It's not really accurate to call the Wagoneer S Jeep's first electric vehicle. For several years now, Europeans have been able to buy the Jeep Avenger, a subcompact crossover that will surely never see American roads. But it is the first electric Jeep designed for American consumption. It's aimed at the highly competitive midsize SUV segment, which gets ever more crowded even as electrification faces a less certain future here. Indeed, the brand, along with its Stellantis sibling Chrysler, just shelved all its plug-in hybrids, discontinuing them just a few days ago.

Like the little Avenger, the Wagoneer S makes use of one of parent company Stellantis' purpose-built EV platforms , one shared with the growly-sounding Dodge Charger . At 192.4 inches (4,886 mm) long, 74.8 inches (1,900 mm) wide, and 64.8 inches (1,645 mm) tall, it's a little larger than cars like the BMW iX3 or Audi Q6 e-tron but a little smaller than domestically designed rivals like the Cadillac Lyriq and Acura ZDX , which have particularly long wheelbases.

I find it a rather handsome car, one that has to marry Jeep's Wagoneer styling cues with as many wind-smoothing and air-shaping elements as possible. The way the rear wing juts out above the tailgate window reminds me of a '90s rally hatchback, but it's the product of the designers and the engineers working on drag reduction. The overall drag coefficient is 0.29, and since Jeep actually publishes the frontal area, too, I can tell you the more important CdA number—where drag is multiplied by the frontal area—is 8.67.

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It's looking to be a solid year for kaiju fans. Not only are we getting Godzilla Minus Zero in November—sequel to the critically acclaimed Godzilla Minus One (2023)—but Apple TV just released a teaser for the second season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters , part of Legendary Entertainment’s MonsterVerse , which brought Godzilla, King Kong, and various other monsters ( kaiju ) created by Toho Co., Ltd into the same fold.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

The first season picked up where 2014's Godzilla left off, specifically the introduction of Project Monarch, a secret organization established in the 1950s to study Godzilla and other kaiju —after attempts to kill Godzilla with nuclear weapons failed. The plot spans three generations and takes place in the 1950s and half a century later. In the first season, two siblings (Kate and Kentaro Randa) follow in their father’s footsteps to uncover their family’s connection to the secretive organization known as Monarch. Naturally, they find themselves in the world of monsters and discover Army officer Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell), a longtime family ally.

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A third person has died in a rash of poisonings from wild, foraged mushrooms in California, health officials report.

Since November, a total of 35 people across the state have been poisoned by mushrooms, leading to three people receiving liver transplants in addition to the three deaths. Health officials in Sonoma County reported the latest death last week .

Michael Stacey, Sonoma's interim health officer, attributed the cases and deaths to an extraordinary boom in the prevalence of death cap mushrooms ( Amanita phalloides ), noting that in an average year, the state sees fewer than five mushroom poisoning cases.

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Moxie Marlinspike—the pseudonym of an engineer who set a new standard for private messaging with the creation of the Signal Messenger—is now aiming to revolutionize AI chatbots in a similar way.

His latest brainchild is Confer , an open source AI assistant that provides strong assurances that user data is unreadable to the platform operator, hackers, law enforcement, or any other party other than account holders. The service—including its large language models and back-end components—runs entirely on open source software that users can cryptographically verify is in place.

Data and conversations originating from users and the resulting responses from the LLMs are encrypted in a trusted execution environment (TEE) that prevents even server administrators from peeking at or tampering with them. Conversations are stored by Confer in the same encrypted form, which uses a key that remains securely on users’ devices.

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Anthropic's agentic tool Claude Code has been an enormous hit with some software developers and hobbyists, and now the company is bringing that modality to more general office work with a new feature called Cowork .

Built on the same foundations as Claude Code and baked into the macOS Claude desktop app, Cowork allows users to give Claude access to a specific folder on their computer and then give plain language instructions for tasks.

Anthropic gave examples like filling out an expense report from a folder full of receipt photos, writing reports based on a big stack of digital notes, or reorganizing a folder (or cleaning up your desktop) based on a prompt.

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A company called GRU Space publicly announced its intent to construct a series of increasingly sophisticated habitats on the Moon, culminating in a hotel inspired by the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco.

On Monday, the company invited those interested in a berth to plunk down a deposit between $250,000 and $1 million, qualifying them for a spot on one of its early lunar surface missions in as little as six years from now.

It sounds crazy, doesn't it? After all, GRU Space had, as of late December when I spoke to founder Skyler Chan, a single full-time employee aside from himself. And Chan, in fact, only recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Paramount Skydance escalated its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) today by filing a lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court against WBD, declaring its intention to fight Netflix’s acquisition.

In December, WBD agreed to sell its streaming and movie businesses to Netflix for $82.7 billion. The deal would see WBD’s Global Networks division, comprised of WBD's legacy cable networks, spun out into a separate company called Discovery Global. But in December, Paramount submitted a hostile takeover bid and amended its bid for WBD. Subsequently, the company has aggressively tried to convince WBD’s shareholders that its $108.4 billion offer for all of WBD is superior to the Netflix deal.

Today, Paramount CEO David Ellison wrote a letter to WBD shareholders informing them of Paramount’s lawsuit. The lawsuit requests the court to force WBD to disclose “how it valued the Global Networks stub equity, how it valued the overall Netflix transaction, how the purchase price reduction for debt works in the Netflix transaction, or even what the basis is for its ‘risk adjustment’” of Paramount’s $30 per share all-cash offer. Netflix’s offer equates to $27.72 per share, including $23.25 in cash and shares of Netflix common stock. Paramount hopes the information will encourage more WBD shareholders to tender their shares under Paramount's offer by the January 21 deadline.

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Linux and Git creator Linus Torvalds' latest hobby project contains code that was "basically written by vibe coding," but you shouldn't read that to mean that Torvalds is embracing that approach for anything and everything.

Torvalds sometimes works on a small hobby project over holiday breaks. Last year, he made guitar pedals. This year, he did some work on AudioNoise, which he calls "another silly guitar-pedal-related repo." It creates random digital audio effects.

Torvalds revealed that he had used an AI coding tool in the README for the repo :

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The Federal Communications Commission is letting Verizon lock phones to its network for longer periods, eliminating a requirement to unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network. The change will make it harder for people to switch from Verizon to other carriers.

The FCC today granted Verizon's petition for a waiver of the 60-day unlocking requirement. While the waiver is in effect, Verizon only has to comply with the CTIA trade group's voluntary unlocking policy . The CTIA policy calls for unlocking prepaid mobile devices one year after activation, while devices on postpaid plans can be unlocked after a contract, device financing plan, or early termination fee is paid.

Unlocking a phone allows it to be used on another carrier's network. While Verizon was previously required to unlock phones automatically after 60 days, the CTIA code says carriers only have to unlock phones "upon request" from consumers. The FCC said the Verizon waiver will remain in effect until the agency "decides on an appropriate industry-wide approach for the unlocking of handsets."

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