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A Surge of Earthquakes in Alaska Is Raising Red Flags

A powerful offshore earthquake triggered a tsunami warning for communities along a 700-mile (1,100-kilometer) stretch of Alaska’s southern coast on Wednesday, July 16. Fortunately, the wave never came, and ground shaking caused minimal damage, but another large quake could strike this area in the near future. Since 2020, five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 7.2 to 8.2 have struck the southern coast of Alaska. It’s not unusual for seismic activity to occur in this part of the state, as it run

ChatGPT’s new AI agent can browse the web and create PowerPoint slideshows

On Thursday, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Agent, a new feature that lets the company's AI assistant complete multi-step tasks by controlling its own web browser. The update merges capabilities from OpenAI's earlier Operator tool and the Deep Research feature, allowing ChatGPT to navigate websites, run code, and create documents while users maintain control over the process. The feature marks OpenAI's latest entry into what the tech industry calls "agentic AI"—systems that can take autonomous multi-s

Hate Windows 11? Here's how you can make it work more like Windows 10

Pau Barrena/Bloomberg via Getty Images I wrote the original version of this post when Windows 11 was still less than a year old, after reading a ton of feedback from early adopters. I didn't have to spend a lot of time in support forums and other community sites to hear a steady stream of criticism from people who were annoyed by the changes Microsoft made in the Windows 10 user interface they had grown comfortable with. Enough time has passed since the original Windows 11 release that some of

Microsoft's Copilot Vision can now see and analyze your entire Windows desktop

Microsoft Microsoft has expanded the powers and reach of its Copilot Vision AI to help you with all types of content. In a Tuesday blog post, the company revealed that Windows insiders can now opt to share their entire desktop with Copilot Vision where you can ask it to analyze and answer questions about all the items on your screen. A big leap forward Available in the US for Windows 10 and 11 and coming soon to other non-European countries, Copilot Vision on Windows acts as a virtual compani

Get the macOS Finder to Do Just About Anything by Typing Natural Language Commands

I'm genuinely not sure if large language models—often referred to as “AI” in shorthand—are the future of computing. But I also don't think chatbots are how people will use this technology in the years to come. Substage, an indie Mac application by developer Joseph Humfrey, is a simple app that points to a potential alternative—one that's useful right now. This application floats under every Finder window, meaning you see it only when you're browsing files in macOS. You can type English-languag

Ukrainian hackers claim to have destroyed servers of Russian drone maker

Ukrainian hacktivist group BO Team has claimed to have hacked into the network of Russian drone maker Gaskar Group and disrupted its operations. In a post on its Telegram channel, BO Team announced the breach, saying it carried out the attack along with the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance, another hacktivist group that operates in Ukraine, as well as Ukraine’s military intelligence. The three groups, according to a machine translation of the announcement, “carried out large-scale work to seize the en

Android’s Desktop Mode gets a handy shortcut to pin your favorite apps to the taskbar

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority TL;DR Google is improving Android’s still-in-development Desktop Mode by adding the ability to pin apps to the taskbar for quick access. A new “pin to taskbar” shortcut appears in an app’s context menu, letting you add it to the dock for easy launching even after it’s closed. This is a small but necessary step in Google’s effort to make Android a more viable desktop competitor, especially against platforms like the iPad. Android finally has a proper Desktop

Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slower

When it comes to concrete use cases for large language models, AI companies love to point out the ways coders and software developers can use these models to increase their productivity and overall efficiency in creating computer code. However, a new randomized controlled trial has found that experienced open source coders became less efficient at coding-related tasks when they used current AI tools. For their study, researchers at METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research) recruited 16 softwa

Kiro: A new agentic IDE

I’m sure you’ve been there: prompt, prompt, prompt, and you have a working application. It’s fun and feels like magic. But getting it to production requires more. What assumptions did the model make when building it? You guided the agent throughout, but those decisions aren’t documented. Requirements are fuzzy and you can’t tell if the application meets them. You can’t quickly understand how the system is designed and how that design will affect your environment and performance. Sometimes it’s b

AWS launches Kiro, its Cursor clone

I’m sure you’ve been there: prompt, prompt, prompt, and you have a working application. It’s fun and feels like magic. But getting it to production requires more. What assumptions did the model make when building it? You guided the agent throughout, but those decisions aren’t documented. Requirements are fuzzy and you can’t tell if the application meets them. You can’t quickly understand how the system is designed and how that design will affect your environment and performance. Sometimes it’s b

The upcoming GPT-3 moment for RL

The upcoming GPT-3 moment for RL Matthew Barnett, Tamay Besiroglu, Ege Erdil Jun 20, 2025 GPT-3 showed that simply scaling up language models unlocks powerful, task-agnostic, few-shot performance, often outperforming carefully fine-tuned models. Before GPT-3, achieving state-of-the-art performance meant first pre-training models on large generic text corpora, then fine-tuning them on specific tasks. Today’s reinforcement learning is stuck in a similar pre-GPT-3 paradigm. We first pre-train l

Hacking Coroutines into C

Hacking Coroutines into C 12.7.2025 A while ago, I was part of a team developing embedded software. The software was deeply rooted in state machines - dozens of them—spread across multiple functions. While this architecture is common in embedded development, especially for systems without an operating system, I started to question: Is this really the clearest way to express control flow? The state machines in our code worked fine, but understanding and maintaining them was often a headache. T

24 hours with Alexa Plus: we cooked, we chatted, and it kinda lied to me

I’ve waited two years to try out the new Alexa, which was first announced way back in 2023, and this week I finally got access to Alexa Plus. I’ve now spent 24 hours with Amazon’s generative AI-powered voice assistant, and it’s not just an improvement on the original; it’s an entirely new assistant. Alexa Plus knows more, can do more, and is easier to interact with because it understands more. I can ramble, pause, sigh, cough, change my request mid-sentence, and it can adapt and respond appropr

Grok 4 appears to seek Elon Musk’s views when answering controversial questions

Elon musk and the xAI logo. Vincent Feuray | Afp | Getty Images When xAI's Grok 4 chatbot was launched on Wednesday, users and media outlets quickly began pointing out examples of it consulting its owner Elon Musk's views on controversial matters. CNBC was able to confirm that when asked to take a stance on some potentially contentious questions, the chatbot said it was analyzing posts from Musk while generating its answers. When asked, "Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict? O

AI coding tools can reduce productivity

The buzz about AI coding tools is unrelenting. To listen to the reports, startups are launching with tiny engineering teams, non-programmers are “vibe-coding” entire apps, and the job market for entry-level programmers is crashing. But according to a METR experiment conducted in the spring of 2025, there’s at least one cohort that AI tools still aren’t serving. METR performed a rigorous study (blog post, full paper) to measure the productivity gain provided by AI tools for experienced developer

Not So Fast: AI Coding Tools Can Reduce Productivity

The buzz about AI coding tools is unrelenting. To listen to the reports, startups are launching with tiny engineering teams, non-programmers are “vibe-coding” entire apps, and the job market for entry-level programmers is crashing. But according to a METR experiment conducted in the spring of 2025, there’s at least one cohort that AI tools still aren’t serving. METR performed a rigorous study (blog post, full paper) to measure the productivity gain provided by AI tools for experienced developer

The FBI Is Using Polygraphs to Test Officials' Loyalty

Typically, the F.B.I. has turned to polygraph tests to sniff out employees who might have betrayed their country or shown they cannot be trusted with secrets. Since Kash Patel took office as the director of the F.B.I., the bureau has significantly stepped up the use of the lie-detector test, at times subjecting personnel to a question as specific as whether they have cast aspersions on Mr. Patel himself. In interviews and polygraph tests, the F.B.I. has asked senior employees whether they have

Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity

We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI accel

Measuring the Impact of AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity

We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI accel

Automatically Packaging a Haskell Library as a Swift Binary XCFramework

Announcing xcframework or: the happy path for wiring a Haskell dependency to your Swift app I’ve written about Haskell x Swift interoperability before. Calling Haskell from Swift is about marshalling and the foreign function interface. But Creating a macOS app with Haskell and Swift tells the much messier tale of hijacking XCode to vodoo together the Haskell library, its headers, and two handfuls of other magic ingredients into one buildable SwiftUI application. Stop! Don’t click on the last l

Perplexity Comet

The Web Should Work For You We believe curiosity is a superpower. It’s the spark that propels humanity forward. Yet, the web—our greatest source of information—was never designed to nurture curiosity; instead we’ve been asked to “browse” it through a one-way lens. That’s why we made Comet. Comet gives curious minds a thought partner for every aspect of online life. Comet moves every tab or task into a simple space for asking more of the world. With Comet, the web becomes a tool of curiosity, h

Windows 11 KB5062553 & KB5062552 cumulative updates released

Microsoft has released Windows 11 KB5062553 and KB5062552 cumulative updates for versions 24H2 and 23H2 to fix security vulnerabilities and issues. Today's updates are mandatory as they contain the July 2025 Patch Tuesday security patches for vulnerabilities discovered in previous months. You can install today's update by going to Start > Settings > Windows Update and clicking on 'Check for Updates.' You can also manually download and install the update from the Microsoft Update Catalog. Wha

I gave Google Tasks another shot — and remembered why I left

Andy Walker / Android Authority I’m not a calendar person. My day sliced into blue and yellow chunks down to the last minute — even telling me when to eat or take a break — isn’t the kind of rigidity I can live with. That’s far too structured for me. I instead swear by a hotchpotch system of Post-it notes, the good-old paper and pen, and most importantly, my task managing app — TickTick. TickTick is where all my personal and work tasks live, giving me a clear view of what needs to be done, whe

How a big shift in training LLMs led to a capability explosion

In April 2023, a few weeks after the launch of GPT-4, the Internet went wild for two new software projects with the audacious names BabyAGI and AutoGPT. “Over the past week, developers around the world have begun building ‘autonomous agents’ that work with large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 to solve complex problems,” Mark Sullivan wrote for Fast Company. “Autonomous agents can already perform tasks as varied as conducting web research, writing code, and creating to-do lists.”

Backlog.md – Markdown‑native Task Manager and Kanban visualizer for any Git repo

Markdown‑native Task Manager & Kanban visualizer for any Git repository npm i -g backlog.md or bun add -g backlog.md Backlog.md turns any folder with a Git repo into a self‑contained project board powered by plain Markdown files and a zero‑config CLI. Features 📝 Markdown-native tasks -- manage every issue as a plain .md file 🔒 100 % private & offline -- backlog lives entirely inside your repo 📊 Instant terminal Kanban -- backlog board paints a live board in your shell 🌐 Modern web interf

Backlog.md – CLI that auto-generates task files (took my Claude success to 95 %)

Markdown‑native Task Manager & Kanban visualizer for any Git repository npm i -g backlog.md or bun add -g backlog.md Backlog.md turns any folder with a Git repo into a self‑contained project board powered by plain Markdown files and a zero‑config CLI. Features 📝 Markdown-native tasks -- manage every issue as a plain .md file 🔒 100 % private & offline -- backlog lives entirely inside your repo 📊 Instant terminal Kanban -- backlog board paints a live board in your shell 🌐 Modern web interf

The Verge’s summer ‘in’ and ‘out’ list

Here at this website, my colleagues and I follow our beats closely, from wearable tech and laptops to influencer culture and federal policy. Last year, I asked a bunch of staff at The Verge to pretend to be trend forecasters for a lighthearted collection of what’s hot and what’s not. Some of the predictions really held up: many would say the US Supreme Court continues to be out, congestion pricing in New York is decidedly in despite attempts to kill it, and cats are, as ever, a bit of both.

Haskell, Reverse Polish Notation, and Parsing

My Side Quest into Haskell, Reverse Polish Notation, and Parsing 26 Jun, 2025 My Journey into Haskell: Building a Reverse Polish Notation Calculator Introduction: A Side Quest In my attempt to get my first paycheck, aka get a job, I have led myself down a fascinating rabbit hole into functional programming, mathematical notation, and parsing theory. This is the story of how I discovered Haskell, tackled reverse Polish notation, and learned about monadic parsing along the way. My journey bega