeting, and that's a new world record.

Karsten Warholm's mark of 45.94 had been standing since 2021, and honestly nobody was really expecting it to go tonight. Warholm was right there in the race, finished second, just had to watch dos Santos come off the last hurdle and pull away.

The Brazilian is 26, unbeaten all season, but his personal best before tonight was 46.29 — set four years ago. He knocked nearly half a second off that in one run, which is a lot for this event.

BBC Sport says the evening isn't over either — there are potential 800m world records on the table and Mondo Duplantis might be pushed in the pole vault.

📌 Daily Recap · Aug 29

💤 Dormant Bitcoin wallets wake up with million-dollar gains
🏈 Seahawks sell for a record-shattering $9.6 billion
🎬 Disney+ filmed the Gallagher brothers ending their feud
💸 Abu Dhabi royals quietly back Trump's crypto trust bank
⚡ Dos Santos smashes the 400m hurdles world record in Zurich

Whoever had their phone on silent all day — this is their catch-up. Pass it along.

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $78,252 📈 +1.0% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,459 📈 +1.0% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 69 — Greed

💸 The GTA 6 leaks were a crypto scheme — and a profitable one

An account called Cyberleek spent days releasing GTA 6 footage under the cover of protesting physical media's decline. Every post pointed to a site where fans voted on future leaks using Cyberleek's own token.

Crypto analyst Vice Cit had called it a money scheme from the start — and overnight it concluded. Fee revenues moved into multiple wallets and were withdrawn. Total: ~$270,000, against a $29,000 setup cost. Multiple withdrawal routes suggest a group rather than one person. Identifying anyone now depends on Rockstar's lawyers pressuring exchanges and platforms to hand over data.

The leaks are likely done: the token was falling, interest cooling, and Rockstar's official gameplay hits Netflix today. Full breakdown via IGN.

💿 Xbox figured out how to make discs and digital get along

While Sony announced the end of disc-based PS5 games after January 2028 and caused a minor uproar, Microsoft went the other direction. Starting August 31, Xbox Insiders test a long-wanted feature: insert a disc into an Xbox One or Series X, claim a permanent digital copy, leave the disc in a drawer.

The disc stays bonded to your account — lend it and the license travels with it, so you can't keep both. Trading in still works. "Thousands" of Xbox One and Series X titles supported at launch; Xbox 360 stays out for now, as The Verge first reported this summer.

The quiet logic: Project Helix, the next Xbox, likely ships without a disc drive. A disc that works once as an activation key — physical media's most dignified exit yet.

Engadget

🎬 Netflix's "Wonka's The Golden Ticket" — a nine-episode reality competition set inside a replica chocolate factory — premieres September 23. The show's narrator is an AI recreation of Gene Wilder's voice, built by ElevenLabs in collaboration with his estate.

Variety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGVuOT6h11c