“Raise your hand if YouTube has ever shown you a video you didn’t search for.” Every hand in the room went up. “Now keep your hand up if you ended up watching it.” Not a single hand went down. Whispers and giggles scattered across the room. We were 45 minutes into what was supposed to be a talk…

February 17, 2026 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm The world runs on copilots now AI has slipped from chatbot novelty to infrastructure in our schools, offices and hospitals. The harms may scale faster than the gains By Eric Sullivan edited by Seth Fletcher Tavis Coburn Join Our Community of…

Adam Hart has been a nurse at St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson, Nev., for 14 years. A few years ago, while assigned to help out in the emergency department, he was listening to the ambulance report on a patient who’d just arrived—an elderly woman with dangerously low blood pressure—when a…

We’re open-sourcing Upright, the synthetic monitoring system we built to watch over Basecamp, HEY, Fizzy and our many other services. Upright runs health checks from multiple geographic locations and tells us when something breaks. It’s a Rails engine that you deploy to cheap VPS nodes around the…

I write this filled with sadness. Last week, I wrote about how AI is now replacing white-collar workers in earnest as Claude’s Co-work released plug-ins for legal, financial and marketing functions. Social media is filled with accounts from long-time software developers declaring themselves obsolete…

Thanks for subscribing to SatPost. Today, we find out why Docusign has 7,000 employees (and what can it tell us about how AI coding agents will chance B2B SaaS)? Also this week: 29 Thoughts on Super Bowl LX Jony Ive & Ferrari Collaboration …and them wild posts (including EV charging tech) In early…

Back in 2022, my article outlining the Konik Method for Making Useful Notes won Obsidian October and was widely shared in notetaking communities — although it was written before my migration to Substack so alas, all the comments are lost. Now that it’s been three years (!) I thought it might be…

I’ll start with some more tidbits from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat ❄ ❄ We were tired after the event, but our marketing folks forced Rachel Laycock and I to do a quick video. We’re often asked if this event was about creating some kind of new manifesto for AI-enabled…

Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they…

Weird 99% of adults over 40 have shoulder “abnormalities” on an MRI, study finds Some adults over 40 have shoulder pain, but nearly all have “abnormal” joints. Beth Mole – Feb 17, 2026 9:17 am | 18 Man with shoulder pain Credit: Getty | manusapon kasosod Man with shoulder pain Credit: Getty |…

Last summer, on work trips to Portland, Oregon, and New York, and in the fall, while visiting London and Paris, I went out of my way to meet up with old friends, college classmates, and former colleagues, hoping someone would ask the question I’d waited so long to hear: Had I lost weight? I was…

I've spent the better part of a decade building out an ebook library. Be it the hundreds of books I've bought, the many I've hoarded as part of free giveaways, and, of course, various Humble Bundles. My library is a sprawling mess of ePubs, PDFs, Mobi files, and a few esoteric files for good…

ai agents thoughts Author Wes McKinney Published February 17, 2026 Like a lot of people, I’ve found that AI is terrible for my sleep schedule. In the past I’d wake up briefly at 4 or 4:30 in the morning to have a sip of water or use the bathroom; now I have trouble going back to sleep. I could be…

Share this article Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged…

As cinephiles await the big screen event that is The Odyssey, Jonathan Nolan has given his early review of the movie. Writer/director Christopher Nolan‘s brother, who himself is a director and EP on Fallout, praised the upcoming Universal Pictures adaptation of Homer’s epic as a “spectacular film”…

Around the same time and independently were published three books on the history of views of inequality, two of which begin with Greek philosophers and early Christians, and the third (mine) with Physiocrats or the Age of Enlightenment. My Visions of Inequality was published in October 2023, Darrin…

09 Feb, 2026 In the last couple weeks, various folks have written about feeling an inflection point using agentic AI for building software. The consensus seems to be that these tools have crossed some threshold into being genuinely game-changing, and maybe there's no turning back. The piece…

Regular Current Affairs readers know that I have a tendency to make grumbling remarks about a magazine called The Atlantic. In fact, in our print edition we recently awarded The Atlantic a prize for “Worst Magazine In America.” This prompted an irate letter from one of our subscribers, who said that…

Every convenience I enjoy in life has been made possible by the immiseration of others. The oranges on the table, the winter coat I wear as I rush down the steps of my apartment building to the subway—all of it would not exist if someone elsewhere hadn’t toiled in an orchard, a factory, in the…

Close News by 2 mins read 9 February 2026 Follow @@Will_Rimell Share Touchscreens are “the wrong technology to be the primary interface” in cars, according to the man who designed the iPhone and iPad. Many car designers credit Jony Ive’s 2007 creation – the first phone to feature a touchscreen,…

Feb. 9 (UPI) -- As strained relations between Canada and the Trump administration enter a second year, the latest statistics and anecdotal evidence indicate the flight of Canadian "snowbirds" from Florida is still negatively affecting its vital tourism economy. Angry Canadians have been engaged in…

There's a particular joy in slinging a mirrorless camera over your shoulder and realizing it barely tugs at the strap. That feeling multiplies when you glance down and see the lens sitting almost flush with the body, transforming what should be a serious photographic tool into something that looks…

DisplayPort and HDMI are dueling video interface standards, and you've probably come across each of them on different devices. Unlike other universal communication standards like USB, display communication standards are splintered into two very common protocols. HDMI is the more common cable and…

I spend 8+ hours a day building with AI. Claude, Cursor, Telex — I’m in it. I love these tools. I also love WordPress. And I’m tired of people telling me I have to pick one. Here’s what nobody in the “AI will kill WordPress” crowd seems to understand: I have never once considered replacing the…

Static types, algebraic data types, making illegal states unrepresentable: the functional programming tradition has developed extraordinary tools for reasoning about programs. I have spent over a decade writing Haskell professionally, and I believe in all of it. But the very effectiveness of these…

The SSH agent is a little daemon that holds your private keys in memory. This is particularly handy when your keys are protected by a passphrase: you can unlock and add your keys to the agent once and, from then on, any SSH client such as ssh(1) can interact with the keys without asking you for the…

Ice cream with maple syrup and walnuts, a possible superfood? The Obesity Epidemic Epidemiologists agree that America is facing an obesity crisis. Three-quarters of U.S. adults are now overweight or obese[1], and about one in five children are obese.[2] There are likely several factors that are…

I wrote my first line of code in 1983. I was seven years old, typing BASIC into a machine that had less processing power than the chip in your washing machine. I understood that machine completely. Every byte of RAM had a purpose I could trace. Every pixel on screen was there because I’d put it…

We plan our lives like we're editing a movie trailer. The trip to Portugal, or the product launch, or the transformation photo at the gym. The big moment where everything crystallizes into meaning. We accumulate these peaks in our imagination, and then arrange them into a montage that proves our…

Steve Yegge 13 min read·Just now -- This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on. I first started noticing a concerning new phenomenon a month ago, just after the new year, where people were overworking due to AI. This week I’m suddenly seeing a…

by Ploum on 2026-02-11 You don’t need to apologize for taking hours, days, or years to reply to one of my emails. If we are not close collaborators, and if I didn’t explicitly tell you I was waiting for your answer within a specific timeframe, then please stop apologizing for replying late! This is…

Get updates Follow @mattshumer_ Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren't paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to…

Python 3.14 introduced the compression.zstd module. It is a standard library implementation of Facebook’s Zstandard (Zstd) compression algorithm. It was developed a decade ago by Yann Collet, who holds a blog devoted to compression algorithms. I am not a compression expert, but Zstd caught my eye…

The latest trend in mainstream commentary is 'meeting them where they are, no matter what'. The most prominent in this practice is Ezra Klein: "Much of what I would describe as Kirk's worst moments were now just standard fair MAGA Republicanism. And the leader of MAGA Republicanism is the President…

Our App Philosophy We believe that apps should never crash. They should be free of bugs. They should be fast — they should feel lighter-than-air. We believe that quality is more important than just piling on features; we believe that quality is the most important feature. And we believe that high…