I've taken the paywall off this story, just for the next 24 hours, in a devious attempt to lure a few of you into a for future writing. I hope you enjoy it. My ex-husband’s landlady is 77 years old, five feet nine and a quarter inches tall, with broad shoulders, size seven feet and hair as wild as…

Before Google, I worked at a small telecoms company in Liverpool called Qire. It was an interesting company and I’d just gone from working in a big slow corporate building Fraud Detection systems to a small company that had to be pretty nimble. It had maybe 15 people in total. We ended up building…

One of the best books about change I have read is Peter Norton's book on traffic. It's a look back to what was actually going on during the days when automobiles started becoming more popular. The thing you notice when you read it is how much of the pushback, shorn of the specifics, sounds exactly…

You see an ad for something online, some incredibly specific product or place. You’ve never searched for, typed it, or clicked on it. But you do remember talking about it to someone. Obviously, the phone must be listening to you. Somehow, it passed what you said along to Facebook or TikTok or…

For roughly half my life, I’ve been associated with Godwin’s Law, which centers on human beings’ tendency to invoke Hitler or Nazis or the Holocaust in online arguments. I never expected AI models to do this on their own, following some hidden, counterintuitive path of least resistance. But maybe I…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The smell was strange. Sharp. Chemical. Wrong. The concrete wall was too close. My glasses were gone. One of my kids was standing on the sidewalk next to our car—not crying, just confused. The seat belt had…

Lately, Manu Ebert has been trying to keep his A.I. from humiliating him. I recently visited Ebert, a machine-learning engineer and former neuroscientist, at the spare apartment where he and Conor Brennan-Burke run their start-up, Hyperspell. Ebert, a tall and short-bearded 39-year-old with the air…

It’s concerned employees since AI first hit the scene: the technology will take away their jobs. And according to some reports, that’s happening. Or is it? Table of Contents Tech Giants Tie Job Cuts to AI Productivity Much of the current concern about AI-attributed layoffs comes from reports earlier…

Adjust Share You can learn a surprising amount by kicking things. It’s an epistemological method you often see deployed by small children, who target furniture, pets, and their peers in the hope of answering important questions about the world. Questions like “How solid is this thing?” and “Can I…

In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting. The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to…

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts In July, President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for an expansion of involuntary commitment—forcing people into treatment facilities—in response to the homelessness crisis. San Francisco has been attempting…

In 2013, workers at a German construction company noticed something odd about their Xerox photocopier: when they made a copy of the floor plan of a house, the copy differed from the original in a subtle but significant way. In the original floor plan, each of the house’s three rooms was accompanied…

Please enjoy this reprint from Gateways, edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull, an anthology of original stories inspired by science fiction great Frederik Pohl. Pohl’s latest novel, All the Lives He Led, comes out on April 12th from Tor Books. The first lesson Leon learned at the ad agency was: nobody is…

The Spring of 1988 In the spring of 1988, Alan Cooper sat in front of a computer in a large boardroom at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, patiently waiting for Bill Gates to arrive. At the time, Cooper's main business was writing desktop application software to sell to publishers.…

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Reporting Highlights A Freelance Vigilante: A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell…

On the morning of my ninth birthday, I made a wish. Not a birthday wish, though — or at least not the kind you make before blowing out candles. It wasn’t something you wish for with a smile on your fa

Image; The SS Normandie. View original image View dithered image Support Low-tech Magazine via Paypal or Patreon Flying has become cheaper than taking a train or driving a car. Yet, environmental conc

The day that Boulangism relaunched, every virtual machine in every toaster and Disher dishwasher chimed awake and announced the new, exciting unlocking offer. These alerts loaded in little windows the

Under cover of darkness, I boarded a Navy vessel at a heavily guarded military base along the Eastern Seaboard. The location and time of departure, as well as the direction and distance of travel, wer

Most New Testament scholars agree that some 2,000 years ago a peripatetic Jewish preacher from Galilee was executed by the Romans, after a year or more of telling his followers about this world and th

This is Chapter Thirty or so in a whole ongoing saga that I don’t have time to get into right now. I’m jumping in at the point when my Machiavellian twin brother Charles decided to take over Mars, and

https://parametric.press/issue-01/unraveling-the-jpeg/

1 SHOW UP WITH HEARTFELT INTENSITY. 1. My first road trip was a family road trip. We opted to forgo the annual family summer vacation and instead drive down the Pacific Coast Highway,📌 starting in Van

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

One of the most fundamental aspects of any storage solution is durability—how well is your data protected from loss or corruption? And that can feel especially important for a cloud environment. Cloud

Note: If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here . When you say the word “me,” you probably feel pretty clear about what that means. It’s

There are a lot of articles and presentations out there that discuss how to manage technical debt. In my opinion, most of these approaches are workarounds to fix a broken system. As usual, it’s much b

Once upon a time there was a man who built two enormous machines, and he loved them very much. He called them Brother and Sister and programmed them with intelligences that woke and stretched and test

As many countries are going through another wave of infections, including some where the vast majority of the population has been vaccinated, many are starting to despair that we’ll never see the end

About Documents Resources Programs Blog Podcasts Bookstore Login/Register Search Constitution Elections Race and Equality Rights and Liberties by Frederick Douglass July 05, 1852 Edited and introduced

O ver the past decade , Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party have transformed a democracy into something close to an autocracy. Shortly after his first reelection in 2014, Orbán