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// Tech news at terminal velocity
cat 2026-02-16.md
$ cat TLDR.md
▸ Western Digital says 'sold out' thanks to AI demand
▸ Anthropic hides Claude's thinking and devs are furious
▸ Qwen 3.5 drops with native multimodal agents
Alibaba's Qwen team just dropped version 3.5, moving towards 'native multimodal agents.' Instead of bolting vision onto a text model like a Frankenstein monster, this thing was born seeing. Expect better performance in complex workflows without the usual token tax.
New ads confirm the Galaxy S26 will feature a 'privacy display' capable of physically blacking out the screen to everyone but the user. Finally, you can doomscroll in peace on the subway without judgment from the person standing over your shoulder.
Peter Steinberger, the brain behind the open-source agent 'OpenClaw', is joining OpenAI. While OpenClaw remains open source (for now), this signals Sam Altman is doubling down on the 'agentic future' where AI does the work instead of just talking about it.
India's first AI IPO didn't exactly go to the moon. Fractal Analytics had a muted debut, signaling that investors might finally be asking 'where is the revenue?' instead of just throwing money at anything with 'Neural' in the pitch deck.
Anthropic is trying to hide Claude's internal 'thought' process actions, and developers are revolting. The company claims it's for safety, but building on a black box that refuses to explain its logic is a debugger's nightmare. If we can't see the chain of thought, we can't trust the output.
Western Digital has officially announced that hard drives are sold out for the year. Why? AI, obviously. Training models requires massive datasets, and those datasets have to live somewhere. If you were planning a homelab upgrade, you might want to check eBay before prices go vertical.
Longtime NPR host David Greene is suing Google, claiming NotebookLM's eerily smooth podcast host voice is a rip-off of his own. It raises the classic ship of Theseus question: if an AI is trained on enough public radio, does it eventually demand a tote bag and a donation?
The Unicode Consortium is standardizing MessageFormat, a new way to handle localizable strings. If you've ever fought with pluralization rules or gendered grammar in your UI, this is the holy grail you've been waiting for.
Redis creator Antirez is back with 'picol', a Tcl interpreter written in just 500 lines of C. It's a masterclass in minimalism and a reminder that you probably don't need that 2GB dependency for your config file parser.
A deep dive into how Zig handles error payloads. Unlike exceptions (chaos) or Go's 'if err != nil' (repetitive stress injury), Zig's approach offers a compelling middle ground for systems programming.
A Verge reviewer spent weeks with Casio's 'Moflin' AI robot and absolutely loathed it. Apparently, a fuzzy guinea pig that simulates emotional distance is just a little too real for comfort.
Researchers interviewed 130 Bigfoot hunters to understand why they do it. Spoiler: It's not really about the unicorn; it's about the friends we made in the woods while looking for a hairy cryptid.