This is very handy when you want to share an excerpt of writing in context, a concept that is totally lost if you just take a screenshot with a highlight.

How This Works

This feature is made possible by a web standard called Text fragments. It’s been built into browsers for years now; it’s just not the kind of feature that made a lot of headlines at the time.

The feature basically creates a URL that includes enough information for your browser to find the highlighted text portion. If you copy a URL made this way and paste it into a document so you can study the link’s structure, you can see how this works.

In the simplest cases, the URL will include the entire highlighted portion. That works fine for short fragments, but for long passages, the URL gets ungainly pretty fast. When you’re linking to longer text fragments, the URL includes a reference to the beginning and end of the excerpt. Either way, the URL tells your browser not only which page to load, but what part of the text should be highlighted. Your browser finds the text, highlights it, and jumps directly to it.

There are subtle differences in how browsers handle this. Safari highlights text in yellow, for example, whereas in my tests Chrome seemed to prefer purple. But since this URL structure is standardized across browsers, a link created in one browser works in every browser.

It’s worth noting this feature doesn’t work in all contexts. If the website you’re reading is behind a paywall, and the person you’re sharing with doesn’t have access, they probably won’t be able to see the excerpt you’re trying to share. The feature also doesn’t work inside PDF files, even when you open them in your browser.

But sharing a text fragment, in most cases, is a lot more useful than sharing a screenshot. Give it a try the next time you’re trying to win an argument online.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: What someone may attempt to explain in a long, drawn-out description
Answer: DREAM

6A clue: Back in style
Answer: RETRO

7A clue: Remnants in a recently used fire pit
Answer: ASHES

8A clue: Sheds tears
Answer: WEEPS

9A clue: Animal in need of adoption
Answer: STRAY

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Takes a card from the deck
Answer: DRAWS

2D clue: The Great Meme ___, movement to purge social media of “brain rot”
Answer: RESET

3D clue: Thin air, so to speak
Answer: ETHER

4D clue: Colombian food cart dish
Answer: AREPA

5D clue: Green and fuzzy, as a rock
Answer: MOSSY

Following an early teaser in May, Citizen Sleeper creator Gareth Damian Martin has revealed Signet City. Martin describes their new game as a “fungalpunk” RPG. In an all too brief trailer, we’re introduced to the game’s stark monochrome visuals and mushroom-infested City 17-esque setting as the post-punk drone of the band SPRINTS plays in the background. “You are a parasite, in a city where strange technologies and radical ideas are taking root,” says the game’s YouTube description. “Grow into and through its inhabitants, uncover and change their stories, and witness the terminal season of the Signet City.”

“Unlike traditional RPG protagonists, players in Signet City exist as a parasite moving through the city’s social body, shaping conversations, influencing inhabitants, and navigating the games beautifully crafted locations,” publisher Fellow Traveller Witness writes in its press release for the game. “This allows the game to dig deep into the interior lives of the parasite’s hosts, in powerful, affecting prose that has become the signature of Jump Over the Age’s games.” A fact sheet adds that Signet City is partly informed by the turbulent decade the United Kingdom experienced during the 1980s, with its northern industrial cities serving as inspiration for the setting. 

Martin’s previous games, In Other Waters, and the Citizen Sleeper series, were all set in the distant future, so for them to explore what could be an alternate reality for their latest project is something new. As for the art style, screentoned manga, pen and ink drawings and black and white photography are cited as touchpoints. Signet City also sees Martin working with a new set of collaborators, with Eli Rainsberry taking over for Amos Roddy to produce the game’s soundtrack and audio, and Tom Kitchen assisting with its environmental art.

Jump Over The Age

I imagine a lot of people will compare Signet City to The Last of Us, but I would argue the game sees Martin exploring ideas that have interested them for years. In interviews following the release of Citizen Sleeper, they cited Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World as one of the game’s primary influences. Tsing’s book critiques capitalism, and our current era of precarity and ecological devastation, through the lens of matsutake, one of the more expensive varieties of mushroom. Matsutake, as well as girolle and other species of fungi, feature prominently throughout Citizen Sleeper, its sequel and In Other Waters, wherein the player guides a xenobiologist through an alien landscape teeming with life.

Signet City will arrive on PC through Steam later this year. No word yet on other platforms.

Notion’s integration with Anthropic apparently had a hiccup this weekend.

Early Sunday morning, the company posted, “Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 and 4.8 models are experiencing degraded performance, which is causing a higher rate of failures for users selecting these models in Notion AI.”

As a result, Notion said it was disabling use of “all Anthropic models” in its automated productivity tool.

Twelve hours later, Notion’s head of product Max Schoening wrote that he was “astonished” at “the amount of people RT-ing this because they want a story around model quality to be the reason.” (According to the public stats on X, Notion’s post has been reposted around 1,200 times.)

“The degraded performance was a temporary service disruption,” Schoening said. “This happens. It happens to Notion, GitHub, AWS, your OpenClaw, and everything in between.”

He added that Notion has restored access to Anthropic’s models.

Meanwhile, an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement, “A brief infrastructure issue caused elevated errors on multiple Claude models for a short period of time. The issue has since been resolved. We’re grateful to our users for their patience while we worked to restore service.”

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey isn’t hitting theaters for another month or so, but if you’re already planning your trip to the cineplex, you may want to check out this page on the movie’s website which lets you view the trailer in the six (!) different formats it’s being released in.

We don’t really have an opinion on the big-screen adaptation of the epic tale as a piece of media, but from a technical standpoint, it’s interesting to see how the viewing experience changes between the 70mm IMAX version with an aspect ratio of 1.43:1 and the 35mm cut at 2.39:1. Unfortunately, the website offers no way to approximate what the movie will look like once compressed, streamed over the Internet, and displayed on a cheap TCL TV, to say nothing of how the viewing experience will be impacted should you watch the movie on your phone by way of a series of short YouTube clips while going to the bathroom. Maybe Nolan is saving that for his next film.

If you head over to the movies in one of Waymo’s vehicles, you can feel a little better about the long-term ecological impact of your trip thanks to a recently announced partnership between the autonomous car maker and B2U Storage Solutions. Under the agreement, old batteries pulled from Waymo’s fleet of self-driving electric cars will get a second life as localized grid storage.

The idea is that batteries which no longer hold enough charge to power a robo-taxi should still have enough capacity to store the energy produced by renewable sources so it can be doled out later when the demand goes up. By installing these batteries in the cities that Waymo actually operates their vehicles in, they don’t have to worry about shipping them around either — they can just yank them out of the car, and wire them right into the grid. Of course, eventually the batteries will be too cooked to adequately perform in this role as well, but this should give them a few more productive years before they get torn down and scrapped.

Speaking of scrapping, the Ladybird project has announced a pretty radical change for an open source project: as of Friday no public pull requests to the codebase will be accepted, and the only people who can make changes to the code will be the official maintainers. The license for the project isn’t changing, so folks are still free to create forks and modify the code of the scratch-built browser however they wish, but they’ll have to do so with the understanding that their changes will likely never get merged back upstream.

So why the change? You probably guessed it already: they are sick of people sending in patches developed with AI. We’ve talked about this issue previously, and the Ladybird devs are hardly the only ones struggling to separate the wheat from the vibecoded chaff. For what it’s worth, the announcement makes it clear that the team isn’t necessarily against the responsible use of AI in software development. Their concern stems more from the fact that AI lets anybody and everybody produce code that at least looks valid, and it makes it harder to figure out what’s good and worthy of inclusion and what should probably stay in somebody’s personal repo.

On the subject of software development, health-conscious free software aficionados will be excited to hear that the GNUtrition project hit version 0.33 on Friday. For those keeping track, the free-as-in-speech tool for *nix nerds looking to keep track of their caloric intake hasn’t seen a major release since 2012. The update takes into account the latest US Department of Agriculture (USDA) dietary data, and somewhat surprisingly, switches the whole codebase from Python 2 to pure C. Patches which would have allowed the new build of GNUtrition to calculate the nutritional value of substances eaten off of one’s shoe were mysteriously vetoed from the highest levels of the Free Software Foundation.

One more software link for the road: assuming it hasn’t been taken down by Nintendo’s rabid lawyers by the time this hits the front page, check out this WebASM port of Pokemon Emerald that you can play right in the browser.

The game came out more than 20 years ago for the Game Boy Advance, so the fact that it can run in a modern browser isn’t exactly shocking given how much of today’s software lives on the web. But we still love seeing these decompilation efforts and all the hacks that are made possible once you’ve got the code to work from rather than having to emulate the original system.

Finally, the good folks at iFixit have released a video wherein they take apart fake Apple products that were purchased in the electronics wonderland of Shenzhen. As you might expect, the gadgets they picked up all look fairly convincing at arm’s length, but many of their features don’t actually work and their internals are cobbled together with random ill-fitting bits and bobs.

At the end of the video they do note that the knock-offs are in general easier to take apart than their Cupertino counterparts, but that this doesn’t really help with their repairability or long-term viability as you’ll likely have a hell of a time tracking down replacement parts for the Number 1 Best AirPoods Max.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

from the bad-faith-bullshit dept

Paramount is clearly getting nervous about the growing opposition to its $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, which is being intensely criticized for dodgy overseas funding, its dire impact on journalism, and the inevitable mass layoffs, consumer price hikes, and shittier overall product that always results from debt-fueled mega-media consolidation.

There’s a certain desperation creeping into their arguments as state regulators send signals that they’re considering filing an antitrust lawsuit. Top Paramount lawyer Makan Delrahim recently sat down for an interview with the billionaire-owned LA Times (non-paywalled alternative), and insisted that opposition to the company’s terrible merger spree is somehow antisemitic:

“Let’s be honest,” he told the Times. “There’s a lot of fear-mongering, particularly from people in Washington, D.C. They are running a political campaign. Some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction, really because of their own antisemitic views. Regulators and law enforcement officials will see right through that.”

That is, of course, a whole lot of bullshit. Delrahim is trying to pretend that opposition to the deal stems from the fact that billionaire Trump-donor Larry Ellison, who has retooled CBS News to be more friendly to Benjamin Netanyahu, is Jewish. But if there’s any personal ire directed at Ellison as it pertains to the deal, it’s that he has a generational track record of being a foundationally terrible person.

The real-world concerns about the deal have focused on things like the fact it’s heavily financed by Saudi Arabia and China. And there’s fifty years of history showing that deals like this (especially deals involving Warner Brothers) routinely result in mass layoffs, higher prices, and both a shittier company and a less healthy film and television production market.

This sort of mindless consolidation is generally just a shell game performed by the extraction class and the kind of people obsessed with scale that have no genuine, original ideas. It’s utterly senseless, extractive, and destructive, as we all saw with the disastrous AT&T–>Discovery–>Warner Brothers mess (and the AOL Warner Brothers mess decades earlier).

Quick refresher: Delrahim was Trump’s DOJ “antitrust enforcer” during his first term. Delrahim “enforced antitrust” by doing things like rubber stamping Sprint’s merger with T-Mobile, which immediately resulted in more than 8,000 layoffs and an abrupt end to what passed as price competition in U.S. wireless.

These are, you’ll be surprised to learn, bad faith actors who aren’t actually interested in the public interest, product quality, happy workers, healthy markets, healthy companies, or much of anything else beyond short-term financial gains, tax breaks, control, and outsized higher-level executive compensation.

Ellison and Delrahim don’t have to worry about the Trump DOJ or FCC interfering in the deal. But their desperation suggests they are definitely nervous about negative public perception, European regulatory approval, and the hints being sent by state attorneys general that they’re cooking up a collaborative antitrust lawsuit that could either block or dramatically extend the project timeline.

Filed Under: antisemitism, antitrust, consoliation, journalism, larry ellison, makan delrahim, media, mergers

Companies: paramount, warner bros.

Microsoft has created an open-source fork of Windows Terminal called “Intelligent Terminal,” and it allows you to use AI directly inside Terminal without interfering with the regular session.

Microsoft describes the Intelligent Terminal as a built-in assistant that can help you explain errors, draft commands, and fix problems without leaving the terminal.

First, the agent can stay aware of what is happening in your terminal and help when a command fails. Second, it can remember active and past agent sessions, so you can return to earlier work without losing your place.

When you open Intelligent Terminal for the first time, it lets you choose the AI agent for the Terminal pane.

In my screenshot, it lists GitHub Copilot, Claude, Codex, and Gemini. GitHub Copilot is shown as “will be installed,” while the others are already installed.

There are also separate toggles for Automatic error detection and Automatic error suggestion.

When you turn on error detection, Terminal can notice failed commands. Similarly, error suggestion goes further and sends the error to the selected AI agent for a possible fix.

There’s another option, Session management, that lets Intelligent Terminal track active and past agent sessions. This is what allows you to reopen previous agent work.

Once you’ve configured Terminal AI, it’s quite easy to use. Terminal opens with an AI pane below the shell, where it says “Welcome to Intelligent Terminal.”

In my hands-on, I selected Claude as my Terminal AI model, which is why Claude Code is running inside the pane. It could plan a coding task and then ask whether I wanted to auto-accept edits, manually approve edits, or keep planning.

On the left side, you can choose to show or hide the agent panel and turn error detection on or off through its icon. On the right, you’ll see the agent management icon that opens your session management panel and agent status bar.

Intelligent Terminal’s Resume session is one of its best features

As a developer, I use Claude Code in Windows Terminal a lot for help, and while it does the job well, the only issue is that you can’t resume sessions in the standard Terminal unless you’re willing to use Claude’s built-in resume skill, which often makes the model perform worse.

Current Windows Terminal does have a toggle that allows it to open previously closed tabs, but that doesn’t restore your previous sessions.

Intelligent Terminal addresses these concerns with the ability to resume sessions, so you can always go back and forth between your earlier agent work.

Terminal AI is a great idea, but it’s not meant for everyone, and Microsoft understands that, which is why it’s a separate app, and it’s not included with Windows installations yet.

If you’re interested, you can download Intelligent Terminal from the Microsoft Store or Github.

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