标签：#ice

Arriving six years after Google’s last smart speaker, the new HomePod-style device was redesigned to play host to Gemini’s chatbot.

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam What I Built Beat the Oracle is a daily FIFA World Cup 2026 prediction game where you go head-to-head against an AI — Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash — to call match scores before kickoff. Out-predict the machine and you win the day's Turing Test. Lose, and the Oracle has outsmarted you... until tomorrow. Every day you're served the same 5 matches as everyone else: some already played (scored instantly), some upcoming (lock in your call and come back). The Oracle reads each team's recent World Cup form and makes its own prediction with written reasoning — which you only see after you've locked in yours. No peeking, no cheating. Just you versus the machine. Scoring: Result Points Exact scoreline 3 🎯 "Enigma Cracked!" Correct result (W/D/L) 1 ✅ Miss 0 ❌ Why this fits the June Solstice Game Jam This jam asked for a game inspired by the solstice or any June celebration — and Beat the Oracle is stitched to June on two threads the challenge itself calls out: The World Cup is June's global celebration. The prompt names it directly: "the electric teamwork and high stakes of the World Cup, bringing the entire planet together in the spirit of play." That's the playground this game lives in — and as a bonus, I built it from 🇨🇦 Canada, a 2026 host nation . June is Alan Turing's month. Born June 23rd, Turing is the reason this jam has a "father of computing" prize at all. So I didn't bolt a Turing reference onto a football game — I built a playable Turing Test and gave it a World Cup costume. Turing's 1950 question, "Can machines think?" , becomes a question you answer with your gut every single day: can a machine predict football better than you? And the "daily" loop — new matches each day, your score reset, the machines winning "for today" — leans into the solstice's own theme of cycles and the passage of time. Every day is a fresh test. Every match is a new cipher. 🔗 Live demo: hema-nambi.github.io/BeatTheOracle Code Hema-Nambi /

Sitting at a desk for hours? Upgrade your WFH setup and work in style with these comfy WIRED-tested seats.

Sitting at a desk for hours? Upgrade your WFH setup and work in style with these comfy WIRED-tested seats.

Sitting at a desk for hours? Upgrade your WFH setup and work in style with these comfy WIRED-tested seats.

With its music focus, no-AI content policy, and larger artist royalties, the hi-res streaming service is scooping up all sorts of switchers.

AI is once again at the heart of a college graduation protest — this time for the technology's use in Google's defense contracts.

JPMorgan can't be pleased by any of this.

Three days. Claude Fable 5 — Anthropic's most capable model ever shipped to the public, posting 95% on SWE-bench Verified — was live for exactly 72 hours before the US government issued an export control directive on June 12 that forced Anthropic to pull it globally. For everyone. Including US users. Including Anthropic employees who hold foreign passports. Here is what Fable 5 actually is, what the government directive says, what Anthropic says about it, and what developers building on Claude should do while this gets resolved. What Claude Fable 5 Is Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 on June 9, 2026, alongside Claude Mythos 5, its restricted sibling for government-adjacent cybersecurity work. Fable 5 is the first publicly available model in Anthropic's new "Mythos-class" tier — a category above the previous frontier that Claude Opus 4.8 (released May 28) occupied. The benchmark gap is not close. Fable 5 posted 95.0% on SWE-bench Verified and 80.3% on SWE-bench Pro. The next best competitor on SWE-bench Pro is GPT-5.5, sitting at 58.6%. That is a 21.7-point gap — roughly twice the margin by which Claude Opus 4.8 led its generation. Across all eight coding benchmarks Anthropic published at launch, Fable 5 led with an average margin of 11.8 points: Benchmark Claude Fable 5 Next Best Gap | SWE-bench Verified | 95.0% | ~74% | +21 | | SWE-bench Pro | 80.3% | 58.6% (GPT-5.5) | +21.7 | | FrontierCode Diamond | leads | baseline | +23.6 | | HLE (no tools) | leads | baseline | +13.7 | | Terminal-Bench | leads | baseline | +4.6 | Beyond static benchmarks, Anthropic ran a long-horizon game-playing evaluation using Slay the Spire with persistent file-based memory. Fable 5 improved three times faster than Opus 4.8 as memory accumulated, and reached the final act three times as often. The large-context reasoning advantage — the same capability that powered the 8x engineering productivity multiplier at Anthropic — is structurally more pronounced in Fable 5 than in any previous publ

Book: The Complete Guide to Go Programming Also by me: Thinking in Go (2-book series) — Complete Guide to Go Programming + Hexagonal Architecture in Go My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub You come to Go from a language with classes. You see struct embedding for the first time, and it reads like inheritance. A field with no name, methods that "carry over" to the outer type, a base struct that your type extends. So you write code the way you always have, and most of it works. Then a method does something you did not ask for, a type satisfies an interface you never meant to implement, or two embedded types fight over a name and the compiler shrugs until the exact line that calls it. Embedding is not inheritance. It is composition with a syntax that promotes methods and fields up one level. Once you hold that distinction, the surprises stop being surprises. Here is where they come from. Embedding promotes, it does not subclass Write an embedded field by giving a type with no field name: type Engine struct { Horsepower int } func ( e Engine ) Start () string { return "vroom" } type Car struct { Engine // embedded Brand string } Car now has a Start method and a Horsepower field, both promoted from Engine . You can write car.Start() and car.Horsepower as if they were declared on Car . car := Car { Engine : Engine { Horsepower : 300 }, Brand : "Fiat" } fmt . Println ( car . Start ()) // vroom fmt . Println ( car . Horsepower ) // 300 This is where the inheritance illusion starts. car.Start() is sugar. The compiler rewrites it to car.Engine.Start() . The receiver of Start is still an Engine , never a Car . There is no base class, no super , no virtual dispatch. Engine does not know Car exists. That last point is the one that bites. A promoted method runs against the embedded value, not the outer struct. The method that ignores the outer struct Say you want a stringer on the embe

Book: The Complete Guide to Go Programming Also by me: Thinking in Go (2-book series) — Complete Guide to Go Programming + Hexagonal Architecture in Go My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub You wrote a function that walks a directory and reads every file. It opened cleanly in review. It passed tests on a fixture folder with three files. Then a customer pointed it at a folder with 20,000 files, and the logs filled with: open /data/batch/img-08431.png: too many open files The code never closed anything early. It deferred every close. And that is exactly the problem. defer runs at function return, not end of iteration defer schedules a call to run when the surrounding function returns. Not when the current block ends. Not when the loop iteration ends. When the function returns. Most of the time that distinction does not matter, because most deferred calls live in short functions that return quickly. Put a defer inside a for loop, though, and every iteration adds one more deferred call to a stack that does not unwind until the whole loop is done and the function exits. Here is the version that ships: func processFiles ( paths [] string ) error { for _ , p := range paths { f , err := os . Open ( p ) if err != nil { return err } defer f . Close () // runs at RETURN, not here if err := handle ( f ); err != nil { return err } } return nil } Read it the way the language reads it. On the first iteration, os.Open returns a file handle and you defer its close. On the second iteration, another handle, another deferred close. By the time the loop has touched 20,000 files, you are holding 20,000 open descriptors, and not one of them closes until processFiles returns. Your process has a file-descriptor limit. On Linux the soft default is often 1024. You blow through it somewhere around the 1024th file, and the error you get back says nothing about defer . It says too many open files , wh

My voice agent took 1.2 seconds. Users hated it. So I made it lie. A while back I shipped a voice agent that took roughly 1,200ms to respond. Not catastrophic on paper. Pretty bad in practice. Users would ask a question, get a beat of silence, and start over. Some thought the mic had cut out. One tester told me, with a straight face, that my agent was "thinking too hard." I tried everything legitimate first. Smaller LLM. Streaming TTS. Region-pinned endpoints. I shaved off about 200ms and felt clever for a week. Then I measured again and realized I was still on the wrong side of every latency threshold that matters. So I gave up on being faster and started working on being a better liar. This is the playbook I wish I had when I started: five perception tricks that reduce felt latency without touching the actual numbers. They're the voice-AI equivalent of a magician's misdirection. Your right hand waves at the audience. Your left hand swaps the card. The cliff you can't engineer your way out of In a previous article I broke down the three latency cliffs for voice AI. The short version: Around 200ms : the brain starts to register the pause as "slow." This is the conversational baseline humans use with each other. Around 500ms : the conversation breaks. The user starts to wonder if they need to repeat themselves. Around 800ms : they've quietly given up. Even if your answer arrives, the trust is gone. If your stack is doing STT plus LLM plus TTS plus network, hitting 200ms end-to-end is, frankly, a fantasy for most teams. You can chase it. You can throw money at it. You can cache and prefetch and stream. At some point you bottom out. That's where perception work begins. The user can't measure your p99 latency. They can only measure how the agent feels . Those are two different problems and they have two different solutions. 5 tricks I now use to mask latency 1. Acknowledgment tokens ("Got it", "On it", "Let me check") What it is: A short, instant utterance played the mo

Last sprint, a team I talked to demoed a voice agent that handled support calls impressively — right up until a caller asked "can you email me those instructions?" and the room went quiet. The agent could talk about the docs. It had no address to send them from. The workaround on the whiteboard afterwards was grim: relay through a shared noreply@ , lose the replies, reconcile threads manually in the ticketing system. Voice agents hit this wall constantly, because phone calls generate follow-up artifacts — reset instructions, documents, meeting recaps — and email is how callers expect to receive them. The clean fix is the same one that works for text agents: the voice agent gets its own mailbox. The identity half A Nylas Agent Account is a hosted mailbox you create through the API — Agent Accounts are in beta — and the voice use case from the product docs is exactly the scenario above: a voice agent taking support calls sends documents, reset instructions, or meeting recaps from its own voice-agent@yourcompany.com address the moment the caller asks. The part that makes it more than a send pipe: when the caller replies, the reply returns through the same account, so the full conversation is one thread in one mailbox. The phone call and its written follow-ups stop living in separate systems. Each account is a real grant with a grant_id that works against the existing Messages, Threads, and Webhooks endpoints, ships with six system folders, and sends up to 200 messages per account per day on the free plan. The plumbing half The voice agents recipe covers how the runtime actually calls email tools. The flow is the same regardless of vendor: speech → STT → LLM (function-calling) → subprocess(nylas …) → JSON → LLM → TTS → speech The LLM decides on a tool, the runtime spawns a Nylas CLI subprocess with --json , the result comes back, and the model composes a spoken response. On LiveKit, a tool is just a decorated function: from livekit.agents import function_tool import sub

The partnership will see TCS creating a business unit focused on deploying Anthropic's AI models to its customers.

The games start June 11 and end with a grand finale in New Jersey on July 19. There are 104 of them. Here’s how to watch ’em all.

Stop writing SQL strings that look like a ransom note. Here's how to write queries that are readable, safe, and maintainable. The Problem With "Good Enough" SQL Formatting Most Python developers start here: user_id = 5 query = " SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = " + str ( user_id ) cursor . execute ( query ) It works. Until it doesn't — and when it breaks, it breaks badly : SQL injection, cryptic errors from mismatched types, and queries that take 45 minutes to debug at 2am. Let's fix that, permanently. 1. Never Concatenate User Input — Use Parameterized Queries This is rule #1 and it's non-negotiable. ❌ The Wrong Way (SQL Injection Waiting to Happen) username = request . args . get ( " username " ) # Could be: ' OR '1'='1 query = f " SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ' { username } '" cursor . execute ( query ) If username is ' OR '1'='1 , your entire users table just got exposed. ✅ The Right Way: Parameterized Queries username = request . args . get ( " username " ) # psycopg2 (PostgreSQL) cursor . execute ( " SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = %s " , ( username ,)) # sqlite3 cursor . execute ( " SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ? " , ( username ,)) # SQLAlchemy Core from sqlalchemy import text result = conn . execute ( text ( " SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :name " ), { " name " : username }) The database driver handles escaping. You never touch it. This pattern is immune to SQL injection by design. Gotcha: Note the trailing comma in (username,) . Without it, Python treats the string as an iterable and passes each character as a separate parameter. This is one of the most common beginner bugs. # 💥 Bug: passes ('a', 'l', 'i', 'c', 'e') instead of ('alice',) cursor . execute ( " SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = %s " , ( username )) # ✅ Correct: single-element tuple cursor . execute ( " SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = %s " , ( username ,)) 2. Multi-Line Queries: Triple Quotes + Consistent Indentation For anything longer than one clause, use tri

ServiceNow is used by thousands of enterprises to automate their internal processes, but says several customers had data accessed because of a security bug.

The games start June 11 and end with a grand finale in New Jersey on July 19. There are 104 of them. Here’s how to watch ’em all.

When you expose inventory or checkout endpoints to public-facing front-ends or third-party webhooks, safeguarding those APIs from brute-force scripts, scraping bots, and inventory hoarding algorithms becomes a critical requirement. Without defensive rate limiting, a single coordinated script can easily overwhelm your database connections. The Problem with Simple Counter Resets A common mistake when setting up basic API protection is using a rigid "Fixed Window" counter (e.g., allowing 100 requests per minute, resetting exactly at the turn of the clock). This creates a massive flaw where a developer can flood your server with 100 requests at 11:59:59 and another 100 requests at 12:00:01, effectively doubling your acceptable burst traffic and causing severe performance dips. To handle uneven burst traffic safely without crashing your database, the standard approach is implementing a token bucket algorithm. The Token Bucket Pattern The token bucket algorithm maintains a centralized bucket that holds a maximum capacity of tokens. Tokens are added back to the bucket at a constant, predictable rate over time. Each incoming API request consumes exactly one token. If the bucket is completely empty, the request is instantly rejected with a 429 Too Many Requests status code, protecting your core server threads. javascript // Quick Redis-based token bucket rate limiter concept async function isRateLimited(userId) { const key = `rate:${userId}`; const now = Date.now(); // Use a Redis multi-exec transaction to atomically check and update tokens const [tokens, lastRefill] = await redis.hmget(key, 'tokens', 'lastRefill'); // Calculate token replenishment based on time elapsed... // Return true if tokens <= 0, otherwise decrement tokens and update timestamp }

** How I instrument ASR, LLM, TTS, and the client with OpenTelemetry, and which number in each layer I actually look at ** TL;DR. A voice agent is four moving parts stuck together: speech to text, the model that writes the reply, text to speech, and the client that plays the audio back. End to end latency hides which of those four is slow on any given turn, so I stopped tracking it as one number and started tracing each stage as its own OTel span with a shared session id. The number I watch hardest is barge-in: when the user starts talking over the agent, how many milliseconds until the agent actually stops sending audio. In our setup we want that under 200ms, and when p95 barge-in creeps past that, the agent feels like it is talking at you instead of with you. Everything below is how I wire the spans, what attributes go on each one, and the p95 I page on per layer. The thing I keep saying, and the thing that keeps being true: voice agents fail in production not because of raw latency but because nobody simulated the audio and LLM pipeline together. You can have a fast ASR, a fast model, a fast TTS, and a voice agent that still feels broken, because the failure lives in the seams between them and in the parts (barge-in, jitter) that no single-stage benchmark touches. Tracing is how I get the seams to show up. A note before the layers. This is just the setup we run, the spans we emit, and the mistakes that made us add each attribute. Some of it is probably specific to our stack and will not transfer. I will flag that where I can. The shape of a turn, and why one span is not enough One turn is: user says a thing, agent says a thing back. Underneath that is roughly: audio frames come in, ASR turns them into text (streaming partials as it goes); the text plus history goes to the LLM, which streams tokens back; as text comes out, TTS turns it into audio, also streaming; the client receives audio frames and plays them, with some buffering to smooth out jitter. If you wrap