Technology

Two smaller companies, Oklo and TerraPower, along with Vistra, a large energy company, just signed agreements with Meta.

"That level of openness and transparency is exactly what should be expected of NASA."

Apple and Google are being dragged into the uproar around X's AI chatbot that has continued to virtually undress women in images without their consent this week. In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), and Ed Markey (D-MA) wrote that "X's generation of these harmful and likely illegal depictions of women and children has shown complete disregard for your stores' distribution terms." X users have identified several cases where Grok undressed or sexualized apparent minors in the AI-created images. The senators point to the app stores' own policies for why the app should … Read the full story at The Verge.

Hunter-gatherers probably derived the poison from the milky bulb extract of a Boophone disticha plant.

Faced with a ban in the United Kingdom, X pushes flawed fix to CSAM problem.

We saw a ton of cool new products at CES 2026, but not all of them made the cut when it came to deciding what was best of show. One of those products that we nevertheless think holds promise is Anker’s AeroFit Pro 2, which are wireless earbuds that can double as open-ear headphones. You pick the mode you want: wedge them into your ears for better sound enhanced by active noise cancellation, or let them pump out sound near your ears so that you can keep stay tuned into your surroundings. By using the code WSTDA3875US at Anker’s site, you can knock $30 off their $179.99 price. Anker Soundcore AeroFit Pro 2 Where to Buy: $179.99 $149.99 at Anker The AeroFit Pro 2 have an ear hook design, which could make them a great fit for working out. They contain sensors that can determine how you’re wearing them and adjust features accordingly. They can recalibrate the EQ, and in earbud mode, turn on active noise cancellation by way of their six built-in microphones. However, as our announcement post mentioned, I wouldn’t expect ANC that can rival the category’s flagship products from Bose, Sony, or Apple. Other Verge-approved deals for your consideration Donkey Kong Bananza is one of 2025’s best video games and one of the Switch 2’s best titles. Discounts on the game are rare, so if you’ve been considering it, consider hopping over to Walmart or Amazon where you can buy the physical cartridge version for $62.99 instead of $70. Bananza was made by the same development team within Nintendo responsible for Super Mario Odyssey, which should be all the convincing you need to play this fun, surprisingly lengthy 3D platformer. Read our review. Most of the time, the only light that I have going in my office is the Elgato Key Light. It’s bright, its color temperature can be easily dialed in through the mobile or desktop app, and it attaches conveniently to my desk. I use it as bias lighting, aimed diagonally up toward my ceiling to diffuse the lighting evenly in the corner that I work in. If you need a powerful light to illuminate you during video calls, streams, or for any other reason, you can save 23 percent on the Key Light at Amazon, where it costs $138.99 (originally $199.99, but usually around $180 outside of a deal). B&H Photo has it for a dollar more. I see so many disposable hand warmers littered on the streets and sidewalks in NYC during the winter. More people should consider rechargeable hand warmers, like this twin-pack that costs $15.99 (originally $29.99) at Amazon and recharges via USB-C. Once fully charged, each warmer can provide warmth for four to eight hours, depending on the heat setting you choose. The two warmers snap together magnetically when you aren’t using them, and they each have a silicone wrist strap, so they won’t easily go flying out of your pocket.

👋 I’m Saaniya Chugh, and in this interview, I share my journey as a Senior Technical Consultant, tech author, and HackerNoon contributor, what sparked my love for writing, and how I blend ITSM, AI, and storytelling in my work. I talk about defining moments in both consulting and writing, the evolving role of content in the digital age, and why I chose to support the HackerNoon Writing Course as a guest speaker. At the heart of it all, my message is simple: AI can be a collaborator, but authentic human storytelling will always be irreplaceable.

What is every playoff team good at? What are their biggest concerns? Who could make the difference between a short stay and a deep run in the postseason? Here are our strengths, question marks and X-factors for all 14 playoff teams.

Those around the league are high about the Ravens' job, but aren't as high about the Dolphins' vacancy. Also, here's where some around the league think John Harbaugh will land next.

What do the 18 teams who missed the NFL playoffs need to do in order to make the postseason next year? Here's our No. 1 offseason goal for all 18 non-playoff teams.

The Jaguars have been one of the NFL's biggest surprises this season, with first-year coach Liam Coen performing an impressive turnaround.

SpaceX opened its 2026 launch campaign with a mission for the Italian government.

The Champ Stack 10K is one of the first power banks you can safely break in two. | Image: Nimble Accessory maker Nimble announced a new power bank at CES 2026 that will appeal to anyone who's had to reluctantly share or loan their portable charger to someone else. The Champ Stack 10K looks like a typical 10,000mAh power bank that's jumped on the built-in charging cable bandwagon, but it has one interesting difference: you can break it in two - without damaging it - so two people can charge their devices separately. Once separated, each half of the Champ Stack 10K functions as a standalone 5,000mAh power bank, which should provide enough capacity to fully revive a dead smartphone. One half ends up with the power bank's built-in USB-C ch … Read the full story at The Verge.

X is allowing only “verified” users to create images with Grok. Experts say it represents the “monetization of abuse”—and anyone can still generate images on Grok’s app and website.

Despite a subpar 2026 quarterback draft class, a host of NFL QBs could be available this offseason, including some very big names.

Mira is a hormone testing kit that I tried out ahead of CES 2026. I had to pee in that cup. This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they're going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here. At CES 2026 this week, people kept asking me what health tech I was seeing on the show floor. My only answer was this: bodily fluids. As in urine, blood, sweat, and saliva. With most people, my response typically got a handful of groans and raised eyebrows. Among insiders, I surprised no one. CES is ground zero of the wellness Wi … Read the full story at The Verge.

This year's CES was an odd one. This is a conference usually dominated by futuristic, expensive TVs and futuristic, expensive cars, but those things weren't what dominated CES 2026. Instead, Las Vegas was filled with new ideas about old gadgets and showed us a whole lot of really impressive hardware waiting on software to catch up. On this episode of The Vergecast, recorded live at the Brooklyn Bowl in Vegas, David and Nilay talk through some of the big stories from this year's show. (Thanks to everyone who came to see us and stuck around after for drinks and bowling - we had a blast hanging with all of you!) We talk about the robots that c … Read the full story at The Verge.

Kia unveiled the EV2, a small and affordably priced electric vehicle built for the European market. The EV2 made its debut at the Brussels Auto Show, where executives touted it as its "most compact" EV to date. Of course, it was another in a long line of affordable, capable, and impressively designed EVs that won't be available to US customers - at least not right away. And it arrives at a time when Europeans have many affordable options from which to chose, potentially complicating Kia's strategy for the EV2. The EV2 will come in two trims: a Standard-range version, with 42.2kWh battery pack and 317 km (197 miles) of range based on the W … Read the full story at The Verge.

Canceled contracts and scaled-back product plans turn out to be costly.

Elon Musk's AI company has restricted Grok's controversial AI image-generation feature to only paying subscribers on X, after the tool invited heated criticism from across the world for letting users generate sexualized images of women and children.

The CES show floor officially closes its doors at the end of the day, but there's still a trickle of announcements and reveals coming out of Las Vegas. If you're struggling to stay on top of all the new tech, gadgets, concepts, and AI-powered devices as the final day of CES gets underway, we're still rounding up the best hardware and upgrades that have debuted so far so you can quickly get up to speed. As the show draws to a close for another year, you can still catch up on all of The Verge's CES 2026 coverage here. Philips Hue SpatialAware Preset scenes are the easiest way to take advantage of color-changing smart lights in a room, but t … Read the full story at The Verge.

A close up photo of an Asus monitor showing its RGB stripe sub pixel layout. CES is a lot — a deluge of consumer tech surrounded by lots of bad carpeting. The Verge’s on-the-ground team of super nerds covered so many new products and technologies that it’s understandable if it was all a little overwhelming. That’s why we’ve gathered up a collection of trend reports from the show to help make sense of everything that happened at CES 2026, which, by extension, is a preview of the big tech stories for the year to come. CES 2026 was awash in bodily fluids Most dubious uses of AI at CES 2026 TV makers are taking AI too far Is this the world’s first solid-state battery? The PC market braces for an AI-driven storm The gap between premium and budget TV brands is quickly closing What surprised us the most at CES 2026 Wi-Fi 8 is appearing at CES before most of us have switched to Wi-Fi 7 CES promises the robot butler, but delivers better Roombas instead AI moves into the real world as companion robots and pets Power bank feature creep is out of control  I tested Nvidia’s Tesla Full Self-Driving competitor — Tesla should be worried RGB is the next big thing in OLED gaming monitors

While most crypto struggles, three memecoins show bullish signals. PEPE demonstrates resilience with strong holder growth, BONK shows accumulation and ecosystem expansion, and Pepeto stands out with $7.14M raised, 100K+ participants, and 850+ platform applications during a market downturn. Pepeto’s low entry price and utility-driven growth create the clearest 100x setup.

Alabama passed a 10 percent porn tax last year, as Utah and Pennsylvania eye similar bills. Half the country has enacted age-verification laws to prevent minors from viewing porn.

this land is greenland, this land is my land / vibecoding reindustrialization / “wtf, i love hedge funds now” -aoc (probably)

Health officials and family members said at least one child was among the dead in northern Gaza following several strikes there as well as east of Gaza City.

Anthropic announces its first enterprise deal of 2026, which includes building agents for, and giving Claude code to, Allianz.

For the eighth year in a row, the world’s oceans absorbed a record-breaking amount of heat in 2025. It was equivalent to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools.

The Stickverse is a scrappy, Python-based animation pipeline that turns a raw text story into a fully voiced, lip-synced video. It uses Google's Gemini to parse the script, a tool to record your own bad voice acting, and OpenCV to draw the frames.

Laravel is a PHP framework for building web applications. It can be used to create many things, including a 'headless CMS' with a fraction of the complexity and cost of other CMSs. It ha to be as been by far the most cost effective and personally rewarding technical decisions I have made over years.

AWS Systems Manager helps you manage, configure, and operate your compute resources and applications without logging into them.

Carson Beck and the Miami Hurricanes delivered when it mattered most, beating Ole Miss in an instant classic at the Fiesta Bowl on Thursday night.

In most enterprise Databricks environments (like in MSC or large analytics ecosystems), system tables such as system.job_run_logs or system.cluster_events may be restricted or disabled due to security or governance policies.

Save up to 77% on 2-year plans and get 3 free months with our NordVPN discount codes.

"The crew is highly trained, and they came to the aid of their colleague right away."

IA2 outpaces SWIRL and Lan et al. in training efficiency using TD3-TD-SWAR and adaptive action masking for faster SQL index selection.

After a hectic 48 hours, quarterback Demond Williams Jr. is staying put at Washington.

Use /ai to organize files, convert image formats, and more

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the White House is legally required to keep paying its dues despite withdrawing from the 31 agencies related to the world body.

Email prompts where replies become your journal entries

For the past two weeks, X has been flooded with AI-manipulated nude images, created by the Grok AI chatbot — and governments around the world are promising to take action.

Spying doesn't become legal just because "cheaters" are the targets.

Create, save, and share prompts

Indiana Hoosiers head coach Curt Cignetti, who rarely expresses joy on the sideline, explained how he's occasionally happy.

FCC says new category of devices "can operate outdoors and at higher power."

SK Hynix and Micron are also riding high on the AI industry's demand for RAM.

Old-school food pyramid returns, but jumbled and upside-down, like a funnel.

Tron: Ares, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour—The Final Show are just a few of the movies you should be watching on Disney+ this month.

Smartest way to discover unseen literature

These bird feeders come with cameras and connected apps to let you see and learn about the birds in your neighborhood.

A pioneering IoT–Oracle eAM integration transformed manufacturing maintenance from reactive to predictive. By combining real-time sensor data, automated work orders, and intelligent scheduling, the platform eliminated unplanned downtime, cut MTTR by 60%, improved MTBF by 45%, and delivered $2.5M in annual savings—setting a new industry standard later commercialized by Oracle.

EverNitro is positioning itself against competitors such as NitroBrew as a long-term more affordable all-in-one solution. “We offer the quality of a commercial tap with the footprint of a coffee maker. While others sell you gas, we give you technology to harvest it for free,” founder and CEO Terry Tan said.

CES is always chock-full of robots, and this year electronics giant LG announced a new bot, dubbed CLOid, that it claims will revolutionize household chores (as in, you won't have to do them anymore).

With top-quality noise reduction and advanced spatial audio support, these earbuds might come for your AirPods.

“Under the right conditions, some dogs present behaviors strikingly similar to those of young children.”

This FAQ explains everything about the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon: who can participate, how to submit projects, what information is needed, how scoring works, and what prizes and rewards are available. Learn how to earn a Proof of Usefulness score, access software credits from sponsors, and compete for cash and software prizes.

Expert explains how simple it could be to tweak Grok to block CSAM outputs.

It's said that defense wins championships, so which playoff teams boast the best units? We rank all 14 defenses.

Internet monitoring firms and experts say Iran’s internet has almost completely shut down, as protests spread through major cities.

Luckey, who initially made his fortune in VR and now runs the defense contractor Anduril, and Ohanian both seemed to agree: Stuff was better in the old days.

The move comes as Disney launched a personalized vertical video feed in the ESPN app last year.

From an AI panda pet to an anime girl hologram for your desk, here are the wildest products at CES 2026.

After record-setting launch, Western holiday sales are down compared to the first Switch.

Law enforcement has more tools than ever to track your movements and access your communications. Here’s how to protect your privacy if you plan to protest.

The security lapse exposed personal information belonging to residents who received state benefits.

Undetectable browser automation that behaves like a user

Snowflake is bolstering its data stack to make the platform better suited to the sheer volume of data produced by AI agents.

Tom Brady relived the "Tuck Rule Game" in the most recent edition of "Story Time with Tom," and how it almost didn't happen.

The Miami Dolphins have fired head coach Mike McDaniel after four seasons, the team announced on Thursday morning.

US also pulling out of pacts promoting development, democracy, and human rights.

Edit apps visually in 1 click without having to prompt fixes

Jalen Hurts might never be the QB everyone in Philadelphia wants. But everything he's been through makes him exactly whom the Eagles need.

To cap off a season of surprises, FOX Sports' NFL experts make their bold predictions for the postseason. A Texans Super Bowl, anyone?

“This is a very significant contribution to the astronomical community."

Six coaches in the postseason field have made it to the Super Bowl. Two are first-year coaches and two more will also make their playoff debuts. We rank all 14.

It’s the most studied supplement in sports medicine, but it’s not just for athletes anymore.

The crop of next-generation TVs arriving this year has more accurate colors than ever, thanks to a fancy new kind of backlighting.

Route, verify, and settle paid API calls with clear traces

The supply shortage of the RAM needed to build phones and PCs isn’t going away. But a few companies have a plan to solve it.

How two big names in mainstream disaster preparedness helped sell Americans on fear, anxiety, and a new generator.

this whole country is insane / the e-girl next door / pyramid scheme

The new EX60 will be unveiled later this month; here's what we know.

Cross-border payment gateway for enterprises

The Ultimate Open Source Library for Gemini & Nano

FOX Sports' Michael Cohen details how the four remaining CFP coaches are balancing a national championship run and the transfer portal in real time.

It’s a widespread view that child deaths are still a pressing problem in poorer countries, but not in rich ones.I don’t think this is true, and I want to illustrate it with one example from the United States.In 2023, 30,200 children died in the US. In the same year, 22,800 Americans of any age were killed through homicide. You can see this in the chart.Few Americans would argue that murders are a “solved problem”. And this is certainly not what you’d take away from the news. As we showed in a recent article, homicides receive disproportionate coverage in both left- and right-leaning media, relative to the number of people who die from them.The everyday tragedies of children dying from preterm births, neonatal sepsis, and asphyxia do not get nearly the same attention, but are no less important. These are problems that we can still make more progress on.I’ve recently written about what high-income countries can do to continue reducing child deaths.

ChatGPT designed for health and wellness

The general data agent

Researchers suggest that they have recovered sequences from ancient works and from letters that may belong to the Renaissance genius.

Which teams who haven't fired their head coach have reached out to John Harbaugh? A source with one team looking for a head coach called the Steelers "an interesting dark horse" in the Harbaugh sweepstakes.

A WIRED review of outputs hosted on Grok’s official website shows it’s being used to create violent sexual images and videos, as well as content that includes apparent minors.

Who should the Ravens turn to at head coach to help maximize Lamar Jackson's window as an elite quarterback? Robert Saleh tops the list of potential candidates.

Which transfers are poised to make the biggest impact next season? And which decisions leave us scratching our heads? Our college football writers debate it.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he left a bear cub’s corpse in Central Park in 2014 to “be fun.” Records newly obtained by WIRED show what he left New York civil servants to clean up.

New research has given credence to a 5,000-year-old practice.

With the 2025 regular season wrapped up, we make our picks for a host of the NFL's major on-field awards.

Allies including France and Germany are working closely on a plan on how to respond should the United States act on its threat to take over Greenland.

Replace repeated @mentions in Slack with channel aliases

U.S. European Command announced the seizure of the merchant vessel Bella 1 for “violations of U.S. sanctions” in a social medial post.

Iran’s army chief has threatened preemptive military action over the “rhetoric” targeting the Islamic Republic.

delta force deep fakes / power struggle / big stick

The indie ad markeplace to sell or find ad spots

The missing voice input for Linux. Beautiful Private Offline

Organize prompts, track changes, and iterate faster.

Only one button works. Every other click is chaos.

Bringing LEGO creations to life like never before

The agreement is a strong sign that the Venezuelan government is responding to Trump’s demand that they open up to U.S. oil companies.

Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela's interim president, has risen to prominence through strategic moves and political savvy.

The Trump administration has put Venezuela's hardline interior minister on notice that he could be at the top of its target list.

There's a clear No. 1 in Tom Brady's latest top 10. But the rest of the ranking? Well, he believes the gap between No. 10 and 1 is as tight as ever.

Automate assembling the perfect context for your project

The idea-first hub for developers

Which NFL team has the most attractive head coach opening in the 2026 hiring cycle? Here's our breakdown.

The End of an Era, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and The Beatles Anthology are just a few of the shows you should be watching on Disney+ this month.

The leaders issued a statement reaffirming the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island “belongs to its people.”

In the HBO show’s fourth season, Industry proves to be more prescient than it’s ever been.

On this week’s episode of The Big Interview, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale talks about Elon Musk, political resistance, and why she still has hope for America’s future.

Notch Shelf, Floating Basket & Clipboard Manager for macOS

oh hello, zohran / the us house of representatives day traders / walz out

This weekend’s invasion was both a throwback to the last century and a new, uniquely Trumpian nightmare—one that’s just beginning.

Build chatbots with memory using just an API

Swarm agents optimize CUDA/Triton for any HF/PyTorch model

We just lived through the period with the fastest population growth in human history. Six decades ago, there were three billion people on our planet. Since 2022, there have been more than eight billion people — an increase of five billion over this period.It would have been impressive if food supplies had merely kept pace with population growth. But as the chart above shows, they grew even faster. On every continent, food supplies — measured by calories — grew faster than the population. This rise in food production per person was a major reason for the decline of extreme poverty and hunger.To us, this chart documents one of humanity’s most extraordinary achievements.Hunger remains a large problem today, especially in Africa. We recommend the article by our colleague Hannah Ritchie: “Increasing agricultural productivity across Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most important problems this century”.A note on the data: Food supply estimates come from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. We adjusted them to account for changes in region definitions and data coverage over time.

Turn Notion into your ecommerce source of truth

MCP server that gives AI the ability to use an iPhone

Real-time AI coding assistant telemetry in your Mac's notch

we talked to substack's former vp of comms and the ceo of anti-pr pr firm rostra about why she raised a $40m vc fund to invest in founders who aren't boring

Visual workspace to capture, organize, and create with AI

The historical series Shogun was an international hit that won a record 18 Emmy Awards. With production on season 2 starting, the writer and executive producer talk about their new challenges.

Innovative research into the gene-editing tool targets influenza’s ability to replicate—stopping it in its tracks.

A Wall Street Terminal For Everyone

An agent that monitors, curates & writes authentic comments

The coaching carousel for the 2026 offseason is about to get moving. Here are the latest news and rumors from around the NFL!

The administration has made it clear that Nicolás Maduro's capture was tied to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. Much less certain is how US companies will actually access them—or if they even want to.

Descriptive set theorists study the niche mathematics of infinity. Now, they’ve shown that their problems can be rewritten in the concrete language of algorithms.

Meta’s end-to-end encrypted messaging app is used by billions of people. Here’s how to make sure you’re one of the most locked-down ones out there.

Digital chief of staff that automates your files with AI

Being targeted by sophisticated spyware is relatively rare, but experts say that everyone needs to stay vigilant as this dangerous malware continues to proliferate worldwide.

Create, repurpose, and post across 9+ social platforms

Never lose a vibe coding session. Archive, replay, search.

The tactics behind protest policing are changing—from one of cooperation to intentional antagonism for political marketing purposes.

The “super flu” behind outbreaks in the US and UK is a new variant of influenza A H3N2, subclade K. Existing vaccines appear to be insufficiently effective against the virus.

A faster alternative client for Bluesky

Government staffing cuts and instability, including this year’s prolonged shutdown, could be hindering US digital defense and creating vulnerabilities.

As I’ve written before, I’m leaning heavily into immutability in the election site code. Until September 2025 (it’s taken a long time to get round to writing this blog post) that meant a combination of records, ImmutableList<T> and ImmutableDictionary<TKey, TValue>. In an ECMA C# standards meeting, however, Joseph Musser passed on some really valuable feedback … Continue reading Changing Immutable Collections →

The United States’ plan for dealing with Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China remains ill-defined among a shifting global order. That must change.

Live interactive widgets from Airtable, Notion or Sheets

US support for nuclear energy is soaring. Meanwhile, coal plants are on their way out and electricity-sucking data centers are meeting huge pushback. Welcome to the next front in the energy battle.

One Gate for all your Notifications

Incident management that lives where your team works

From university breaches to cyberattacks that shut down whole supply chains, these were the worst cybersecurity incidents of the year.

Privacy may be dead, but civilians are turning conventional wisdom on its head by surveilling the cops as much as the cops surveil them.

From Donald Trump to DOGE to Chinese hackers, this year the internet’s chaos caused outsize real-world harm.

Today’s global coral bleaching events are the worst kind of climate warning.

The first commit to tinygrad was October 17, 2020. It’s been almost three years since we raised money. The company is 6 people now. The codebase is 18,935 lines not including tests. I have spent 5 years of my life working on 18,935 lines, and now many others have put years in as well. And there’s probably 5 more years to go. But this is the right process to compete with NVIDIA. Only a fool begins by taping out a chip; it’s expensive and not the hard part. Once you have a fully sovereign software stack capable of training SOTA models, the chip is so easy. Note that AMD, Amazon, Tesla, and Groq have taped out fine chips, but only Google and NVIDIA chips have ever been seriously used for training. Because they have the software. We are finally beginning to tackle LLVM removal, making tinygrad have 0 dependencies (except pure Python) to drive AMD GPUs. We have a frontend, we have a graph compiler, we have runtimes, and we have drivers. This is no longer a toy project, it outperforms PyTorch on many workloads. When this is finished and cleaned up, it’ll be about 20,000 lines. And that’s completely it. I think a lot of how software is thought about is wrong. All codebases have workarounds for issues in other parts of the codebase. Sometimes you are lucky and these workarounds are clear, but many times they are so deep and structural that you’ll never see them reading the code line by line. I think this is so bad that 98% of lines of software are basically this in some way shape or form. tinygrad is following the Elon process for software. Make the requirements less dumb. The best part is no part. Most requirements in software exist to maintain compatibility with other abstractions. Let’s look at an LLM server. The real requirement is that it provide an OpenAI compatible API for quickly running LLMs on GPUs. But when you look at these codebases and what they depend on, they are collectively millions and millions of lines. tinygrad is 1000x smaller. It’s because each piece of code in that stack isn’t focused on the goal. It’s focused on the other pieces of code. I believe this is the same dysfunction that exists in organizations too. The tiny corp is a company, but like how fancy chefs will deconstruct dishes, the tiny corp is a deconstructed company. We have almost nothing private, it’s a Discord and GitHub. To fund the operation, we have a computer sales division that makes about $2M revenue a year. We also have a contract with AMD to get MI350X on MLPerf for Llama 405B training. This was negotiated mostly in public on Twitter. People get hired by contributing to the repo. It’s a very self directed job, with one meeting a week and a goal of making tinygrad better. Our mission is to commoditize the petaflop.

In the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation for modern geometry and physics.

Vibe Coding with a planning assistant to build with clarity

Chinese companies have pledged hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy manufacturing investments overseas, but the projects are having significant social, environmental, and human rights impacts.

Stranger Things, City of Shadows, and Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft are just a few of the shows you need to watch on Netflix this month.

The future of conflict is cheap, rapidly manufactured, and tough to defend against.

in january 2025 the whole world changed — a look back at all the bangers, as pirate wires covered the intersection of politics, technology, and culture

In Pirates of the Caribbean, Jack and Will use an overturned dinghy to hold air underwater. Madness or brilliance?

One Battle After Another, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, and It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley are just a few of the movies you should be watching on HBO Max this month.

Although wolf-canine interbreeding has been considered extremely rare, the latest research shows that many present-day canines carry a small amount of wolf genes.

WIRED spoke with DeepMind’s Pushmeet Kohli about the recent past—and promising future—of the Nobel Prize-winning research project that changed biology and chemistry forever.

Centralize your team’s AI, cut costs and stay organized

A keyboard-first, AI-powered native browser for macOS.

Heated Rivalry, Mad Men, and The Pitt are just a few of the shows you need to be watching on HBO Max this month.

The New York Police Department's “mosque-raking” program targeted Muslim communities across NYC. Now, as the city's first Muslim mayor takes office, one man is fighting—again—to fully expose it.

See where your brand is discovered and fix what blocks it

A context-aware, intelligent day planner

Here’s how a fake clip from 2019 wound up in the latest Justice Department Epstein files dump.

The DOJ says it still has “hundreds of thousands” of pages to review, as the latest Epstein files release spurred more pushback from Democratic lawmakers and other critics of the administration.

Two decades ago social media promised to connect people with pals far and wide. Twenty years online has left us turning to AI for kinship. IRL companionship is the future.

From Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to the US government’s Halo memes, fandom has become the defining language of US politics.

here comes santa claus / wildfire whitepill / local retard doesn’t know how the military works

I got a lot weird hate for saying Tesla is 8 years away from solving self driving. I stand by that statement. I also think Tesla will solve it first. At least FSD is real AI that you can evalulate the honest progress of, unlike remote control cars that break when the power goes out. I’m not sure this hate is a real opinion, or simply arguments are soldiers political thinking shilling for the stock price. People post screenshots of their 1,000 miles of 100% self driving and for some reason think they know more than me about this. comma.ai owns a HW4 Tesla and many of my friends own Teslas. I’m constantly trying the latest stuff, I got a ride in a Cybertruck from JFK to downtown Manhattan two days ago (one intervention). It’s 8 years away (this is where I’d take even money, equally likely to be sooner or further) from being finished. And by finished I don’t mean useful, even comma.ai is already useful. I mean finished. That it drives in every scenario on par with a skilled human, recovers from scenarios, and makes less mistakes than skilled, attentive, humans. Long after these cars are frequently on the road with no driver. That you’d repeatedly bet your life on it driving across the country without making a single mistake. I saw similar stuff about my thoughts on AI coding. AI’s will eventually become better programmers than humans, they just aren’t yet. Sure, if you compare it to noobs they are better, but if you compare a depth 3 minimax search to me at chess the search is also better. I like AI, I want it to be good, it will someday be good, and right now it’s kind of good, but it’s not that good yet. This seems to just be the type of opinion that pisses everyone off. Like that I think Trump is a OK president, good at some things bad at others. But commenters seem to be dumb politically minded shills who need to sort every comment into with us or against us. I’m against all of you and with the truth.

Minimal syslog collector and viewer based on DuckDB

Wicked, Merry Little Batman, and Die Hard are just a few of the movies you should be watching on Amazon Prime Video this week.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, Frankenstein, and Klaus are just a few of the movies you should watch on Netflix this month.

Plus: Cisco discloses a zero-day with no available patch, Venezuela accuses the US of a cyberattack, and more.

the city's reparations scheme is dreaming big, delivering nothing, and derailing city funds

tech companies give the government, historically dumb and slow, cutting-edge tools to enforce the law of the land. don't like it? change the law, don't blame the toolmakers.

See the new movie Avatar: Fire and Ash if you’d like. But if you really want to experience the big blue world of Pandora, the video game is where it’s at.

Come See Me in the Good Light, Highest 2 Lowest, and F1: The Movie are just a few of the movies you should be watching on Apple TV this month.

one guy is single-handedly correcting the ai water doomerism with a calculator and a chatbot

Is the latest iPhone operating system aesthetically appealing? No. But is it useful? Also no. At least I have company among the disgruntled.

Turns out the idea wasn’t a desktop emulator with a keyboard and mouse, it was just a command line. I’m blown away with how good Claude Code is. I assume it was long context RLed in similar environments. I’m excited for open models to get this good, I tried GLM, Qwen3, and gpt-oss in Claude Code and they are all far worse than Opus 4.5. Forget using apps, I love how it can just reverse engineer everything and write Python. Ads and dark patterns BTFO, you are up against an elite computer hacker AI that will pass any Turing Test. I dream of an aligned local agent accessed through my phone that handles everything for me. Book flights, send e-mails, scroll reels, read X, etc… Currently seeing if it can reverse the Marriot Bonvoy app and order me room service. One prompt, “bypass permissions on” PS: I still think it’s a bad programmer, largely for the same reason it’s a bad rapper. It lacks taste, and it’s unclear how to teach it this. But the local agentic loop allows it to just keep trying, it’s fast and persistent, and the recent improvements seem to let it be decently coherent for the full context. Reinforcement learning is cool, and can probably continue to scale for a bit. I see people on Twitter saying I’m late to these things. Opus 4.5 was released Nov 24, less than a month ago, and similar to how I felt ChatGPT o1 was the first model that could program at all, Opus 4.5 is the first model I feel that can use computers at all. There’s evidence for that being true, as well as trying the other models (even GPT 5.2) in agentic loops and they aren’t good. Both Claude Code and opencode behave similarly with Opus 4.5, and opencode or Claude Code with other models performs poorly.

What does the British government spend its budget on? The chart shows spending broken down by category, scaled to £100. It combines both central and local government spending.Social protection is the single largest item. Out of every £100 spent, £33 goes to it — more than health, at £19 per £100. The UK is typical in this regard — in every OECD country except the US, social protection is the biggest category.Public services also account for a large share: £14 per £100. These include core government functions, foreign aid, and interest payments on government debt.Education and economic affairs, which support the broader economy or specific industries such as fishing and manufacturing, are also prominent categories.Explore how other OECD countries spend their budgets.

how somali immigrants in minnesota (and now maine?) sent billions of taxpayer dollars to islamic terrorists — and what happens when we stop expecting people to assimilate

I’m a Black staffer at WIRED. My position feels more precarious than ever. There’s a reason for that.

Medication, Vitamin & Supplement Reminder

Since 2000, GDP per capita has doubled in all three Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (where it has nearly tripled).Living conditions in these countries have improved more broadly. Poverty rates are lower, and life satisfaction is higher. Incomes have not just doubled in terms of GDP per capita; median incomes have also doubled.Read more from my colleague Max Roser about economic growth, how it’s measured, and why it matters.

saikat chakrabarti built "the squad." now he's running for congress to turn them into a party.

This Data Insight is the third of a three-part series on China’s role in global trade, drawing on new writing we added this week to our Trade and Globalization topic page.China is the top source of imports for many countries. But this tells us only how China compares with other trading partners, not how large these imports are relative to the size of each country’s economy. That is what this map shows.The map plots the total value of merchandise imports from China as a share of each importing country’s GDP. The data shows that Chinese imports are relatively small when compared with the overall size of the importing economy.Take the Netherlands as an example: China is the country’s leading source of imports. But compared with the size of the whole Dutch economy, this is a comparatively small amount — about 10% as a share of GDP. And as the map shows, the Netherlands is at the high end, largely because it imports a lot overall.In many countries, imports from China account for much less than 10% of GDP. There are a few reasons for this. First, even if China is the leading partner, most countries still import from a wide range of places. And second, in most countries, the economic value produced domestically is larger than the total value of imported goods.Read more about trade partnerships and China’s changing role in global trade.

on kitkat, the beloved sf feline who was run over by an autonomous vehicle, and jackie fielder, the pandering sf politician who now wants to ban the vehicles altogether

This Data Insight is the second of a three-part series on China’s role in global trade, drawing on new writing we added this week to our Trade and Globalization topic page.China’s central role in merchandise trade is the result of a large change that has taken place in just a few decades. This change has been especially large in Africa and South America.In 1990, most African countries imported mainly from Europe, and most South American imports came from North America. Today, Asia is the top source of imports for both regions, primarily due to the rapid growth of trade with China.The chart here focuses on Ethiopia, a country that illustrates this shift. Home to around 130 million people, it is one of Africa’s largest countries and has experienced rapid economic growth in recent decades.In the early 1990s, over 40% of Ethiopia’s imports came from Europe, while very little came from China. Since then, the roles of China and Europe have almost reversed: imports from China now account for one-third of Ethiopia’s total imported goods.Read more about trade partnerships and China’s changing role in global trade.

Parkinson’s disease has environmental toxic factors, not just genetic.

This Data Insight is the first of a three-part series on China’s role in global trade, drawing on new writing we added this week to our Trade and Globalization topic page.Over the past two decades, China’s role in global trade has expanded substantially. It has become a central hub, particularly through growing relationships with many lower and middle-income countries.The map here shows how China ranks as a source of imports into each country. A rank of 1 means that China is the largest source of merchandise goods (by value) that a country buys abroad.In 2024, China was the top source of imported goods for around two-thirds of countries worldwide. This includes nearly all of Asia, much of Africa and Latin America, and parts of Europe.In many countries, China has overtaken the United States as the largest origin of their imported goods. This shift has occurred relatively recently, mainly over the past two decades.Read more about trade partnerships and China’s changing role in global trade.

Turn any web data into instant, interactive charts

Despite the world’s immense progress against child mortality, in some of the poorest countries, one in ten children still dies. That’s a level last seen in the richest countries in the middle of the 20th century.The chart shows the nine countries, all located in Africa, where this is the reality today. In Niger, more than 11 out of every 100 children die before the age of five. In the European Union, the child mortality rate is more than twenty times lower.To learn more, read my colleague Max’s article: “Child mortality: an everyday tragedy of enormous scale that we can make progress against”.

In 1961, around two chickens were slaughtered per person globally each year. As many countries grew richer — and richer countries tend to eat more meat — global demand for chicken increased.Since then, the number of chickens slaughtered per person has quadrupled. On average, 9 chickens are killed each year for every person in the world. Chickens have also become much heavier, so the amount of meat eaten in kilograms has grown even faster.Life is short and painful for many farmed animals. Global estimates suggest that most are raised in factory farms. In the United States, around 99% of livestock comes from them.Explore more interactive charts and articles on animal welfare on our dedicated topic page.

One of the starkest expressions of global inequality is a child’s chance of survival. In 2023, 2.84 million children in Africa died before reaching their fifth birthday, giving the continent the highest child mortality rate of any region (5.9%).The chart above shows a simple hypothesis: how many more African children would reach the age of five if it had the same child mortality rates as other regions?If conditions in Africa improved enough to match Asia’s current child mortality rate (2%), 1.9 million of these 2.84 million children would survive.If the child mortality rate were to drop to the European rate (0.4%), then 2.64 million children would be saved each year.To learn more, read my colleague Max’s article on the progress made in reducing child mortality.

Your AI Ops Manager

I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels Apple’s quality is degrading. I spend 10 hours a day on my laptop and would spend any amount of money within reason for a better one. However, everything comes with tradeoffs. My dream laptop is simple, a MacBook with Linux, supported by a company that is user aligned. The first idea is simple, put Linux on a MacBook. Asahi Linux is a good idea, however, it won’t ever be good. Apple is putting more and more stuff into closed source microcontrollers that have no documentation. Like jailbreaking, it may start off strong when people are excited, but support for the next generation and that last bit of polish won’t ever get there. While it got some impressive stuff like psychoacoustic bass (works on other machines too, I installed this on my ZBook), it lacks DP Alt Mode, meaning you can’t plug in a USB-C monitor. I don’t fault the Asahi people, Apple uses custom undocumented hardware to manage the USB ports, and reversing muxes seems boring. Additionally, like on almost all Linux laptops, the power management is bad. And even worse, there’s 0 documentation from Apple on how to fix it, so despite it being super good on macOS, it’s one of the more annoying laptops to try to fix on Linux. At least if you have a laptop with AMD or Intel there’s some docs on power states. So with Apple out, we have to look for alternatives. I like so much about Framework as a company, straightforward, open source ethos, but they aren’t building the product I want. I don’t care one bit about upgradability or customizability. After a year or two, I’m happy to throw it out and buy a new one. It’s not like upgradability is a bad thing, but it usually comes with tradeoffs to weight and power draw, and I’d rather it all be in one solid package glued together. And I don’t like customizability because I like when all the testing and polish work is put into one configuration. Perhaps the Framework 16 will impress me; I shouldn’t judge until I use it. But I see things like a request for a touchpad single unit so there’s not some random pieces of plastic digging into my wrist just in case I want to move my touchpad left or right. And I read some complaints about the rigidity, how can it be rigid if the modules are attached with magnets? Engineering is all about trade-offs, and the trade-off I’d prefer is 0 upgradability or customizability in exchange for less weight and more polish. The Framework 16 also has a Strix Point instead of a Strix Halo, and I hear the power draw isn’t too much better on Point. Coming from an M3 Max, the Strix Halo is just barely acceptable performance wise, I also own an Intel Core 7 155H and AMD Hawk Point. Those are not what I consider okay in a laptop. I’m typing this blog on a HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14. Question to HP, who names this crap? Why do these companies insist on having the most confusing product lineups and names. Are ZBooks good or do I want an OmniBook or ProBook? Within ZBook, is Ultra or Fury better? Do I want a G1a or a G1i? Oh you sell ZBook Firefly G11, I liked that TV show, is that one good? Wait wait wait OMEN MAX 16z-ak000 has a lot of capital letters, that one must be the best, right? But there’s also an HP EliteBook, Elite sounds like the best, do I still want a ZBook? These are all real products on HP’s laptop page. Consumer electronics naming is very simple. Make a good product with a simple name. “iPhone”, “comma”, “Z Fold”. Then every year or two, add one to the number of that product. If it’s a small refresh, you can add a letter after the number. “2 3 3X 4” “4 4s 5 5s 6 …” “2 3 4 5 6 7” Why is this so hard for companies like HP? If I made a laptop, it would come in one configuration. Call it the hackbook Highest end Strix Halo part, which is the best mobile(ish) chip you can get outside Apple. 16 core Zen 5 CPU, 40 core RDNA 3.5 GPU. 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM @ 256 GB/s. A stunning 16 inch OLED screen that’s the full size of the laptop. A max size legal on planes 100 Wh battery. Great sound with out of the box tuned psychoacoustic bass. Aluminium unibody with just one bit of laser etched branding where the Apple is, no other writing on the laptop. A classy keyboard without weird logos and random lights. An awesome touchpad; the ZBook touchpad is actually fine, it’s not just Apple with good ones anymore. Crazy fast boot times, amazing power management. Linux can be tuned so well if you care, and this tuning will be installed on every one we sell. We sell one configuration to all the best developers in the world who want to not use a MacBook anymore. Apple will not understand what they had until they lose it, the only reason anything works on Mac at all is because there’s 100,000 amazing developers who use these machines every day; they put some work into making their house nice. And when it’s time to upgrade in one or two years, we’ll have the hackbook two ready for you. The number goes up by one, and you know which one to buy. For some reason people say I get distracted, but comma has been around for ten years following this playbook; we now have a comma four for you. If I built one laptop, I’d keep building a laptop for 10 years. With Apple’s decline and our rise, the hackbook four will be the first one that’s clearly better than a MacBook. I’m writing this blog post in hopes I don’t actually have to do this. I’m not really going to, there’s so many other things to do. This is just whining and bikeshedding. Can somebody please build a good MacBook replacement and make it a Schelling point everyone will switch to so I don’t have to think about this anymore?

Almost 20,000 Americans were murdered in 2023.The chart shows the homicide rates among male and female victims. Men were 2.7 times more likely to die by homicide than women.We can see that for men, most of these murders were committed by friends, neighbors, acquaintances, or strangers (shown as “Other” in the chart) rather than a partner or family member. The opposite is true for women: intimate partners are the biggest threat.Because the risks are different, the most effective responses may differ too. For women, reducing intimate partner violence is a key priority. For men, prevention is more often tied to crime, gangs, and violence among acquaintances or strangers.Explore homicide rates for more countries.

I’ve been trying to replace my MacBook. I switched from an iPhone to a Z Fold 5 (and now a Z Fold 7) which has gone well 2 years in, so I’ve been trying to do the same with my laptop. For phones, this was easier because the Samsung hardware is already better. Sadly, there’s no better laptop hardware than a MacBook, and while Asahi Linux is cool, it doesn’t work on the M3. Even on the M1, it’s missing the ability to plug an external USB-C monitor in, a key feature I use every day! Without support from Apple, I don’t see this being a viable long term solution, mostly because of Apple’s use of custom little MCUs to do everything. I bought a HP ZBook Strix Halo and a Framework 16. I’ve been daily using the HP, the Framework gets here hopefully this week and maybe I’ll stream it when I get it. I’ve been running Omarchy which I have been quite happy with. It fixed the problem I always had with Arch, which is how customizable it is. It’s a great OS (why isn’t apt-get multithreaded yet?), leave the customizability there, but pick some good defaults with taste. The main issue I have with Linux laptops is power management. I got idle lid-closed power down to 0.2W with the help of AMD’s awesome amd_s2idle script. This is similar to a MacBook, and is 15 days in a bag. Lid-open power has been more of a challenge. I wrote a script to poll the best sensors I could find as fast as I could. I got CPU draw from the SMU and battery draw from the bytes of whatever it is the EC is. Embedded Controller? I couldn’t get the ACPI battery draw to update faster than every 30 seconds, but the EC has it every second in its bytes. Btw, LLMs are super helpful at reverse engineering – it’s almost becoming fun again. After tuning, at screen-on idle, the whole laptop draws 7W, and when browsing the web more like 10W. That’s only 7 hours of life, which is 30% of a MacBook, and still not really acceptable. 4W of those 7W are the CPU. Strix Halo is the only laptop chip that rivals the Apple M-Series, actually having decent cores (the AVX-512 is real too) and good RAM bandwidth. Sadly it’s chiplets, which the LLMs tell me are very power hungry. I tried to further power limit the CPU with RyzenAdj, but I couldn’t even get it to 3W with a stated limit of 2W. I wonder if there’s some other ways to do it, what more can I turn off? The main fix for s2idle was turning off the webcam, what else is on and wasting my CPU (well, really APU) power? AMD, want to release docs about the power draw of Strix Halo? You could probably figure out a lot through experiments too, but then I have to, like, disable the GPU over ssh and then I have to get another laptop and that all sounds like a lot of work. I’m already busy trying to build an open source rocprof-trace-decoder. Also, package Strix Halo with MoP like Apple. it’s the best thing about PoP (low power) without the worst thing about PoP (bad thermals). That picture is Intel Lunar Lake, and you know MoP is a good idea because Intel is discontinuing it while Apple keeps doing it. For the other 3W, this is on HP. The OLED screen is about a watt, which is really good. Don’t turn on the stupid keyboard backlight that draws 2 watts! The memory is probably about a watt too, you can’t really turn it off to measure. I couldn’t find a way to lower the clocks either. That leaves 1 watt of possibility. The WiFi and NVMe are both extremely low power. Any other ideas? I bet there’s something stupid or poorly designed, HP should release a schematic of the laptop. In fact, you don’t need to release a full schematic, just a block diagram. Framework releases these and just showing what parts are used and how they are connected is 80% of what you want. If the CPU could be brought down to 2W (Apple M3 Max is 1W!) and the laptop brought down to 2W, with a 99.6 Wh battery that’s 25 hours. If someone makes one of these in a nice 16” form factor, OLED screen, aluminium unibody, no stupid branding everywhere, I think it might be time for a lot of developers to switch.

The 1970s were a decade shaped by fears about overpopulation. As the world’s most populous country, China was never far from the debate. In 1979, China designed its one-child policy, which was rolled out nationally from 1980 to curb population growth by limiting couples to having just one child.By this point, China’s fertility rate — the number of children per woman — had already fallen quickly in the early 1970s, as you can see in the chart.While China’s one-child policy restricted many families, there were exceptions to the rule. Enforcement differed widely by province and between urban and rural areas. Many couples were allowed to have another baby if their first was a girl. Other couples paid a fine for having more than one. As a result, fertility rates never dropped close to one.In the last few years, despite the end of the one-child policy in 2016 and the government encouraging larger families, fertility rates have dropped to one. The fall in fertility today is driven less by policy and more by social and economic changes.This chart shows the total fertility rate, which is also affected by women delaying when they have children. Cohort fertility tells us how many children the average woman will actually have over her lifetime. In China, this cohort figure is likely higher than one, but still low enough that the population will continue to shrink.Explore more insights and data on changes in fertility rates across the world.

Seasonal influenza is sometimes seen as a mild illness, but it remains a major cause of death. In serious cases, it can cause deadly complications such as pneumonia, strokes, and heart attacks. Researchers estimate that the flu causes about 400,000 respiratory deaths and 300,000 cardiovascular deaths globally each year.The flu is most dangerous for infants and older adults. The map here shows rates of respiratory deaths caused by the flu in adults aged 65 and over, averaged across 2002–2011 (excluding the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic).The data shows that death rates tend to be higher in South America, Africa, and South Asia than in Europe or North America.I come from South America, and I found this surprising: most of what I hear about flu deaths tends to come from richer countries in the Northern Hemisphere. But the map shows that the flu is also deadly, in some cases even more so, in other regions where poverty, worse underlying health, limited access to healthcare, and lower vaccination coverage contribute to higher mortality.One explanation for my misperception might be that surveillance and reporting are stronger in the countries that I associate with deaths from flu. Another could also be age differences: people in high-income countries tend to be older, so their total number of deaths — the ones you actually hear about — may still be higher, even if rates are lower.When you consider the total death toll, you realize that the numbers are very large on the whole. Recall that the map only includes respiratory deaths, so the overall mortality is actually higher if we include other flu-related complications like cardiovascular disease.Even if you account for the uncertainty of estimates in low-income countries — due to limited testing and death registration — the overall pattern remains striking: seasonal influenza kills hundreds of thousands each year, with many of these deaths in South America, Africa, and South Asia.Read more in our article, “How many people die from the flu?”

Earlier this year, I attended a shooting competition for queer, often trans, very online misfits. Then Charlie Kirk was killed.

Measuring happiness is difficult, but one way to understand how satisfied people are with their lives is to simply ask them.Self-reported life satisfaction is one key metric that researchers often rely on. It asks people to imagine a hypothetical ladder, where the best possible life for them is a 10, and the worst possible life is a 0. They then have to place their current position on the ladder.The chart shows the three-year average scores from 2022 to 2024 for the four countries with the highest ratings and the four with the lowest.Afghans reported the lowest life satisfaction in the world, far below any other country.This incredibly low score has been replicated in other studies. Researchers recently compared Afghans’ life satisfaction with international datasets dating back to 1946 and found it was the lowest ever recorded. Two-thirds gave a score of 0 or 1 on the 10-point scale.See self-reported levels of life satisfaction in your own country.

Everyone’s suddenly obsessed with the pelvic floor—physical therapists, MAHA influencers, me. Could this deeply misunderstood body part really be the seat of so much modern dysfunction?

Women are much more likely than men to be killed by their intimate partner. The chart shows this across nine OECD countries in 2023.These deaths are rarely isolated events. Research shows that partner homicides are usually the endpoint of a long pattern of coercive control — behaviors such as surveillance, isolation, intimidation, restrictions on daily life, and physical violence.Recognizing both the gender imbalance and its roots in coercive control can help focus support services, encourage family and friends to act sooner, and increase social pressure against abusive behavior.While women face the highest risk from intimate partners, men make up about 80% of homicide victims globally. The gender split in partner homicides is therefore a striking exception.Explore more data on homicide rates where the perpetrator is an intimate partner.

This chart shows global GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation. Looking at the world economy from this perspective, it is the steadiness of this change that stands out to me. Average incomes per person have risen at a fairly constant pace of roughly 2% per year, interrupted only by the 2008–09 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic.One reason this is noteworthy, in my view, is that national economies changed a lot during the same period. Some economies slowed, many others grew, and more generally, some major political shifts took place. Yet when all of this is aggregated, the global average followed a remarkably smooth upward track.The line in the chart ends in 2024, so it does not yet capture more recent developments. But a few recent articles, such as this one from The Economist, look at data for 2025 and point to the same stability.Past trends may not continue in the future. But this data reminds us that global economic aggregates can develop more steadily than the headlines might make us think.Read more about what economic growth is and why it is important.

In 2015, countries worldwide signed the Paris Agreement, aiming to keep the global temperature rise “well below 2°C” and limit this increase to 1.5°C.To meet these targets, there are limits to the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that can be emitted. These are called carbon budgets. Every year we emit more CO2, these budgets shrink. (That’s because total warming is roughly proportional to cumulative CO2.)In the chart, you can see estimates for how much CO2 the world can emit — from the start of next year — while staying below different levels of warming. This is based on having a 50% likelihood of staying below it; if we wanted to guarantee that we didn’t pass these temperatures, our budget would be much smaller.To get a sense of perspective, we’ve compared each budget with the projected amount of CO2 that the world is expected to emit in 2025. This tells us how many years we have left if emissions stay at their current levels.At current emission rates, the 1.5°C budget would run out around 2030. It seems implausible that global emissions will fall quickly enough to avoid this.The 2°C budget would last until mid-century. By taking action on climate change, we buy ourselves more time and can avoid this level of warming.This is based on the latest estimates from the Global Carbon Project. See how emissions are changing in your country.

Have global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions gone up or down this year?The latest projections from the Global Carbon Project give us some insight. Their researchers and analysts do invaluable work in estimating greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, helping us understand how the situation is evolving.Today, they published their latest “carbon budget”. The chart shows their historical estimates, as well as their projections for 2025.They project that this year, emissions from fossil sources — that is, from fossil fuels and industrial processes — will increase by around 1%. Emissions from all three fuels — coal, oil, and gas — are expected to increase. Meanwhile, emissions from land-use change have decreased due to fewer extreme wildfires and reduced deforestation in South America.This reduction in land use may offset the increase from fossil fuels, resulting in a global total similar to last year. Note that estimates for land-use emissions are much less certain than for fossil fuels.While many countries have made progress in reducing emissions, global fossil emissions continue to rise. To tackle climate change, they need to peak and rapidly decrease in the coming years and decades.This is based on the latest estimates from the Global Carbon Project. Explore how global and national emissions are changing.

Roads in rich countries tend to be much safer than those in low- and middle-income countries. Cars are more modern, infrastructure is better, and driving laws are stricter and better enforced.However, there are still huge differences between high-income countries. This is obvious from the chart, which shows death rates from road injuries across various countries. Rates can vary more than 20-fold.I was recently surprised to find that my country, the United Kingdom, has some of the safest roads in the world, alongside Sweden, Singapore, and Norway. It can be easy to complain about the situation in our own country without considering what things are like elsewhere.Road deaths are incredibly high in several Middle Eastern countries, like Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. These countries tend to have far more high-speed highways, drivers often cover much longer distances, and the enforcement of regulations such as speed limits, seatbelt use, and driving distractions is weaker. These countries have reduced fatality rates in recent years, but still have much higher death tolls than other rich countries.Read my article on how the United Kingdom built some of the world’s safest roads.

For years, plastic surgeons thought the proportions of a beautiful buttocks should follow the Fibonacci sequence. Now, people are looking for a more Kardashian shape.

Palantir’s CEO is good with ICE and says he defends human rights. But will Israel and Trump ever go too far for him?

In the late 19th century, Georg Cantor believed his new theory could help the Church understand the infinite nature of the divine. He miscalculated.

The revolution started on social media. It ended with protests, violence, and an online poll to pick the new prime minister.

Kids everywhere know her voice—if not her name. WIRED talks to the former SM trainee about her rise to global superstardom with her hit song “Golden.”

On an airstrip somewhere in Texas, a swarm of killer jets approaches—controlled by, of all things, a large language model.

What motivates people to work is simple. Will my life improve if I put in effort. As long as you have a society where that’s not true, you will have a very demotivated workforce. This is why things like UBI are a terrible idea. If you are at the baseline and don’t see a walkable path to rise above it, you won’t. The more the government or corporations randomly change policies day in and out, the more you feel like that your actions won’t improve your life, and if things do get better (or worse) it’s at the whim of a system much larger than you. Gambling is the ultimate expression of this acceptance. Whether it’s casinos or crypto or lotteries or investments, you relinquish yourself to being an observer, knowing that it’s not effort that gets you ahead, but instead, impersonal luck. The fundamental problem with gambling is that it creates no value. It’s completely zero sum, and that means in the long run in a society of gamblers everyone loses. Additionally, when you win, gambling conditions you to believe this is how money is “made,” even when it clearly isn’t. If you made $100k in a casino on a hot run in one night, how do you motivate yourself to put in a year’s worth of effort to earn that? I’m now a Hong Kong resident. I think people still have no idea how fake the US economy is, and how bad it will get over the next 20 years. I used to think that this was just a phenomenon in tech, but now tech is everything. If nobody is creating the value and everyone is trying to cannibalize, eventually there is nothing left. It’s a long road to redemption, and a shorter one to damnation    – mgk America has an amazing piece of land, and a multicultural civil society will rise again. But before it does, America needs to have a century of humiliation. History is going faster now, so maybe it’ll only be a score. You’ll know things are turning around when the money is real again.

I watched Legally Blonde (2001) today and it’s so quaint to see a time when people basically trusted the system. She goes and works at a “prestigious law firm” like this is some kind of victory, but in reality the whole system was a huge circlejerk. I toured a bunch of Chinese factories last week. One was installing 100 new CNC machines, and there was no hype or secrecy around it. They straight up told me it was $20k a machine. These sort of vibes. “I’m gonna tell you what I’m doing, and you can try to compete, but I’ll still crush you.” And I believe them. As cheap as comma is and as much as we love vertical integration, we are going to continue to work with that factory. The big question: are most people in America productive or unproductive? If it’s the former, why can’t we solve this with democracy? Jail for the cronies and rent-seekers, wireheading city for the homeless, and no more medicare or social security. But I fear it’s the latter: 73.9 million people are on social security. There’s 258 million people over 18 in the US, so 28% of voters are on the take. And that’s just one group of the unproductive. There’s everyone who is working in made up fake systems where both sides ratchet up complexity when really the whole thing should go away. I think the most people are unproductive ship has sailed. America got 51% attacked. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. Can we get a good dictator and not a South America style one? America (people like Elon and Jensen, who are both first-generation immigrants btw) can rival China, partically if we can attract talent from all over the world, but not if this clown show continues. Everyone does understand that productive capacity is how wars are won and lost, right? Would you bet on 100 CNC machines or 100 lawyers?

Here’s a simple test to see if you are who I described in the last blog post. If the money and users went away, would you leave technology? If you were building this stuff for free for you and your 5 friends, would you keep at it? Math has this quality inherently. Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture for him and his boys; no businessfuckers showed up and put ads in the proof, no politicsfuckers showed up and demanded the proof remind you that masks prevent the spread of covid. I wish this was true about tech. At comma, our goal is to build one perfect box that drives a car better than a human. If we were the only one with that box, that would accomplish the goal of the company. Not making money or having users. Those things are fine, but the real goal is the building of the one magical box. We need the cloud to go away. The cloud is a highway to serfdom. And this won’t happen with changes to politics or culture, technology itself is upstream of both of them. Apps like Gmail can host 10,000 users on a single box, so there was never hope that everyone would run their own mail server. The economy of scale is too good. You’d be swimming super upstream to get Web 2.0 off of the cloud. Call it cloud-favoring. There’s some good news in the form of the GPTs. ChatGPT can only host ~10 users on a box, though while ChatGPT has high requirements for compute, it has very low requirements for bandwidth. You could interact with it over a 56k modem. That tips the scales such that chatbots will remain in the cloud, even if we move to a model architechture that doesn’t benefit from batching. The providers want you in the cloud. Call it cloud-neutral. However, robotics is different! Both openpilot and Tesla FSD don’t use the cloud and likely never will. The bandwidth and latency requirements are too high, and as with cars the same thing will be true for all shapes and sizes of robots. Gaming has always struggled to be in the cloud for similar reasons, note that when you buy a Switch or PS5 the compute actually is local. Call these cloud-averse. Robotics is inherently cloud-averse. The companies will all try to shoehorn cloud into it, but like forcing you to create a cloud account for your microwave, people will see it as stupid and favor the products that actually just run locally. As long as there’s decent open source alternatives, the robotics ecosystem will have checks and balances against enshittifcation. As the quality of macOS degrades and Windows forces more and more cloud account crap on you, is the era of the Linux Desktop finally here? I suspect the breakdown of robotics operating systems will look similar to computer and phone operating systems. I also really like the way nanochat is thinking about the foundation model problem. I predict that robotics software will move towards on device learning, but there will still be a foundation model in the repo, and these things will be expensive to make. However, that cost can simply be a commodity – the way nanochat talks about a $100 ChatGPT. More and more of the training code will make its way into openpilot as the robots learn online. There will still be a pretrained world model, but that will be a commodity. A fully reproducible build in 5000 UOps in tinygrad + some commodity data. The way the waves of robotics will break looks bright for individual sovereignty, and robotics will be where the real value in AI comes from. Many “knowledge work” problems are adversarial; not true for physical things like farming. I’ll end with the quote from ecromata: we will abolish scarcity; there will be nothing for them to steal they can’t have for free

I want money. I have high TC. I get big compensation. I advance in my career. I have many business opportunity. I am senior employee. I have many reports. I have big package. I am important. I fly on private jet. I party with model. I go to prestigious school. I have piece of paper with school logo. You can see I am important? You can see I have big package? lol you got laid off from an ad company after spending half your life chasing stuff made up by other men. you sought status instead of skill. you are a loser. get the fuck out.

They take you and make you They look at you in disgusting ways You should’ve never trusted Hollywood    – System of a Down I’ve been watching this. Tech got inflitrated in such a way that you forgot that it was ever different, but watch that linked movie. It was different, and you don’t even really remember. A perfect capture by power. I also read Manna this weekend. It poses a good question; will the machines work for us or will we work for the machines? My brothers in Christ: you cannot even imagine what winning looks like.    – Curtis Yarvin With the way things are currently looking, despite it becoming as easy as taking candy from a baby, people will not give up their desire for power over other people. You do not win at this game If technology is centralized, you will be a slave. The boot stomping on a human face. You will not be one of the 6 winners. There won’t even be 6 winners, the winners will continue to fight with you in the middle until there’s 1 winner. And that winner isn’t really a winner. If one person ends up with all the money, the money is worthless. If you are in any way involved with this, please stop. If enough people stopped building centralized technology and started thinking intelligently about how to build usable decentralized stuff, things could flip. Your vacations aren’t worth it. Your house isn’t worth it. Eating fancy food isn’t worth it. This isn’t the far future, this is 20 years from now. Where do you work? What do you do there? If everyone acted like you, where is the world going? Please stop. Think with a little bit of time horizon.

Learn languages with music, practice with people

In my previous blog post I described some behaviour of C# record types which was unexpected to me, though entirely correct according to the documentation. This is a follow-up post to that one, so if you haven’t read that one yet, please do so – I won’t go over all the same ground. Is this … Continue reading Records and the ‘with’ operator, redux →

Unexpected inconsistency in records The other day, I was trying to figure out a bug in my code, and it turned out to be a misunderstanding on my part as to how C# records work. It’s entirely possible that I’m the only one who expected them to work in the way that I did, but … Continue reading Unexpected inconsistency in records →

Records and Collections This post is to some extent a grab-bag of points of friction I’ve encountered when using records and collections within the election site. Records recap This may end up being the most generally useful blog post in this series. Although records have been in C# since version 10, I haven’t used them … Continue reading Records and Collections →

Storage Since my last post about the data models, I’ve simplified things very slightly – basically the improvements that I thought about while writing the post have now been implemented. I won’t go into the details of the changes, as they’re not really important, but that’s just to explain why some examples might look like … Continue reading Election 2029: Storage →

Data models (and view-models) and how they’re used I was considering using the term “architecture” somewhere in the title of this post, but it feels too pompous for the scale of site. I could probably justify it, but it would give me the ick every time I used the term. But this post will basically … Continue reading Election 2029: Data Models →

Technical overview This post is mostly for scene-setting purposes. There’s nothing particularly remarkable here, but it’s useful to get the plain facts out of the way before we get into genuinely interesting design aspects. Just as a reminder, go to https://election2029.uk if you want to see what any of this looks like at the moment. … Continue reading Election 2029: Technical overview →

Introduction It’s been over 8 months since I started my UK Election 2029 site, and high time that I actually wrote an introduction post so that I can get into more detailed topics later. In 2024, shortly after the UK general election was announced, I created a small site at https://jonskeet.uk/election2024, initially to keep track … Continue reading Election 2029: Introduction →

Shortly after writing my previous post, a colleague pinged me to say she’d figured out what was wrong – at least at the most immediate level, i.e. the exception itself. Nothing is wrong with the ordering code – it’s just that the exception message is too easy to misread. She’s absolutely right, and I’m kicking … Continue reading Election 2029: The Impossible Exception – Solved →

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