🧱 LEGO teaches bricks to respond to play

At CES 2026, LEGO introduced SMART Play, a new system the company calls its biggest leap since the minifigure era, physical blocks that react to what kids actually do with them, without screens or apps.

🔸 A responsive building system: SMART Play is made up of connected bricks, tags, and figures that give traditional LEGO builds awareness and feedback.

🔸 Electronics hidden in plastic: A regular-looking 2×4 brick contains a custom chip, motion sensors, LEDs, a speaker, and wireless charging components.

🔸 Meaning, not noscripts: Small ID tiles and minifigures tell the system what a build represents, allowing behavior and sound to change as the story evolves.

🔸 Local intelligence: Using a Bluetooth-based network, bricks understand position, movement, and orientation relative to each other in real time.

🔸 Unlimited sound design: Audio is generated on the fly rather than stored, so the same brick can convincingly sound like engines, animals, or something far less heroic.

🔸 Long-term bet: The platform took around a decade to develop and is protected by dozens of patents.

🔸 First release: The system launches with Star Wars sets priced from $70 to $160, with pre-orders opening January 9 and shipping starting March 1.

SMART Play doesn’t pull LEGO into screens, it quietly adds intelligence to the bricks themselves, keeping play tactile while making it adaptive.

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⚠️ A programmer outsourced his relationship to an AI.

Instead of replying himself, he connected an AI agent that chats with his girlfriend on Telegram when he’s busy.

The bot messages her directly, reacts to texts, tracks emotional tone, and keeps the conversation going.

If things escalate into a “code red” moment, the system alerts the human to step in.

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Plan A: Vibe coding

Plan B: OnlyFans

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🩺 OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT Health

OpenAI has introduced a dedicated health-focused area inside ChatGPT, positioning it as a navigation and understanding layer for medical information rather than a substitute for clinicians.

🔸 The feature was built alongside medical professionals, drawing on roughly 600,000 feedback entries from more than 260 practicing doctors over two years.

🔸 OpenAI stresses the tool does not diagnose or prescribe, limiting outputs to areas like nutrition guidance and explanations of lab results.

🔸 Health conversations live in a separate, isolated environment with stronger encryption and independent memory handling.

🔸 These interactions are not currently used to train OpenAI models, though data collection still occurs at a system level.

🔸 The rollout includes links with Apple Health, Peloton, and similar platforms, opening the door to deeper personal health context.

🔸 Longer term, this positioning could pressure wearable and fitness-data players such as Oura and Whoop.

🔸 Technically, there’s no new underlying model the experience is driven by a specialized system setup rather than bespoke AI.

🔸 Practical differences versus a standard chat remain limited unless users connect external health data.

🔸 Availability appears restricted for now, with access tied to US-based accounts.

AI isn’t becoming a doctor but it is quietly moving closer to the data layer around one.

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🎮 Gamepad hides a full steering wheel

GameSir showed off an unconventional controller at CES 2026: a standard-looking gamepad with a compact force-feedback steering wheel embedded right in the center.

🔸 The wheel uses a Hall-effect encoder for precision, with adjustable rotation ranging from 30° to 1080°.

🔸 Force feedback is a core feature, early testers say it actively resists turns and can even lock up if over-rotated.

🔸 Each trigger includes its own haptic motor, designed to mimic effects like tire slip and hard braking.

🔸 Analog sticks and buttons also rely on Hall-effect sensors, improving durability and accuracy.

🔸 An RGB strip on top acts as a visual tachometer, reflecting engine revs during gameplay.

🔸 The wheel’s center section supports swappable overlays, allowing cosmetic or functional customization.

🔸 Battery life is estimated at 20–30 hours per charge, despite the added motors and feedback systems.

🔸 A commercial launch is planned for later this year, though pricing remains undisclosed.

GameSir is betting that racing fans want immersion without giving up the couch and this controller is a bold swing at that idea.

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🗣️ Jeff Bezos shares the advice he received from John Doerr early on at Amazon

“When I first met John Doerr who is the partner at Kleiner Perkins who invested in Amazon, one of the things he said really stuck with me,” Jeff Bezos begins. “What startup companies do is they take their precious early-capital dollars and systematically eliminate risks. That’s what the successful ones do.”

Jeff continues:

“What people often get wrong is that when you’re a startup company, 99% of whether you make it to being a more established company is luck. At Amazon we’ve worked incredibly hard. We’ve cared for our customers. I would put us up against any company in terms of how much we have bled and sweat for our customers. But we had the planets align for us so perfectly in those early days, in terms of the timing and many other things like decisions we made that were poor decisions but turned out to be the right decision anyway and those early days are when the company’s destiny is not really in its own control.”

As a company grows larger and becomes established, Jeff explains, you worry less about externalities.

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☁️ A material that’s lighter than air

Sora Materials unveiled Soramatex at CES 2026, an ultra-light material with a density of 0.0005–0.01 g/cm³, meaning it’s literally lighter than air. Journalists who handled it said it was almost impossible to feel in their hands.

🔸 The company keeps the formula secret, describing it only as “carbon powder,” though its properties resemble graphene aerogel.

🔸 Unlike traditional aerogels, Soramatex is fire-resistant, solving a major safety issue that has limited real-world adoption.

🔸 The material offers thermal insulation, electromagnetic shielding, and sound absorption in a single structure.

🔸 Sora Materials claims Soramatex is recyclable, positioning it as a more sustainable advanced material.

🔸 In aviation, using it as insulation could cut aircraft weight by up to one ton, directly improving fuel efficiency and range.

🔸 Other target use cases include spacecraft, electric vehicles, and “flying cars.”

🔸 Soramatex was developed through a Japanese research program in Aichi Prefecture.

🔸 The company came to CES to find partners for commercialization, signaling a push from lab material to industrial deployment.

If Soramatex scales as promised, weight, not power, may become the next big bottleneck in transportation.

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🧠 How ChatGPT killed stack overflow

Stack Overflow was once the place for programmers to ask questions. At its pandemic peak, it shaped how millions of developers learned to code. But habits have changed and fast.

🔸 Today, it’s often easier to ask a chatbot than to dig through forum threads, comments, and accepted answers.

🔸 As a result, activity has collapsed: the number of new questions last month was roughly the same as in 2008, the year Stack Overflow launched.

🔸 In practical terms, the forum as a living community is fading, fewer questions, fewer answers, less discussion. But the company itself isn’t dead.

🔸 Stack Overflow no longer relies primarily on ads. Its real asset is the massive archive of developer knowledge built over nearly two decades.

🔸 That archive is now monetized by selling access to AI companies, which use the data to train large language models.

Stack Overflow didn’t lose to bad moderation or competition, it lost to a new interface for knowledge itself.

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🔥 A boiler that mines Bitcoin while heating water

The company Superheat has released a household boiler with a built-in Bitcoin miner, it heats water and simultaneously mines BTC.

🔸 The idea is simple: the device consumes the same amount of electricity as a regular boiler, but part of that cost is offset by income from cryptocurrency mining.

🔸 Instead of wasting heat, the miner’s output is fully reused for water heating, improving overall energy efficiency.

🔸 In effect, you’re paying for hot water and getting Bitcoin as a by-product.

🔸 The boiler is priced at $2000, positioning it as a niche product for crypto-friendly households.

It’s less about getting rich on mining and more about turning unavoidable energy use into something marginally profitable.

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💼 ChatGPT wants to help you land your next job

OpenAI is testing a new feature tentatively called ChatGPT Jobs, aimed at job search, career navigation, and professional growth.

🔸 The feature is not publicly available yet, but early details suggest a full-stack assistant for job seekers.

🔸 ChatGPT Jobs will help users improve and tailor their resumes based on role, industry, and seniority level.

🔸 It will identify suitable job openings by matching skills, experience, and career goals not just keywords.

🔸 Users will get interview guidance, including how to answer questions, position strengths, and avoid common mistakes.

🔸 The system is expected to find, compare, and evaluate job offers, helping users weigh compensation, role scope, and growth potential.

🔸 The goal appears to be reducing reliance on traditional job boards and recruiters by turning ChatGPT into a career copilot. No official launch date has been announced.

If this works as intended, job hunting may shift from scrolling listings to having an AI actively represent your interests in the market.

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🔔 Anthropic tightens access to Claude and one change really hurts

There are two pieces of news from Anthropic, both about the same thing: they’re tightening control over how Claude is used for coding, especially Claude Opus 4.5, which many now consider the strongest coding model on the market. One move was expected. The other is painful.

🔸 Anthropic cut off xAI from Claude Opus 4.5 inside Cursor. It turned out xAI engineers were actively using Claude for coding. Anthropic didn’t like that and simply отключили доступ, no ceremony.

🔸 This wasn’t a surprise. Anthropic’s terms explicitly prohibit using their models to build competing AI products. It was only a matter of time. Still, sympathy to the xAI devs.

🔸 The painful part: Anthropic banned using personal Claude subnoscriptions inside third-party clients like OpenCode.

🔸 Previously, OpenCode let users plug in their own paid Claude subnoscription and work with the same modes and limits as the official client but at a much lower cost than buying tokens via the API. That loophole is now closed.

🔸 Anthropic’s official explanation: third-party clients “damage UX.” If something breaks in OpenCode, users might blame Claude itself, hurting Anthropic’s reputation.

🔸 Unofficially, the real issue looks like unit economics and strategic control, not UX. Subnoscription leakage into external tools undermines pricing and platform leverage.

🔸 The result: OpenCode users are scrambling for workarounds on social media but so far, nothing reliable has surfaced.

🔸 From Anthropic’s perspective, the move is understandable. From users’ perspective, it’s brutal.

Claude Opus 4.5 may be the best coding model right now but Anthropic is making it very clear: you’ll use it where and how they want, or not at all.

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We need this in 2026.

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