Need something new for your reading list? This week, we recommend A.D. Sui’s The Iron Garden Sutra, a meditative horror sci-fi/fantasy and murder mystery.

I don’t typically gravitate toward locked room mysteries, but the description of this book ticked all the right boxes to win me over: “a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding.” It has all the makings of a compelling murder mystery, which is fine on its own, but thanks to the philosophical musings of its main character, Vessel Iris, and a setting that almost demands existential contemplation, it becomes something much deeper.

Vessel Iris is a monk some time in the far future whose mission is to perform funeral rites for the dead so their souls may reach their ultimate destination, according to the beliefs of his religion, the Starlit Order. “Vessels” like Iris share their mind with an AI companion, which creates a really interesting dynamic for the reader, as there is a constant dialogue going on between the two from the start (carrying a tone that sometimes verges on “old married couple,” which I quite enjoyed). Iris shows up to an ancient ship called the Counsel of Nicaea expecting to perform his duties for the long-deceased on board and instead finds himself facing a group of researchers who are very much not dead — and a jumbled mess of bones from the hundreds of bodies they disturbed by moving, which he’ll have to sort in order to properly bless.

Despite being a ghost ship in most respects, it turns out the Nicaea is alive with vegetation and gardens that would have once supported the humans that lived there. And, there’s seemingly something else, as Iris’ AI begins to pick up strange pings from a presence on the ship, and one by one the team of researchers starts getting picked off. As everything unravels, Iris begins to question his faith and his purpose.

This was such a great read, and I was excited to learn it’s the first in a two-book series, The Cosmic Wheel series. Fans of horror sci-fi/sci-fantasy should definitely check this one out. 

vivo has just taken the covers off the design of the upcoming vivo T5x, which is set to bring some major upgrades for the T-series lineup. And we have it with us, currently testing what the phone can do. We can’t talk about the performance or camera samples just yet, but we can talk about the design and show you how it looks in person.

vivo has confirmed that the T5x 5G will launch in India on March 17 at 12 PM IST. After the official announcement, the smartphone will be available for purchase through Flipkart, the vivo India online store, and authorised offline retail outlets across the country.

Design & Hardware

The T5x follows vivo’s recent language, with a camera island on the back, albeit smaller. It’s a comfortable phone to use day to day, and I do like the matte finish very much since it doesn’t attract fingerprints.

The front houses a fairly sizeable full HD+ display that’s plenty sharp for everyone and even stays readable in direct sunlight. The phone will also have IP68 and IP69 ratings, meaning you can technically submerge it underwater and be fine.

Optics will be handled by a 50 MP Sony main camera sensor with Electronic Image Stabilisation and the ability to capture 4K videos. We’ve taken the T5x cameras for a spin, and they seem plenty decent. Though you should wait for our full review, it’ll drop next week after the launch.

Battery & Performance

The biggest highlight of the vivo T5x is obviously the 7,200 mAh battery. vivo says it’s the biggest in the segment and should last multiple days on a charge. We can’t really say much about that claim, but the phone also has 44W fast charging.

The new vivo T5x 5G will have a new MediaTek Dimensity 7400 Turbo processor. The processor should deliver smooth performance for daily tasks and gaming, and the Chinese smartphone maker is currently advertising an AnTuTu score of over one million.

On the software side, the vivo T5x 5G will run OriginOS 6 based on Android 16. This new version is designed to deliver smoother navigation and improved performance. Users can also expect more customization features and a cleaner interface.

Expected Price in India

vivo plans to bring the phone to India with an expected price under ₹23,000. The phone will target the mid-range segment where strong performance and large batteries attract buyers. Furthermore, vivo will launch the smartphone on March 17 at 12 PM IST, and customers can buy it through Flipkart, the official vivo India website, and offline stores.

Tintin fans who grew up reading comic book pages late into the night can now hold his iconic Moon Rocket (set 21367) in their hands, a complete replica built from the ground up with bricks. This finished LEGO Ideas model is made up of over 1,283 pieces, and clearly aimed at adult fans, specifically those aged 18 and up.

Once fully assembled, the rocket stands nearly 50 centimeters tall, stretches 20 centimeters from nose to tail, and spreads 23 centimeters across its base. Every inch of it is wrapped in the iconic red and white checkered panels straight out of the original Tintin comics, instantly recognizable to anyone who grew up with the moon adventure stories.

LEGO Ideas Minifigure Vending Machine Building Set for Adults – Creative Office Decor or Home Book Shelf…

• RELIVE CHILDHOOD MEMORIES – Spark nostalgia with the LEGO Minifigure Vending Machine (21358) building blocks for adults 18 years and up
• LEGO COIN-OPERATED ACTION – Builders can construct their own vending machine, then drop a LEGO coin element in the slot and turn a handle that…
• 16 LEGO MINIFIGURES – Build characters from classic LEGO themes including Castle, Paradisa, and Fabuland, as well as 4 fan-selected minifigures, a…

Six crew members are packed inside and ready to go, with Tintin at the helm, dressed in a full space suit with a helmet and oxygen tank attached to his back. Captain Haddock stands immediately alongside him, dressed in same gear, and Professor Calculus wears his helmet with a contemplative expression. Thomson & Thompson, the detective pair, follow suit (pun intended), wearing identical clothes and, you guessed it, the same brilliant green hair coming out from behind their visors, plus there’s Snowy, a separate molded figure who doesn’t require a helmet because, well, he’s a dog. One panel near the top of the nose cone detaches with the touch of a button, revealing a little control room hidden up there, and of course, any minifigure can occupy that spot to recreate the precise moment the crew notices the Earth drifting in the distance.

The design comes from a Portuguese fan known as TKel86 on the official LEGO Ideas platform, and looking at his early sketches it’s clear he had something far more ambitious in mind at first, complete with launch towers and desert bases. What survived the journey from concept to shelf is arguably better for it though, a clean and focused interpretation that lets the rocket speak for itself.

The minifigures sit at a satisfyingly accurate scale, and some clever building techniques give the whole structure a beautiful gentle curve that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a LEGO set. The individual floors lock together snugly too, so there’s no risk of the whole thing coming apart in your hands. It’s available to order right now and hits shelves on April 1st, priced at $159.99 in the United States with regional pricing available elsewhere.

There may have been some extra incentive for the Trump administration to get the TikTok US deal done. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is set to receive a total of $10 billion in the deal that allowed TikTok to remain in the US. The new investors who acquired stakes in the US entity of TikTok already paid a $2.5 billion fee to the administration when the deal closed in January, but WSJ‘s latest report noted that the group of investors would continue to make payments until the total hits $10 billion.

After a group of investors, which includes Oracle along with the Silver Lake and MGX investment firms, acquired stakes in the US-based TikTok entity called TikTok USDS Joint Venture, the WSJ previously reported that the administration would receive a “multibillion-dollar fee” for its work on the deal. To better contextualize the recently-revealed $10 billion fee the Trump administration is receiving, the US entity of TikTok was valued at $14 billion by Vice President JD Vance.

The Trump administration has previously involved itself in major deals with other US corporations. Last year, the administration invested $8.9 billion into Intel and received a nearly 9 percent equity stake. In terms of unprecedented windfalls, the Trump administration also received a Boeing 747-8 as a gift from the Qatari government in May.

Long-time tech journalist Clive Thompson interviewed over 70 software developers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and start-ups for a new article on AI-assisted programming. It’s title?

“Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It.”

Published in the prestigious New York Times Magazine, the article even cites long-time programming guru Kent Beck saying LLMs got him going again and he’s now finishing more projects than ever, calling AI’s unpredictability “addictive, in a slot-machine way.”

In fact, the article concludes “many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird…”

Brennan-Burke chimed in: “You remember seeing the research that showed the more rude you were to models, the better they performed?” They chuckled. Computer programming has been through many changes in its 80-year history. But this may be the strangest one yet: It is now becoming a conversation, a back-and-forth talk fest between software developers and their bots…
For decades, being a software developer meant mastering coding languages, but now a language technology itself is upending the very nature of the job… A coder is now more like an architect than a construction worker… Several programmers told me they felt a bit like Steve Jobs, who famously had his staffers churn out prototypes so he could handle lots of them and settle on what felt right. The work of a developer is now more judging than creating…

If you want to put a number on how much more productive A.I. is making the programmers at mature tech firms like Google, it’s 10 percent, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, has said. That’s the bump that Google has seen in “engineering velocity” — how much faster its more than 100,000 software developers are able to work. And that 10 percent is the average inside the company, Ryan Salva, a senior director of product at the company, told me. Some work, like writing a simple test, is now tens of times faster. Major changes are slower. At the start-ups whose founders I spoke to, closer to 100 percent of their code is being written by A.I., but at Google it is not quite 50 percent.
The article cites a senior principal engineer at Amazon who says “Things I’ve always wanted to do now only take a six-minute conversation and a ‘Go do that.” Another programmer described their army of Claude agents as “an alien intelligence that we’re learning to work with.” Although “A.I. being A.I., things occasionally go haywire,” the article acknowledges — and after relying on AI, “Some new developers told me they can feel their skills weakening.”

Still, “I was surprised by how many software developers told me they were happy to no longer write code by hand. Most said they still feel the jolt of success, even with A.I. writing the lines… ”

A few programmers did say that they lamented the demise of hand-crafting their work. “I believe that it can be fun and fulfilling and engaging, and having the computer do it for you strips you of that,” one Apple engineer told me. (He asked to remain unnamed so he wouldn’t get in trouble for criticizing Apple’s embrace of A.I.) He went on: “I didn’t do it to make a lot of money and to excel in the career ladder. I did it because it’s my passion. I don’t want to outsource that passion”… But only a few people at Apple openly share his dimmer views, he said.

The coders who still actively avoid A.I. may be in the minority, but their opposition is intense. Some dislike how much energy it takes to train and deploy the models, and others object to how they were trained by tech firms pillaging copyrighted works. There is suspicion that the sheer speed of A.I.’s output means firms will wind up with mountains of flabbily written code that won’t perform well. The tech bosses might use agents as a cudgel: Don’t get uppity at work — we could replace you with a bot. And critics think it is a terrible idea for developers to become reliant on A.I. produced by a small coterie of tech giants.

Thomas Ptacek, a Chicago-based developer and a co-founder of the tech firm Fly.io… thinks the refuseniks are deluding themselves when they claim that A.I. doesn’t work well and that it can’t work well… The holdouts are in the minority, and “you can watch the five stages of grief playing out.”
“How things will shake out for professional coders themselves isn’t yet clear,” the article concludes. “But their mix of exhilaration and anxiety may be a preview for workers in other fields… Abstraction may be coming for us all.”