A week before the midterm elections, Vice President JD Vance hosted a town hall in Texas with Fox News host Jesse Watters. It was a friendly event with a friendly audience in what should have been a friendly state, and maybe that’s why Vance couldn’t help himself. When a college student earnestly asked how the […]
Tech CEO hearings. Tougher AI and data center guardrails. Investigations of Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts. The gates are open for Democrats once they regain control of committee gavels come January after a historic win of majorities in both the House and Senate on Tuesday. “LAWYER UP,” the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee wrote […]
Data center developers are poised to face a more restrictive building environment after voters across the country voted in candidates who favor moratoriums and ballot measures that put more obstacles on their expansion, delivering a stinging blow to a central pillar of the AI industry. Of voters polled by NBC News on Election Day, 76 […]
James Talarico, the Democratic Texas senator-elect, not only managed to flip the state in yesterday’s midterms but prevailed in the most expensive Senate election to date. More than $573 million was spent on advertisements between Talarico, his Republican opponent Ken Paxton, and their aligned PACs. And a big chunk of that money came from just […]
When Donald Trump began his second term as president, Silicon Valley gratefully embraced moral nihilism. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and more collectively donated millions to Trump’s inauguration fund to ensure his favor in a new era of gangster tech regulation. Meta overhauled its content policy to allow calling gay people mentally ill and women property. Elon […]
Investing in any stock is kind of like gambling in the sense that you’re betting your money on a company’s future performance. But how do you bet on a technology that could, in the worst-case scenario, “pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” or best case, “bring forth an age of miracles”? To some extent, […]
Three years ago, I wrote an obituary for the smart display. The category – smart speakers with touchscreens attached – was stuck with a few underpowered gadgets from Google and Amazon that tried to do too much and did too little well. Back then, I also laid out what they needed to do to improve. […]
Apple’s long-awaited touchscreen MacBook Pro is finally here. I got to try this MacBook that, according to the last two Apple CEOs, shouldn’t exist. The most surprising thing is how normal it is. The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display (what a name) has one of the nicest screens I’ve seen on a laptop. The […]
The Anthropic S-1 seems to have provided the financial justification for the company to spend as much as it possibly can on compute. If you are the kind of person who wonders if Anthropic is doing its level best to build a machine god while convincing Wall Street it’s in the business of selling IT […]
When attorneys general from across the US announced a $17 billion settlement with Meta this summer, the sum was unprecedented. But a ruling last week by a New Mexico judge blew that number out of the water. The judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion to resolve claims that Meta misled users around the 2018 […]