Whether it’s a new couch or a rare piece of hardware picked up on eBay, we all know what it feels like to eagerly await a delivery truck. But the CERN researchers involved in a delivery earlier this week weren’t transporting anyone’s Amazon Prime packages, they were hauling antimatter.

Moving antimatter, specifically antiprotons, via trucks might seem a bit ridiculous. But ultimately CERN wants to transfer samples between various European laboratories, and that means they need a practical and reliable way of getting the temperamental stuff from point A to B. To demonstrate this capability, the researchers loaded a truck with 92 antiprotons and drove it around for 30 minutes. Of course, you can’t just put antiprotons in a cardboard box, the experiment utilized a cryogenically cooled magnetic containment unit that they hope will eventually be able to keep antimatter from rudely annihilating itself on trips lasting as long as 8 hours.

Speaking of deliveries, anyone building a new computer should be careful when ordering components. Shady companies are looking to capitalize on the currently sky high prices of solid-state drives by counterfeiting popular models, and according to the Japanese site AKIBA PC Hotline, there are some examples in the wild that would fool  all but the most advanced users. They examine a bootleg drive that’s a nearly identical replica of the Samsung 990 PRO —  the unit and its packaging are basically a mirror image of the real deal, the stated capacity appears valid, and it even exhibits similar performance when put through a basic benchmark test.

But while the drive’s sequential read and write speeds are within striking distance of the official numbers from Samsung, things start to fall apart when doing random speed tests or performing real-world operations. It took the fake drive over 25 minutes to write a 370 GB file, while the authentic one ripped through the same file in less than 4: giving a true write speed of 261 MB/s and 1,861 MB/s, respectively.

Luckily you don’t have to time how long it takes to dump 100+ GB of data on the drive just to see if it’s legitimate, Samsung offers a tool that can communicate with the drive and determine if it’s an original or not. If they don’t already, we imagine other manufacturers will roll out similar capabilities in an effort to combat these sophisticated clones.

Of course, computers aren’t the only things in our modern world that are impacted by the rising prices of memory and flash storage. On Friday, Sony announced that they would be implementing higher prices across their PlayStation line starting this week to compensate for what they call “pressures in the global economic landscape.”

Starting April 2nd (presumably they didn’t want consumers to think this was a joke), the base model PS5 will be bumped up to $649.99 in the US and €649.99 in Europe, while the PS5 Pro will be set at an eye-watering 899.99 in both currencies. Admittedly we’ve done absolutely no research to support this, but surely that must make the latter system the most expensive home game console in history by a considerable margin. In comparison, Microsoft’s top of the line Xbox Series X is currently priced at $799, though the model with the smaller 1 TB drive is still available for $649.

One might think that the skyrocketing cost of memory would force developers to take a lesson from the early days of computing, and usher in a new era of highly optimized code that manages to do more with less. That would be nice. Instead, we have now have DOOM rendered in the browser using CSS.

As Niels Leenheer explains in the write-up, the original goal was to have the entire game running in CSS. But he quickly ran into issues trying to implement the game logic. So he settled for letting Claude port the open source C code for the base game over to JavaScript, which freed him up to work on doing the graphics in CSS.

If you’re interested in web development it’s a fascinating look at how far the modern browser can be pushed, and even if you don’t, it’s a surprisingly smooth way to play the classic shooter without having to install anything.

Lastly, the public is finally getting some information about the health scare aboard the International Space Station that triggered the first-ever medical evacuation from the orbiting laboratory back in January. As we predicted in our previous coverage, NASA was unwilling to put personal information about one of their astronauts on the public record, and have remained tight-lipped about the situation. So it was Crew-11 Pilot Mike Fincke himself that decided to not only come forward as the individual who experienced the issue, but to detail what he went through in an interview with the Associated Press.

So what happened? Well, nobody is quite sure yet. Fincke says he was eating dinner the night before he was scheduled to go on a spacewalk outside the Station, and suddenly realized he couldn’t speak. His crewmates realized he was in distress, and contacted medical personnel at Mission Control on his behalf. Testing performed both on the Station and back on Earth has yet to provide any explanation for the episode. It lasted approximately 20 minutes, and he’s experienced no issues since. Space is kinda crazy like that sometimes.

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

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle is tough, but in the end, it’s a fun one. And the spangram makes a fun themed shape! Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. 

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: For a rainy day

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Singin’ in the rain.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

• CANT, CALL, ROUT, RILE, SIRE, LIRE, BAIL, MAIL, TALL, MALL, HALL, BAND, PANE, TAPAS

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

• RIBS, VENT, PANEL, SHAFT, BUTTON, CANOPY, HANDLE

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is UMBRELLATERM. To find it, start with the U that is three letters to the right on the bottom row, and wind up, forming … kind of an umbrella shape?

The Handala hackers associated with Iran have breached the personal email account of FBI Director Kash Patel and published photos and documents.

The FBI has confirmed the compromise, saying that the stolen data was not recent and did not include any government data.

​On Friday, the Handala threat actor announced on one of their websites that Patel has been added to the list of their victims, alleging that they compromised “the so-called ‘impenetrable’ systems of the FBI” in just a few hours.

The hackers said that their action was in response to the FBI seizing Handala domains and the U.S. government offering a reward of up to $10 million for information on the threat group’s members.

However, the hackers had breached the FBI Director’s personal Gmail inbox.

“All personal and confidential information of Kash Patel, including emails, conversations, documents, and even classified files, is now available for public download,” the Handala hackers said before publishing proof of the breach.

Shortly after the announcement, the threat actor published a set of watermarked personal photos and documents extracted from Patel’s inbox, along with email correspondence from before becoming FBI director.

​In a statement for BleepingComputer, the FBI said that it was aware of hackers “targeting Director Patel’s personal email information.”

The agency further notes that it has taken every necessary precaution to reduce any negative impact that may result from this activity.

​The Handala hacktivist group has previously breached the Microsoft environment of medical technology giant Stryker and wiped nearly 80,000 devices.

​Also known as Handala Hack, Hatef, and Hamsa, the actor emerged in December 2023 and is a hacktivist persona carrying out cyber activities for Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).

​In the statement on the compromise of Director Patel’s personal email account, the FBI reiterated the $10 million reward from the Department of State’s Rewards for Justice “for information leading to the identification of the Handala Hack Team out of Iran.”

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• Weekend work has risen over 40% as schedules start earlier, but productivity gains remain uneven
• AI adoption has integrated deeply, increasing time spent across all tasks
• Collaboration and multitasking have surged, while uninterrupted focus reaches a three-year low

The rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence created the impression that humans would complete tasks faster and reduce workplace burdens.

But new data from the ActivTrak Productivity Lab’s 2026 State of the Workplace analysis claims workplace activity is not shrinking in the way many expected.

Last week, one of our product managers (PMs) built and shipped a feature. Not spec’d it. Not filed a ticket for it. Built it, tested it, and shipped it to production. In a day.

A few days earlier, our designer noticed that the visual appearance of our IDE plugins had drifted from the design system. In the old world, that meant screenshots, a JIRA ticket, a conversation to explain the intent, and a sprint slot. Instead, he opened an agent, adjusted the layout himself, experimented, iterated, and tuned in real time, then pushed the fix. The person with the strongest design intuition fixed the design directly. No translation layer required.

None of this is new in theory. Vibe coding opened the gates of software creation to millions. That was aspiration. When I shared the data on how our engineers doubled throughput, shifted from coding to validation, brought design upfront for rapid experimentation, it was still an engineering story. What changed is that the theory became practice. Here’s how it actually played out.

The bottleneck moved

When we went AI-first in 2025, implementation cost collapsed. Agents took over scaffolding, tests, and the repetitive glue code that used to eat half the sprint. Cycle times dropped from weeks to days, from days to hours. Engineers started thinking less in files and functions and more in architecture, constraints, and execution plans.

But once engineering capacity stopped being the bottleneck, we noticed something: Decision velocity was. All the coordination mechanisms we’d built to protect engineering time (specs, tickets, handoffs, backlog grooming) were now the slowest part of the system. We were optimizing for a constraint that no longer existed.

What happens when building is cheaper than coordination

We started asking a different question: What would it look like if the people closest to the intent could ship the software directly?

PMs already think in specifications. Designers already define structure, layout, and behavior. They don’t think in syntax. They think in outcomes. When the cost of turning intent into working software dropped far enough, these roles didn’t need to “learn to code.” The cost of implementation simply fell to their level.

I asked one of our PMs, Dmitry, to describe what changed from his perspective. He told me: “While agents are generating tasks in Zenflow, there’s a few minutes of idle time. Just dead air. I wanted to build a small game, something to interact with while you wait.”

If you’ve ever run a product team, you know this kind of idea. It doesn’t move a KPI. It’s impossible to justify in a prioritization meeting. It gets deferred forever. But it adds personality. It makes the product feel like someone cared about the small details. These are exactly the things that get optimized out of every backlog grooming session, and exactly the things users remember.

He built it in a day.

In the past, that idea would have died in a prioritization spreadsheet. Not because it was bad, but because the cost of implementation made it irrational to pursue. When that cost drops to near zero, the calculus changes completely.

Shipping became cheaper than explaining

As more people started building directly, entire layers of process quietly vanished. Fewer tickets. Fewer handoffs. Fewer “can you explain what you mean by…” conversations. Fewer lost-in-translation moments.

For a meaningful class of tasks, it became faster to just build the thing than to describe what you wanted and wait for someone else to build it. Think about that for a second. Every modern software organization is structured around the assumption that implementation is the expensive part. When that assumption breaks, the org has to change with it.

Our designer fixing the plugin UI is a perfect example. The old workflow (screenshot the problem, file a ticket, explain the gap between intent and implementation, wait for a sprint slot, review the result, request adjustments) existed entirely to protect engineering bandwidth. When the person with the design intuition can act on it directly, that whole stack disappears. Not because we eliminated process for its own sake, but because the process was solving a problem that no longer existed.

The compounding effect

Here’s what surprised me most: It compounds.

When PMs build their own ideas, their specifications get sharper, because they now understand what the agent needs to execute well. Sharper specs produce better agent output. Better output means fewer iteration cycles. We’re seeing velocity compound week over week, not just because the models improved, but because the people using them got closer to the work.

Dmitry put it well: The feedback loop between intent and outcome went from weeks to minutes. When you can see the result of your specification immediately, you learn what precision the system needs, and you start providing it instinctively.

There’s a second-order effect that’s harder to measure but impossible to miss: Ownership. People stop waiting. They stop filing tickets for things they could just fix. “Builder” stopped being a job title. It became the default behavior.

What this means for the industry

A lot of the “everyone can code” narrative last year was theoretical, or focused on solo founders and tiny teams. What we experienced is different. We have ~50 engineers working in a complex brownfield codebase: Multiple surfaces and programming languages, enterprise integrations, the full weight of a real production system. 

I don’t think we’re unique. I think we’re early. And with each new generation of models, the gap between who can build and who can’t is closing faster than most organizations realize. Every software company is about to discover that their PMs and designers are sitting on unrealized building capacity, blocked not by skill, but by the cost of implementation. As that cost continues to fall, the organizational implications are profound.

We started with an intent to accelerate software engineering. What we’re becoming is something different: A company where everyone ships.

Andrew Filev is founder and CEO of Zencoder.

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FiiO has announced a round of price increases across several of its most popular portable audio products, effective April 1, 2026, and while the official explanation points to rising semiconductor and memory chip costs, that’s only part of the story.

According to the company, ongoing supply chain instability and sharply higher component pricing, particularly for memory, have pushed costs beyond what it can absorb. The result: higher retail pricing for models like the DISC, JM21, M21, and M33. But let’s not pretend this exists in a vacuum. Tariffs continue to cast a long shadow over Chinese audio brands selling into the U.S., and the broader personal audio market is starting to feel…crowded. Very crowded. CanJam NYC was absolutely mobbed with consumers and the FiiO table was one of the busiest at the weekend event, but the shotgun approach may not be the best course of action right now.

FiiO, for its part, hasn’t exactly been sitting still. If anything, the brand has been flooding the zone. It’s rolling out new DACs, DAPs, dongles, and IEMs at a pace that feels less like product strategy and more like a high-speed chase. That kind of release cadence keeps the brand top of mind, but it also creates internal pressure: inventory, positioning, and the very real risk of cannibalizing your own lineup.

Layer in intensifying competition from equally aggressive Chinese rivals and increasingly capable budget gear and you start to see the bigger picture. This isn’t just about chip prices going up. It’s about a brand navigating tariffs, margin pressure, and a market that may finally be hitting the brakes after years of runaway growth.

Which FiiO Models Are Getting More Expensive and By How Much?

FiiO has confirmed price increases across four products, covering both its entry and mid tier lineup. Effective April 1, 2026, the DISC will retail for $89.99, the JM21 for $259.99, the M21 for $369.99, and the M33 for $699.99. The changes are not extreme on an individual level, but they are consistent across multiple categories and price points.

The M21 moves up from its original $329 launch price to $369, a noticeable but measured increase for a mid tier digital audio player. The JM21 is a more meaningful shift. Previously positioned closer to the $200 range depending on market and configuration, it now sits just under $260, which places it in a more competitive segment with fewer clear advantages. The M33 approaches $700, moving further into territory where buyers may start comparing it more directly with higher end alternatives. Even the DISC increases from roughly $79 to $89.99, indicating that lower cost products are not exempt from these adjustments.

Taken together, these changes reflect more than a simple update tied to component costs. They suggest a broader shift in pricing across FiiO’s lineup at a time when competition is increasing and buyers have more options at nearly every level.

The Bottom Line

FiiO is being transparent about why prices are going up, and that counts for something. Rising component costs and ongoing tariff pressure are real issues that every manufacturer in this category is dealing with, not just one brand. The lineup itself remains competitive from a feature and performance standpoint, and FiiO still offers a wide range of options that cover everything from entry level to more advanced portable systems.

The downside is timing and positioning. Several of these products were defined by their value, and those margins are now tighter. As prices climb, buyers are more likely to compare across brands, and that is where the pressure builds. HiBy, Shanling, Astell and Kern, and iBasso are all delivering strong alternatives at similar price points, often with distinct strengths in software, design, or tuning.

These increases will likely impact first time buyers and value focused users the most, while existing FiiO customers may be more willing to absorb the changes. The bigger question is whether the market will continue to accept higher pricing as competition intensifies and product cycles continue to accelerate.

Where to buy:

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