The Agent Drafts, a Human Approves: Inside State of the Map US 2026

Three days at the mappiest event of the year surfaced the trends redefining geospatial engineering: serverless map stacks, AI-drafted data, and human-in-the-loop authorship at planet scale. From June 11 to 13, Madison, Wisconsin was the center of the mapping universe. Leading geospatial companies and independent mappers packed a hotel a block from the State Capitol … Read more

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches to study dark matter and dark energy

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope blasts off. | Photo: NASA / John Kraus After funding struggles and a name change, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has been successfully launched. It will now make a three-month, one-million-mile journey to its orbit at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2) beyond the Moon. From this vantage point, … Read more

How I Built an Open Source Publishing Workflow for Chess Streamers

A static-site pipeline that turns chess live-streams into searchable session pages with games, chat replay, transcripts, thumbnails, analytics, and SEO metadata. Livestreams Are Bad Archives Livestreams are great in the moment and surprisingly weak as archives. After a stream ends, the recording usually becomes a long video with a title, a thumbnail, and maybe a … Read more

Two new small, powerful Macs

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 142, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, how is it almost September already, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been remembering Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, and Peter Cullen, absorbing … Read more

China’s robots race ahead

Humanoid robot competes in the optional boxing routine event during the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games at National Speed Skating Oval on August 26, 2026 in Beijing, China. | Image: Getty Images This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on falling robots and the … Read more