The LineShine supercomputer at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen. | Photo: Liang Xu/Xinhua via Getty Images Despite trade restrictions, China has reclaimed the title of the world's fastest supercomputer for the first time since 2018. LineShine has pushed El Capitan out of number one on the TOP500 ranking. That's despite strict limits on what high-powered computing components can be sold to China by US firms, which dominate the list, with America holding three of the top five spots. LineShine doesn't even use any GPUs, which are typically the backbone of modern supercomputers.While reaching the peak of the Top500 carries obvious bragging rights, it also serves as a message from the Chinese government to the US. The Trump administration has sought …Read the full story at The Verge.

That sure is a man in a cube, alright. | Image: NBC / Jim Henson Company I'm sure we're all familiar with Dark Crystal, so we know that Jim Henson can be weird and tackle slightly more mature subject matter. But there is little in his oeuvre that is quite as mind-bending as the Muppetless The Cube. This 1969 teleplay was produced for an NBC anthology series called Experiment in Television, which featured, appropriately enough, various experimental films, plays, and documentaries. One episode even featured Marshall McLuhan explaining his oft-cited theory that "the medium is the message." Even among all these oddities, however, Jim Henson's The Cube stands out. It's a 53-minute bottle film - taking place almost e …Read the full story at The Verge.

Jonathan Rinderknecht was facing arson charges for setting a fire on New Year's Day in 2025, which became one of the deadliest wildfires in LA history. To make their case, prosecutors turned to location data from his iPhone, security camera footage, and witness testimony. But they also turned to his ChatGPT logs.Prosecutors said that Rinderknecht had ChatGPT generate images of fire, asked the chatbot, "Why am I so angry all the time?", and ranted to it about how the wealthy were destroying the world. They also pointed to a screen recording in which Rinderknecht asked ChatGPT whether someone could be blamed for a fire if it was lit by their …Read the full story at The Verge.

Suno has ambitions to be more than just a toy to churn out AI slop, it also wants to be a streaming destination and to break new artists. Spark is their new incubator program for independent artists that provides grants, mentorship, and marketing support.To apply, artists need to be an unsigned singer, songwriter, or producer releasing music under their own name. They also need to agree to some terms and conditions that have raised some eyebrows over on the Suno subreddit. For one, you need to agree to make your songs available on Suno for remixing. That's not necessarily super concerning, but the broad license it grants Suno to your works …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft’s obsession with AI integration began a couple of years ago, when the company announced Copilot as a web tool and then later added it to Windows. The company didn't stop there; it even built custom computers and partnered with OEMs to build PCs with custom chips for AI tasks. You might remember the Snapdragon X Elite processor lineup of Copilot+ PCs that promised an on-device AI experience, multiple AI features, and integrations with popular apps.

Pretty much everything costs more these days, from gas to groceries to online services. For instance, the cost of a standard individual YouTube Premium plan was $12 per month when it was first launched in 2018 and remained at that price through most of 2020 — it's now more than $16 in the U.S. Instead of playing along with Google, I decided to proudly cancel my YouTube Premium account and look at other solutions to get my videos on my television.

There are countless reasons why AI-assisted coding tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, and so on, are incredible. They've practically removed the barrier there once was to begin coding, and turned what used to be hours of grinding through documentation into a conversation. You can now go from a chaotic idea spiraling in your head into a fully working prototype within seconds, and a non-technical person no longer needs to sign up to a months-long course just to build the thing they have in mind.

I'd been an X11 user for decades, so when I saw that the developers of KDE were dropping support in favor of Wayland, I didn't know how to feel. If you were an early Linux user, you couldn't get away from the X Window System unless you wanted to use the command line without a GUI, and we all grew up knowing how to use and tweak it.

A Jellyfin server makes it much easier to consume your media on all the devices you own. By hosting it on a central device on your network, you can stream to any device in your home (or outside of it, with the right setup) without being restricted by the corporations that run modern streaming services.

The founding story of Nest is pretty much a perfect tech myth. A legendary product maker (in this case, Tony Fadell) helps create one of the most successful products ever (the iPhone) and then rides off into the sunset to enjoy the rest of his life, only to have an experience that drags him back for one last job. For Fadell, that job was to try and reinvent the thermostat. And maybe change the way our homes work forever.On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the early days of Nest. The Verge's David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy describe Fadell's frustration with outdated, expensive temperature controls …Read the full story at The Verge.

Using an aging PC build can feel frustrating. It used to boot silently and handle 4K gaming or heavy code compilation without breaking a sweat. Now the fans sound like a jet engine the second you open a browser tab, and games that used to hit a locked 90FPS are suddenly hitching and dipping into the forties.

I've been heavily exploring the world of agentic coding over the last few months, and one thing stuck out to me. No matter which harness or tool I used, every session went the same way. I'd define a goal in a fresh chat, lay down the ground rules for bug-fix steps, add any other workflow options I can remember, and remind the agent about the test-then-commit ritual I always follow (but sometimes forget).