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As organizations push to convert AI ambition into defensible business results, many are discovering that infrastructure alone is not enough. Instead, the real challenge lies in reconciling decades of

Rack-scale infrastructure has become the defining unit of deployment as enterprises shift from individual servers to fully integrated racks to meet the extreme power and cooling demands of production

The European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, reportedly plans to issue a record fine to Google LLC over its practices in the search market. German newspaper Handelsblatt today cited so

Written by: Takahiro Sugiyama, Peter Revelant, Mathew Potaczek Introduction In late 2025, Mandiant responded to a security incident involving a compromised web server running KnowledgeDeliver. Knowled

This article defines and clarifies key terminology related to AI agents, including the concepts of 'harness' and 'scaffold,' which are important architectural and operational components in building an

Check Point Research: How Iranian threat actor Nimbus Manticore used techniques like AI-assisted malware development and SEO poisoning to target companies during the US-Iran war — Key Findings — The I

An Ars Technica article examining the cultural pressure to complete highly-acclaimed games like The Witcher 3, arguing that a game being objectively good doesn't obligate players to enjoy it or finish

Joshua McElwee / Reuters: In his ~43,000-word encyclical, the Pope urged governments to slow down AI development and decried “new forms of slavery” in AI and tech supply chains — Pope Leo urged govern

Reuters: Iranian state media reports that President Masoud Pezeshkian has issued an order to reopen international internet access after a near-90-day blackout — Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian has

Bryan Hecht / The Boston Globe: Massachusetts formally recognizes the App Drivers Union, which says it represents ~70,000 workers and is the first state-certified rideshare union in the US — Uber and

Ionut Arghire / SecurityWeek: More than 5,500 GitHub repositories were infected with malware in a supply chain attack, dubbed Megalodon, on May 18 that relies on automated commits — Fake automated com

Dropped this morning by the Vatican: Magnifica Humanitas of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. This is a very interesting document. It's

OpenAI announced a strategic partnership with Grupo Folha and Grupo UOL, major Brazilian media companies, to integrate their content into OpenAI's AI models and products. The partnership enables OpenA

Pope Leo XIV warned of the risks of AI and unconstrained technological power in his first major papal document released on Monday. Magnifica Humanitas is the pope's manifesto on 'safeguarding the huma

Pope Leo XIV today issued an encyclical that contains an extensive discussion of artificial intelligence and its risks. The approximately 43,000-word document is entitled “Magnifica Humanitas,” which

New York Times: Pope Leo XIV presents Magnifica humanitas, his encyclical on AI, calling for AI regulation, protection for children against hypersexualized AI images, and more — The document marks a p

Reuters: Report: the EU plans to fine Google a high triple-digit million euro amount as part of a 2025 probe over concerns it favors its own services in search results — The European Union is planning

Bloomberg: SoftBank stock jumped 4.6% to a record high on Monday, spurred by hopes of big returns from the company's stakes in OpenAI and SB Energy Corp if they go public — SoftBank Group Corp. shares

Océane Herrero / Politico: Sources: Meta, Google, and Amazon execs met Vatican officials on April 29, as part of a quiet lobbying push ahead of Pope Leo XIV's first AI encyclical — As Leo XIV prepares

Sophie Shulman / CTech: Sources: Wix is expected to cut ~1,000 jobs in the coming months, or ~20% of its workforce, after weak Q1 earnings and a ~50% collapse of its stock in 2026 — The company will r

Jennifer Maas / Variety: Star Citizen, a video game in development since 2012, has reached $1B in lifetime funding; it remains in alpha and does not have a confirmed release date — Cloud Imperium Game

Tristan Bove / Fortune: Study: rate of fabricated references in biomedical papers has grown 12x+ since 2023; in early 2026, one in 277 papers had at least one non-existent reference — It was a process

Reuters: Tether plans to launch GELT, an “official” stablecoin representing the Georgian lari, with the support of Georgia's government in an unusual partnership — Tether, the world's biggest stableco

Adi Robertson / The Verge: The FTC settles with Cox, MindSift, and 1010 Digital Works for $930K over claims they falsely said they could use phone mics to spy on users for ad targeting — More specific

I spent five years inside Microsoft Corp.’s Windows business during an era when Dell Technologies Inc. was a top-volume partner. These two companies sold in lockstep. Every Dell personal computer ship

Charles Clover / Financial Times: The UK, outpaced by the US and China in AI, is turning to experimental technologies like neuromorphic computing in search of computing sovereignty — Military capabili

Sonia A. Rao / New York Times: Visually impaired Waymo users in California say riding in a Waymo gives them a feeling of independence and spares them from discrimination from human drivers — Ruben Bru

Lakshmi Varanasi / Business Insider: X says it is cracking down on large accounts that have been gaming its revenue-sharing program by “programmatically reuploading content from smaller accounts” — X

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: A deep dive into Apple Watch and Health efforts; sources: iOS 27 to get a revamped AirPods control panel and default support for AirPlay rivals like Google Cast — Also: iOS 27

New York Times: A look at the scourge of smartphone thefts in London, as victims describe receiving texts threatening them into unlinking Apple IDs from stolen iPhones — Tens of thousands of smartphon

Nikkei Asia: At an IEEE conference, Huawei proposed a new chip scaling law and said it aims to design chips with transistor density equivalent to 1.4nm by 2031 — TAIPEI — Huawei Technologies on Monday

Release: datasette 1.0a30 The big new feature in this alpha is a new customizable 'Jump to...' menu, described in detail in The extensible 'Jump to' menu in Datasette 1.0a30 on the Datasette blog. You

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a4 Taking advantage of the new makeJumpSections() JavaScript plugin hook added in Datasette 1.0a30, datasette-agent now presents this 'Start a new agent chat' interface as

Release: datasette-fixtures 0.1a0 One of the smaller features in Datasette 1.0a30 is this: New documented datasette.fixtures.populate_fixture_database(conn) helper for creating the fixture database ta

Bloomberg: DeepSeek says it will lower V4 Pro API prices by 75% to 0.435/1M input and 0.87/1M output tokens, making permanent the discount prices set to expire on May 31 — DeepSeek said it will make p

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI mischief, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET

Nicole Nguyen / Wall Street Journal: Hands-on with a pre-release build of Google Docs Live, an AI-powered voice tool for drafting documents, rolling out this summer to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers — A

Financial Times: How the AI boom is transforming global M&A, now dominated by the AI-driven race to control the world's energy, fiber networks, and computing capacity — Deals hit record highs, unloved

Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games Via Hacker News I learned that UK publisher Usborne published free PDFs of their 1980s Computer Books, some of which I remember working through on my Co

Paige Smith / Bloomberg: Moment, which develops AI tools for automating fixed-income and equities trading tech, raised a $78M Series C led by Index Ventures, with a16z participating — Moment, the fina

Melissa Shin / Bloomberg: Plenary Americas LP, La Caisse's infrastructure arm, agrees to acquire and take private Canadian database company ISC for $872M, expected to close in Q3 — The infrastructure

Sean O'Kane / TechCrunch: Quartermaster, which is building an analytics platform and a SmartMast, with sensors on a ship's mast to relay real-time maritime data, raised a $43M Series A — Oceans — to s

The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clan

David Oks: Rising DRAM prices are driving “forced premiumization” in the smartphone market in India and Africa, as consumers in the sub-$200 segment risk being priced out — The global memory crunch an

Financial Times: Sources: Princeton Digital Group to sell its Chinese data center assets for as much as $1B, capping global buyout firms' retreat from China's data center market — Princeton Digital Gr

Emily Nicolle / Bloomberg: Tether buys out SoftBank's ~26% stake in bitcoin treasury company Twenty One Capital, taking Tether's stake to ~71%; SoftBank's stake was worth ~$679M — Tether has bought ou