IT General

I've always found resume writing to be a headache, and it's only gotten worse. There are ATS (Applicant Tracking System) tools scanning for keywords, design conventions I'm no longer up to date on, endless advice about mirroring the language of the job posting—and who knows what else. It's a lot to keep track of for a document I neither enjoy writing nor have much experience creating. I also don't have much incentive to get better at it, since I land most jobs through social outreach or referrals.

.Most people celebrated when Microsoft loosened its grip on Windows updates. The forced restarts were annoying, the timing was always wrong, and it felt like your computer was making decisions that belonged to you. I get it, but the more I think about what mandatory updates were actually doing, the harder it is to feel good about losing them.

I've had my Kindle 4 for more than a decade, and for most of that time I used the stock Kindle software. When Amazon announced it was dropping support for this model, I decided to jailbreak it. I wish I'd done it sooner, as the Kindle has become far more useful; I've found several ways that I can use it with Home Assistant, and you can find old Kindles on secondhand marketplaces for as little as $25.

Samsung is a leader in Android features and UI options, but that hasn't stopped it from continuing to up its customization game. If you're a seasoned Samsung owner, you probably know about the Good Lock app. It's a suite of tools that took me by surprise, especially when it broke Android’s own rules to deliver better experiences. Learning more about these buried apps and their features can drastically alter your device.

Losing your only charging cable in the middle of a long drive is the kind of thing that makes reasonable people take impulsive risks. Buying a charging cord from a gas station is one of the worst decisions you can make. Some of them are a legitimate security threat, and the ones that aren't can still do real damage to your hardware over time.

The whole point of running a home server is being able to reach your files, media, dashboards, and other self-hosted services whenever you need them. Unfortunately, the easiest way to use remote access is also the riskiest one: through port forwarding.

A sound system isn't a cheap proposition, and if you're going to spend the money, you don't want any regrets a year or two down the road. Rather than buying a soundbar, you should piece together your own system—it'll age better and offer better performance.

Emissions regulations, electrification, and ever-stricter fuel economy standards have forced manufacturers to downsize their engines or abandon internal combustion altogether. Even Ferrari has an EV now. The days of the V12 engine are numbered. But they aren’t over, thanks to Zenvo.

Home Assistant is the best smart home platform in almost every way. The problem is that it has a bit of a reputation for being overly complex, which can put a lot of people off. But the project is actively focused on improving the user experience, prioritizing user-friendliness to increase adoption.

We typically think of a smartwatch as an extension to a phone, but there’s no reason it can’t be a useful companion for a computer, too. I was able to set up a simple automation to launch apps on my desktop from my Galaxy Watch—and I did it with two apps I already had installed.

I love streaming services. I see them as an affordable way to watch movies, and when those movies rotate away, I can stream something new.

There was an age where partitioning drives was not only common, but encouraged. But PCs have changed a lot in the past few years. Nowadays, while partitioning is still an option, I'd argue that 90% of users probably shouldn't.

If you've ever dual-booted a PC, you've probably noticed a pretty marked difference between how quickly apps launch on Linux compared to Windows. On Linux, everything seems to snap open instantly, while on Windows there is a perceptible hesitation. Installing Linux on an old PC only exaggerates that even more.

Pull the plug on your internet connection and your Amazon Echo suddenly seems useless. But there's a difference between Alexa being offline and Alexa being completely switched off. I took my Echo offline to find out what still works and what doesn't.

There was a time when AIO (All-In-One) liquid coolers were the perfect middle ground between expensive and complex custom loops and loud and ineffective air coolers. No matter which AIO you chose, it was probably better than most air coolers you could have used in the same build.

Excel has changed dramatically since I first started using it. Microsoft has added features like AI tools, dynamic arrays, Power Query improvements, Python integration, and many new functions—but one of the first "advanced" features I learned is still one of the tools I use most. Setting up Custom Lists only takes a few minutes, yet it quietly saves me time every time I enter or sort recurring data.

The Raspberry Pi may have fallen out of favor among homelabbers and hobbyists for its high price-to-performance ratio, but the single-board computer still has some compelling use cases. Detecting earthquakes and other seismic activity is up there with the best of them.

If you struggle to learn terminal commands, I have four perfect remedies I've picked up over many years, some of which will boost your skills instantly.

I've heard about Linux distributions designed to be difficult to break, and it got me wondering whether I could build something similar with Windows. I actually have a few good reasons to want one. I keep a PC in my garage connected to a large monitor next to my workout equipment. In addition, I do a lot of software testing for my job, and there's a shared media PC in my living room that my family and guests can all use. In all three cases, being able to restart the computer and immediately return it to a known-good state could be incredibly useful.

Do you understand quantum parallel repetition? What about quantum complexity, lattice cryptography, or extremal combinatorics?

The new OpenAI model Astra knows all about them.

Recently, OpenAI confirmed the existence of Astra, calling it "our next major model." On Aug. 1, the ChatGPT-maker revealed that "an internal version of Astra" solved 10 major open math problems, some of which have been unresolved for decades. Then, on Aug. 7, OpenAI announced that Astra had developed such advanced cyber capabilities that new security controls were necessary and that some internal development work would be paused.

"These results, in addition to expert assessments, have led us to conclude last night that we cannot rule out critical cyber capabilities under our Preparedness Framework."

OpenAI's Preparedness Framework is the company's "approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities" that could be dangerous. It tracks risk levels in three categories: biological and chemical, cybersecurity, and AI self-improvement.

Previously, GPT-5.6-Sol was evaluated as a "high" risk in cybersecurity, and so Astra could be the first OpenAI model to be classified as a "critical" risk.

"Under our Preparedness Framework, a model reaches the Critical cybersecurity threshold if it can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention, or can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal," OpenAI's blog post states.

OpenAI's testing now shows enough progress on agentic coding and developing zero-day exploits (previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in software or hardware) that the company is stepping back to strengthen security around Astra. To do this, the company is tightening sandboxes that keep the model contained and monitoring its Chain of Thought to "interrupt high risk activity."

OpenAI also said that it's committed to working with "relevant government agencies and select AI safety organizations to test the capabilities for this model."

Frontier AI models have progressed rapidly in the cybersecurity domain this year. Some zero-day bug bounty. programs have been forced to shut down due to the deluge of AI-discovered bugs, as Mashable has reported.

Until recently, the prospect of swarms of AI agents conducting relatively autonomous cyber attacks on critical infrastructure was mostly hypothetical. That risk seems much more real thanks to unreleased models like Claude Mythos and OpenAI Astra.

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What else do we know about OpenAI Astra?

Precious little, to be honest. Prior to the most recent announcement, OpenAI had released few concrete details, besides its internal name, Astra, and the fact that it was in testing to become OpenAI's next major model.

Bleeping Computer recently described Astra as "a powerful model that allows AI agents to collaborate on different parts of a larger problem." That suggests it's designed for agentic work and can "tackle complex, long-running tasks," also per Bleeping Computer.

At this point, it's unclear if Astra will eventually be released as GPT-5.7, the beginning of GPT-6, or something else entirely. If it truly has critical cybersecurity capabilities, it may never be fully released to the public, as with Anthropic's Claude Mythos.

However, let's look again at how OpenAI initially described Astra: "The results were achieved by an internal version of Astra, our next major model."(Emphasis added by Mashable.) That certainly suggested that OpenAI was preparing Astra for release sooner rather than later. However, in its Aug. 7 blog post, OpenAI's language had shifted, describing Astra as "one of our upcoming models." (Emphasis added by Mashable.)

The company has also so far declined to answer our questions about Astra, but we'll update this story if we receive more information.

However, we can make some additional deductions. Based on OpenAI's original blog post about Astra, "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science," it's safe to say that the new Astra model has made significant advances in science and mathematics, as well as in cybersecurity.

So, we talked to a mathematician about what Astra means for the future of AI and science — and what it doesn't mean.

New Anthropic and OpenAI models are really good at coding and math Credit: Photographed by Joseph Maldonado / Mashable Composite by Rene Ramos

Earlier this year, Anthropic announced that its unreleased Mythos model was so good at hacking that it was too dangerous to release to the public. At the time, we questioned this narrative, as the company's warnings effectively doubled as PR for itself. However, we can't deny that the latest frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI have gotten remarkably good at cybersecurity, agentic coding, and discovering zero-day bugs.

More recently, OpenAI and Anthropic have shown progress on research-level mathematics as well.

First, OpenAI released a disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture in May. Then, an Anthropic-linked mathematician casually announced that he used Fable 5 to disprove the Jacobian Conjecture, one of the infamous Smale's problems in mathematics. Now, OpenAI has announced that Astra solved 10 more open problems in mathematics.

It's a potentially paradigm-shifting moment, though this is hardly proof that artificial general intelligence or the singularity is nigh.

First, most of these math accomplishments take the form of disproofs and counterexamples, which aren't as impressive as positive proofs that greatly expand our understanding of the universe, like, say, Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Theorem.

When Fable 5 disproved the Jacobian Conjecture, I spoke to Columbia professor Andrew Blumberg, who is also on the board of directors of the First Proof project, which tested the capabilities of frontier large language models in solving research-level mathematics.

At the time, he told me that Fable 5's feat "did not cause me to update my priors about what AI can and can't do." Blumberg added, "This is exactly the kind of thing I would expect AI to be able to do. If there was a counterexample that was concise and easy to state that people haven't found because it's a pain to search through all this stuff, AI will find it."

Ultimately, Blumberg said that Fable 5's counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture didn't necessarily teach us anything new or exciting about the world, even though it was very impressive.

I went back to Blumberg to ask about OpenAI and Astra's latest work, and he said his priors still haven't changed — AI is a very useful tool for advanced science, but Astra's math results don't suggest AI is ready to replace human scientists and mathematicians.

"If you look at what these are, they're pretty short. They are either counterexamples or they are small, extremely clever constructions that build on known things, and it's super cool, right? I want to be clear: If a person had done many of these things, that person would be justly lauded for their achievement, and so [this work is] great, but they don't change my priors."

And, as many people have pointed out (including, most recently, data scientist Nate Silver), we have to put these results in perspective. While OpenAI was keen to point out that these problems were solved with just $2,000 worth of tokens, that doesn't account for the trillions spent on AI technology in recent years.

"When you hear about the amount of money that's being poured into these machines, and you think about what it would be like if we spent a trillion dollars on hiring and training mathematicians and paying the best mathematicians football players' salaries to do nothing but solve these problems, I think we'd see a shitload of progress," Blumberg told Mashable.

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At the same time, the prospect of Astra-level models being in the hands of every scientist, physicist, and mathematician on Earth is truly exciting. Likewise, the prospect of Astra-like tools being available to hackers and other bad actors is truly concerning.

When will GPT Astra be released?

Previously, we speculated that GPT-Astra would be released by the end of the year, but now that OpenAI is delaying development for security reasons, it's much harder to say. As we mentioned earlier, it may never be fully released.

There are other factors that could delay its release as well.

First, the White House is reportedly close to finalizing a voluntary AI framework for testing new frontier models before they're released publicly. OpenAI has now publicly committed to working with relevant government agencies before releasing Astra. And if Astra is deemed to have "critical" capabilities, then additional time would be required to develop a safe-for-public-consumption version of the model.

There is reason to believe that Astra is far along in its development cycle, however. The Information recently reported that OpenAI is actively previewing Astra in Washington, D.C., and if Astra is already generating major results in math, it's likely fairly far along in testing.

Major AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have been releasing major updates to their models every few months, with entirely new model families coming out every one to two years. GPT-5 was introduced in August of 2025, which means we're due for GPT-6 any time now.

So far, OpenAI hasn't said anything about a release timeline.

Its most recent blog post about Astra concludes: "We’re committed to working alongside governments, safety institutes, and civil society to ensure that the frontier capabilities of models like Astra, and those that follow, are deployed responsibly and broadly for the benefit of all humanity."

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.