YouTube Music just announced Samples, a new in-app feature where users can scroll through short music video clips from their favorite artists and discover new songs. Welcome back to the short-form video wars. Yes, Silicon Valley remains hyperfixated on generative AI, but don’t forget one of its other, recent favorite trends: releasing features that vaguely…
Take a walk around San Francisco this summer and you’ll see something curious: Jaguar SUVs and Chevrolet hatchbacks driving around with no one inside. The ghostly vehicles are owned and operated by Google spinoff Waymo and General Motors subsidiary Cruise. Soon there will likely be a lot more of them, because last week, the companies…
Gideon: I hear you navigating a kind of, I guess, a broad political space. I hear you talking like someone who is part of both left and right political groupings. You know, you obviously—a lot of the people that you hang out with in Silicon Valley, or around Elon, are libertarians or conservatives, and then…
“You get on an exchange for as long as you can, until they shut your ass down,” says Knox. “You quickly [run out of exchanges], so you sit on a lot of useless money. The whole ‘crypto is permissionless and censorship-resistant’ thing is a bunch of bullshit.” (Knox suspects she has ended up on a…
In short, the tentacles of US tech firms are everywhere—vaccines, food, cancer research, psilocybin centers, criminal justice reform, homelessness—the list could reach the moon. (Speaking of the moon, how could we forget commercial spaceflight?) And the AI boom is likely to further expand tech firms’ power and riches. Yet on Capitol Hill, some powerful Republicans…
All that Andrew McCalip wanted for his 34th birthday was a shipment of red phosphorus. It was a tough request—the substance happens to be an ingredient for cooking meth and is controlled by the US Drug Enforcement Agency—but also an essential one, if McCalip was going to realize his dream of making a room-temperature superconductor,…
FedEx spokesperson Adam Snyder says the company reminds contractors to closely monitor working conditions. “We encourage our team members and service providers across FedEx to take precautions in the hot weather by staying hydrated, taking frequent breaks, and recognizing the signs of heat related illnesses,” he says. UPS spokesperson Becky Biciolis-Pace says the company is…
The bird is dead, but zombie Twitter is not. Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, the platform has survived rate-limiting, massive staff cuts, suspensions of journalists, hemorrhaging ad dollars, exorbitant API price hikes, and a frenzy of new competitors. This week it survived becoming not Twitter, as the site suddenly rebranded to X. During its first…
For three months in late 2020, nearly 7,200 US adults on Facebook and 8,800 on Instagram received a radically different experience than the services’ billions of other users. When they scrolled through their newsfeed, Facebook and Instagram showed them the newest posts as determined by the clock, not those judged most relevant by an algorithm…
A fleet of robot ships bobs gently in the warm waters of the Persian Gulf, somewhere between Bahrain and Qatar, maybe 100 miles off the coast of Iran. I am on the nearby deck of a US Coast Guard speedboat, squinting off what I understand is the port side. On this morning in early December…