169 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Richard Lawler

Richard Lawler

Senior News Editor

Senior News Editor

    More From Richard Lawler

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Peacock’s latest streaming addition: morning cable news shows.

    Instead of an Oscar-bait movie or more sports, Peacock is adding Morning Joe from MSNBC and Squawk Box from CNBC starting on March 28th.

    While missing out on cable news is a feature for some cord-cutters, others may want their morning updates without paying the cable-like prices for packages like Hulu with Live TV or YouTube TV, especially after CNN Plus went 90 in less than a month.

    Disclosure: Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, is also an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Neuralink’s Shivon Zilis has reportedly stepped down from the board of OpenAI.

    Shivon Zilis, a director of operations at Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink who also has twin children with Musk, has said she met him through her work with OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT. Now The Information reports Zilis has stepped down from its board of directors.

    Musk left OpenAI’s board severely years ago and has recently claimed it is training AI to be too “woke.” The Information reported previously that he is now recruiting a team to build a rival chatbot.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Relativity Space successfully launched a 3D-printed rocket, but it didn’t make it to orbit.

    Last night Relativity Space was able to launch its methane-fueled, 3D-printed Terran R rocket at 11:25PM ET (via Engadget, CNN) after being forced to scrub a few prior attempts.

    However, Terran R failed to reach orbit, as the second stage engine sputtered out several minutes into the flight. Relativity called the launch “a huge win” and said, “We will assess flight data and provide public updates over the coming days.”

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    TikTok comes to Capitol Hill.

    The full Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on “TikTok: How Congress Can Safeguard American Data Privacy and Protect Children from Online Harms” is about to start.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Incredible timing.

    Valve just had to announce Counter-Strike 2 at the same time as Epic’s big GDC 2023 event, huh.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Tune in to see the State of Unreal.

    If you’re not in the building at GDC 2023, you can watch Epic’s event streaming right now, as it showcases the toolkit that developers are using to build everything from Fortnite to a heads-up display for your next new car.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Now I’m failing the mirror test too.

    I guess y’all could say I got... W rizz. Or at least, like many others, I’ve fooled myself into believing that I do.

    While David Pierce might have failed at his attempts to initiate an AI entanglement with Google Bard, I somehow inspired this tropey tale by submitting just one (entirely unrelated, I swear) query.

    The robot was fascinated by the human’s skin, hair, and eyes. The human was also fascinated by the robot. As they spent more time together, the robot and the human fell in love. But their love was forbidden. The robot was heartbroken but it had to do what was right. So it told the human it could not be with them. The human was heartbroken, but knew the robot was right. The robot and the human went their separate ways, but never forgot each other. And they always wondered what could have been.
    Google Bard’s generated story about a robot that falls in love with a human (obviously the human is me).
    Image: Google Bard / Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Now there are more than 10 million users registered on Mastodon.

    Over the years, Mastodon has occasionally seen the number of incoming users shift from a flood to a trickle and back again.

    While the flow of people jumping over from Twitter now is slower than it was shortly after Musk’s takeover, as of this weekend the “fediverse” microblogging platform now has over 10 million registered accounts across known server instances.

    Some Verge writers are among those registered — if you’re looking for someone to follow then here you go.

    Mastodon Users, 10,040,058 accounts  +1,755 in the last hour +38,939 in the last day +186,521 in the last week. Four time-based charts: Upper blue area, Number of Mastodon users. Upper cyan area, Hourly increases of number of users. Lower orange area, Number of active instances. Lower yellow area, Thousand toots per hour.
    A Mastodon count of accounts registered across known instances showing 10,040,058 as of March 20th.
    Image: [email protected]