Silver State of Mind

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Tuesday, September 29, 2026

Tech Tuesday
  1. 9:04The Smart Start

    Tesla's Semi Factory Just Went Loud

    Tesla's dedicated Semi truck factory out at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center hit volume production last week, handing the first keys to PepsiCo, DHL, and US Foods. What Nevada actually got in writing back in 2023, whether the jobs number holds up, and the room-splitter waiting a year or so down the road: a self-driving semi on I-80.

  2. 9:18The Smart Start

    The Great Self-Checkout Retreat

    Major retailers have spent the last two years quietly ripping self-checkout back out, and this month a pizza chain admitted it pulled its AI voice-ordering because it "erased hospitality." What's actually driving the reversal, and whether it's showing up at a Reno-area store near you.

  3. 9:32The Smart Start

    Your Free AI Note-Taker Might Be Committing a Felony on Your Behalf

    Nevada's phone-recording law reads like it needs just one person's OK, but the state's own courts say otherwise. What that means for anybody running Zoom AI Companion, Otter, or Granola on a routine business call, and the one sentence that fixes almost all of it.

  4. 9:46The Smart Start

    The Cable Company Renamed Itself While You Were Asleep

    Charter's $34.5 billion buyout of Cox closed in August, and Spectrum's pricing and branding rolled out to Northern Nevada in September. What actually changed on your bill, why a widely-repeated customer-count figure up here is wrong, and what to check before a quiet transition becomes a quiet rate increase.

  5. StandbyThe Smart Start

    The Garage Genius Coming to Give a Talk for Free

    NVIDIA's chief scientist, Bill Dally, the man behind the parallel-computing architecture that made GPUs what they are, is giving a free public talk at UNR on October 21. Who he actually is, why a chip legend ends up in Reno, and what UNR's own AI push looks like right now.

  6. StandbyThe Smart Start

    Running the Noise Backward

    How AI image generators actually work, mechanically, no jargon: a picture pulling itself back out of pure static, one step at a time. Where the training photos actually came from, why hands still look weird, and two free tools to try it yourself this week.

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