MacPaw, the Ukraine-based developer, has announced that Setapp Mobile — its alternative iOS app store for European Union users that launched in open beta in September 2024 — will shut down on February 16, 2026, citing “still-evolving and complex business terms” for alternative marketplaces that don’t fit its current business model.

Alternative iOS stores became possible under the Digital Markets Act but face challenges including Apple’s controversial Core Technology Fee, which Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has called “ruinous for any hopes of a competing store getting a foothold.”

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei predicted a future in which AI will spur significant economic growth — but could lead to widespread unemployment and inequality. Amodei is both “excited and worried” about the impact of AI, he said in an interview at Davos Tuesday. “I don’t think there’s an awareness at all of what is coming here and the magnitude of it.”

Anthropic is the developer of the popular chatbot Claude. Amodei said the government will need to play a role in navigating the massive displacement in jobs that could result from advances in AI. He said there could be a future with 5% to 10% GDP growth and 10% unemployment. “That’s not a combination we’ve almost ever seen before,” he said. “There’s gonna need to be some role for government in the displacement that’s this macroeconomically large.”

Amodei painted a potential “nightmare” scenario that AI could bring to society if not properly checked, laying out a future in which 10 million people — 7 million in Silicon Valley and the rest scattered elsewhere — could “decouple” from the rest of society, enjoying as much as 50% GPD growth while others were left behind. “I think this is probably a time to worry less about disincentivizing growth and worry more about making sure that everyone gets a part of that growth,” Amodei said. He noted that was “the opposite of the prevailing sentiment now,” but the reality of technological change will force those ideas to change.

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Netflix agreed to pay all cash for Warner Bros. Discovery, amending its $72 billion deal in an attempt to fight off Paramount’s hostile takeover bid.

Netflix originally agreed to buy the company with a mix of cash and stock. To sweeten the offer for shareholders, Netflix and Warner Bros. today announced that Netflix will pay all cash instead. If successful, Netflix’s purchase will include HBO Max, WB Studios, and other assets.

The price is unchanged at $27.75 per share, and Warner Bros. is targeting an April 2026 shareholder vote. The original plan was for Netflix to buy each Warner Bros. share with $23.25 in cash and $4.50 in Netflix stock.

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Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker warned that AI agents that autonomously carry out tasks pose a threat to encrypted messaging apps [non-paywalled source] because they require broad access to data stored across a device and can be hijacked if given root permissions.

Speaking at Davos on Tuesday, Whittaker said the deeper integration of AI agents into devices is “pretty perilous” for services like Signal. For an AI agent to act effectively on behalf of a user, it would need unilateral access to apps storing sensitive information such as credit card data and contacts, Whittaker said. The data that the agent stores in its context window is at greater risk of being compromised.

Whittaker called this “breaking the blood-brain barrier between the application and the operating system.” “Our encryption no longer matters if all you have to do is hijack this context window,” she said.

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TCL is taking majority ownership of Sony’s Bravia series of TVs, the two companies announced today.

The two firms said they have signed a memorandum of understanding and aim to sign binding agreements by the end of March. Pending “relevant regulatory approvals and other conditions,” the joint venture is expected to launch in April 2027.

Under a new joint venture, Huizhou, China-headquartered TCL will own 51 percent of Tokyo, Japan-headquartered Sony’s “home entertainment business,” and Sony will own 49 percent, per an announcement today, adding:

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Akai just revealed its most powerful standalone groovebox, the MPC XL. For the uninitiated, the MPC has been around since the 1980s and pretty much defined hip hop from that era. The line has continuously iterated to keep up with the times and the XL looks to be the baddest of them all.

First of all, it offers four times the processing power of previous MPCs, which is enough to load up to 32 virtual instruments at the same time. This is assisted by a full 16GB of RAM, which is a whole lot in this era of AI tomfoolery. The XL can handle 16 audio tracks simultaneously. In my experience with previous units, this is more than enough for a full song.

It runs on a proprietary OS and features a 10-inch OLED touchscreen for making adjustments. There are also dozens of knobs and buttons to play with, including 16 knobs that integrate with the display for real-time feedback.

The XL features a step sequencer, but this is an MPC. The real star attraction are those 16 drum pads. These pads can be set to trigger samples and hits, but can also be programmed to initiate effects and do all kinds of other stuff. Each pad has four quadrants, one for each corner, and they are all fully adjustable.

Looking for even more nuanced control? There are two assignable touch-strips and plenty of short-cut keys. It has built-in microphone preamps, phono inputs for sampling, instrument inputs and numerous other connectivity options. This is a true flagship in every sense of the word. It’s also very, very large.

The MPC may have started as a hip hop machine, but newer models are useful for any genre of music. To that end, it comes with an extensive collection of plugins, samples and effects. These even include some plugins made by rival company Native Instruments.

The software can handle stuff like stem separation, time-stretching and more. The workflow has been heavily inspired by modern DAWs, with a full arrangement view available on that OLED.

The MPC XL is a standalone unit, so it doesn’t need a computer or anything like that. The power requirements here, however, don’t allow for batteries. This thing has to be plugged in, much like Native Instruments’ Maschine+. It’s available right now and costs a whopping $2,900. This is a serious machine with a serious price tag, just like Roland’s recently-released TR-1000 drum machine.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/akais-mpc-xl-groovebox-is-the-most-powerful-device-the-company-has-ever-made-183952483.html?src=rss

AI will displace so many jobs that it will eliminate the need for mass immigration, according to Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Bloomberg: “There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” said Karp, speaking at a World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday. “I do think these trends really do make it hard to imagine why we should have large-scale immigration unless you have a very specialized skill.”

Karp, who holds a PhD in philosophy, used himself as an example of the type of “elite” white-collar worker most at risk of disruption. Vocational workers will be more valuable “if not irreplaceable,” he said, criticizing the idea that higher education is the ultimate benchmark of a person’s talents and employability.

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Sometimes, you just need to give your mind a little vacation. And these days, outer space sounds like as good a destination as any. Thankfully, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is here to give us a dazzling new image of the Helix Nebula.

Discovered in the early 19th century, the Helix Nebula resides in the constellation Aquarius. (Cue The 5th Dimension.) At about 655 light-years away, it’s one of Earth’s closest planetary nebulae. When zoomed farther out, it’s easy to see why it’s been nicknamed the Eye of God or Eye of Sauron. This 2004 image from the Hubble telescope illustrates that.

NASA / ESA / C.R. O’Dell (Vanderbilt University) / M. Meixner / P. McCullough / G. Bacon ( STSI)

What we’re seeing in the nebula is, in a sense, a moment of death that lays the groundwork for a new birth. The dying star (out of frame in the closer new image) sheds its outer layers. As expelled gas and dust cool, they provide raw material that could someday form new stars and perhaps planetary systems.

The new image from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) provides a much closer, higher-resolution view.

Those pillars you see are called cometary knots, and this image is our best view of those to date. “Here, blistering winds of hot gas from the dying star are crashing into colder shells of dust and gas that were shed earlier in its life, sculpting the nebula’s remarkable structure,” the ESA wrote in its press release.

The knots’ colors represent temperature and chemistry. Hints of blue indicate the hottest gas (energized by ultraviolet light). The yellow regions, where hydrogen atoms form molecules, are farther from the nebula’s nucleus (and therefore cooler). On the edges, reddish-orange regions depict the coolest material, where gas thins and dust begins to form.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/earth-is-having-some-issues-so-lets-enjoy-the-webb-telescopes-new-nebula-image-181049901.html?src=rss

Cointelegraph, once one of the most-visited cryptocurrency news sites, has seen its monthly traffic plummet from roughly 8 million visits to 1.4 million — an 80% drop in three months — after Google issued a manual penalty in October 2025 for the outlet’s partnership with a blackhat SEO firm that used Cointelegraph’s domain authority to promote affiliate links to offshore casinos and betting platforms.

The CEO, who had no prior media experience, proceeded despite warnings from Google earlier in 2025 and repeated objections from the outlet’s three most senior editorial staff members throughout the year. The penalty removed Cointelegraph from Google News, Discover and search results entirely; a search for “Cointelegraph” now returns CoinDesk as the top result. Jon Rice, the former editor-in-chief, resigned on December 31st and described the situation as an “existential threat to business.”

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