AI

AI Cracked Coding—Now Engineers Face the Real Test

AI Cracked Coding—Now Engineers Face the Real Test

AI Cracked Coding. Now It's Exposing What Engineers Actually Do The moment agentic AI started writing production-grade code at scale, a quiet panic spread through engineering teams—not because code-writing was hard (it wasn't anymore), but because it made visible what software engineers had been hiding from themselves for years: that actually writing the code was never the job. The job was everything else. The conversations. The trade-offs. The politics. The person across the table who doesn't want the refactor because they own the legacy system. The sprint that needs to ship even though the design isn't perfect. The hiring of…
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AI Is Rewiring How We Think—Not Making Us Dumb

AI Is Rewiring How We Think—Not Making Us Dumb

AI Isn't Rotting Your Brain—It's Quietly Rewiring Who's in Charge You used to remember your best friend's phone number. You used to argue with people using facts you'd actually memorized, or at least facts you'd bothered to look up yourself. You used to sit with uncertainty for a few minutes before asking someone else. Now, you ask Claude or ChatGPT in 3 seconds, and it tells you an answer that sounds so confident you don't bother double-checking it. That's not brain rot. It's something more interesting—and harder to reckon with: a fundamental shift in who controls your cognitive process. The…
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How Microsoft’s developers are using AI

Microsoft is pitching a future where AI controls everything on your PC and agents go and do work for you in the background. But before the company gets there, it has to build the tools to make these systems work and convince its own developers that AI is actually capable of achieving these big promises. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed earlier this year that up to 30 percent of the code of "some of our projects" is written by AI, and I've been eager to learn exactly how Microsoft's developers are using the technology ever since. I've been speaking to…
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OpenAI denies liability in teen suicide lawsuit, cites ‘misuse’ of ChatGPT

OpenAI’s response to a lawsuit by the family of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who took his own life after discussing it with ChatGPT for months, said the injuries in this “tragic event” happened as a result of Raine’s “misuse, unauthorized use, unintended use, unforeseeable use, and/or improper use of ChatGPT.” NBC News reports the filing cited its terms of use that prohibit access by teens without a parent or guardian’s consent, bypassing protective measures, or using ChatGPT for suicide or self-harm, and argued that the family’s claims are blocked by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In a blog…
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House overhauls KOSA in a new kids online safety package

The House Energy and Commerce Committee released a package of 19 bills aimed at protecting kids on the internet, teeing Congress up for a chance at passing some of the most substantive internet regulations in recent history, alongside a fight over online speech rights. The subcommittee on commerce will consider the bills during a hearing on Tuesday, including the contentious Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). KOSA has been the centerpiece of advocacy from parent survivors whose kids died after suffering from a range of online harms, including cyberbullying, sextortion, and drugs purchased through the internet. But the new version of…
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David Sacks tried to kill state AI laws — and it blew up in his face

On Wednesday, a rumor began popping up in Washington about a momentous policy change: the White House, it was said, would issue an executive order on Friday that would finally preempt state AI laws, handing over those regulatory powers to the federal government. The minute it leaked online, lawyers and policymakers began to scour every sentence of it. There was a lot about it that seemed politically unfeasible; there was even more that seemed overbroad, possibly illegal. There were a lot of agencies that had suddenly been cut out. But crucially, they noticed how much power would have been handed…
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ChatGPT shopping research builds you a buyer’s guide using AI

ChatGPT shopping research builds you a buyer’s guide using AI

OpenAI is making it easier to plan out holiday shopping with ChatGPT’s latest feature, called “shopping research.” Any shopping question in ChatGPT will trigger this new feature, which is rolling out to all ChatGPT users on free and paid plans on mobile and web, with “nearly unlimited usage” available during the holiday shopping season. Now, if you ask ChatGPT for “best TVs in bright lighting,” for example, as the company’s announcement video shows, the response will end with a button asking if you want to do additional research. This is where the “personal shopper” aspect comes in, although the blog…
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Google denies ‘misleading’ reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

Google denies ‘misleading’ reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

Google is pushing back on viral social media posts and articles like this one by Malwarebytes, claiming Google has changed its policy to use your Gmail messages and attachments to train AI models, and the only way to opt out is by disabling “smart features” like spell checking. But Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson tells The Verge that “these reports are misleading – we have not changed anyone’s settings, Gmail Smart Features have existed for many years, and we do not use your Gmail content for training our Gemini AI model.” You may want to double-check your settings anyway, as one…
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Google’s new AI image creator took my shirt off

Three pros. | Image: The Verge / Google, Nano Banana Pro I gave Google's new Nano Banana Pro a try, and it immediately took my clothes off. I didn't ask it to, but the AI model evidently decided my greetings card would look better with more skin. Nano Banana Pro is, as the name suggests, aimed at professionals. Powered by Gemini 3, it's effectively an upgrade of the company's popular image generation and editing tool that went viral in a social media trend that turned selfies into hyperrealistic 3D figurines. Google says it lets you create higher quality images that…
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Microsoft’s AI-powered copy and paste can now use on-device AI

Microsoft is upgrading its Advanced Paste tool in PowerToys for Windows 11, allowing you to use an on-device AI model to power some of its features. With the 0.96 update, you can route requests through Microsoft’s Foundry Local tool or the open-source Ollama, both of which run AI models on your device’s neural processing unit (NPU) instead of connecting to the cloud. That means you won’t need to purchase API credits to perform certain actions, like having AI translate or summarize the text copied to your clipboard. Plus, you can keep your data on your device. Along with support for…
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