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This story is a comic by Danny Fenster and Amy Kurzweil and is not compatible with RSS readers. But you can (and should) read it at The Verge’s website.

Pakistani military jets have hit targets inside Afghanistan, bombing parts of Kabul, Kandahar and Paktia, as open military conflict surged between the two countries. Pakistan's Defence Minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, said Islamabad's patience had run out and declared the ne...

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: Perhaps the most surprising announcement on Thursday was that Apple and Netflix, which have had a rather stand-offish relationship when it comes to video programming, have struck a deal to swap some Formula One-related content. Formula...

Pre-show: Marco’s Watch and snow blows woes TruFuel Follow-up: Casey got the CableCARD email 😭 YoLink alternatives (via Joe) IKEA Matter-over-Thread announcement KLIPPBOK (leak sensor) BILRESA (remote control) MYGGSPRAY (motion sensor) House batteries & V2H/...

“An interview from 2036 with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman.” This is what AI video generation was meant for.

Link: aicandy.be/giorgio-1

The New York Times: Netflix said on Thursday that it had backed away from its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, a stunning development that paves the way for the storied Hollywood media giant to end up under the control of a rival bidder, the technology heir David ...

The NY Times has added another daily crossword to the line-up: the Midi. “The standard Times daily crossword, you see, is a 15×15 grid. The Mini is 5×5. The new Midi is 9×9, snug in between.”

Life support is the hardest technical obstacle to the human exploration of Mars.

During the recent annular solar eclipse on February 17, the ESA’s PROBA-2 satellite captured this great shot of the Moon passing in front of the Sun. Cue up the Johnny Cash.

Tags: astronomy · Moon · photography · science · Sun

Apple Newsroom:

Today, Apple announced iPhone and iPad are the first and only consumer devices in compliance with the information assurance requirements of NATO nations. This enables iPhone and iPad to be used with classified information up to the NATO restricted level without requiring special software or settings — a level of government certification no other consumer mobile device has met.

That’s nice, but the iPhone is only the second phone to be approved for handling classified information for the Board of Peace. The first, of course, was the T1.

Link: nr.apple.com/Do0I6B8WX0

Bitcoin is down 50%, several prominent industry figures have been uncovered in the Epstein files, Trump’s facing a probe into his family’s $500M deal with the UAE, and crypto super PACs spend their first $6 million in the midterms.

“Eclipses have been connected with the fate of rulers since at least ancient Mesopotamia, around 4,000 years ago.” But more recently: “In 1581, Queen Elizabeth I of England made it a felony to use horoscopes to predict her death or her successor.”

Agentic Engineering Patterns > Many of my tips for working productively with coding agents are extensions of advice I've found useful in my career without them. Here's a great example of that: hoard things you know how to do. A big part of the skill in building softwa...

Calculating the longest line of sight on Earth: 530km (329 miles) between “an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan”.

“x86CSS is a working CSS-only x86 CPU/emulator/computer. Yes, the Cascading Style Sheets CSS. No JavaScript required. What you’re seeing above is a C program that was compiled using GCC into native 8086 machine code being executed fully within CSS.”

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. [...]

— Andrej Karpathy

Tags: andrej-karpathy, coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms

Ali Akbar, the last newspaper hawker in Paris, has been awarded a knighthood by French president Emmanuel Macron. “Macron went on to refer to Akbar as ‘the most French of the French — a Voltairean who arrived from Pakistan.’”

New book, shipping May 19, from author Geoffrey Cain:

For twelve years, from 1985 to 1997, Jobs wandered the business wilderness with his new venture, NeXT. It was a period of spectacular failures, near-bankruptcy, and brutal humiliation. But out of this crucible of defeat emerged the visionary leader who would go on to create the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, transforming Apple into the most valuable company on earth.

Drawing on previously unpublished materials and new interviews with the key players, Geoffrey Cain reveals the untold story of Steve Jobs’s “lost decade” — the formative years that shaped the icon we thought we knew.

Afterword by Ed Catmull, who was obviously intimately familiar with Jobs in that era. And via Cain’s post on LinkedIn announcing the book, the foreword is by NeXT cofounder Dan’l Lewin.

Link: geoffreycain.net/steve-jobs-in-exile/

Still feels a bit ridiculous to me that Markdown is now an editing mode in Notepad.

Link: blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/01/21/notepad-and…