Our AI bill hit $50K last month (we're a 4 person team). AI is a sh*tty business - just like restaurants. Hear me out..... That $50K bill wasn't a surprise. When you run AI at scale (real scale, not demo scale..) this is what it costs. But the number wasn't the problem. I built a software company…

Today on Decoder, I want to lay out an idea that’s been banging around my head for weeks now as we’ve been reporting on AI and having conversations here on this show. I’ve been calling it software brain, and it’s a particular way of seeing the world that fits everything into algorithms, databases…

For more than three hours on Feb. 10, Mikaela Shiffrin and her team hashed through how a day that had begun with so much promise had turned nightmarish. The American Alpine skiing star had spent the past four years answering questions about a disastrous showing at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, where…

I shipped more code last quarter than any quarter in my career. I also felt more drained than any quarter in my career. These two facts are not unrelated. I build AI agent infrastructure for a living. I'm one of the core maintainers of OpenFGA (CNCF Incubating), I built agentic-authz for agent…

Ross and Hugo Turner are genetically identical professional adventurers. By dressing one in cutting-edge technical apparel and the other in 100-year-old heritage kit on the world’s toughest expeditions, they are conducting the ultimate A/B test on modern gear. On the vast, blinding expanse of the…

Preface What if our AI bullishness continues to be right...and what if that’s actually bearish? What follows is a scenario, not a prediction. This isn’t bear porn or AI doomer fan-fiction. The sole intent of this piece is modeling a scenario that’s been relatively underexplored. Our friend Alap Shah…

Credit...Illustration by Pablo Delcan and Danielle Del Plato In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird. Credit...Illustration by Pablo Delcan and Danielle Del Plato March 12, 2026 Lately, Manu Ebert has…

Sam Altman sits with his legs pretzeled in an office chair, staring deeply into the ceiling. To be fair, the new OpenAI headquarters—a temple of glass and blond wood in San Francisco’s Mission Bay—seems to invite this kind of contemplation. A kiosk behind reception holds booklets that describe the…

Get updates Follow @mattshumer_ Get early access to future reviews and builds. Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren't paying close attention. The stock market was doing…

Credit...Holly Andres for The New York Times Jessie Diggins has become the best-ever American cross-country skier because of what she pushes her body through. Credit...Holly Andres for The New York Times Listen to this article · 22:12 min Learn more Feb. 5, 2026 The deepest Jessie Diggins ever…

This framework turns lived experience into insight. You capture thoughts as they happen, review them weekly, and notice emerging patterns. It's what shows up when you pay attention and reflect with honesty. I built this because I needed a way to make sense of experience without adding pressure. The…

In 1796, when Edward Jenner developed the first vaccine, against the smallpox virus, no one knew what viruses were, let alone connected them to diseases. Many believed Jenner’s vaccine worked because it depleted the body of the specific nutrients the disease needed to thrive. In reality, his concept…

Greetings from Read Max HQ! This week, a collection of thoughts about a new trend in tech criticism masquerading as a lumpy and overstuffed essay. A reminder: This piece, and all the pieces you read on the Read Max newsletter, is funded almost entirely by paying subscribers of this newsletter. I am…

Seven German journalism students tracked Russian-crewed freighters lurking off the Dutch and German coast—and connected them to drone swarms over military bases. Let me walk you through what Michèle Borcherding, Clara Veihelmann, Luca-Marie Hoffmann, Julius Nieweler, Tobias Wellnitz, Sergen Kaya,…

As sentences go, “Apple Intelligence now works in Apple Shortcuts” isn't the most likely to inspire a lot of people to click a link. And that's too bad: This change, one of the more overlooked new features in macOS 26, means you can use Apple's on-board AI to do all kinds of things while designing…

Dept. of Science It used to be that drawing heat from deep in the Earth was practical only in geyser-filled places such as Iceland. But new approaches may have us on the cusp of an energy revolution. November 17, 2025 Near the Krafla geothermal-energy plant, scientists drilled down to magma,…

Illustration: New York Magazine This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. Chungin “Roy” Lee stepped onto Columbia University’s campus this past fall and, by his own admission, proceeded to use generative artificial…

Field Notes cofounders Aaron Draplin and Jim Coudal have convened to ostensibly talk about their cult-fave memo book brand. But Draplin—the gregarious, hilarious Portland proprietor of Draplin Design Co.—just wrapped up jury duty. And almost 10 minutes into our conversation, he’s regaling us with…

Henry, a boyish-looking AI researcher, believes there's about a 50/50 chance that in the next few years AI will become so powerful and sophisticated it will pose an existential threat to all human life. For his day job, he's trying to prevent this from happening by working for a small safety-focused…

“It’s not true that no one needs you anymore.” These words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The plane was dark and quiet. A man I assumed to be her husband murmured almost inaudibly in response, something to the effect of “I…

Stripe’s Annual Letter is eminently quotable and insightful. As a payments company, Stripe has a unique data on the entire business landscape. But who else about the Collison brothers would cite the O-ring model in their annual report? Businesses on Stripe generated $1.4 trillion in total payment…

On a 5K screen in Kirkland, Washington, four terminals blur with activity as artificial intelligence generates thousands of lines of code. Steve Yegge, a veteran software engineer who previously worked at Google and AWS, sits back to watch. “This one is running some tests, that one is coming up with…

Recently, I accidentally overdrew my checking account. That hadn’t happened to me in years—the last time was in 2008, when I was running a small business with no safety net in the middle of a financial crisis. Back then, an overdrawn account meant eating canned soup and borrowing cash from friends…

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The pain jolted me awake. It was barely dawn, a misty February morning in 2023. My side felt as if I’d been stabbed. I had been dealing with pain for weeks — a…

Pushed to use artificial intelligence, software developers at the e-commerce giant say they must work faster and have less time to think. Others welcome the shift. Listen to this article · 11:09 min Learn more Credit...Davide Bonazzi By Noam Scheiber has reported on working conditions at Amazon for…

In a sea of nearly identical fitness trackers, Whoop stands apart. Since it started in 2012, the company has understood that the hardware was secondary to software. For a pricey monthly membership, you get access to a (theoretically) never-ending series of new features in the Whoop app, and the…

So, it was capitalism after all. More specifically, crony capitalism. I am talking, of course, about how the leaders of the tech world revealed themselves before and after the 2024 presidential election, when just a little more than half of America (and a surprisingly diverse group for an anti-DEI…

Mary Springowski has been obsessed with microchips ever since the accident in 2016. That was the year a loaded parts cart at a Ford plant in northeastern Ohio rammed into her leg and tore her Achilles tendon, laying her up for weeks. A 25-year veteran of Ford and the United Auto Workers, Springowski…

Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project had uncovered massive government fraud when it alleged that 150-year-olds were claiming Social Security benefits. But Musk has provided no evidence to back up his claims, and experts quickly…

Start-ups say we’re closer than ever to near-limitless, zero-carbon energy from fusion. When will we get there? DIII-D National Fusion Facility, operated by General Atomics, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory The quest for fusion energy — the clean, potentially limitless source that could…

Michael Phelps knows himself. He knows if he doesn’t exercise throughout the week, he’ll turn into some “big ass ogre that no one wants to be around.” He knows Post Malone’s music has recently worked best for cardio days and Eminem’s for heavy lifting. He believes in structure, which is why he has…

Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud, Mosaad bin Mohammad al-Aiban, Yuri Ushakov, and Sergei Lavrov on February 18. (Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/Pool/AFP via Getty Images.) We are delighted to feature Francis Fukuyama in the pages of Persuasion once again. But some…

It’s hard to get a job at Charlie Gipple’s financial advisory firm if you went to the wrong college—like Harvard, Yale or Princeton. The chief executive of CG Financial Group in Johnston, Iowa, says academic credentials don’t impress him like they used to. He worked with many graduates of top-tier…

I have shipped a lot of different projects over the last ~10 years in tech. I often get tapped to lead new ones when it’s important to get it right, because I’m good at it. Shipping in a big tech company is a very different skill to writing code, and lots of people who are great at writing code are…

Stay up-to-date on the latest breaking news. Get MTFP's in-depth, independent reporting sent directly to your inbox. This story is published by agreement with ProPublica. It may not be republished without the express permission of ProPublica. Lisa Warwick found her husband gasping for air at the…

Reporting Highlights A Freelance Vigilante: A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends. The Future of Militias: He penetrated a new generation of militia leaders, which…

Not long ago, I let a colleague insert an IV line in my hand. He swished saline back and forth between two syringes to create bubbles, then he injected the foamy liquid into my vein. We wanted to know if a new gadget—a small Doppler ultrasound—could hear the bubbles in my bloodstream. We hoped the…

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but everything seems to be going down the tubes quite fast. And not fun tubes, like at a waterpark. The “ending in shit” kind. The issues are complicated, the reasons diverse, but there are a few culprits who have been making themselves extremely visible.…

For the last few months, there's been a lot of conversation around the "Department" of Government Efficiency, which is ostensibly an effort at improving government efficency, with a primary narrative being around government spending. This is not the actual purpose of DOGE, and it's worth explaining…