Short visual explainers of the tech you use, plus a curated daily feed of AI and tech news.
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Picked each morning and explained in plain language, with a link to the original reporting.
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Eight areas of technology, each one explained from the basics up.
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Short Reels that show how the tech behind your apps works, one idea at a time.
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One short email with an explainer to watch and the story worth knowing about.
Story of the Day
Gemini 4 Hydrogen isn't getting a slow, security-conscious release like Carbon and Argon. Google is continuing its elemental AI naming scheme with the new Gemini 4 Hydrogen.
Ars Technica
Latest headlines
MIT Technology Review
A polygraph tracks body signals such as heart rate and breathing, on the theory that lying changes them. The Pentagon's proposed Polygraph+ program would score those signals with machine learning and add standoff sensing, which reads those signals without touching the person. Experts are skeptical, since a racing pulse can signal nerves as easily as a lie, and tech-based lie detection has a long record of failure.
brave.com
Developers and AI agents can now pay for the Brave Search API on demand with USDC via the open x402 protocol, settling each query in real time without an account or API key. The Brave Search API, our developer tool for building applications with data from the Web, is adding support for instant, pay-as-you-go, agentic payments enabled by the open x402 payment protocol.
The Decoder
Anthropic is adding Claude directly to video calls. Claude Meetings joins Google Meet sessions and creates documents, whiteboards, and meeting notes in real time.
MIT Technology Review
Representatives from Nvidia told Illinois representative Bill Foster that it would be technically possible to implement the anti-smuggling measures called for in the Chip Security Act, Foster told MIT Technology Review in an interview on Thursday, even while an industry group claimed they were “potentially infeasible.
The Decoder
Google's Gemini 4 Hydrogen replaces the Flash series, but benchmarks suggest it also makes the pricier Argon obsolete. On the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Hydrogen nearly matches Claude Sonnet 5.5 for less money but costs about 2.5 times more per task than GPT-6.1 Sol and still falls short on agentic coding.
