Tech News

.NET 11 has been released, bringing C# 15, faster developer tools, and improvements to the runtime and libraries. The update also adds new capabilities for building web, mobile, desktop, and AI applications.

Amstrad’s choice of 3-inch floppy drives was likely driven by cost savings—especially reusing common 5.25-inch controllers and drivers—rather than the long-rumored bankruptcy-auction or scrapheap explanations. Readers recall the disks as robust and reliable, though expensive and lower-capacity than 3.5-inch media. The format also appeared in Sinclair/Amstrad machines and a few niche systems, but 3.5-inch drives soon became the standard.

The U.S. is imposing new rules on ordering synthetic DNA to deter bioterrorism, with the policy apparently affecting government-funded researchers and suppliers. Commenters question how much supply-side restrictions will help, noting that DNA manipulation is not especially difficult and determined actors may find workarounds. Some also speculate about whether restrictions relate to hidden AI biotech capabilities, but the discussion offers no clear evidence.

A new guide explains how to store SSH keys in the macOS Secure Enclave and require Touch ID for every use. The method works without third-party apps, offering stronger local key protection on Macs.

Dave Billings bought a Boeing 737-500 fuselage for about £4,000 on Facebook Marketplace. The plane has now been lifted into his back garden as he works on turning it into a bunker.

A startup has raised $30M to develop a parallel-first CPU with thousands of cores that abandons shared mutable memory and linear instruction sequences, paired with its open-source Vine language. Commenters are skeptical, comparing the approach to GPUs and long-standing superscalar optimizations while stressing that the real challenge is building compilers and software for a new architecture.

Messy Nessy’s compendium gathers images of abandoned greenhouses, showcasing their eerie beauty and the way neglected glass structures are reclaimed by overgrowth. The piece surveys these forgotten sites as relics of past cultivation, quiet decay, and unexpected visual charm.

Counterfeit wine fraud, long focused on high-end bottles, is increasingly targeting everyday wines found on supermarket shelves. Criminal gangs are producing fake wine at broader price points, raising concerns for consumers and brands.

A developer has statically recompiled Call of Duty: Black Ops II from 32-bit x86 Windows to native ARM64 macOS. The project uses Remill to LLVM IR, a hand-written Win32 runtime, and Direct3D 11 rendering via Metal, with no Wine and no game files.

Aircad is a new browser-based tool for professional 2D drafting and 3D modeling. It adds multiplayer editing and an AI agent that can draft, model, and render alongside users.

LiteDRAM offers a small, configurable DRAM core, and a new write-up explains the DRAM interface and PHY. It covers why DDR3 and newer interfaces must be tuned at boot to ensure reliable high-speed memory operation.

Researchers reconstructed the deep history of human-tuna interactions by combining archaeological bones, ancient rock art, frescos and vases, written historical records, and ethnographic accounts. The multidisciplinary evidence traces how people and tuna have been linked across cultures and centuries.

A look back at the ordinary, unremarkable things created in 2026, focusing on mundane innovations that quietly shaped daily life without fanfare. The piece reflects on how understated products and ideas can have a lasting impact despite lacking obvious spectacle.

The piece argues that studying Babylonian mathematics can sharpen historians’ “research taste”—the intuition for choosing fruitful questions and methods—by forcing deep engagement with unfamiliar technical traditions. Drawing on an eccentric historian’s example, it shows how such immersion challenges modern assumptions and improves historical inquiry.

A survey across nine countries found that about 24% of respondents had seen a label noting content was made with AI in the past week, with 20% reporting another AI-related encounter. Despite AI’s growing role as an information gateway, audiences remain reluctant to let it make their news.

This 2013 article revisits a clever, old-fashioned game-programming trick that exemplifies resourceful coding from earlier eras. It highlights a notable hack used in classic game development, though further details are not provided.

Sixteen LLMs took on TIS-100’s community leaderboard, finding 133 new frontier points across 18 of 55 puzzles. Their runs included three outright cycle records, showing LLMs can produce competitive solutions to the programming puzzle.

A new work-in-progress GitHub project, no382001/zipc, is developing a ZIP-style Prolog virtual machine for trilog. The repository is open for contributions as development continues.

The piece recounts the decade-long journey behind The BEAM Book, spanning three publishers and an open-source sprint. It explains the author’s motivation for documenting the BEAM and the challenges of bringing the project to completion.

The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is a scholarly reference work focused on the Assyrian language. Associated with the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, it serves as a comprehensive lexical resource.

A new study suggests that “jumping genes,” or transposable elements, played a key role in ant evolution after the dinosaurs went extinct. Researchers found these mobile genetic elements helped ants diversify and adapt, offering insight into how genetic changes can drive evolution.

In “Good Enough for a Tuesday Night,” Merritt Tierce recounts an affair with an economist that became a lens on the cost-benefit calculus of modern dating. The essay explores how romantic choices get weighed like transactions and what that reveals about intimacy today.

We just released a collection of popular songs with music sheets that show a letter on each note, which makes playing much easier when you're just starting out. Play any song with the built-in player, or switch to piano view and follow the falling notes. You can also create your own music sheets with our Music Letter Notes app. Enjoy!

Toyota is reviving its Scion brand with an unusual lineup for the American market. The relaunched Scion plans to sell a kei truck, a bike, and a hybrid side-by-side.

AlphaProof Code agents generated over three million lines of machine-checked Lean proofs to verify Signal’s core cryptographic protections down to the machine-instruction level. The effort aims to provide formal assurance for critical cryptographic code.

Gemini 4 Carbon is now available to developers, enterprises, scientists, and consumers. The release expands access to the new model across both professional and consumer use cases.

Two Amazon engineers replaced Claude Sonnet 4.6 with the Strands Decider decision model in one of the company’s largest internal ticketing systems. The swap is reportedly saving Amazon millions of dollars.

Blender 5.3 has been released, adding Gaussian splat support alongside DLSS denoising, light dispersion, EEVEE fisheye, Outliner sorting, and ripple video editing. The update brings a broad mix of rendering, workflow, and video-editing improvements.

Fable 5.2 reportedly generated a complete, multi-level game in a single attempt, bringing a user’s nephew’s dream game to life. The result suggests LLMs can now produce full playable games that are genuinely fun.

Val Town, a platform for building and deploying JavaScript functions, is winding down. The company announced the closure with a brief message thanking users for building with it.