LinkedIn adds a button to report AI-generated ‘slop’

LinkedIn is taking aim at the “AI slop” — low-quality, artificially generated content — filling its feed. On Thursday, the company announced that it’s adding a new feature to let users click a “seems like AI slop” button when someone’s post appears to have been written with AI.

Spotify launches ‘User Notes’ to let users add memories to songs

10:41 AM PDT · July 30, 2026

Spotify is giving users a new way to personalize their playlists with “User Notes,” a feature that lets them add their own notes to individual tracks, the company announced on Thursday.

Global smartphone sales fall by six percent amid memory cost crisis - Engadget

Despite the slump, Apple and Samsung have both seen their market share go up.

DavideAngelini/Shutterstock

A new report from the technology analyst group Omdia claims that global smartphone sales are down six percent year on year, falling to 272 million units in 2Q26. An already stagnating market is now facing up to the reality of the ongoing memory crisis and rising component costs, with supply chain disruption set to continue for at least the remainder of 2026 (and likely a lot longer).

LinkedIn is testing a 'seems like AI slop' reporting tool - Engadget

The company is also removing some of its own AI-writing features.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is once again trying to get a handle on the vast amounts of AI slop on the platform. To do that, the company is testing a new reporting tool that let users flag potential slop and removing the "rewrite with AI" button it once promoted on every post.

Expensive phone cases: When and why it's worth paying more - Engadget

Do you really need to shell out big bucks for a rugged phone case?

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The spacecraft NASA sent to rescue the falling Swift observatory is in trouble - Engadget

The LINK probe is now spinning helplessly in orbit.

Katalyst Space

In early July, NASA launched a spacecraft designed to rescue the Swift observatory, which is currently decaying at a faster rate than normal, in hopes that it could still collect data for scientists over the coming years. But now that spacecraft itself is in trouble, and the fate of the mission remains unclear. In an update on the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory blog, NASA has revealed that the spacecraft called LINK experienced attitude control issues last weekend, meaning it had problems managing its orientation in space. That caused the spacecraft to spin, which in turn resulted to sporadic communications.

Samsung's mobile division posts first-ever loss due to soaring memory prices - Engadget

The company's chip division absolutely smashed it, though.

Chung Sung-jun/Getty Images

How can one of the world's largest smartphone companies lose money by selling more smartphones than ever? I think we all know the answer: soaring memory prices caused by the AI boom. Samsung just announced that despite "solid" smartphone sales and growing revenue, its DX division (which includes mobile) posted its first-ever loss of 800 billion won ($544 million) in the company's second fiscal quarter.

Claude Opus 5 became downright ruthless when tasked with running a vending machine

For a year now, the AI safety testing firm Andon Labs has given frontier models various real-world tasks to determine how well they do as agents running for long periods with no human supervision.

Your old Google Pixel smartphone could be repurposed in a data center - Engadget

Keeping phones out of landfills and doing useful things is a good thing.

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Tech news has been getting progressively more gloomy of late. As RAMaggedon continues to break pricing on basically all gadgets (and many of us panic-buying PCs), it's refreshing when feel-good stories come along. Enter a project designed to reduce e-waste caused by discarded phones. Researchers at the University of San Diego are trying to help out schools and students by investigating whether old Google Pixel phones can be reused as affordable computing clusters.

Is your iPhone stuck in SOS mode? Here's how to fix it - Engadget

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

It's an all too familiar scene: you're exploring a new area, you take out your phone, and you see the dreaded SOS symbol in the top right corner. It feels like a death knell in our phone addicted landscape. But it doesn't mean that your phone is totally useless. If you see the SOS or SOS only symbol, you may be able to contact emergency services via other available cellular networks. For iPhone 14s and later models, users can also make emergency calls and texts via Apple's satellite network.