This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about the streaming industry, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedStreaming was once a reprieve from cable. Not only could you watch whatever you wanted at any given time, but you didn't have to sit through five-minute-long commercial breaks. And the best part was the price: Netflix, for example, cost just $7.99 / month when it launched its standalone streaming service in 2010. Amazon's Prime Video was the same, offering ad-free streaming as a p …Read the full story at The Verge.

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).

At this point, Obsidian is as much a hobby for me as it is a productivity tool. I like tinkering with plugins and testing out new ones, and I recently came across one that lets me connect my Jellyfin server to my Obsidian vault. Sounds awesome, right? That's what I thought, until everything was set up and I started testing it.

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 The Verge's David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy describe Fadell's frustration with outdated, expensive temperature controls …Read the full story at The Verge.

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.

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.

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.

Food-safe filament makes 3D printing for the kitchen sound more settled than it really is. The label feels reassuring, especially when printers already do such a good job with brackets, clips, drawer organizers, and replacement bits. It is easy to look at a cleaner material spec and imagine cups, utensils, snack trays, and custom containers finally becoming fair game. The problem is that the filament is only one piece of a much messier food-safety puzzle.

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.

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.

Considering the privacy implications of letting cloud platforms manage footage of my surroundings, I’ve moved to a completely self-hosted surveillance setup. Frigate is my preferred Network Video Recorder for my FOSS home security system, and with its lightweight nature, terrific support for AI accelerators, and top-notch object detection capabilities, it’s a solid companion to my arsenal of smart home services.