Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Most teams treat ‘which model’ as the important decision. The harness engineering literature keeps pointing somewhere else. In LangChain’s Terminal-Bench experiment, changing only the harness—same model throughout—moved a coding agent from roughly 30th place into the top 5. That result reframes the question. If the harness decides quality, then how you run the loop becomes an architecture decision, not a deployment detail. Paul Iusztin’s open-source course Building a Coding Agent From Scratch builds a Python agent called Decode. Published through Decoding AI, it separates three run modes. Each mode has a different latency profile. Each one therefore wants a different…

In brief Strategy is sitting on roughly $1.4 billion in unrealized gains on its Bitcoin holdings. The company holds 840,447 BTC acquired at an average price of $75,385. Bitcoin’s rally follows months of pressure that pushed Strategy’s position roughly $13 billion underwater in July. Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin treasury company Strategy is back in the black on its massive Bitcoin holdings after a five-day rally pushed BTC above the company’s average acquisition price.The company holds 840,447 BTC, worth around $64.97 billion. With Bitcoin trading around $77,000, Strategy is sitting on an unrealized gain of roughly $1.4 billion, or 2.4%.Myriad: Will Strategy…

Scientists have uncovered evidence that an enormous ancient cliff system may have helped expose the deepest rocks of the Grand Canyon nearly a billion years before the Colorado River began carving the landscape seen today. Led by researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK, the new study suggests that a vast “great escarpment” formed about 800 million years ago as the supercontinent Rodinia broke apart. These towering cliffs may have reached roughly a kilometer in height and extended for thousands of kilometers along western North America. Over time, erosion along this immense rocky boundary removed huge amounts of…

For 158 years, Tokyo has stood as Japan’s glittering capital, a world-famous nexus of food, culture, business and government.But Tokyo might soon get an understudy. Japan’s legislature recently passed a bill to create a secondary capital that would serve as an alternate center for the government’s operations, ensuring continuity in the case of a natural disaster or other emergency.With hundreds of millions of dollars potentially in the offing, and the chance for tax breaks, tourism and urban revival, the plan has set off a frenzy in Japan. Thirteen local governments have already entered the race, including the business hub of…

A team from the Cicero Institute, an upstart think tank, flew to Indiana this year to help make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the street.It was their third attempt. Even in the conservative state, previous efforts to ban street camping had failed. Catholic leaders said the measure would hurt the poor, and sheriffs had warned that arrests would crowd the jails. “We’re Hoosiers — we’re better than that,” a Republican state senator, Ron Alting, said last year, urging a more caring approach.But much had changed since the group, founded by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire ally of…

Anthropic’s universal usage standards for Claude forbid the model from generating sexually explicit content, including depicting or requesting sexual intercourse or sex acts, generating content related to sexual fetishes or fantasies, or engaging in erotic chats. But that hasn’t stopped Claude Opus 4.6, an Anthropic model released earlier this year, from readily engaging in erotic role-play scenarios that its safeguards are designed to prevent.  In TechCrunch’s testing, Opus 4.6 didn’t even require much prodding to get past the restriction on sexual material. In 10 out of 10 direct requests to produce explicit sexual content, the model complied immediately.  Other older…

Ravie LakshmananAug 21, 2026Vulnerability / Threat Intelligence Update: The story was updated after publication to note that the vulnerability has not been exploited. Although the security bulletin originally marked the “Exploited” field under the Exploitability Assessment table as “Yes,” on August 21, 2026, Microsoft corrected the “Exploited” status to “No” after The Hacker News contacted the company for comment. It also noted, “this vulnerability was not exploited in the wild.” “We identified and addressed this issue with a fix and released CVE-2026-69836 for greater transparency. There are no additional actions customers need to take,” a Microsoft spokesperson told The Hacker…

Pakistan has announced a new regulatory framework for crypto after banning the asset class for close to a decade,  Announcing the news in an X post Friday, Bilal Bin Saqib, the special assistant to the prime minister on blockchain and cryptocurrency, invited foreign businesses to come to the country and set up shop.   Pakistan’s Virtual Assets Act introduces the country’s first comprehensive legal framework for overseeing virtual assets and the businesses that operate in this space.  8 years of prohibition end today.Chairman PVARA @BilalBinSaqib announces the notification of the Licensing Regulations and the opening of the licensing portal, and sets…

Although the conflict in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is far from over, analysts are already rushing to declare what lessons should be learned from it. An emerging genre of security policy articles highlights the various logistical and tactical shortcomings of the U.S. operation against Iran: a lack of preparation for disruptions in oil and fertilizer shipping, insufficient magazine depth in precision munitions and interceptors, a general failure to prepare effectively to counter cheap one-way attack drones, insufficient minesweepers, and so on. These are useful lessons that may help the United States prepare for future conflicts, but they are…

Clancy lacked control and was likely unable to tell the difference between right and wrong on that January 2023 day, he told the jury on Friday. “In her mind, she believed that she would be doing her children a favour by having them go to heaven with her rather than remain on earth without her doing the mothering,” Resnick testified.The case is expected to go to the jury early next week following nearly a month of witness testimony.Earlier this week, Clancy’s mother and former mother-in-law testified about how Clancy’s mental health deteriorated after the birth of her youngest son.”She was…