On Version History: the messy, all too short beginning of the vertical video revolution.
Stopping to watch the race from outside the track can get you fined, but as long as you keep moving, security can’t do anything about it. Most of the view is obstructed along the pedestrian areas. One of the few exceptions is a pair of escalators at Spring Mountain and Las Vegas Blvd, which are closer than any of the seats and at one of the best turns.
Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity has blown the doors open on the great AI browser fight.
Last week, rumors started flying that Tim Cook might step down as CEO next year and be replaced by John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering. Well, Bloomberg’s Marc Gurman says, not so fast. He claims those reports are simply false, and that while the company is certainly planning for Cook’s eventual retirement, it’s unlikely to happen in 2026.
Gurman:
Yes, Apple will eventually have a new leader. And, yes, it’s probably Ternus. But unless there is some unexpected event that forces Cook to step down sooner than planned, that moment is not at hand.
5
Verge Score
The latest smartphone-sized reader comes with a lot of new features. They’re not all upgrades.
Doors are a weird and notoriously tough nut to crack for game devs. Tom Forsyth, formerly of Valve, shared a story about how he discovered a game-breaking bug less than five minutes into Half Life 2 while building a VR port in 2013. The crazy part was that the bug persisted even when they built the original source for the desktop, instead of VR. It’s a wild tale of math, CPU instruction sets, and game physics. Grab a drink and go read the full thread on Mastodon.
As part of the settlement with Universal, Udio has amended its terms of service, and users can no longer download their outputs. This has AI music makers furious, and with good reason. Unfortunately, they have little recourse, as the contract they sign when creating a Udio account includes a waiver of the right to bring a class action. This should alarm customers of rival services like Suno, which is also in the crosshairs of the major labels.
I don’t like where Windows is going. Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable. Time to give it a shot.
The moss isn’t quite as hardy as the reigning king of extremophiles, the tardigrade, but it put up an impressive showing in an experiment where scientists exposed sporophytes (the reproductive structures that produce spores) to the harsh vacuum of space for 283 days. After crunching the numbers, they believe the moss could survive for around 5,600 days, or a little over 15 years in space and still survive and reproduce. According to the press release:
... Over 80% of the spores survived 9 months outside of the International Space Station (ISS) and made it back to Earth still capable of reproducing, demonstrating for the first time that an early land plant can survive long-term exposure to the elements of space.
Valve’s big hardware push: you asked, we answered.
This Associated Press report explains that after getting authorization for a domestic license plate reader in 2017, the readers “have become a major — and in some places permanent — fixture of the border region.”
Readers are operated by the DEA, local law enforcement paid via federal grants, and at least three companies: Rekor, Vigilant Solutions, and Flock Safety.
Negotiators are deadlocked in a tumultuous close to United Nations climate talks. A proposed roadmap for transitioning away from coal, oil, and gas has become a flashpoint. “We’re facing the reality of a no-deal scenario” EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said earlier today.
Documents released by the House Oversight Committee shed light on Epstein’s day-to-day, largely via email — including his preoccupation with his Google presence.
The feature is rolling out for Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels, according to Microsoft. I like using tables in Apple Notes, so I think they’ll be pretty useful in Notepad, too.
A woman died and her husband was seriously injured after first responders struggled to retrieve them from a burning Model 3, according to a new lawsuit filed against the company. The crash took place January 2023 in Washington state and is the latest to allege that Tesla’s door handle design is trapping people inside their vehicles.
We already knew that the old-school blue books were popular again, given how easy it is to cheat with AI. The Economist reports that blue book sales have nearly tripled from 2022 to October 2025, topping $300,000 in just the first 10 months of this year, according to data firm Circana.
[The Economist]
Video generators like Sora rely on a monoculture that no longer exists — and their creations are straight-up trash.
