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      AI companies want you to stop chatting with bots and start managing them

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026

    On Thursday, Anthropic and OpenAI shipped products built around the same idea: instead of chatting with a single AI assistant, users should be managing teams of AI agents that divide up work and run in parallel. The simultaneous releases are part of a gradual shift across the industry, from AI as a conversation partner to AI as a delegated workforce, and they arrive during a week when that very concept reportedly helped wipe $285 billion off software stocks.

    Whether that supervisory model works in practice remains an open question. Current AI agents still require heavy human intervention to catch errors, and no independent evaluation has confirmed that these multi-agent tools reliably outperform a single developer working alone.

    Even so, the companies are going all-in on agents. Anthropic's contribution is Claude Opus 4.6 , a new version of its most capable AI model, paired with a feature called " agent teams " in Claude Code. Agent teams let developers spin up multiple AI agents that split a task into independent pieces, coordinate autonomously, and run concurrently.

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      The Switch 2 is getting a new Virtual Console (kind of)

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026 • 1 minute

    In 2018, we lamented as Nintendo officially replaced the Virtual Console—its long-running line of downloadable classic games on the Wii and Wii U—with time-limited access to a set of games through a paid Nintendo Switch Online subscription . Now, Hamster Corporation is doing what Nintendo no longer will, by offering downloadable versions of retro console games for direct individual purchase on the Switch 2.

    As part of today's Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase , Hamster announced a new Console Archives line of emulated classics available for download starting today on the Switch 2 and next week on the PlayStation 5 (sorry, Xbox and OG Switch fans). So far that lineup only includes the original PlayStation snowboarding title Cool Boarders for $12 and the NES action platformer Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos for $8 , but Hamster promises more obscure games, including Doraemon and Sonic Wings Special , will be available in the future.

    If the name Hamster Corporation sounds familiar, it's because the company is behind the Arcade Archive series , which has repackaged individual arcade games for purchase and emulated play on modern consoles since 2014. That effort, which celebrated its 500th release in December , even includes some of Nintendo's classic arcade titles , which the Switch-maker never officially released on the original Virtual Console.

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      With GPT-5.3-Codex, OpenAI pitches Codex for more than just writing code

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026

    Today, OpenAI announced GPT-5.3-Codex, a new version of its frontier coding model that will be available via the command line, IDE extension, web interface, and the new macOS desktop app . (No API access yet, but it's coming.)

    GPT-5.3-Codex outperforms GPT-5.2-Codex and GPT-5.2 in SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal-Bench 2.0, and other benchmarks, according to the company's testing.

    There are already a few headlines out there saying "Codex built itself," but let's reality-check that, as that's an overstatement. The domains OpenAI described using it for here are similar to the ones you see in some other enterprise software development firms now: managing deployments, debugging, and handling test results and evaluations. There is no claim here that GPT-5.3-Codex built itself.

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      "ICE Out of Our Faces Act" would ban ICE and CBP use of facial recognition

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026

    A few Senate Democrats introduced a bill called the ‘‘ICE Out of Our Faces Act," which would ban Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from using facial recognition technology.

    The bill would make it "unlawful for any covered immigration officer to acquire, possess, access, or use in the United States—(1) any biometric surveillance system; or (2) information derived from a biometric surveillance system operated by another entity." All data collected from such systems in the past would have to be deleted. The proposed ban extends beyond facial recognition to cover other biometric surveillance technologies, such as voice recognition.

    The proposed ban would prohibit the federal government from using data from biometric surveillance systems in court cases or investigations. Individuals would have a right to sue the federal government for financial damages after violations, and state attorneys general would be able to bring suits on behalf of residents.

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      Neocities founder stuck in chatbot hell after Bing blocked 1.5 million sites

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026 • 1 minute

    One of the weirdest corners of the Internet is suddenly hard to find on Bing, after the search engine inexplicably started blocking approximately 1.5 million independent websites hosted on Neocities.

    Founded in 2013 to archive the "aesthetic awesomeness" of GeoCities websites , Neocities keeps the spirit of the 1990s Internet alive. It lets users design free websites without relying on standardized templates devoid of personality. For hundreds of thousands of people building websites around art , niche fandoms , and special expertise —or simply seeking a place to get a little weird online —Neocities provides a blank canvas that can be endlessly personalized when compared to a Facebook page. Delighted visitors discovering these sites are more likely to navigate by hovering flashing pointers over a web of spinning GIFs than clicking a hamburger menu or infinitely scrolling.

    That's the style of Internet that Kyle Drake, Neocities' founder, strives to maintain. So he was surprised when he noticed that Bing was curiously blocking Neocities sites last summer. At first, the issue seemed resolved by contacting Microsoft, but after receiving more recent reports that users were struggling to log in, Drake discovered that another complete block was implemented in January. Even more concerning, he saw that after delisting the front page, Bing had started pointing users to a copycat site where he was alarmed to learn they were providing their login credentials.

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      Watch Kanzi the bonobo pretend to have a tea party

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026 • 1 minute

    Little kids hosting make-believe tea parties is a fixture of childhood playtime and long presumed to be exclusively a human ability. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University presented evidence in a new paper published in the journal Science that a bonobo named Kanzi was also able to participate in pretending to hold a tea party. For the authors, this suggests that apes are capable of using their imagination just like human toddlers.

    “It really is game-changing that their mental lives go beyond the here and now," said co-author Christopher Krupenye. "Imagination has long been seen as a critical element of what it is to be human, but the idea that it may not be exclusive to our species is really transformative. Jane Goodall discovered that chimps make tools, and that led to a change in the definition of what it means to be human, and this, too, really invites us to reconsider what makes us special and what mental life is out there among other creatures."

    Per Krupenye et al., by the age of two, human children are able to navigate imaginary scenarios like a tea party, pretending there is real tea present even if the teapot and cups are actually empty. Cognitively speaking, it's an example of secondary representation, because it involves decoupling an imagined or simulated state (pretending there is actual tea in the cup) with the reality (the cup is empty).

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      Bad sleep made woman's eyelids so floppy they flipped inside out, got stuck

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026

    A poor night's sleep might leave you feeling like your eyelids have filled with lead—and keeping them open is the ultimate dead lift. But for some, bad sleep brings on eyelids so droopy and floppy that they can do curl ups on their own.

    That was the unfortunate case for a 39-year-old woman who sought care at an ophthalmology clinic in Brooklyn, New York. She told the doctors that for six weeks she felt like she had something in her eyes, and they were watery. By the time of her appointment, her eyelids had rolled up, flipping inside-out on their own—and were staying that way. In the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors report her eye-opening case —and its unexpected solution.

    (You can see images of her eyelids—flipped and recovered— here . The images may seem graphic to some, but they are not much worse than that kid in elementary school who would flip their eyelids just to freak everyone out for laughs. You know the one.)

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      Google hints at big AirDrop expansion for Android "very soon"

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026

    There is very little functional difference between iOS and Android these days. The systems could integrate quite well if it weren't for the way companies prioritize lock-in over compatibility. At least in the realm of file sharing, Google is working to fix that. After adding basic AirDrop support to Pixel 10 devices last year, the company says we can look forward to seeing it on many more phones this year.

    At present, the only Android phones that can initiate an AirDrop session with Apple devices are Google's latest Pixel 10 devices. When Google announced this upgrade, it vaguely suggested that more developments would come, and it now looks like we'll see more AirDrop support soon.

    According to Android Authority , Google is planning a big AirDrop expansion in 2026. During an event at the company's Taipei office, Eric Kay, Google's VP of engineering for Android, laid out the path ahead.

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      OpenAI is hoppin' mad about Anthropic's new Super Bowl TV ads

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026

    On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch complained on X after rival AI lab Anthropic released four commercials, two of which will run during the Super Bowl on Sunday, mocking the idea of including ads in AI chatbot conversations. Anthropic's campaign seemingly touched a nerve at OpenAI just weeks after the ChatGPT maker began testing ads in a lower-cost tier of its chatbot.

    Altman called Anthropic's ads "clearly dishonest," accused the company of being "authoritarian," and said it "serves an expensive product to rich people," while Rouch wrote , "Real betrayal isn't ads. It's control."

    Anthropic's four commercials , part of a campaign called "A Time and a Place," each open with a single word splashed across the screen: "Betrayal," "Violation," "Deception," and "Treachery." They depict scenarios where a person asks a human stand-in for an AI chatbot for personal advice, only to get blindsided by a product pitch.

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