This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
AI can’t make good video game worlds yet, and it might never be able to
15 Feb 2026, 1:00 pm by Jay Peters
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about video game industry’s pushback against generative AI, follow Jay Peters. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.
How it started
Long before the generative AI explosion, video game developers made games that could generate their own worlds. Think of titles like Minecraft or even the original 1980 Rogue that is the basis for the term “roguelike”; these games and many others create worlds on the fly with certain rules and parameters. Human developers painstakingly work to make s …
Why are Epstein’s emails full of equals signs?
15 Feb 2026, 1:00 pm by Joshua Dzieza
Many of the emails released by the Department of Justice from its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein are full of garbled symbols like:
The scrambled text is so ubiquitous that it’s spurred conspiracy theories that it could be some kind of code. But as believable as it might be that a cabal of elite sex traffickers would communicate in a secret language, the reality is probably more boring: The symbols are likely artifacts from the way the Department of Justice converted the emails to PDFs.
“The glyphs and symbols are probably some artifact of a poor conversion process,” said Chris Prom, professor and archivist at the University of Il …
End of today’s The Verge roundup.
