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Banning adult content at WaPo.

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Dominic Preston
Someone nailed their halftime show bets on Polymarket.

An anonymous Polymarket account, created a day before the Super Bowl, bet exclusively on celebrity appearances during Bad Bunny’s performance, and got every single one right. It’s a little less alarming than the user who seemed to know Venezuelan president Maduro’s capture was coming, but no less suspicious.

Screenshot: X / Polymarket
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Dominic Preston
Edge cases only.

As Waymo uses AI-generated 3D worlds to simulate driverless cars’ encounters with tornadoes, floods, and even elephants, one commenter wonders if they could try AI school buses next.

cowboyfromspace:

They got elephants down but forgot about school buses?

Get the day’s best comment and more in my free newsletter, The Verge Daily.

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External Link
Dominic Preston
Disney loses Dolby in Europe.

Disney Plus subscribers in a few European countries have spotted that Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and 3D content have disappeared from the service. A Disney statement blames it on “technical challenges,” but FlatpanelsHD points out it may be linked to a patent dispute in Germany.

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Andrew J. Hawkins
Lyft doing teen accounts now, too.

The new accounts for riders aged 13 to 17 launch today in over 200 major markets, including New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Boston, and Washington, DC. Parents get a link to track trips in real time, receive updates at pickup and drop-off, and can communicate directly with their teen’s Lyft driver if needed, the company says. The announcement comes almost three years after Uber first launched its teen accounts.

1/3Image: Lyft
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Dominic Preston
EU tells Meta to let other AIs back on WhatsApp.

The European Commission has weighed in on the November decision to block the likes of ChatGPT and Copilot from WhatsApp, and thinks it violates EU antitrust laws. It’s surprisingly fast for the organization, which called the issue “urgent” because of the risk of “irreparable” damage to competition in the nascent AI industry.

European Commission illustration of its measures to make Meta include 3rd party chatbots on WhatsApp
Image: European Commission
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Jess Weatherbed
2026 AI investments will cost more than the Moon landing.

Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are planning to spend $670 billion on AI infrastructure this year, more than some of the biggest capital efforts in US history by percentage of gross domestic product. It’s dwarfed only by the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the US.

A graph taken from The Wall Streey Journal showing spending as percentage of annual average GDP.
The 2026 spend on AI alone is bigger than the entire 1850s railroad expansion and the Apollo space program.
Graph by The Wall Street Journal
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Jess Weatherbed
The State Department is deleting X posts.

The removals — which follow the Trump administration’s previous data purging efforts — target all posts prior to the president returning to office in January 2025, with a goal to “limit confusion on US government policy,” A spokesperson told NPR that the department’s X accounts “are one of our most powerful tools for advancing the America First goals.”

Reality is losing the deepfake war
Play

Why you can’t label your way into consensus reality amid the AI deepfake apocalypse.

Nilay Patel
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Richard Lawler
Ring advertised its neighborhood surveillance network.

The Search Party ad showed Jamie Siminoff’s vision of what connected cameras can do, and it seems to suggest they will only use that power to find lost dogs.

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Youtube
Richard Lawler
T-Mobile and Coinbase’s Super Bowl ads used the Backstreet Boys in very different ways.

And neither one had noticeable AI. T-Mobile brought the actual Backstreet Boys in, while Coinbase broke things up with a weird karaoke-style presentation of “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” to highlight its crypto exchange without actually mentioning crypto.

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Richard Lawler
Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad has a change that made it less directly about OpenAI and ChatGPT.

The round of Big Game ads Anthropic previewed earlier this week set Sam Altman off, as he called them “clearly dishonest.”

Now, while the original ad says, “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” nodding to OpenAI’s plans, the one that aired replaced it with a new tagline: “There is a time and place for ads. Your conversations with AI should not be one of them.”

Screenshot from Anthropic ad saying “ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
Anthropic’s original Super Bowl ad’s closing message, which is not the same as the one that aired on Sunday.
Image: Anthropic
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Youtube
Richard Lawler
OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad claims “You can just build things” with Codex.

As OpenAI and Anthropic feud over AI advertising, both companies are running Super Bowl ads for their AI products. After OpenAI boss Sam Altman said its ad would focus on “builders,” OpenAI debuted this ad about its AI coding agent, Codex.

ChatGPT is much more well-known, but enterprise use of tools like Codex is probably where OpenAI’s money is.

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Richard Lawler
SpaceX brings Starlink to the Super Bowl broadcast.

The first Super Bowl ad from SpaceX apparently didn’t have enough time left in production to mention its newly-joined X / xAI elements, but it is promoting the idea of global satellite internet.

I drove three Chinese cars — here’s why they would clean up in the US

The Geely, Lynk & Co, and Zeekr cars we drove were all ready for US primetime.

John Voelcker
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Youtube
Terrence O'Brien
Super Beatmaker is the roguelike TTRPG for music making I need in my life.

The world of affordable plugins, sample library subscriptions, and a particularly virulent case of GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) has me making less music, not more. YouTuber and producer Jon Makes Beats is developing a TTRPG that battles decision paralysis with dice rolls and a Dungeons & Dragons-like rule system.

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Youtube
Terrence O'Brien
A space crab made of rocks would die for Ryan Gosling in the final Project Hail Mary trailer.

The adaptation of Andy Weir’s best-selling novel is hitting theaters on March 20th. But, before that, we’re getting our clearest look yet at Rocky, the alien that befriends Gosling’s Ryland Grace. This trailer really ramps up the drama and… wait, why is Grace teaching Rocky to dance?

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Instagram
Terrence O'Brien
Cardi B gave a robot a lapdance and it threw itself at her.

Cardi had a little fun with a pint-sized humanoid in San Francisco. She ran her hands over its tiny silver body, got a little flirty, and then seemingly was caught off guard by its weight. She put her arms around its neck, it tilted forward, and they both hit the pavement.

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Instagram
Terrence O'Brien
Watch an Amazon delivery drone crash into an apartment building in Texas.

Amazon’s drones have had a… let’s say, rocky history. On Wednesday, one hit the side of a building in Richardson, Texas, before falling to the ground in smoke. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, and damage to the building was minimal, according to Amazon.

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Terrence O'Brien
Friendly reminder to back up your backups.

Threads user innneresting was archiving photos and videos backed up on CDs and DVDs, and encountered an alarming amount of failures. Many of the discs were Verbatim DataLifePlus discs from 2005, advertised to last up to 50 years, and well cared for. You can never have too much redundancy.

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Terrence O'Brien
A power outage is causing problems for some Microsoft customers.

The issue appears to be mostly affecting users on the West Coast, but certain services that rely on Azure, including the Microsoft Store, are experiencing outages and slowdowns after a data center suffered a partial power loss. Microsoft’s Azure Status Page is updating regularly:

Starting at 08:00 UTC on 07 February 2026, a subset of customers using Azure services in the West US region may experience intermittent service unavailability or delays in monitoring and log data for some resources hosted in the affected datacenter areas. Impacted customers may observe degraded performance or delayed telemetry as services continue to recover.

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Terrence O'Brien
OpenClaw is scanning AI skills after hundreds of malicious add-ons were found on ClawHub.

Researchers raised alarms when over 400 malicious skills were uploaded to ClawHub and GitHub in just one week. That prompted an outcry, so OpenClaw partnered with VirusTotal to scan third-party skills. The company acknowledges it’s not a “silver bullet,” but it should provide at least some reassurance to concerned users.

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Youtube
Terrence O'Brien
MST3K is coming back. Again.

Instead of Jonah Ray, Mike Nelson (from the show’s original run) will be donning the jumpsuit. Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett will also be reprising their roles as Servo and Crow. The focus of MST3K: The RiffTrax Experiments will be on “classic bad” movies and it’s already blown past its Kickstarter goal.

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Youtube
Terrence O'Brien
Moody is a teleprompter that lives in the notch on your Mac.

Sure, you could just load a script up in a window on your laptop, but then you wouldn’t be looking into the camera, which makes things feel awkward and amateurish when you’re recording a video. Moody solves that by putting the prompter in the notch right next to the lens.

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Stevie Bonifield
An advisor to Prince Andrew tried to pitch Epstein on EV investments.

David Stern suggested Epstein invest in multiple EV startups, including Lucid Motors, Faraday Future, and Canoo, TechCrunch reports. Stern was also an advisor to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and worked with Epstein for nearly a decade, calling him his “mentor.” He also pitched Epstein on buying farmland in Russia and the news organization Al-Jazeera.

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