On Wednesday evening, I had a profound sense of déjà vu. When I watched Mark Zuckerberg open his Meta Connect keynote by giving the world a live backstage tour from his new glasses, I was transported back to 2012. I was in the live audience at Google I/O when Sergey Brin introduced the world to […]
This week, Google announced that it has finally completed moving “the best” of its Nest-branded smart home devices from the Nest app to the Google Home app. This means users of Google Nest hardware shouldn’t have to bounce between two apps anymore and can finally delete the Nest app. (The “best” qualifier is doing some […]
Fall Upgrade Week feels like an odd time to celebrate my move to a 50-year-old film camera, but there’s logic to it: not because film photos are timeless, or because I want to wax lyrical about warmth and grain and analog appeal, but because I don’t think there’s any better way to teach yourself about […]
The microphones in your earbuds probably suck. You know, I know it, and apparently Nothing knows it too. Its fix? Better microphones – but in the charging case, not the buds. The Ear 3 buds feature what the company calls “Super Mic.” What that really means is a pair of microphones built into the earbuds’ […]
Today, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan held a joint webcast to explain just why the world’s most valuable company (Nvidia’s at $4.28 trillion) is throwing a $5 billion lifeline to a struggling competitor. Nvidia quickly shut down several possible explanations. Huang claimed it had nothing to do with Trump, who famously […]
Yesterday, Disney-owned ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live “indefinitely” for a comment Kimmel made about the response to Charlie Kirk’s death. The response from Republican commentators has been predictably gleeful. They’ve positioned the suspension as a reversal of “cancel culture,” a “deplatforming” that’s simply fair retaliation for antagonizing them. “Jimmy Kimmel does have Free Speech, he […]
Wildfire smoke is the air quality nightmare of our generation, eating away at previous gains made by cracking down on industrial emissions and tailpipe pollution. Constant exposure to smoke is becoming a chronic threat even in places that historically haven’t had many wildfires. Climate change is priming forests to burn more intensely, which means more […]
In American Sweatshop, German director Uta Briesewitz’s new psychological drama, every character working at a content moderation firm understands that ingesting horrific images is part of the job. They have all seen the disturbing footage uploaded to social media, and they know how important it is that someone is always there to determine whether those […]
Holding a principled commitment to the First Amendment is a challenge. Even so, it’s been bemusing to watch the Republican Party – which has spent years demanding legal cover for sending spam emails, sabotaging public health, and avoiding social media moderation – launch a full-scale broadside against it over the past week. Authorities are just […]
On Guido Reichstadter’s 17th day without eating, he said he was feeling alright – moving a little slower, but alright. Each day since September 2nd, Reichstadtler has appeared outside the San Francisco headquarters of AI startup Anthropic, standing from around 11AM to 5PM. His chalkboard sign states “Hunger Strike: Day 15,” though he actually stopped […]