Inside Maye Musk’s Cozy Relationship With China
In January, with a nationwide ban on TikTok looming, hundreds of thousands of people in the US began flocking to another Chinese social media app called...
Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science
On the library’s side, some people thought Ginsparg was too hands-on. Others said he wasn’t patient enough. A “good lower-level manager,” according to someone long involved...
How Extropic Plans to Unseat Nvidia
“This signal on the oscilloscope may seem simple at first glance, but it demonstrates a key building block for our platform, representing the birth of the...
I Went Undercover in Crypto’s Answer to ‘Squid Game.’ It Nearly Broke Me
Before the game began, I listened back to my conversations with CTG players from previous seasons, hoping to glean some essential wisdom that might help me...
The Best Programming Language for the End of the World
Coding in Forth reminded me of the lawless dystopia in Mad Max. You make your own rules, subject to the limits of the context. You can...
The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack
The Santa Ana winds were already blowing hard when I ran the first worm simulation. I’m no hacker, but it was easy enough: Open a Terminal...
Databricks Has a Trick That Lets AI Models Improve Themselves
Databricks, a company that helps big businesses build custom artificial intelligence models, has developed a machine-learning trick that can boost the performance of an AI model...
Trump Admin Plans to Cut Team Responsible for Critical Atomic Measurement Data
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is discussing plans to eliminate an entire team responsible for publishing and maintaining critical atomic measurement data...
DOGE’s Misplaced War on Software Licenses
Because agencies sometimes get bulk or government-specific discounts, it can also be more affordable to buy software licenses on behalf of their private contractors. “It’s a...
Google’s Taara Hopes to Usher in a New Era of Internet Powered by Light
Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” known as X, has long cultivated craziness in its edgy projects. Perhaps the most outlandish was Loon, which aimed to deliver internet via...