Catania is the second-largest city in Sicily, built on volcanic lava stone from Mt. Etna. Residents refer to the restive volcano as Idda. “If you’re in the right place at the right time, you can hear ...

A tool I’ve been using for a while, Roo Code, an extension for Visual Studio Code, recently made a decision that got me thinking about… ...

Ah, don’t you just love the Los Gatos Christmas parade? Filmmaker and editor at Stark Insider, covering arts, AI & tech, and indie film. Inspired by Bergman, slow cinema and Chipotle. Often found ...

The ninth edition of Stanford’s AI Index Report landed this week, and the headline from co-chairs Yolanda Gil and Raymond Perrault sets the tone. “The data does not point in a single direction,” they ...

Musey, a Meta Muse personal AI agent, opens its first conversation by explaining what it can do with the user's approval. Correction, September 22, 2026: this piece originally said Meta cannot access ...

5 out of 5 stars – 'The gold standard for pocket eReaders.' A 4.3-inch, 72-gram pocket e-reader that adds a touchscreen and a dual-tone front light to the open-source XTEINK X4. If you’ve been ...

My poor Livia. As usual I missed its annual cleaning reminder in my Google calendar. 5 years. In. A. Row. I partly blame the pandemic for that. But I know in my heart that’s ridiculous as ...

The X4 sitting idle, showing the cover of whatever I am reading. E-ink holds the image at zero power, so it waits there like a paperback left face up. (Photo: Clinton Stark / Stark Insider) I was ...

AI is the hottest topic here in Silicon Valley, and across the entire world as its disruption and impact can be felt across just about every industry. Many are wondering: is it a good thing, or a not ...

What we learned onboarding autonomous bots with OpenClaw and NanoClaw, and why Claude Code kept trying to neuter our agents. It’s pretty clear that the big theme for 2026 is agentic workflows and ...

Everything retro seems to be in these days, including video game consoles. Old systems from Nintendo, Sony, Sega and Atari among others have plenty of fans as you’ll see if you check places like ...

TurboQuant compresses AI model vectors from 32 bits down to as few as 3 bits by mapping high-dimensional data onto an efficient quantized grid. (Image: Google Research) The AI industry loves a big ...