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There are few things that unite the world like animal videos. There are also few things that are so readily commoditized. Both have occurred in the case of Punch, a baby monkey at the Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan. Punch captured hearts around the world after a viral post showed him hugging a stuffed orangutan toy after being rejected by other monkeys. E-commerce sellers act quickly with monkey merch Now, the young Japanese macaque and his stuffed friend are available as everything from toys on Etsy to adecide for yourself if its AIchildren’s book on Amazon. Theres also an official Punch Monkey store with products like stickers, shirts, and mugs. Some of the merchandise even contains hopeful sayings, like Small, but brave, alongside imagery of the pair. In fact, the original plush orangutan doll is available for $19.99, as its one of the Djungelskog soft toys from Ikea. The Swedish retailer has gone so far as to make an advertisement based on Punch and shared to its social channels. In it, a stuffed monkey holds the orangutan while real monkeys appear in the background. The copy reads, Sometimes, family is who we find along the way. It then refers to the stuffed toy as Punchs comfort orangutan. View this post on Instagram Fast Company has reached out to Ikea for more information on the retailer’s orangutan soft toy sales. We will update this post if we hear back. Meanwhile, a new video appears to show Punch having made some progress with his fellow monkeys. But the young creature has already reached the same status as its fellow infamous animals like Moo Deng, the pygmy hippo.
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E-Commerce
Yet another powerful person has stepped down after being named in the Epstein files. Brge Brende, president and CEO of the World Economic Forum (WEF), best known for hosting an annual summit of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, has stepped down after an internal investigation into his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a statement released Thursday, Brende announced that after eight years in his role, hed be resigning in the wake of the latest batch of files released from the federal investigation into Epstein. I am grateful for the incredible collaboration with my colleagues, partners, and constituents, and I believe now is the right moment for the Forum to continue its important work without distractions, Brende said. WEF co-chairs André Hoffmann and Larry Fink also released a statement on behalf of the Board of Trustees, thanking Brende for his years of service and respecting his choice to step down. His dedication and leadership have been instrumental during a pivotal period of reforms for the organization, leading to a successful annual meeting in Davos, they said. They also noted that the WEFs investigation into Brende found no additional concerns beyond what has been previously disclosed. Though Brende had previously claimed he was completely unaware of [Epsteins] criminal acts and past in statements to the Norwegian media, the newly released collection of Epstein files tell a different story. Epstein and Brende stayed in contact long after Epstein was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008, with messages between the two continuing through at least mid-2019, just months before Epstein died in jail. In one text exchange, Epstein appears to have sent Brende a letter by his lawyers that was published in the The New York Times, which included the claim, The number of young women involved in the investigation has been vastly exaggerated. Brende replied to the letter with a thumbs-up emoji. Brendes resignation comes less than a year after the last shakeup at the WEF. In April 2025, founder Klaus Schwab stepped down as chair of its board, and a month later in May, the board opened an investigation into Schwab after an anonymous letter accused him of misusing funds and making inappropriate comments toward women. Between the two scandals, the WEFs reputation as a mecca for world leaders has taken a massive hit. In Brendes absence, the WEFs managing director Alois Zwinggi will serve as interim president and CEO. Brende is far from the only executive to step down after appearing in the Epstein files. Since the newest batch of files released on January 30, business leaders including Hollywood agent Casey Wasserman and former general counsel for Goldman Sachs Kathryn Ruemmler have resigned from their positions, while political figures including Britain’s Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, and Peter Mandelson, the countrys ambassador to Washington, have been arrested for their ties to Epstein.
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E-Commerce
Everyone who has tried to code with Anthropic’s Claude Code AI agents runs into the same usability problem: If you run two or three concurrent artificial intelligence sessionssay, one rewriting your server code, another generating tests, a third doing background researchyou are forced to manually hunt through separate terminal tabs, each one generating a relentless stream of machine-readable log entries, just to figure out what each program is actually doing at any given moment. Not only is it hard to follow whats really going on, but not checking constantly can also lead to problems, as agents might stop to ask you something and you wont notice it for minutes or hours. Developer Pablo De Lucca thought there had to be another way: What if you could create a control panel and alert system that bridges the AI coding agents with your brain in an intuitive way, allowing you to control at a glance whats going on? Thats how Pixel Agents was born.Pixel Agents is an extension that runs inside Visual Studio Code, the most popular code editor on the planet. If you have no idea what Im talking about, thats okay. The important thing to know here is that the UX of agentic coding could someday soon look a lot different.While it looks like an adorable 8-bit video game, Pixel Agents is not something you can play. Rather, it transforms the user experience of coding with Anthropic’s Claude Code agentic AIs by turning them into sprite characters who live, work, and interact in an office doing your bidding.The extension draws directly from the language of video games because its something everyone understands. “I envision a future where agent-based user interfaces resemble a video game more than a traditional IDE, he said in the Reddit thread introducing his tool. Projects like AI Town have demonstrated the appeal of visualizing agents as characters within a tangible space, which I find much more engaging than just viewing endless lines of terminal text.”[Image: Pixel Agents]How Pixel Agents worksThe extension achieves this transformation by acting as a silent observer. Think of Anthropic’s Claude Code as a worker who keeps a detailed, timestamped diary of every action it takes: every file it opens, every command it runs, every moment it waits. These diaries are stored in a format called JSONL transcript files, essentially a structured log that records the machine’s activity in real time. Pixel Agents reads these logs continuously, without touching or modifying Claude Code itself, and uses the entries as triggers to update the state of the corresponding character, animating them on screen and making them talk using speech bubbles when needed.Developers can customize the virtual office where these characters live to better suit their needs. A built-in layout editor lets them design their own workspace on a grid that can be expanded to up to 64 by 64 tiles, with furniture, walls, and floors arranged to taste. Then, each concurrent Claude Code session spawns one of six distinct animated pixel art character designs into that space. The layout persists across VS Code windows so the office retains its configuration between work sessions. The result is a spatial map of your entire active workload.“Each character moves around, takes a seat at a desk, and visually represents the actions of the agent, De Lucca describes on Reddit. For instance, when coding, the character types; when searching for files, it appears to read; and if it’s waiting for input, a speech bubble appears.[Source Image: Pixel Agents]Love them bubblesOne of the most persistent frustrations in AI-assisted development is the blocked agent. That’s when a program that has paused its work to request human authorization (for example, permission to execute a potentially destructive system command) sits completely idle. It’s usually invisible inside a minimized terminal tab until the developer happens to notice it. Pixel Agents converts that invisible pause into a visual and audio event: an amber bubble over the character’s head, with an optional sound notification.The extension also tackles a second, subtler problem: the spawning of sub-agents. Modern AI coding tools routinely break large tasks into smaller pieces, launching temporary child processes to handle discrete sub-problems before terminating. In a text terminal, the birth and death of these ephemeral processes is nearly invisible and cognitively taxing to follow. Inside the Pixel Agents office, each sub-agent physically materializes as a separate character visually linked to its parent, then disappears with a dedicated exit animation the moment its job is complete. De Lucca says that the sub-agents enter and exit with neat animations reminiscent of the Matrix. That way, the workload hierarchy becomes something you can see rather than something you have to infer from logs.The extension is free but the furniture and office tile graphics come from a commercial asset pack called Office Interior Tileset (16×16) by an artist named Donarg, which is available on itch.io for $2. De Lucca has publicly called for community contributions of public domain art assets to fully open and extend the visual ecosystem.Hopefully people will contribute. Pixel Agents is one of those happy ideas that solve a real problem in a fun way, making the invisible visible and turning the annoying into entertainment. Translating the abstract, parallel labor of multiple autonomous machines into a spatial, ambient picture that a human brain can monitor at a glance is definitely something to admire. Whether that constitutes the beginning of a broader shift in how we design interfaces for AI tools remains to be seen, but as a proof of concept, it is hard to argue with.
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E-Commerce
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