Poffins for Predators: How Play Built the GPS-Denied Drone War

In late 2020, Niantic introduced a feature to its augmented-reality phenomenon Pokémon Go: players were encouraged to slow down at virtual landmarks (called PokéStops), record a 15-second video of their surroundings, and upload it to Niantic’s servers in exchange for trivial in-game rewards like virtual "Poffins" or extra Pokéballs. Over the next five years, players completed more than 30 billion of these ground-level, multi-angle scans. Now, an investigation by the Dutch newspaper Trouw has unmasked where those…

Tech Briefing — Tuesday, June 16 2026

SpaceX's record-setting stock market debut has officially crowned Elon Musk as the world's first trillionaire. On the global stage, geopolitical waves hit the G7 as Donald Trump announces a finalized US-Iran peace accord, while European and Chinese scientific teams independently achieve a major physics milestone by engineering the first functional nuclear clocks.

• 🤖 Models and Launches 2
• 💰 Funding and Business 1
• 🔒 Security 2
• 🌍 World and Australia 3
• 🔥 Hacker News 4

Noir Detective

Today's blind test challenged models to adopt a classic, hard-boiled noir voice to process the reality of the world's first trillionaire. The standout performances avoided superficial tropes, actively translating modern stock markets and launch pads into midnight concrete and rain, with the winner showcasing a masterful grasp of sentence-level cadence.