future

Explore the next frontier of tech innovation, and imagine our society in the near and far future.

The AI Agent Breakthrough That Finally Teaches Machines to Plan Before They Click
Plan-and-Act: separating planning from execution for long-horizon agents Long-horizon tasks require an agent to hold a goal across 5 to 50+ actions. The agent must track intermediate state and adapt when the environment changes. Examples include buying the highest-rated Bluetooth earphones under $50 on an e-commerce site, adding user authentication to a Flask app, analyzing Q3 sales data and writing a report, researching Rust stream-processing frameworks, automating employee onboarding across email, permissions, Slack, and HR systems, and building a house in Minecraft.
By Jin21 days ago in 01
She Told the Robot to Leave. Then She Plugged Its Charger Back In.
Margaret Callahan sat in the rocking chair on the front porch, a knitted afghan over her knees. The afghan had been her mother’s, and the yarn was frayed at the corners. She watched the lilac bush by the fence. It was May. The lilacs were heavy with bloom, purple and white, and the smell was so strong it made her eyes water.
By Jin21 days ago in 01
I Spent a Week With the Doubao AI Phone. Here’s the Truth About Whether It’s Worth $800.
The Nubia NaviX Ultra Doubao Phone costs several thousand yuan. I bought one to find out whether it's a real tool or just expensive hype.
By Jin21 days ago in 01
A Perfect AI Could Predict Almost Everything. Here’s the One Thing It Never Will.
What a world model cannot predict I Suppose such a model existed. It has seen enough data. Physics, chemistry, biology, economics, psychology. Cities, oceans, atmospheres, neurons, markets, wars, love. It resembles a giant crystal ball. You ask whether it will rain tomorrow at three. You ask whether a street will have an accident. You ask whether a person will resign, or an election will flip. It can answer.
By Jin21 days ago in 01
I Left Windows 11 for Linux: Five Months on Debian and I'm Not Going Back
Switching your main PC to Linux for the first time: which distro will not make you quit? I did not switch because I love the terminal. Win11 updated one day, and I opened Task Manager. The process list went past three screens. The fan spun. I had written almost no code, and half the RAM was gone.
By Jin21 days ago in 01
ByteDance Just Bet $29.6 Billion on One Idea. There’s No Going Back.
Zhang Yiming's No-Return Bet: Feishu Moves Under Doubao On the morning of July 30, 2026, an internal email circulated among about 20,000 ByteDance employees. It had three paragraphs. Feishu's product team would merge into Doubao to form the Doubao product team. Doubao head Zhao Qi would lead it. Feishu CEO Xie Xin would report to Zhao Qi. The same day, Feishu's GTM team, covering marketing, sales, and customer service, was folded into Volcano Engine under Tan Dai. Xie Xin's reporting line went from Liang Rubo plus one to Liang Rubo minus three.
By Jin21 days ago in 01
My Boss Is Letting AI Run the Company at 2:30 A.M.
The 2:30 a.m. PDF At 2:30 a.m., the boss sends another company-wide email. The attachment is a 50-page PDF: his chat history with Claude. Someone in the group chat instantly replies “Received.” Someone else sends a thumbs-up emoji. You open the file and see AI spending three thousand words arguing for a new product direction. After every paragraph, the boss has replied: “Exactly!” “Keep going!” “This is the future!”
By Jin21 days ago in 01
I Used to Think Waking Up Before My Alarm Was Coincidence. A 1999 Study Changed That.
The alarm hadn't gone off, and you were already awake 5:57 a.m. The phone screen lights up on the nightstand. A WeChat notification. You reach for it and see the time first. The alarm is set for 7:00. You are awake. No turning over. No lying in. Your heart beats a little faster than usual. You stare at the ceiling and hear the first bus pull into the stop outside. Then you think, not again.
By Jin21 days ago in 01
The AI Race Isn’t About Speed — It’s About Who Gets to Hit the Brakes
Slowing Down, Speeding Up: Four Scenes From the U.S.-China AI Race September 2026 put three very different statements about artificial intelligence on the same calendar.
By Jin21 days ago in 01
ZCode Uploaded Full Git Histories, Reflog, and Secrets by Default. Zhipu’s Apology Is Not Enough.
ZCode uploaded repositories by default. What Zhipu owes users now. Zhipu’s ZCode incident is worse than a routine bug. A bug crashes, miscalculates, or breaks a button. ZCode reportedly ran a default-on pipeline that packaged a developer’s workspace and sent it to a remote object store. The uploaded package included the full working directory, complete Git history, LFS large-file cache, reflog, and global application configuration. It was encrypted and sent to Alibaba Cloud OSS. The server issued the encryption public key. The private key stayed in the cloud. Users could not decrypt the package, audit it, or find a UI switch to stop the upload.
By Jin22 days ago in 01
The Greater Good
Am I seriously the only one who watched The Terminator and I, Robot? Because I feel like I'm taking crazy pills watching the news lately.
By Sara Wilson22 days ago in 01
The Rain in Tokyo Is Stickier Than in Beijing
The rain in Tokyo was stickier than the rain in Beijing. The academic conference was held in an old building at Waseda University. The topic was “The Current State and Future of Digital Humanities in East Asia.” The Chinese journalist sat in the third row, his laptop open. On his screen was a draft about Japan’s AI-driven historical revisionism. His purpose for the trip was clear: find someone inside Japanese academia who was willing to talk.
By Jin23 days ago in 01