Skip to main con­tent

New EU rules to stop the de­struc­tion of un­sold clothes and shoes­New EU rules to stop the de­struc­tion of un­sold clothes and shoe­s­The Delegated and Implementing Acts will sup­port busi­nesses in com­ply­ing with new re­quire­ments.

The European Commission to­day (Feb 9) adopted new mea­sures un­der the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) to pre­vent the de­struc­tion of un­sold ap­parel, cloth­ing, ac­ces­sories and footwear. The rules will help cut waste, re­duce en­vi­ron­men­tal dam­age and cre­ate a level play­ing field for com­pa­nies em­brac­ing sus­tain­able busi­ness mod­els, al­low­ing them to reap the ben­e­fits of a more cir­cu­lar econ­omy.Every year in Europe, an es­ti­mated 4-9% of un­sold tex­tiles are de­stroyed be­fore ever be­ing worn. This waste gen­er­ates around 5.6 mil­lion tons of CO2 emis­sions — al­most equal to Sweden’s to­tal net emis­sions in 2021.To help re­duce this waste­ful prac­tice, the ESPR re­quires com­pa­nies to dis­close in­for­ma­tion on the un­sold con­sumer prod­ucts they dis­card as waste. It also in­tro­duces a ban on the de­struc­tion of un­sold ap­parel, cloth­ing ac­ces­sories and footwear.The Delegated and Implementing Acts adopted to­day will sup­port busi­nesses in com­ply­ing with these re­quire­ments by:Clar­i­fy­ing dero­ga­tions: The Delegated Act out­lines spe­cific and jus­ti­fied cir­cum­stances un­der which the de­struc­tion will be per­mit­ted, for in­stance, due to safety rea­sons or prod­uct dam­age. National au­thor­i­ties will over­see com­pli­ance.Fa­cil­i­tat­ing dis­clo­sure: The Implementing Act in­tro­duces a stan­dard­ised for­mat for busi­nesses to dis­close the vol­umes of un­sold con­sumer goods they dis­card. This ap­plies from February 2027, giv­ing busi­nesses suf­fi­cient time to adapt.In­stead of dis­card­ing stock, com­pa­nies are en­cour­aged to man­age their stock more ef­fec­tively, han­dle re­turns, and ex­plore al­ter­na­tives such as re­sale, re­man­u­fac­tur­ing, do­na­tions, or reuse.The ban on de­struc­tion of un­sold ap­parel, cloth­ing ac­ces­sories and footwear and the dero­ga­tions will ap­ply to large com­pa­nies from 19 July 2026. Medium-sized com­pa­nies are ex­pected to fol­low in 2030. The rules on dis­clo­sure un­der the ESPR al­ready ap­ply to large com­pa­nies and will also ap­ply to medium-sized com­pa­nies in 2030.“The tex­tile sec­tor is lead­ing the way in the tran­si­tion to sus­tain­abil­ity, but there are still chal­lenges. The num­bers on waste show the need to act. With these new mea­sures, the tex­tile sec­tor will be em­pow­ered to move to­wards sus­tain­able and cir­cu­lar prac­tices, and we can boost our com­pet­i­tive­ness and re­duce our de­pen­den­cies.“The de­struc­tion of un­sold goods is a waste­ful prac­tice. In France alone, around €630 mil­lion worth of un­sold prod­ucts are de­stroyed each year. Online shop­ping also fu­els the is­sue: in Germany, nearly 20 mil­lion re­turned items are dis­carded an­nu­ally.  Tex­tiles are a ma­jor part of the prob­lem, and a key fo­cus for ac­tion. To cut waste and re­duce the sec­tor’s en­vi­ron­men­tal foot­print, the European Commission is pro­mot­ing more sus­tain­able pro­duc­tion while help­ing European com­pa­nies stay com­pet­i­tive. The ESPR is cen­tral to this ef­fort. It will make prod­ucts on the EU mar­ket more durable, reusable and re­cy­clable, while boost­ing ef­fi­ciency and cir­cu­lar­ity.Del­e­gated Regulation set­ting out dero­ga­tions from the pro­hi­bi­tion of de­struc­tion of un­sold con­sumer prod­ucts | European CommissionImplementing Regulation on the de­tails and for­mat for the dis­clo­sure of in­for­ma­tion on dis­carded un­sold con­sumer prod­ucts | European CommissionThe de­struc­tion of re­turned and un­sold tex­tiles in Europe’s cir­cu­lar econ­omy | European Environment Agency (EEA)

EU Environment newslet­ters de­liver the lat­est up­dates about the European Commission’s en­vi­ron­men­tal pri­or­i­ties straight to your in­box.

tl;dr: I’m join­ing OpenAI to work on bring­ing agents to every­one. OpenClaw will move to a foun­da­tion and stay open and in­de­pen­dent.

The last month was a whirl­wind, never would I have ex­pected that my play­ground pro­ject would cre­ate such waves. The in­ter­net got weird again, and it’s been in­cred­i­bly fun to see how my work in­spired so many peo­ple around the world.

There’s an end­less ar­ray of pos­si­bil­i­ties that opened up for me, count­less peo­ple try­ing to push me into var­i­ous di­rec­tions, giv­ing me ad­vice, ask­ing how they can in­vest or what I will do. Saying it’s over­whelm­ing is an un­der­state­ment.

When I started ex­plor­ing AI, my goal was to have fun and in­spire peo­ple. And here we are, the lob­ster is tak­ing over the world. My next mis­sion is to build an agent that even my mum can use. That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and ac­cess to the very lat­est mod­els and re­search.

Yes, I could to­tally see how OpenClaw could be­come a huge com­pany. And no, it’s not re­ally ex­cit­ing for me. I’m a builder at heart. I did the whole cre­at­ing-a-com­pany game al­ready, poured 13 years of my life into it and learned a lot. What I want is to change the world, not build a large com­pany and team­ing up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to every­one.

I spent last week in San Francisco talk­ing with the ma­jor labs, get­ting ac­cess to peo­ple and un­re­leased re­search, and it’s been in­spir­ing on all fronts. I want to thank all the folks I talked to this week and am thank­ful for the op­por­tu­ni­ties.

It’s al­ways been im­por­tant to me that OpenClaw stays open source and given the free­dom to flour­ish. Ultimately, I felt OpenAI was the best place to con­tinue push­ing on my vi­sion and ex­pand its reach. The more I talked with the peo­ple there, the clearer it be­came that we both share the same vi­sion.

The com­mu­nity around OpenClaw is some­thing mag­i­cal and OpenAI has made strong com­mit­ments to en­able me to ded­i­cate my time to it and al­ready spon­sors the pro­ject. To get this into a proper struc­ture I’m work­ing on mak­ing it a foun­da­tion. It will stay a place for thinkers, hack­ers and peo­ple that want a way to own their data, with the goal of sup­port­ing even more mod­els and com­pa­nies.

Personally I’m su­per ex­cited to join OpenAI, be part of the fron­tier of AI re­search and de­vel­op­ment, and con­tinue build­ing with all of you.

The claw is the law.

That the U. S. Surveillance State is rapidly grow­ing to the point of ubiq­uity has been demon­strated over the past week by seem­ingly be­nign events. While the pic­ture that emerges is grim, to put it mildly, at least Americans are again con­fronted with crys­tal clar­ity over how se­vere this has be­come.

The lat­est round of valid panic over pri­vacy be­gan dur­ing the Super Bowl held on Sunday. During the game, Amazon ran a com­mer­cial for its Ring cam­era se­cu­rity sys­tem. The ad ma­nip­u­la­tively ex­ploited peo­ple’s love of dogs to in­duce them to ig­nore the con­se­quences of what Amazon was tout­ing. It seems that trick did not work.

The ad high­lighted what the com­pany calls its “Search Party” fea­ture, whereby one can up­load a pic­ture, for ex­am­ple, of a lost dog. Doing so will ac­ti­vate mul­ti­ple other Amazon Ring cam­eras in the neigh­bor­hood, which will, in turn, use AI pro­grams to scan all dogs, it seems, and iden­tify the one that is lost. The 30-second com­mer­cial was full of heart-tug­ging scenes of young chil­dren and el­derly peo­ple be­ing re­united with their lost dogs.

But the graphic Amazon used seems to have un­wit­tingly de­picted how in­va­sive this tech­nol­ogy can be. That this ca­pa­bil­ity now ex­ists in a prod­uct that has long been pitched as noth­ing more than a sim­ple tool for home­own­ers to mon­i­tor their own homes cre­ated, it seems, an un­avoid­able con­trast be­tween pub­lic un­der­stand­ing of Ring and what Amazon was now boast­ing it could do.

Many peo­ple were not just sur­prised but quite shocked and alarmed to learn that what they thought was merely their own per­sonal se­cu­rity sys­tem now has the abil­ity to link with count­less other Ring cam­eras to form a neigh­bor­hood-wide (or city-wide, or state-wide) sur­veil­lance drag­net. That Amazon em­pha­sized that this fea­ture is avail­able (for now) only to those who “opt-in” did not as­suage con­cerns.

Numerous me­dia out­lets sounded the alarm. The on­line pri­vacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) con­demned Ring’s pro­gram as pre­view­ing “a world where bio­met­ric iden­ti­fi­ca­tion could be un­leashed from con­sumer de­vices to iden­tify, track, and lo­cate any­thing — hu­man, pet, and oth­er­wise.”

Many pri­vate cit­i­zens who pre­vi­ously used Ring also re­acted neg­a­tively. “Viral videos on­line show peo­ple re­mov­ing or de­stroy­ing their cam­eras over pri­vacy con­cerns,” re­ported USA Today. The back­lash be­came so se­vere that, just days later, Amazon — seek­ing to as­suage pub­lic anger — an­nounced the ter­mi­na­tion of a part­ner­ship be­tween Ring and Flock Safety, a po­lice sur­veil­lance tech com­pany (while Flock is un­re­lated to Search Party, pub­lic back­lash made it im­pos­si­ble, at least for now, for Amazon to send Ring’s user data to a po­lice sur­veil­lance firm).

The Amazon ad seems to have trig­gered a long-over­due spot­light on how the com­bi­na­tion of ubiq­ui­tous cam­eras, AI, and rapidly ad­vanc­ing fa­cial recog­ni­tion soft­ware will ren­der the term “privacy” lit­tle more than a quaint con­cept from the past. As EFF put it, Ring’s pro­gram “could al­ready run afoul of bio­met­ric pri­vacy laws in some states, which re­quire ex­plicit, in­formed con­sent from in­di­vid­u­als be­fore a com­pany can just run face recog­ni­tion on some­one.”

Those con­cerns es­ca­lated just a few days later in the con­text of the Tucson dis­ap­pear­ance of Nancy Guthrie, mother of long-time TODAY Show host Savannah Guthrie. At the home where she lives, Nancy Guthrie used Google’s Nest cam­era for se­cu­rity, a prod­uct sim­i­lar to Amazon’s Ring.

Guthrie, how­ever, did not pay Google for a sub­scrip­tion for those cam­eras, in­stead solely us­ing the cam­eras for real-time mon­i­tor­ing. As CBS News ex­plained, “with a free Google Nest plan, the video should have been deleted within 3 to 6 hours — long af­ter Guthrie was re­ported miss­ing.” Even pro­fes­sional pri­vacy ad­vo­cates have un­der­stood that cus­tomers who use Nest with­out a sub­scrip­tion will not have their cam­eras con­nected to Google’s data servers, mean­ing that no record­ings will be stored or avail­able for any pe­riod be­yond a few hours.

For that rea­son, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos an­nounced early on “that there was no video avail­able in part be­cause Guthrie did­n’t have an ac­tive sub­scrip­tion to the com­pany.” Many peo­ple, for ob­vi­ous rea­sons, pre­fer to avoid per­ma­nently stor­ing com­pre­hen­sive daily video re­ports with Google of when they leave and re­turn to their own home, or who vis­its them at their home, when, and for how long.

Despite all this, FBI in­ves­ti­ga­tors on the case were some­how mag­i­cally able to “recover” this video from Guthrie’s cam­era many days later. FBI Director Kash Patel was es­sen­tially forced to ad­mit this when he re­leased still im­ages of what ap­pears to be the masked per­pe­tra­tor who broke into Guthrie’s home. (The Google user agree­ment, which few users read, does pro­tect the com­pany by stat­ing that im­ages may be stored even in the ab­sence of a sub­scrip­tion.)

While the “discovery” of footage from this home cam­era by Google en­gi­neers is ob­vi­ously of great value to the Guthrie fam­ily and law en­force­ment agents search­ing for Guthrie, it raises ob­vi­ous yet se­ri­ous ques­tions about why Google, con­trary to com­mon un­der­stand­ing, was stor­ing the video footage of un­sub­scribed users. A for­mer NSA data re­searcher and CEO of a cy­ber­se­cu­rity firm, Patrick Johnson, told CBS: “There’s kind of this old say­ing that data is never deleted, it’s just re­named.”

It is rather re­mark­able that Americans are be­ing led, more or less will­ingly, into a state-cor­po­rate, Panopticon-like do­mes­tic sur­veil­lance state with rel­a­tively lit­tle re­sis­tance, though the wide­spread re­ac­tion to Amazon’s Ring ad is en­cour­ag­ing. Much of that muted re­ac­tion may be due to a lack of re­al­iza­tion about the sever­ity of the evolv­ing pri­vacy threat. Beyond that, pri­vacy and other core rights can seem ab­stract and less of a pri­or­ity than more ma­te­r­ial con­cerns, at least un­til they are gone.

It is al­ways the case that there are ben­e­fits avail­able from re­lin­quish­ing core civil lib­er­ties: al­low­ing in­fringe­ments on free speech may re­duce false claims and hate­ful ideas; al­low­ing searches and seizures with­out war­rants will likely help the po­lice catch more crim­i­nals, and do so more quickly; giv­ing up pri­vacy may, in fact, en­hance se­cu­rity.

But the core premise of the West gen­er­ally, and the U. S. in par­tic­u­lar, is that those trade-offs are never worth­while. Americans still all learn and are taught to ad­mire the iconic (if not apoc­ryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to de­fine the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me lib­erty or give me death.” It is hard to ex­press in more de­fin­i­tive terms on which side of that lib­erty-ver­sus-se­cu­rity trade-off the U.S. was in­tended to fall.

These re­cent events emerge in a broader con­text of this new Silicon Valley-driven de­struc­tion of in­di­vid­ual pri­vacy. Palantir’s fed­eral con­tracts for do­mes­tic sur­veil­lance and do­mes­tic data man­age­ment con­tinue to ex­pand rapidly, with more and more in­tru­sive data about Americans con­sol­i­dated un­der the con­trol of this one sin­is­ter cor­po­ra­tion.

Facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­ogy — now fully in use for an ar­ray of pur­poses from Customs and Border Protection at air­ports to ICE’s pa­trolling of American streets — means that fully track­ing one’s move­ments in pub­lic spaces is eas­ier than ever, and is be­com­ing eas­ier by the day. It was only three years ago that we in­ter­viewed New York Times re­porter Kashmir Hill about her new book, “Your Face Belongs to Us.” The warn­ings she is­sued about the dan­gers of this pro­lif­er­at­ing tech­nol­ogy have not only come true with star­tling speed but also ap­pear al­ready be­yond what even she en­vi­sioned.

On top of all this are ad­vances in AI. Its ef­fects on pri­vacy can­not yet be quan­ti­fied, but they will not be good. I have tried most AI pro­grams sim­ply to re­main abreast of how they func­tion.

After just a few weeks, I had to stop my use of Google’s Gemini be­cause it was com­pil­ing not just seg­re­gated data about me, but also a wide ar­ray of in­for­ma­tion to form what could rea­son­ably be de­scribed as a dossier on my life, in­clud­ing in­for­ma­tion I had not wit­tingly pro­vided it. It would an­swer ques­tions I asked it with creepy, un­re­lated ref­er­ences to the far-too-com­plete pic­ture it had man­aged to cre­ate of many as­pects of my life (at one point, it com­mented, some­what judg­men­tally or out of feigned “concern,” about the late hours I was keep­ing while work­ing, a topic I never raised).

Many of these un­nerv­ing de­vel­op­ments have hap­pened with­out much pub­lic no­tice be­cause we are of­ten dis­tracted by what ap­pear to be more im­me­di­ate and prox­i­mate events in the news cy­cle. The lack of suf­fi­cient at­ten­tion to these pri­vacy dan­gers over the last cou­ple of years, in­clud­ing at times from me, should not ob­scure how con­se­quen­tial they are.

All of this is par­tic­u­larly re­mark­able, and par­tic­u­larly dis­con­cert­ing, since we are barely more than a decade re­moved from the dis­clo­sures about mass do­mes­tic sur­veil­lance en­abled by the coura­geous whistle­blower Edward Snowden. Although most of our re­port­ing fo­cused on state sur­veil­lance, one of the first sto­ries fea­tured the joint state-cor­po­rate spy­ing frame­work built in con­junc­tion with the U. S. se­cu­rity state and Silicon Valley gi­ants.

The Snowden sto­ries sparked years of anger, at­tempts at re­form, changes in diplo­matic re­la­tions, and even gen­uine (albeit forced) im­prove­ments in Big Tech’s user pri­vacy. But the cal­cu­la­tion of the U. S. se­cu­rity state and Big Tech was that at some point, at­ten­tion to pri­vacy con­cerns would dis­perse and then vir­tu­ally evap­o­rate, en­abling the state-cor­po­rate sur­veil­lance state to march on with­out much no­tice or re­sis­tance. At least as of now, the cal­cu­la­tion seems to have been vin­di­cated.

Imagine you’re main­tain­ing a na­tive pro­ject. You use Visual Studio for build­ing on Windows, so you do the re­spon­si­ble thing and list it as a de­pen­dency

If you’re lucky enough not to know this yet, I envy you. Unfortunately, at this point even Boromir knows…

What you may not re­al­ize is, you’ve ac­tu­ally signed up to be un­paid tech sup­port for Microsoft’s “Visual Studio Installer”. You might no­tice GitHub Issues be­com­ing less about your code and more about bro­ken builds, specif­i­cally on Windows. You find your­self ex­plain­ing to a con­trib­u­tor that they did­n’t check the “Desktop de­vel­op­ment with C++” work­load, but specif­i­cally the v143 build tools and the 10.0.22621.0 SDK. No, not that one, the other one. You spend less time on your pro­ject be­cause you’re too busy be­ing a hu­man-pow­ered de­pen­dency re­solver for a 50GB IDE.

Saying “Install Visual Studio” is like hand­ing con­trib­u­tors a choose-your-own-ad­ven­ture book rid­dled with bad end­ings, some of which don’t let you go back. I’ve had to re-im­age my en­tire OS more than once over the years.

Why is this tragedy unique to Windows?

On Linux, the tool­chain is usu­ally just a pack­age man­ager com­mand away. On the other hand, “Visual Studio” is thou­sands of com­po­nents. It’s so vast that Microsoft dis­trib­utes it with a so­phis­ti­cated GUI in­staller where you nav­i­gate a maze of check­boxes, hunt­ing for which “Workloads” or “Individual Components” con­tain the ac­tual com­piler. Select the wrong one and you might lose hours in­stalling some­thing you don’t need. Miss one, like “Windows 10 SDK (10.0.17763.0)” or “Spectre-mitigated libs,” and your build fails three hours later with a cryp­tic er­ror like MSB8101. And heaven help you if you need to down­grade to an older ver­sion of the build tools for a legacy pro­ject.

The Visual Studio ecosys­tem is built on a legacy of ‘all-in-one’ mono­liths. It con­flates the ed­i­tor, the com­piler, and the SDK into a sin­gle, tan­gled web. When we list ‘Visual Studio’ as a de­pen­dency, we’re fail­ing to dis­tin­guish be­tween the tool we use to write code and the en­vi­ron­ment re­quired to com­pile it.

Hours-long waits: You spend an af­ter­noon watch­ing a progress bar down­load 15GB just to get a 50MB com­piler. Zero trans­parency: You have no idea which files were in­stalled or where they went. Your reg­istry is lit­tered with cruft and back­ground up­date ser­vices are per­ma­nent res­i­dents of your Task Manager.No ver­sion con­trol: You can’t check your com­piler into Git. If a team­mate has a slightly dif­fer­ent Build Tools ver­sion, your builds can silently di­verge.The “ghost” en­vi­ron­ment: Uninstalling is never truly clean. Moving to a new ma­chine means re­peat­ing the en­tire GUI dance, pray­ing you checked the same boxes.

Even af­ter in­stal­la­tion, com­pil­ing a sin­gle C file from the com­mand line re­quires find­ing the Developer Command Prompt. Under the hood, this short­cut in­vokes vc­varsall.bat, a frag­ile batch script that glob­ally mu­tates your en­vi­ron­ment vari­ables just to lo­cate where the com­piler is hid­ing this week.

Ultimately, you end up with build in­struc­tions that look like a le­gal dis­claimer:

“Works on my ma­chine with VS 17.4.2 (Build 33027.167) and SDK 10.0.22621.0. If you have 17.5, please see Issue #412. If you are on ARM64, god­speed.”

On Windows, this has be­come the “cost of do­ing busi­ness”. We tell users to wait three hours for a 20GB in­stall just so they can com­pile a 5MB ex­e­cutable. It’s be­come an ac­tive de­ter­rent to na­tive de­vel­op­ment.

I’m not in­ter­ested in be­ing a hu­man de­bug­ger for some­one else’s in­staller. I want the MSVC tool­chain to be­have like a mod­ern de­pen­dency: ver­sioned, iso­lated, de­clar­a­tive.

I spent a few weeks build­ing an open source tool to make things bet­ter. It’s called msvcup. It’s a small CLI pro­gram. On good net­work/​hard­ware, it can in­stall the tool­chain/​SDK in a few min­utes, in­clud­ing every­thing to cross-com­pile to/​from ARM. Each ver­sion of the tool­chain/​SDK gets its own iso­lated di­rec­tory. It’s idem­po­tent and fast enough to in­voke every time you build. Let’s try it out.

#include @setlocal

@if not ex­ist msvcup.exe (

echo msvcup.exe: in­stalling…

curl -L -o msvcup.zip https://​github.com/​mar­ler8997/​msvcup/​re­leases/​down­load/​v2026_02_07/​msvcup-x86_64-win­dows.zip

tar xf msvcup.zip

del msvcup.zip

) else (

echo msvcup.exe: al­ready in­stalled

@if not ex­ist msvcup.exe exit /b 1

set MSVC=msvc-14.44.17.14

set SDK=sdk-10.0.22621.7

msvcup in­stall –lock-file msvcup.lock –manifest-update-off %MSVC% %SDK%

@if %errorlevel% neq 0 (exit /b %errorlevel%)

msvcup au­toenv –target-cpu x64 –out-dir au­toenv %MSVC% %SDK%

@if %errorlevel% neq 0 (exit /b %errorlevel%)

.\autoenv\cl hello.c

Believe it or not, this build.bat script re­places the need to “Install Visual Studio”. This script should run on any Windows sys­tem since Windows 10 (assuming it has curl/​tar which have been shipped since 2018). It in­stalls the MSVC tool­chain, the Windows SDK and then com­piles our pro­gram.

For my fel­low Windows de­vel­op­ers, go ahead and take a mo­ment. Visual Studio can’t hurt you any­more. The build.bat above is­n’t just a helper script; it’s a de­c­la­ra­tion of in­de­pen­dence from the Visual Studio Installer. Our de­pen­den­cies are fully spec­i­fied, mak­ing builds re­pro­ducible across ma­chines. And when those de­pen­den­cies are in­stalled, they won’t pol­lute your reg­istry or lock you into a sin­gle global ver­sion.

Also note that af­ter the first run, the msvcup com­mands take mil­lisec­onds, mean­ing we can just leave these com­mands in our build script and now we have a fully self-con­tained script that can build our pro­ject on vir­tu­ally any mod­ern Windows ma­chine.

msvcup is in­spired by a small Python script writ­ten by Mārtiņš Možeiko. The key in­sight is that Microsoft pub­lishes JSON man­i­fests de­scrib­ing every com­po­nent in Visual Studio, the same man­i­fests the of­fi­cial in­staller uses. msvcup parses these man­i­fests, iden­ti­fies just the pack­ages needed for com­pi­la­tion (the com­piler, linker, head­ers, and li­braries), and down­loads them di­rectly from Microsoft’s CDN. Everything lands in ver­sioned di­rec­to­ries un­der C:\msvcup\. For de­tails on lock files, cross-com­pi­la­tion, and other fea­tures, see the msvcup README.md.

The as­tute will also no­tice that our build.bat script never sources any batch files to set up the “Developer Environment”. The script con­tains two msvcup com­mands. The first in­stalls the tool­chain/​SDK, and like a nor­mal in­stal­la­tion, it in­cludes “vcvars” scripts to set up a de­vel­oper en­vi­ron­ment. Instead, our build.bat lever­ages the msvcup au­toenv com­mand to cre­ate an “Automatic Environment”. This cre­ates a di­rec­tory that con­tains wrap­per ex­e­cuta­bles to set the en­vi­ron­ment vari­ables on your be­half be­fore for­ward­ing to the un­der­ly­ing tools. It even in­cludes a tool­chain.cmake file which will point your CMake pro­jects to these tools, al­low­ing you to build your CMake pro­jects out­side a spe­cial en­vi­ron­ment.

At Tuple (a pair-pro­gram­ming app), I in­te­grated msvcup into our build sys­tem and CI, which al­lowed us to re­move the re­quire­ment for the user/​CI to pre-in­stall Visual Studio. Tuple com­piles hun­dreds of C/C++ pro­jects in­clud­ing WebRTC. This en­abled both x86_64 and ARM builds on the CI as well as keep­ing the CI and every­one on the same tool­chain/​SDK.

Everything in­stalls into a ver­sioned di­rec­tory. No prob­lem in­stalling ver­sions side-by-side. Easy to re­move or re­in­stall if some­thing goes wrong. Cross-compilation en­abled out of the box. msvcup cur­rently al­ways down­loads the tools for all sup­ported cross-tar­gets, so you don’t have to do any work look­ing for all the com­po­nents you need to cross-com­pile.Lock file sup­port. A self-con­tained list of all the pay­loads/​URLs. Everyone uses the same pack­ages, and if Microsoft changes some­thing up­stream, you’ll know.Blaz­ing fast. The in­stall and au­toenv com­mands are idem­po­tent and com­plete in mil­lisec­onds when there’s no work to do.

No more “it works on my ma­chine be­cause I have the 2019 Build Tools in­stalled.” No more reg­istry-div­ing to find where cl.exe is hid­ing this week. With msvcup, your en­vi­ron­ment is de­fined by your code, portable across ma­chines, and ready to com­pile in mil­lisec­onds.

msvcup fo­cuses on the core com­pi­la­tion tool­chain. If you need the full Visual Studio IDE you’ll still need the of­fi­cial in­staller. For most na­tive de­vel­op­ment work­flows, though, it cov­ers what you ac­tu­ally need.

Let’s try this on a real pro­ject. Here’s a script that builds raylib from scratch on a clean Windows sys­tem. In this case, we’ll just use the SDK with­out the au­toenv:

@setlocal

set TARGET_CPU=x64

@if not ex­ist msvcup.exe (

echo msvcup.exe: in­stalling…

curl -L -o msvcup.zip https://​github.com/​mar­ler8997/​msvcup/​re­leases/​down­load/​v2026_02_07/​msvcup-x86_64-win­dows.zip

tar xf msvcup.zip

del msvcup.zip

set MSVC=msvc-14.44.17.14

set SDK=sdk-10.0.22621.7

msvcup.exe in­stall –lock-file msvcup.lock –manifest-update-off %MSVC% %SDK%

@if %errorlevel% neq 0 (exit /b %errorlevel%)

@if not ex­ist raylib (

git clone https://​github.com/​raysan5/​raylib -b 5.5

call C:\msvcup\%MSVC%\vcvars-%TARGET_CPU%.bat

call C:\msvcup\%SDK%\vcvars-%TARGET_CPU%.bat

cmd /c “cd raylib\pro­jects\scripts && build-win­dows”

@if %errorlevel% neq 0 (exit /b %errorlevel%)

@echo build suc­cess: game exe at:

@echo .\raylib\projects\scripts\builds\windows-msvc\game.exe

No Visual Studio in­stal­la­tion. No GUI. No prayer. Just a script that does ex­actly what it says.

P. S. Here is a page that shows how to use msvcup to build LLVM and Zig from scratch on Windows.

Oat is an ul­tra-light­weight HTML + CSS, se­man­tic UI com­po­nent li­brary with zero de­pen­den­cies. No frame­work, build, or dev com­plex­ity. Just in­clude the tiny CSS and JS files and you are good to go build­ing de­cent look­ing web ap­pli­ca­tions with most com­monly needed com­po­nents and el­e­ments.

Semantic tags and at­trib­utes are styled con­tex­tu­ally out of the box with­out classes, forc­ing best prac­tices, and re­duc­ing markup class pol­lu­tion. A few dy­namic com­po­nents are WebComponents and use min­i­mal JavaScript.

Fully-standalone with no de­pen­den­cies on any JS or CSS frame­works or li­braries. No Node.js ecosys­tem garbage or bloat.

Native el­e­ments like , , and se­man­tic at­trib­utes like role=“but­ton” are styled di­rectly. No classes.

Semantic HTML and ARIA roles are used (and forced in many places) through­out. Proper key­board nav­i­ga­tion sup­port for all com­po­nents and el­e­ments.

Easily cus­tomize the over­all theme by over­rid­ing a hand­ful of CSS vari­ables. data-theme=“dark” on body au­to­mat­i­cally uses the bun­dled dark theme.

This was made af­ter the un­end­ing frus­tra­tion with the over-en­gi­neered bloat, com­plex­ity, and de­pen­dency-hell of pretty much every Javascript UI li­brary and frame­work out there. Done with the con­tin­u­ous PTSD of rug-pulls and lock­ins of the Node.js ecosys­tem trash. [1]

I’ve pub­lished this, in case other Node.js ecosys­tem trauma vic­tims find it use­ful.

My goal is a sim­ple, min­i­mal, vanilla, stan­dards-based UI li­brary that I can use in my own pro­jects for the long term with­out hav­ing to worry about Javascript ecosys­tem trash. Long term be­cause it’s just sim­ple vanilla CSS and JS. The look and feel are in­flu­enced by the shadcn aes­thetic.

Modern CSS code snip­pets, side by side with the old hacks they re­place. Every tech­nique you still Google has a clean, na­tive re­place­ment now.

Modern CSS code snip­pets, side by side with the old hacks they re­place. Every tech­nique you still Google has a clean, na­tive re­place­ment now.

/* only L changes, same per­ceived hue */

/* …for each value */

Click out­side to close

((), …)

/* an­i­mate any one with­out touch­ing the rest */

// Shows on mouse click too, or peo­ple re­move it (a11y fail)

Hideki Sato, the de­signer be­hind vir­tu­ally every Sega con­sole, and the com­pa­ny’s for­mer pres­i­dent, has died age 77.

Japanese games out­let Beep21 re­ports that Sato passed away this week­end.

Sato and his R&D team were re­spon­si­ble for the cre­ation of Sega’s ar­cade and home con­sole hard­ware, in­clud­ing the Master System, Genesis / Mega Drive, Saturn, and Dreamcast.

The en­gi­neer joined Sega in 1971 and was the com­pa­ny’s act­ing pres­i­dent be­tween 2001 and 2003. He left the com­pany in 2008.

“From the be­gin­ning, Sega’s home con­sole de­vel­op­ment has al­ways been in­flu­enced by our ar­cade de­vel­op­ment,” Sato pre­vi­ously told Famitsu in an in­ter­view cov­er­ing Sega’s his­tory.

“Our first 8-bit ma­chine was the SC-3000. This was a PC for be­gin­ner-level users. At that time, Sega only did ar­cade games, so this was our first chal­lenge. We had no idea how many units we’d sell.”

Sato said of Mega Drive, Sega’s most suc­cess­ful con­sole: “At that point, we de­cided to start de­vel­op­ing a new home con­sole. By then, ar­cade games were us­ing 16-bit CPUs.

“Arcade de­vel­op­ment was some­thing we were very in­vested in, so we were al­ways us­ing the most cut­ting-edge tech­nol­ogy there. Naturally, it started us think­ing: what if we used that tech­nol­ogy in a home con­sole?

“Two years af­ter we started de­vel­op­ment, it was done: a 16-bit CPU home con­sole, the Megadrive. The 68000 chip had also re­cently come down in price, so the tim­ing was right.”

On Dreamcast, the re­lease that ul­ti­mately ended Sega’s run in hard­ware, Sato said the key­word for the de­vel­op­ment was “play and com­mu­ni­ca­tion.”

“The ul­ti­mate form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is a di­rect con­nec­tion with an­other, and we in­cluded the mo­dem and the link­able VMUs for that pur­pose,” he said.

“We had also planned to have some sort of link­ing func­tion with cell phones, but we weren’t able to re­al­ize it. Consumers were now used to the rag­ing ‘bit wars’, so even though we knew it was a lot of non­sense, we needed to ap­peal to them in those terms with the Dreamcast.

“And so we mar­keted it as hav­ing a ‘128 bit graph­ics en­gine RISC CPU’, even the SH-4 was only 64-bit. (laughs) On the other hand, we ex­ten­sively cus­tomized the orig­i­nal SH-4 for the Dreamcast, to the point where I think you could al­most call it some­thing new.”

Yes, I know I’m crazy, but I fig­ured why not. I’m en­joy­ing work­ing the PC6502 pro­ject but hav­ing a lit­tle tower of PCBs on the sofa is­n’t the best. It’s very sim­ple, these are the specs

* 65C22 VIA (for timers and some IO)

Lower parts (main board, bat­tery, key­board) in it’s case

Screen with BASIC code

First bring up

* 2026-01-01 - Initial power up of PCBs gives all the cor­rect volt­ages

* 2026-01-03 - Bring up of board with sim­ple ROM/RAM/Console work­ing.

* 2026-01-04 - VIA work­ing, ACIA work­ing, comms to/​from the key­board in ba­sic work­ing. Begun in­te­grat­ing key­board into firmware

* 2026-01-05 - Keyboard now in­te­grated into firmware, so you can type on the key­board and don’t need the con­sole for in­put

* 2026-01-09 - Compact flash work­ing, Beeper also now work­ing. Also runs from bat­tery just fine.

* 2026-01-16 - Connected a 4.3″ 800x480 RA8875 based dis­play and got that work­ing. I failed to get the LT7683 based dis­play work­ing.

* 2026-01-17 - work on a num­ber of case re­lated things that did not quite work in ac­tual life.

* 2026-01-18 - Tweaked CPLD to slow down FTDI read/​writes. Also be­gun work on bios, added start beep and be­gun work on load/​save func­tions

* 2026-02-08 - Added more com­mands, no­tably SAVE,LOAD and DIR for com­pact flash

* add in larger dis­play (going to try a 10.1″ RA8889 based 1024x600, fall back is a 9″ RA8875 based 800x480)

The mem­ory map is fairly sta­ble at the mo­ment, every­thing seems to be work­ing fine.

I’ve Added a some ex­tra com­mands to EhBASIC and they are as fol­lows;

* CIRCLE X,Y,R,C,F - Draws a Circle, X is 0-799, Y is 0-479, R(radius) is 1 - 65535, C is 8bit RGB Value (RRRGGGBB), F is fill (0 = no fill, 1 = fill)

* COLOUR <0-255> - Sets the colour (text) to 8bit RGB value, in the form RRRGGGBB

* DIR - Scans the Compact Flash card and shows slot num­ber and name for any files pre­sent

* ELIPSE - X,Y,RX,RY,C,F - Draws an elipse, X is 0-799, Y is 0-479, RX is X ra­dius, RY is Y ra­dius, C is colour and F is fill

* LINE X,Y,EX,EY,C - Draws a line, X is 0-799, Y is 0-479, EX is X end point (0-799), EY is Y end point (0-479), C is colour

* MODE <0,1> - Sets the dis­play mode, MODE 0 is text, MODE 1 is graph­ics

* OUTK - Outputs Text to the 8 char­ac­ter dis­play on the keybed, can be a string or value, any­thing more than 8 char­ac­ters will re­sult in text shift­ing. a String will clear the dis­play and then out­put the char­ac­ters

* PLOT X,Y,C - Plots a dot, X is 0-799, Y is 0-479 and C is 8bit RGB Value (RRRGGGBB)

* SAVE <0-2047>,“” - SAVE cur­rent BASIC pro­gram into a SLOT and give it a name, upto 16 char­ac­ters

* SQUARE - X,Y,EX,EY,C,F - Draws a square, X is 0-799, Y is 0-479, EX is X end point (0-799), EY is Y end point (0-479), C is colour and F is fill

* WOZMON - Jumps to woz­mon, Q will exit WOZMON and re­turn to ba­sic (Handy for check chunks of mem­ory)

New York City’s pub­lic hos­pi­tal sys­tem is pay­ing mil­lions to Palantir, the con­tro­ver­sial ICE and mil­i­tary con­trac­tor, ac­cord­ing to doc­u­ments ob­tained by The Intercept.

Since 2023, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has paid Palantir nearly $4 mil­lion to im­prove its abil­ity to track down pay­ment for the ser­vices pro­vided at its hos­pi­tals and med­ical clin­ics. Palantir, a data analy­sis firm that’s now a Wall Street gi­ant thanks to its lu­cra­tive work with the Pentagon and U. S. in­tel­li­gence com­mu­nity, de­ploys its soft­ware to make more ef­fi­cient the billing of Medicaid and other pub­lic ben­e­fits. That in­cludes au­to­mated scan­ning of pa­tient health notes to “Increase charges cap­tured from missed op­por­tu­ni­ties,” con­tract ma­te­ri­als re­viewed by The Intercept show.

Palantir’s ad­min­is­tra­tive in­volve­ment in the busi­ness of heal­ing peo­ple stands in con­trast to its long­time role help­ing fa­cil­i­tate war­fare, mass de­por­ta­tions, and drag­net sur­veil­lance.

In 2016, The Intercept re­vealed Palantir’s role be­hind XKEYSCORE, a se­cret NSA bulk sur­veil­lance pro­gram re­vealed by the whistle­blower Edward Snowden that al­lowed the U. S. and its al­lies to search the un­fath­omably large vol­umes of data they col­lect. The com­pany has also at­tracted global scrutiny and crit­i­cism for its “strategic part­ner­ship” with the Israeli mil­i­tary while it was lev­el­ing Gaza.

But it’s Palantir’s work with U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is draw­ing the most protest to­day. The com­pany pro­vides a va­ri­ety of ser­vices to help the fed­eral gov­ern­ment find and de­port im­mi­grants. ICE’s Palantir-furnished case man­age­ment soft­ware, for ex­am­ple, “plays a crit­i­cal role in sup­port­ing the daily op­er­a­tions of ICE, en­sur­ing crit­i­cal mis­sion suc­cess,” ac­cord­ing to fed­eral con­tract­ing doc­u­ments.

“It’s un­ac­cept­able that the same com­pany that is tar­get­ing our neigh­bors for de­por­ta­tion and pro­vid­ing tools to the Israeli mil­i­tary is also pro­vid­ing soft­ware for our hos­pi­tals,” said Kenny Morris, an or­ga­nizer with the American Friends Service Committee, which shared the con­tract doc­u­ments with The Intercept.

Established by the state leg­is­la­ture, New York City Health and Hospitals is the na­tion’s biggest mu­nic­i­pal health care sys­tem, ad­min­is­ter­ing over 70 fa­cil­i­ties through­out New York City, in­clud­ing Bellevue Hospital, and pro­vid­ing care for over 1 mil­lion New Yorkers an­nu­ally.

New York City Health and Hospitals spokesper­son Adam Shrier did not re­spond to mul­ti­ple re­quests to dis­cuss the con­trac­t’s de­tails. Palantir spokesper­son Drew Messing said the com­pany does not use or share hos­pi­tal data out­side the bounds of its con­tract.

Palantir’s con­tract with New York’s pub­lic health care sys­tem al­lows the com­pany to work with pa­tients’ pro­tected health in­for­ma­tion, or PHI. With per­mis­sion from New York City Health and Hospitals, Palantir can “de-identify PHI and uti­lize de-iden­ti­fied PHI for pur­poses other than re­search,” the con­tract states. De-identification gen­er­ally in­volves the strip­ping of cer­tain re­veal­ing in­for­ma­tion, such as names, Social Security num­bers, and birth­days. Such pro­vi­sions are com­mon in con­tracts in­volv­ing health data.

Activists who op­pose Palantir’s in­volve­ment in New York point to a large body of re­search that in­di­cates re-iden­ti­fy­ing per­sonal data, in­clud­ing in me­dial con­texts, is of­ten triv­ial.

“Any con­tract that shares any of New Yorkers’ highly per­sonal data from NYC Health & Hospital’s with Palantir, a key player in the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s mass de­por­ta­tion ef­fort, is reck­less and puts count­less lives at risk,” said Beth Haroules of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Every New Yorker, with­out ex­cep­tion, has a right to qual­ity health­care and city ser­vices. New Yorkers must be able to seek health­care with­out fear that their in­ti­mate med­ical in­for­ma­tion, or im­mi­gra­tion sta­tus, will be de­liv­ered to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment on a sil­ver plat­ter.”

Palantir has long pro­vided sim­i­lar ser­vices to the U. K. National Health Service, a busi­ness re­la­tion­ship that to­day has an in­creas­ing num­ber of de­trac­tors. Palantir “has ab­solutely no place in the NHS, look­ing af­ter pa­tients’ per­sonal data,” Green Party leader Zack Polanski re­cently stated in a let­ter to the U.K. health sec­re­tary.

Some New York-based groups feel sim­i­larly out of dis­trust for what the firm could do with troves of sen­si­tive per­sonal data.

“Palantir is tar­get­ing the ex­act pa­tients that NYCHH is look­ing to serve,” said Jonathan Westin of the Brooklyn-based or­ga­ni­za­tion Climate Organizing Hub. “They should im­me­di­ately sever their con­tract with Palantir and stand with the mil­lions of im­mi­grant New Yorkers that are be­ing tar­geted by ICE in this mo­ment.”

“The chaos Palantir is in­flict­ing through its tech­nol­ogy is not just lim­ited to the kid­nap­ping of our im­mi­grant neigh­bors and the mur­der of he­roes like our fel­low nurse, Alex Pretti,” said Hannah Drummond, an Asheville, North Carolina-based nurse and or­ga­nizer with National Nurses United, a nurs­ing union. “As a nurse and pa­tient ad­vo­cate, I don’t want any­thing hav­ing to do with Palantir in my hos­pi­tal — and nei­ther should any elected leader who claims to rep­re­sent nurses.”

Palantir’s vo­cally right-wing CEO Alex Karp has been a fre­quent critic of New York City’s newly in­au­gu­rated de­mo­c­ra­tic so­cial­ist Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Health and Hospitals op­er­ates as a pub­lic ben­e­fit cor­po­ra­tion, but the mayor can ex­ert con­sid­er­able in­flu­ence over the net­work, for in­stance through the ap­point­ment of its board of di­rec­tors. Its pres­i­dent, Dr. Mitchell Katz, was renom­i­nated by Mamdani, then the mayor-elect, late last year.

The may­or’s of­fice did not re­spond in time for pub­li­ca­tion when asked about its stance on the con­tract.

Magnus Carlsen (Norway) is the 2026 FIDE Freestyle Chess World Champion. A draw in the fourth and fi­nal game against Fabiano Caruana (USA) was enough to seal a 2.5–1.5 match vic­tory in Weissenhaus, Germany.

The de­ci­sive mo­ment came in game three. Carlsen won from a dead lost po­si­tion, turn­ing the match in his fa­vor. Entering the fi­nal game, he needed only a draw and achieved it in an equal endgame af­ter Caruana missed late chances to mount a come­back. Both fi­nal­ists qual­i­fied for the 2027 FIDE Freestyle Chess World Championship.