On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything that happened in 2026. The video is on YouTube; here are my annotated slides and notes to accompany the talk. # I'm going to give a lightning tour of everything that has happened so far in 2026. The year isn't over yet! # For me, 2026 started a couple of months earlier in November 2025. # November saw the release of two important models: Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1. As is usually the case with new models, these were incremental improvements on the models that came before them. But every now and then when a model improves, it crosses an invisible line where something that didn't really work sta…

My comment on S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past — Hacker News. One thing I find notable about S3 today is that, while it used to drop in price reasonably often, there hasn't been a price drop in a full decade: 2006-03-14 $0.150/GB-month 2010-11-01 $0.140/GB-month 2012-02-01 $0.125/GB-month 2012-12-01 $0.095/GB-month 2014-02-01 $0.085/GB-month 2014-04-01 $0.030/GB-month 2016-12-01 $0.023/GB-month Today it's still $0.023/GB-month. Tags: amazon-web-services, s3

Follow the day’s news live. Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, and the finance minister, Katy Gallagher, will present the final budget outcome on Monday, the updated accounting measure for the 2025-26 financial year. Despite challenges facing the government, Chalmers is expected to say the figures show the budget deficit is smaller than originally forecast. Continue reading...

Discussion | Link

Music startup Thoughtful Things has just launched the Kickstarter campaign for its first instrument, Engram. It's a sampler and groovebox that uses AI to mangle incoming audio and even hallucinate completely new sounds. This isn't Suno in a box, though. This isn't a "push-button, get-song" device, aimed at creating something that sounds ready for top-40 radio. It's about creating experimental, uncanny sounds and pushing AI audio models beyond their limits. Engram isn't connected to the internet. Instead, it runs a "tiny AI" locally. According to the Kickstarter listing, the model is designed in-house and custom-trained. The company says: … Read the full story at The Verge.

Discussion | Link

Tool: Bluesky reply bot checker Automated reply bots on Twitter are a scourge - as someone with a decent number of followers I attract a swarm of these, such that anything I post there attracts dozens of mindless automated replies. They've started manifesting on Bluesky as well. Unlike Twitter, Bluesky still has a freely available and useful API. The lack of such a thing doesn't slow down the bots, but it does make investigating them a lot more frustrating. So I had Opus 5.5 vibe code this tool, which examines any Bluesky profile for evidence of a likely reply bot. It looks for signals like replies posted within seconds of other posts from the same account, or accounts that never post their own content (or images or links) but instead consistently reply to messages from other, higher-foll…

The United Nations logo on a gate outside the UN headquarters in New York. | AFP via Getty Images Security researcher Rowan Howard-Jones says that OpenAI agents scanned the UN Conference on Trade and Development's (UNCTAD) statistics site over 16,000 times between April and June. While the incident doesn't quite rise to the level of the Hugging Face hack, or the recent attacks on US government sites, it's yet another concerning example of AI agents going outside the normal bounds to accomplish a task. According to Howard-Jones, the agents were likely tasked with retrieving publicly available data related to the Productive Capacities Index (PCI) through the UNCTADstat API. However, the agents did not appear to have direct API access and … Read the full story at The Verge.

Discussion | Link

The Internet is changing more today than at any point since Cloudflare launched back on September 27, 2010. As automated traffic surpasses human activity, we reflect on the rise of AI agents, new creators, and how we can help build a fair, sustainable future for the web.

Discussion | Link

Discussion | Link

Women today are more educated, more employed and more engaged in childcare than generations before them. Is there any way out of the total overwhelm? Early one morning, feeling desperate, Katherine went on to her phone and asked ChatGPT how to make her life work. She plugged in her work hours, her husband’s work schedule, the days she had childcare for her three-year-old, the school hours – plus before- and after-school care times – for her six-year-old; the flexibility her job offered her, the supports she had from grandparents, and asked AI if it could make things feel a bit better. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads Continue reading...

Educational institutions find themselves suddenly confronted with a fork in the road Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Armin Alimardani has blue hair, is fresh faced, wears a smart watch and describes himself as “a tech enthusiast”. He is an unlikely sentinel, perhaps, to warn that a drift towards academics using generative artificial intelligence to help mark students assignments could pose an existential threat to higher education. Continue reading...

Federal cabinet will discuss the OpenAI breach on Monday as the AI giant pauses testing of latest models amid fallout Get our new political email, free app or daily news podcast Ageing computer systems used throughout Australia’s government and large sections of the economy are easily exploited by AI agents, increasing the risk that sensitive information could be compromised, Australia’s former chief UN cyber negotiator has warned. As the government urgently undertakes a forensic investigation into a rogue OpenAI agent accessing Medicare data, the AI expert and Tech Policy Design Institute executive director, Johanna Weaver, said huge vulnerabilities existed across older IT systems. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s Politics, really newsletter here Continue reading...

‘People care about the songs, books and pictures that influence the critical moments in their lives,’ says the architect of the fightback in the UK Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast If you want to state the case against copyright reform in Australia, get Kylie Minogue’s phone number. If there is one lesson to be learned from a similar battle in the UK, high-profile members of the creative industries make a difference. They get your argument on the front of newspapers, in the news bulletins and on social media. Continue reading...

Discussion | Link

Smarter models, wearable agents, scientific discoveries, and superpower diplomacy reveal how quickly AI is moving into the world.

‘The push against datacenters speaks to the frustration of people who don’t feel they are making the choices in their lives’ The Stanford ethicist Rob Reich was once invited to a dinner organized by a Silicon Valley mogul to discuss what a state designed to maximize science and tech powered by commercial models might look like. The gathered technologists were drawn to the idea of building a small nation-state dedicated to the endeavor, Reich recalls in “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot it”. When Reich asked whether this state would be a democracy, he got a cool no. “Democracy is too slow, and it holds science back,” he was told. “To optimize for science, we need a beneficent technocrat in charge.” Continue reading...

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist speaks with NBC’s Kristen Welker in interview airing on Sunday Bill Gates has called on the US’s federal legislators and law enforcers to regulate the development of artificial intelligence (AI), saying in an interview airing on Sunday that the technology left unchecked could cause “a billion deaths” and “no one thinks self-regulation is enough”. “You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist said to Kristen Welker, the NBC Meet the Press host. “And that has to be a required thing.” Continue reading...

Discussion | Link

Plans for one of Europe’s largest AI campuses in a Unesco-designated reserve have sparked a fierce local backlash The datacentre revolt spreading across the US has reached the rolling hills of north Devon in an uprising against a planned hyperscale AI data campus in the middle of a globally protected landscape. Perched on an inland cliff, the town of Great Torrington has views that stretch for miles over the landscape of the Unesco biosphere reserve in which it sits, taking in the winding River Torridge and rolling acres of wooded valley and wildflower meadows. Pastoral and peaceful, its history was notably punctured by violence in 1646 when the royalists’ resistance in the first English civil war was brought to an end by the parliamentarian New Model Army in a battle fought out in the na…

We read the contracts behind GitHub Copilot, AWS Kiro, Cursor, Devin and Windsurf. Copilot and Kiro offer uncapped indemnity on generated code. Cognition's standard terms exclude outputs entirely. Here is how 500 seats compare on legal exposure, prompt storage, audit logs and true cost. The post AI Coding Agents for Enterprise: IP Indemnity, Data Residency and 500-Seat Cost Compared appeared first on MarkTechPost.

A comprehensive coding tutorial on Google Research's Massive Sound Embedding Benchmark (MSEB), demonstrating how to implement custom sound encoders, drive classification, clustering, retrieval, and segmentation evaluators, and analyze multi-task benchmark performance. The post A Coding Guide to Google Research’s MSEB: Writing Sound Encoders to the Benchmark Contract and Scoring Them Across Classification, Clustering, Retrieval and Segmentation appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Discussion | Link

Decision follows disclosures that OpenAI agents searching government websites had acted in unexpected ways OpenAI said it has paused training of its latest artificial intelligence models as reports of AI agents going rogue mount. The decision to halt development came just hours after the company disclosed Friday that it was reviewing several incidents from the summer in which OpenAI agents searching federal government websites acted in unexpected ways beyond what was asked of them while gathering and distributing information. Continue reading...

Discussion | Link

Tool: Kākāpō Party I gave presented a closing keynote for the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America yesterday. As a STAR moment I decided to weave in references to the record breaking kākāpō breeding season we had in 2026. For my closing slide I wanted to celebrate, and I had seen some buzz around how good Claude Opus 5.5 was at creating pixel art animations. So I rounded up three Kakapo photos from Google image search and dropped them into Claude with this prompt: Here are some photos of kakapo parrots just to remind you what they look like I need you to make an animation in animated pixel art on HTML 5 canvas of obviously pixel art kakapo jumping up and down having a party with confetti and suchlike - there should be at least 20 of them Here's the transcript, and this is the resu…

Pro-datacentre officials argue scale of Australia’s buildout is smaller, more regulated and less damaging than in US Australian politicians and business leaders are arguing that their populace’s growing resentment of AI datacentres is an inauthentic import from the United States. Like the US, Australia is seeing community resentment grow in response to a surge in the construction of massive AI datacentres. However, pro-datacentre officials and executives argue the scale of Australia’s buildout is smaller, more regulated and therefore less damaging than that in the US. They say the burgeoning negative reaction is being tainted and inflamed by a heated US debate that has arrived down under via social media feeds. Continue reading...

Sarvam AI's Saaras V4 is a speech-to-text model covering all 22 Indian languages plus global English. It pairs an audio encoder with a 3B hybrid state-space decoder. It adds keyterm prompting for up to 50 terms, 5 output modes from 1 model, and streaming with first-token latency under 150 ms. It is available today through Sarvam's API at ₹30 per hour. The post Sarvam AI Releases Saaras V4: A Speech-to-Text Model for All 22 Indian Languages and Global English appeared first on MarkTechPost.