Did you know that chat interfaces were always (mostly) secretly a command line?
This is still very much a research preview, available only for Claude Max users on Macs with a bunch of bugs and missing features. It will improve rapidly over time.
Cowork combines a lot of the power of Claude Code with the ordinary chat interface, giving it access to a folder on your computer and to Claude Code’s planning and agentic capabilities. It can use that folder as context, to download, to organize and create files, and it can be paired with Claude for Chrome and use your existing connectors.
Anthropic: Introducing Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work.
Cowork lets you complete non-technical tasks much like how developers use Claude Code.
In Cowork, you give Claude access to a folder on your computer. Claude can then read, edit, or create files in that folder. Try it to create a spreadsheet from a pile of screenshots, or produce a first draft from scattered notes.
Once you’ve set a task, Claude makes a plan and steadily completes it, looping you in along the way. Claude will ask before taking any significant actions so you can course-correct as needed.
Claude can use your existing connectors, which link Claude to external information. You can also pair Cowork with Claude in Chrome for tasks that need browser access.
Sholto Douglas (Anthropic): Claude code for all other knowledge work. Many of our best engineers no longer manually write code, they multiplex across multiple cc sessions – soon this will be true for everything else.
The system prompt is here, the core non-tooling parts seem unchanged. This post will cover Claude Cowork, and also updates since last week on Claude Code.
What exactly can it do at this early stage?
Dean W. Ball: it’s basically what I expected. the ui is normal claude, but instead of showing you the bash commands it is executing, it just says “using bash” or “command” (you can click for detail of course). very useful for many I’m sure! not sure if useful for me over cc; still learning.
There are ui niceties that I could see myself preferring to the command line, even as someone very comfortable with terminals. and of course one would expect more such niceties in future iterations.
Vie: My guess is that the prompt scaffolding makes the results and actual work a few times more general for non-code use cases, and a few times more interpretable by lay-people, at the cost of the tail of IQ being a big smaller
Claire Vo: It’s basically local Claude Code with a Mac OS app wrapper focused on a few core primitives:
Connectors / MCPs – external services Cowork has access to
Filesystem – runs locally so will create/read things on your file system
TODOs/Steps – discrete trackable steps cowork will take to execute your tasks
Artifacts – files generated in the process of doing your task
Context – files / sources / connectors used when doing your task
Skills – preloaded with a few key skills, esp. file type creation ones like DOCX, PPT, etc. Claude generally has access to these, so not new.
Every chat is now a task (focused on doing-a-thing) and steps, artifacts, and context get first class treatment in the UI.
… Speaking of skills, Cowork seemingly comes bundled with a few key ones around document creation (you can find them in your file system.)
… Despite it’s flaws, Cowork did create better outputs than straight Chat.
The most credible signal of respect is admitting that a release killed your startup product, which we see here with Eigent.
Steve Hou: Another win for ‘the foundation model is the product.’
This is the first feedback so far about what it’s intended to do:
John Wittle: My mom, sharp old woman, seems to be taking to it with quite a lot of enthusiasm, in a way she had trouble doing with, say, windows-mcp and claude desktop.
seems to unlock normie powers a lot better.
Neil: I think amazing for non coders to discover what’s possible
Rename it away from code, normie figures out they can have it code.
If that’s true with the version that’s two weeks old, the sky’s the limit. We don’t have much data because there aren’t that many normies with $200/month Claude Max subscriptions.
It’s early days, and she reports there were still some other kinks being worked out. In particular, the connectors are having problems.
Tibor Blaho: Available now for Max subscribers on macOS desktop app only, with no project support, no memory between sessions, no sharing, app must stay open during tasks, and consumes more usage than regular chat, with plans to add cross-device sync and Windows support
One thing Claire Vo noted was it asked for approvals on file openings too much. I have a similar complaint with Claude Code, that there’s a bunch of highly safe similar actions that shouldn’t need permission.
Claire also noted that Claude Cowork exposed too many technical files and notes about what it was doing to the user, such as the code used to generate things, which could be confusing to non-technical users. My guess is that such files can be stored in a subdirectory where such users won’t notice, which keeps it available for those who want it, and ‘tell me more about what you’re doing on a technical level’ can be a setting, since the users who want it set to no won’t even notice the option exists.
There is a huge overhang in AI capabilities.
Thus, a common pattern is that someone figures out a way to do useful things at all that humans are willing to learn how to use. And then we muddle down that road, and it’s not first best but it still wins big.
That’s what Claude Code was, and now that’s what Claude Cowork will be for normies. Presumably OpenAI and Google, and then others, will soon follow suit.
Chris Barber: do you see the vision of claude cowork?
imagine claude for execl, powerpoint, word, outlook, chrome, bloomberg terminal, etc. gmail connector. ability to code.
this is the pathway to big knowledge worker adoption
openai and google will need to follow
this will be very strong pmf and growth
invest in it, compete with it, join anthropic/oai/gdm and work on it/competitors, etc
this will be central
claude code *isthe ai coworker, it’ll all build up from there.
If you’re worried Claude Cowork or Claude Code will delete a bunch of stuff in a directory, and you don’t want to use a full virtual sandbox solution, there’s a rather simple solution that also works, which is: Backup the directory, to a place Claude can’t get to it. Then if the worst happens, you restore the backup.
Think before you type. Enter plan mode first and go back and forth a lot.
Keep claude.md short, max 50-100 instructions. Use # while working to edit it.
Store things in external files.
Try to only use 30% of the context window, after that performance degrades.
Make your prompts as specific as possible, including what not to do.
Try out various hooks, MCPs, you name it. Experiment.
When stuck, be creative, pivot, simplify, clear the conversation and start again.
Build systems, not one-off tasks.
Here’s another report of what Claude Code has been good for, with three big unlocks for APIs, connecting distinct products and running things regularly:
Nikhil Krishnan: I’ve spent the last 48 hours in Claude Code – as a non-technical person it’s basically unlocked three very big things for me
The ability to interact with APIs generally – again, as a non-technical person one of the big barriers to running the business has been touching APIs. For example, what you can do in Stripe in the non-developer portal vs. through the API is night and day.
The ability to thread things together – another issue has been threading several different products we work with together to do cohesive tasks. Zapier gets you part of the way for triggers, but Claude Code let’s me do way more complex things that touches multiple things simultaneously
Run something regularly – being able to set a script and run it regularly with this level of ease is a game changer. In about an hour I set up a daily email to myself that tells me the top 3 emails I need to respond to based on a priority scoring system we made together that pulls data from a few different places.
I know I’m late to this and I’m probably doing things poorly so be nice to me. But it’s really been awesome to dive into this.
As always, one could have done all of this any number of other ways, but this deals with the problem of activation energy.
Automated invoice creation, sending, and tracking;
Created scientifically realistic simulations of hydrological systems as a learning project;
Automated my research process of gathering and analyzing all proposed state legislation related to AI (though this is no substitute for reading the bill for anything I am going to write about);
Orchestrated a complex chain of autonomous data collection, processing, analysis, and presentation steps related to manufacturing and industrial policy;
Created a machine-learning model capable of predicting US corn yields with what appears to be very high accuracy (the proof will be in the pudding), based on climate, soil, Earth-observation satellite, and other data sources;
Replicated three machine-learning research papers and modified the approach to suit my own research ends;
Performed hundreds of experiments with Byte-level language models, an emerging interest of mine;
Created an autonomous prediction market agent;
Created an autonomous options trader based on a specific investment thesis I developed;
Built dozens of games and simulations to educate myself about various physical or industrial phenomena;
Created an agent that monitors a particular art market in which I am potentially interested in making an acquisition;
Created a new personal blog complete with a Squarespace-style content management system behind the scenes;
Other things I cannot talk about publicly just yet.
I’m not there yet, largely because we think in different ways, but largely because I’m just getting started with ‘oh right coding things just happens, do coding agent shaped things.’
Dean Ball nails it that coding agents are most helpful exactly when you don’t have to ship your software to third parties. I presume that the code underneath everything I’m having Claude build would horrify professional coders. That’s fine, because even in the places I do ship (cause why not ship, someone might find it useful) I’m not trying to not horrify people. What matters is it works, and that I’m ‘using coding agent shaped requests,’ as Dean puts it, to increasingly get things done.
The coding agents will still produce the most value for professional coders, because they can go into supercharged mode with them and get the most out of them, but that requires the professionals to swim upstream in ways the rest of us don’t have to.
So, say this is what you want:
Prakesh: what i really want as a writer is an automated fact checker and alternative viewpoint giver. there’s a lot of fact rechecking after you have the initial concept of a piece which is tedious but necessary.
Jon Stokes: I literally have this (the fact checker). It’s amazing (not just saying that because my team built it.. it’s truly wild). Happy to demo for you… DM if interested.
Exactly. I haven’t built a custom fact checker yet, but the only thing stopping me is ‘it hadn’t yet occured to me it was sufficiently easy to do that’ combined with ‘I have not yet gotten around to it.’ Check back with me in six months and I bet I do have one, I’m actually building towards such things but it’s not near the top of that queue yet.
As Alex Albert puts it, you get to stop thinking doing something is ‘not worth your time,’ or for Simon Willison entire features are no longer ‘not worth your time’ at least not until they run into serious trouble.
Claude may not yet in its official test be a Pokemon master, but Claude Code is now somewhat of a RollerCoaster Tycoon, with various strengths and weaknesses. Dean Ball suggests you can use Claude Code to do game dev on new ‘[x] tycoon’ games as a niche topic learning exercise. Oliver Habryka challenges whether it’s good enough at game dev for this. As Patrick McKenzie points out, if the game is text based that helps a lot, since visual aspects are a key weakness for now.
Kelsey Piper: In college, I was once told that the really hard part of programming was knowing, in sufficient detail, what you wanted the computer to do. This was not my experience of programming.
In my experience of programming, the really hard part was figuring out which packages weren’t installed or weren’t updated or were in the wrong folder, causing the test we’d done in class to completely fail to work in the same way on my own computer. The next really hard part was Googling everything the debugger spat out to find an explanation of how to make it go away.
… Claude Code solves all of that. Programming, now, really is just a matter of knowing in sufficient detail what you want the computer to do.
… Now, 99% of the time, it feels like magic. The remaining 1% is absolutely maddening.
It’s not that it is easy to know what you want the computer to do, especially if you expand that to include ‘what do I even want to be trying to do today at all.’ Both the macro and micro ‘what are we even doing’ questions are hard. I still spent 90% of my time dealing with packages and syntax and setup and knowing exactly how to do it.
The problem is that, as Kelsey observes, you will spend your time on the bottleneck, whatever that bottleneck might be, and this will be frustrating, especially as this will often be something stupid, or the particular place Claude Code happens to act stupid given the way you’re prompting it.
I said that 99% of the time Claude was great. By which I mean, 99% of the work Claude completed was great, but that doesn’t mean 99% of my time was spent sitting back and marveling. When something worked great, we’d breeze right past it. When Claude had shuffled all the audio files again, we’d spend a really long time fixing that. I found myself, well, yelling at it.
I am happy to report that I haven’t been yelling at Claude Code when it messes up. But yeah, it messes up, because I keep trying to get it to do more until it messes up.
Anthony Morris ツ: We shipped A LOT of updates to Claude Code on desktop in the last week.
– Plan mode (coming soon to web) – Notifications for permissions – Perf improvements – Fixed slash commands – Improved env access – Tons of polish
Numman Ali says v2.1.3 has ‘solved the compaction issue’ so long as you use planning mode and explicitly ask the model for a comprehensive TODO list. It’s hard to tell, but I’ve certainly blown over the compaction line on many tasks and when I’ve saved the necessary context elsewhere it’s mostly turned out fine.
What Clade Code cannot do is allow its harness to be spoofed to use subscriptions. You can either use Claude Code, or you can access Claude via the API, but it’s a terms of service violation to spoof the harness to let you use your subscription allocation. I’d be inclined to let the harnesses stay in place despite the problems described here, so long as the unit economics are not too horrendous. In general I think Anthropic is too focused on getting to profitability quickly, even if you think OpenAI is rather too willing to burn money.
In the interest of not silencing critics, Holly Elmore claims I’m bad now because I’m enthusiastic about getting use out of Claude Code, a ‘recursively self-improving agent.’
I affirm David Manheim’s response that there is no reason for an individual not to use such tools for their own purposes, or not to get excited about what it can do outside of potentially dangerous forms of self-improvement.
I do agree that the vibes in that post were a bit off by not also including awareness of where sufficiently advanced coding agents lead once they start self-improving in earnest, and there is value in having a voice like Holly’s that says the basic thing clearly.
However I also think that there is no contradiction between ‘recursive self-improvement is super dangerous and likely to get us all killed’ and ‘you should be taking full advantage of Claude Code for practical purposes and you’re leaving a lot on the table if you don’t.’
There is a new method called the ‘Ralph Wiggum’ technique, where you tell Claude Code continuously to ‘improve the code’ it has already written. Some say it works great, but the name does not inspire confidence.
The world is collectively underinvesting in optimizing and standardizing such techniques. Some well-designed version of this would presumably be great, and the more parallelization of agents is going on the more valuable it is to optimize non-interruption over token efficiency.
What is the difference between a command line and a chat interface?
Both are text in and text out.
Both allow attachments, at least in Claude Code mode.
Both can have sandboxes, run code, and so on.
The main real difference is that the terminal makes it annoying to edit prompts?
It’s almost entirely about perception. One feels like talk with an entity, one like commands and bash scripts. One looks like a slick modern UI, the other a stark black text box.
There is also a clear plan to have different system prompts, and to build in a different more user friendly set of default connectors and tools.
That plus the change in perception could be a really, really big deal.
Researchers have discovered a never-before-seen framework that infects Linux machines with a wide assortment of modules that are notable for the range of advanced capabilities they provide to attackers.
The framework, referred to as VoidLink by its source code, features more than 30 modules that can be used to customize capabilities to meet attackers’ needs for each infected machine. These modules can provide additional stealth and specific tools for reconnaissance, privilege escalation, and lateral movement inside a compromised network. The components can be easily added or removed as objectives change over the course of a campaign.
A focus on Linux inside the cloud
VoidLink can target machines within popular cloud services by detecting if an infected machine is hosted inside AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba, and Tencent, and there are indications that developers plan to add detections for Huawei, DigitalOcean, and Vultr in future releases. To detect which cloud service hosts the machine, VoidLink examines metadata using the respective vendor’s API.
Similar frameworks targeting Windows servers have flourished for years. They are less common on Linux machines. The feature set is unusually broad and is “far more advanced than typical Linux malware,” said researchers from Checkpoint, the security firm that discovered VoidLink. Its creation may indicate that the attacker’s focus is increasingly expanding to include Linux systems, cloud infrastructure, and application deployment environments, as organizations increasingly move workloads to these environments.
“VoidLink is a comprehensive ecosystem designed to maintain long-term, stealthy access to compromised Linux systems, particularly those running on public cloud platforms and in containerized environments,” the researchers said in a separate post. “Its design reflects a level of planning and investment typically associated with professional threat actors rather than opportunistic attackers, raising the stakes for defenders who may never realize their infrastructure has been quietly taken over.”
Apple’s professional creative apps have been slower to jump on the subscription bandwagon than those from Adobe or some of its other competitors, but the company is taking a step in that direction today. Starting on January 28, Apple will offer an Apple Creator Studio subscription for $13 a month, or $130 a year. Subscribers will get access to the Mac and (where applicable) iPad versions of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage, as well as “intelligent features and premium content” for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone versions of Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform.
Apple says it will also offer a one-month free trial for the subscription and a discounted version for students at $3 a month, or $30 a year.
Most of the apps also seem to be getting small feature updates to go along with the Creator Studio announcement. Final Cut will get a new Transcript Search feature that will allow you to dig through video footage by searching for specific dialogue, and a new Montage Maker feature “will analyze and edit together a dynamic video based on the best visual moments within the footage.” An updated Logic Pro “helps creators deliver original music for their video content” and adds a synth player to the app’s lineup of “AI Session Players.”
The biggest update is probably a new version of Pixelmator Pro for the iPad, designed around the Apple Pencil accessory. When Apple announced it was acquiring Pixelmator in late 2024, the image and vector editing app was only available for the Mac.
As for Keynote, Pages, and Numbers—in another lifetime, the apps formerly known as “iWork”—the core apps remain free, but the Creator Studio subscription adds “premium templates and themes” for the apps, as well as access to a Content Hub that provides “curated, high-quality photos, graphics, and illustrations” for the apps. Apple is also offering a handful of OpenAI-powered generative features, including upscaling and transformation for existing images, the ability to generate images from text, and a Keynote feature that will create a slide deck from a text outline.
Elon Musk’s xAI recently weakened content guard rails for image generation in the Grok AI bot. This led to a new spate of non-consensual sexual imagery on X, much of it aimed at silencing women on the platform. This, along with the creation of sexualized images of children in the more compliant Grok, has led regulators to begin investigating xAI. In the meantime, Google has rules in place for exactly this eventuality—it’s just not enforcing them.
It really could not be more clear from Google’s publicly available policies that Grok should have been banned yesterday. And yet, it remains in the Play Store. Not only that—it enjoys a T for Teen rating, one notch below the M-rated X app. Apple also still offers the Grok app on its platform, but its rules actually leave more wiggle room.
App content restrictions at Apple and Google have evolved in very different ways. From the start, Apple has been prone to removing apps on a whim, so developers have come to expect that Apple’s guidelines may not mention every possible eventuality. As Google has shifted from a laissez-faire attitude to more hard-nosed control of the Play Store, it has progressively piled on clarifications in the content policy. As a result, Google’s rules are spelled out in no uncertain terms, and Grok runs afoul of them.
Google has a dedicated support page that explains how to interpret its “Inappropriate Content” policy for the Play Store. Like Apple, the rules begin with a ban on apps that contain or promote sexual content including, but not limited to, pornography. That’s where Apple stops, but Google goes on to list more types of content and experiences that it considers against the rules.
“We don’t allow apps that contain or promote content associated with sexually predatory behavior, or distribute non-consensual sexual content,” the Play Store policy reads (emphasis ours). So the policy is taking aim at apps like Grok, but this line on its own could be read as focused on apps featuring “real” sexual content. However, Google is very thorough and has helpfully explained that this rule covers AI.
Recent additions to Google’s Play Store policy explicitly ban apps like Grok.
Credit: Google
Recent additions to Google’s Play Store policy explicitly ban apps like Grok. Credit: Google
The detailed policy includes examples of content that violate this rule, which include much of what you’d expect—nothing lewd or profane, no escort services, and no illegal sexual themes. After a spate of rudimentary “nudify” apps in 2020 and 2021, Google added language to this page clarifying that “apps that claim to undress people” are not allowed in Google Play. In 2023, as the AI boom got underway, Google added another line to note that it also would remove apps that contained “non-consensual sexual content created via deepfake or similar technology.”
The “more intelligent” version of Siri that Apple plans to release later this year will be backed by Google’s Gemini language models, the company announced today. CNBC reports that the deal is part of a “multi-year partnership” between Apple and Google that will allow Apple to use Google’s AI models in its own software.
“After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we’re excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users,” reads an Apple statement given to CNBC.
Today’s announcement confirms reporting by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman late last year that Apple and Google were nearing a deal. Apple didn’t disclose terms, but Gurman said that Apple would be paying Google “about $1 billion a year” for access to its AI models “following an extensive evaluation period.”
Bloomberg has also reported that the Gemini model would be run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers, “ensuring that user data remains walled off from Google’s infrastructure,” and that Apple still hopes to improve its own in-house language models to the point that they can eventually be used instead of relying on third-party models.
Since 2018, a group of researchers from around the world has crunched the numbers on how much heat the world’s oceans are absorbing each year. In 2025, their measurements broke records once again, making this the eighth year in a row that the world’s oceans have absorbed more heat than in the years before.
The study, which was published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, found that the world’s oceans absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules’ worth of heat in 2025, the most in any year since modern measurements began in the 1960s. That’s significantly higher than the 16 additional zettajoules they absorbed in 2024. The research comes from a team of more than 50 scientists across the United States, Europe, and China.
A joule is a common way to measure energy. A single joule is a relatively small unit of measurement—it’s about enough to power a tiny lightbulb for a second, or slightly heat a gram of water. But a zettajoule is one sextillion joules; numerically, the 23 zettajoules the oceans absorbed this year can be written out as 23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
John Abraham, a professor of thermal science at the University of St. Thomas and one of the authors on the paper, says that he sometimes has trouble putting this number into contexts that laypeople understand. Abraham offers up a couple options. His favorite is comparing the energy stored in the ocean to the energy of atomic bombs: The 2025 warming, he says, is the energetic equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs exploding in the ocean. (Some other calculations he’s done include equating this number to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or more than 200 times the electrical use of everyone on the planet.)
“Last year was a bonkers, crazy warming year—that’s the technical term,” Abraham joked to me. “The peer-reviewed scientific term is ‘bonkers’.”
The world’s oceans are its largest heat sink, absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess warming that is trapped in the atmosphere. While some of the excess heat warms the ocean’s surface, it also slowly travels further down into deeper parts of the ocean, aided by circulation and currents.
The disease usually develops seven to 14 days after an exposure, but it can take up to 21 days (which is the length of quarantine). Once it develops, it’s marked by a high fever and a telltale rash that starts on the head and spreads downward. People are contagious for four days before the rash develops and four days after it appears. Complications can range from ear infections and diarrhea to encephalitis (swelling of the brain), pneumonia, death in up to 3 out of 1,000 children, and, in very rare cases, a fatal neurological condition that can develop seven to 10 years after the acute infection (subacute sclerosing panencephalitis).
Two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is considered 97 percent effective against the virus, and that protection is considered lifelong. Ninety-nine percent of the 310 cases in the South Carolina outbreak are in people who are unvaccinated, partially vaccinated, or have an unknown vaccination status (only 2 people were vaccinated).
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which only has data as of January 6, has tallied three confirmed cases for this year (two in South Carolina and one in North Carolina, linked to the South Carolina outbreak). Since then, South Carolina reported 26 cases on Tuesday and 99 today, totaling 125. North Carolina also reported three additional cases Tuesday, again linked to the South Carolina outbreak. In all, that brings the US tally to at least 131 just nine days into the year.
In 2025, the country recorded 2,144 confirmed cases, the most cases seen since 1991. Three people died, including two otherwise-healthy children. In 2000, the US declared measles eliminated, meaning that it was no longer continuously circulating within the country. With ongoing outbreaks, including the one in South Carolina, the country’s elimination status is at risk.
Despite being repeatedly told that people were using his product to spy on others without their consent, Fleming helped them with tech support.
A government investigator even opened up an affiliate marketing account for pcTattletale, and Fleming reached out to offer ready-made banner ads with text like “pcTattletale Cheating Husband? #1 catch a cheater spy tracker” and “pcTattletale Husband Cheating? Best Catch a Cheater Spy App.”
Fleming noted in an email that pcTattletale was more successful when marketed at women, because “There are a lot more women wanting to catch their man then [sic] the other way around.” Financial records showed that Fleming was selling around 1,200 pcTattletale subscriptions a year at anywhere from $99 to $300.
Based on all this, the government obtained a search warrant in late 2022 and raided the Bruce Township home where Fleming lived.
In 2024, TechCrunch reported that pcTattletale was hacked and much of its data was leaked. Apparently, hackers had gained access to the company’s private keys for the Amazon Web Services account where most of the video data created by the app was stored. Fleming claimed at the time that his company was “out of business and completely done” after the breach.
The feds eventually charged Fleming with selling a product while “knowing or having reason to know” that the software was “primarily useful for the purpose of the surreptitious interception of wire, oral, or electronic communications.” This week in California, Fleming pled guilty to a single count and was released on his own recognizance while awaiting sentencing.
One piece of stalkerware is off the market; unfortunately, many others remain, and their owners and operators are often harder to find.
Supply shortages and big price increases for RAM and storage have been a major drag for enthusiasts and PC builders in recent months. And while we haven’t yet seen large, widespread price increases for memory-dependent products like pre-built laptop PCs, smartphones, and graphics cards, most companies expect that to change this year if shortages continue.
In the meantime, memory manufacturers are riding high demand and high prices to record profits.
In revenue guidance released this week, Samsung Electronics predicts it will make between 19.9 and 20.1 trillion Korean won in operating profit (roughly $13.8 billion USD) in Q4 2025, compared to just 6.49 trillion won in Q4 of 2024.
Samsung is way more than just a memory business, of course, but its fortunes often rise and fall along with its memory division; Samsung’s profits were dropping dramatically in 2023 partly because of an oversupply of memory that made its memory division lose billions of dollars.
Less-diversified companies that primarily make memory are also raking in money lately. SK Hynix posted its “highest-ever quarterly performance” in Q3 of 2025 with 11.38 trillion Korean won (about $7.8 billion) in operating profit, up from 7.03 trillion in Q3 of 2024, and an operating margin that increased from 40 percent to 47 percent. SK Hynix credits “expanding investments in AI infrastructure” and “surging demand for AI servers” for its performance.
Micron—which recently decided to exit the consumer RAM and storage markets but is still selling its products to other businesses—also reported a big boost to net income year over year, from $1.87 billion in Q1 2025 to $5.24 billion in Q1 2026. This has generated the company’s “highest ever free cash flow.”
“Total company revenue, DRAM and NAND revenue, as well as HBM and data center revenue and revenue in each of our business units, also reached new records [in fiscal Q1],” wrote Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra.
Why is RAM so expensive right now?
Reading these upbeat earnings reports and forecasts will be cold comfort to people trying to build or upgrade a PC, who have seen the price of a 32GB kit of DDR5-6000 increase from $80 in August 2025 to $340 today. And if the current AI boom continues, it’s unlikely to improve in the near term.
Earning some praise from outside experts, including the American Medical Association, the new guidelines are the first iteration to directly address highly processed foods. While emphasizing “whole, nutrient-dense foods,” it aims for a “dramatic reduction in highly processed foods laden with refined carbohydrates, added sugars, excess sodium, unhealthy fats, and chemical additives.”
While the guidelines don’t provide a clear definition of what constitutes highly processed foods or how consumers can identify them, they do offer some broad examples at various points, including store-bought “chips, cookies, and candy,” and “white bread, ready-to-eat or packaged breakfast options, flour tortillas, and crackers.”
New triangle
In an effort to steer Americans to healthy choices, the new guidance unveils a new(ish) visual aid—a food pyramid that is upside-down, thus resembling a funnel.
The move at least explains a puzzling trend: Over the past year, Kennedy and other Trump administration officials have repeatedly made reference to the food pyramid—though only to mock and scorn it, often with inaccuracies.
“The dietary guidelines that we inherited from the Biden administration were 453 pages long,” Kennedy said in August, referring to the 2020–2025 guidelines, which are 164 pages long. “They were driven by the same commercial impulses that put Froot Loops at the top of the food pyramid.”
On Wednesday’s unveiling of the new guidelines, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary lamented that, “for decades, we’ve been fed a corrupt food pyramid.”
Not only were Froot Loops never listed on a food pyramid, no food pyramid has been included in federal dietary guidelines for over a decade, raising the question of why the administration was repeatedly attacking a defunct polyhedron. The original food pyramid was introduced in 1992, significantly revised in 2005, and ditched entirely in 2011. Since then, the guidelines have used MyPlate as a visual aid, intended to provide a simplistic depiction of the foods people should eat, in their recommended proportions, on a plate.
Lingering sales of the original Switch might also be contributing to the relatively weak holiday performance for the Switch 2. In the UK, at least, the older console is still selling well enough to buoy Nintendo’s overall holiday hardware sales in the country to 7 percent higher than what the company achieved in 2017.
Nintendo might need another Super Mario Odyssey-sized hit to keep up sales momentum for the Switch 2.
Credit: Nintendo
Nintendo might need another Super Mario Odyssey-sized hit to keep up sales momentum for the Switch 2. Credit: Nintendo
That said, the transition from record-setting launch sales to relatively underwhelming holiday sales is a worrying sign for the Switch 2’s market momentum. A lack of system-selling Switch 2 exclusive games could explain that movement. In 2017, the October launch of Super Mario Odyssey built holiday excitement for the Switch on top of earlier hits like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. For the Switch 2, holiday releases like Pokémon Legends Z-A and Metroid Prime 4 don’t seem to have had as much impact as early system sellers like Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza.
Thus far, Nintendo’s planned 2026 schedule doesn’t seem primed to offer many big-name exclusive software to turn things around. The year’s first-party lineup is currently anchored by standard sequels for second-tier franchises like Yoshi, Mario Tennis, and Fire Emblem, alongside slightly upgraded “Switch 2 Edition” re-releases of popular Switch games. Aside from Nintendo’s own titles, the planned 2026 release of FromSoft’s Bloodborne-esque Duskbloods as a Switch 2 exclusive could make some fans of the company’s Souls-like games take a second look at the hardware.
Nintendo is likely to announce more Switch 2 exclusives and ports in the coming months, of course. Having a few system-selling blockbusters in that slate could be crucial to propping up the Switch 2’s sales now that pent-up launch-window demand seems largely satiated.
Prior to World War II the vast majority of telescopes built around the world were funded by wealthy people with an interest in the heavens above.
However, after the war, two significant developments in the mid-20th century caused the burden of funding large astronomical instruments to largely shift to the government and academic institutions. First, as mirrors became larger and larger to see deeper into the universe, their costs grew exponentially. And then, with the advent of spaceflight, the expense of space-based telescopes expanded even further.
But now the tide may be turning again.
On Wednesday evening, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, announced a major investment in not just one telescope project, but four. Each of these new telescopes brings a novel capability online; however, the most intriguing new instrument is a space-based telescope named Lazuli. This spacecraft, if successfully launched and deployed, would offer astronomers a more capable and modern version of the Hubble Space Telescope, which is now three decades old.
A billionaire with a keen interest in science and technology, Schmidt and his wife did not disclose the size of his investment in the four telescopes, which collectively will be known as the Schmidt Observatory System. However, it likely is worth half a billion dollars, at a minimum.
“For 20 years, Eric and I have pursued philanthropy to seek new frontiers, whether in the deep sea or in the profound connections that link people and our planet, committing our resources to novel research that reaches beyond what might be funded by governments or the private sector,” Wendy Schmidt said in a statement to Ars. “With the Schmidt Observatory System, we’re enabling multiple approaches to understanding the vast universe where we find ourselves stewards of a living planet.”
Essentially the Schmidts have taken innovative telescope concepts that scientists have proposed for government funding and will provide the money needed to build them. Their gift has enormous potential to advance the study of astronomy and astrophysics.
