The internet is filled with awesome stuff to read, and there’s new awesome stuff to read being published every day! That’s the good news. The bad news is that finding the good stuff feels harder than ever. You either find your favorite writers or sources and check them religiously or just hope that the algorithm gods deliver you something you’ll like. It’s all a lot more work than just tapping the TikTok icon, you know?
Allow The Verge to help a little. This is an endless, often-updated stream of the stuff we’re reading and think you should read, too. Whether it’s a great piece of longform journalism, a sharp take on the news, interesting new studies or lawsuits or whitepapers, a new sci-fi book that will inevitably convince a bunch of founders to build new kinds of robots a decade from now, or something else entirely, it’s all here. So scroll through, click on some stuff, let us know what you think in the comments, and get your read-later queue ready to rumble.
- Jeffrey Epstein made moves at Microsoft.
Epstein “found success boring into the inner sanctums of Microsoft,” according to The New York Times, more so than any other major tech company. New Justice Department documents show he spent a decade networking with top Microsoft executives, including Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, and Steven Sinofsky, even after serving time for soliciting a minor.
How Jeffrey Epstein Ingratiated Himself With Top Microsoft Executives[The New York Times]
- The other chip crisis.
Thought RAMageddon was bad? Wait until Silicon Valley loses access to 90 percent of the world’s chip supply. The New York Times reminds us that’s a possibility, with production concentrated in Taiwan, ever at risk of a Chinese blockade. The industry is now investing in US production, but has been putting this off for years.
The Looming Taiwan Chip Disaster That Silicon Valley Has Long Ignored[The New York Times]
- The tech behind ICE’s facial recognition.
We’ve known for a while that ICE agents are using facial recognition apps to pull people’s details, but The New York Times does a good job of laying out the apps the agency uses, the Palantir-powered database behind them, and how it’s allegedly being used for unexpected penalties like revoking TSA PreCheck.
How ICE Already Knows Who Minneapolis Protesters Are[The New York Times]
- “Enter John and his magical text files.”
Anil Dash wrote a really fun, really deep history of Markdown, the text markup language John Gruber created that has subsequently become totally ubiquitous online. Dash also argues that the idea behind Markdown, and the forces that made it huge, hold important lessons that the current tech industry — and AI companies in particular — could really stand to learn from.
How Markdown took over the world[Anil Dash]
- The IP economy.
I hadn’t heard about Lu Heng before today, and I doubt you had either. But he apparently owns 10 million African IP addresses, which he leases out for profit, creating a financial asset out of what was intended to be basic infrastructure. Classy!
The Battle Over Africa’s Great Untapped Resource: IP Addresses[The Wall Street Journal]
- The seven years of Silksong.
Jason Schreier at Bloomberg has gone deep on Hollow Knight: Silksong in an interview with its devs, exploring the long development journey, some specific features that shifted over the years, and, yes, their plans for future content.
- Changing policy, one email at a time.
The EU’s chat control bill could upend encryption if it passes, and one Danish man is doing his best to prevent that. His site helps regular people — apparently in their millions — to email representatives and complain. Unlike Politico, I wouldn’t call that spam, just democracy working as intended.
- Why your printer sucks.
I was just listening to a podcast, in which the hosts were wondering why all printers are so terrible. (You know, as you do.) That made me re-read this truly wonderful New Yorker story on the subject, which offers as thorough an answer as you’ll ever find. It’s also just a great read:
In building-size paper mills, the fibre is sprayed onto rollers turning thirty-five miles per hour, which press it into fat cylinders of paper forty reams wide... When paper gets too wet, it liquefies; when it gets too dry, it crumbles to dust.
Why Paper Jams Persist[The New Yorker]
- Streaming the strawberry pickers.
I love this description of falling into the rabbit hole of TikTok Live streams of farm workers and other manual laborers, calmly and quietly going about their work. It’s competence porn that highlights the divide between those of us making stuff, and those of us watching from our phones.
- A look at the state of deepfakes.
If you’re interested in a high-level overview of the state of deepfakes, I recommend checking out this blog post from Captions, a Capcut competitor and a software platform that enables creators to generate AI-generated videos from scratch.
What struck me the most is the company’s prediction that, “Very soon, most models will allow you to generate a person (real or synthetic) in any situation – without a duration constraint (longer than 12 seconds) and featuring multiple people in one shot.” Chat, are we cooked?
I’ll have Captions CEO Gaurav Misra on Decoder later this week to talk about this.
- How EA killed the Dragon (Age).
Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier is back with another post-mortem on the hows and whys a big, blockbuster title failed. This time, to my great and everlasting sadness, it’s the story of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Its failure can be summed up simply.
EA’s rapacious quest for the eternal “line go up” game forced Bioware to pivot from single player to live-service, then back to single player, stealing time, resources, and manpower resulting in a game that was nowhere near the original vision its developers had. I’ll never forgive EA for this for as long as I live.
- Comment meatball!
Our sister site Eater just did a great deep dive into why you might be seeing people comment “meatball” and other foodstuffs on cooking creators’ social media. The short of it is AI recipe and link-sharing automations that help users avoid that pesky link in bio. That said, creators have mixed feelings over chatbots taking over their comment section.
- How to get students to stop using AI.
James D. Walsh’s excellent New York Magazine piece about college students cheating their way through school with ChatGPT has provoked a lot of education discourse, much of which reluctantly surrenders that AI is here and that there’s no way to stop people from using it. The takes have ranged from sheepishly accepting that reality to wholeheartedly embracing it — reimagining curriculum, the campus, the entirety of the liberal arts. But in Ted Gioia’s excellent newsletter The Honest Broker, he proposes a different solution. What if we just shut down cheating by making things analog?
Once you get past the flexing about Oxford (sounds like a nice school), Gioia’s answers are actually smart and obvious: Make students write things by hand. Grill students verbally. Raise the difficulty of tests (and also mandate they be handwritten or oral). What he’s outlined is as much a rebuke of AI in the classroom as it is a doubling down of how education used to be: test kids on what they know, and leave it up to them to figure out how to succeed. Maybe they would figure out a new way to cheat, but at least they would be thinking creatively.
5 Ways to Stop AI Cheating[honest-broker.com]
- Searching for meaning in ancient Inca knots.
The Atlantic has a fascinating deep dive into khipus — long cords that the Inca tied knots into to preserve information. Few know how to read the knots, which are hundreds of years old and fragile. But researchers are slowly learning to understand them:
A few years ago, Clindaniel trained an AI system to analyze the colors of 37,645 cords on 629 khipus, as well as the colors of the cords that surround them, which may indicate context and genre. Clindaniel’s program found that rare khipu colors—red, certain blues, orange, yellow, certain grays, greens—were all clustered together, indicating that they were probably used in highly similar contexts. Based on Spanish chronicles and other clues, Clindaniel suggests that this context might have involved religion or Inca royalty.
Unraveling the Secrets of the Inca Empire[theatlantic.com]
- Go read this report on AI’s effects on Amazon’s software labor force.
Amazon engineers related their experience creating software to The New York Times:
The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines ... One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I.
The Times likens the shift to that of Amazon warehouses, where robots “have increased the number of items each worker can pick to hundreds from dozens an hour.”
- “Recurring Screens.”
In poet Nora Claire Miller’s short, moving essay, she draws a line from the very first screensaver (SCRNSAVE, 1983) to the tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle, 1962) to her family’s flight during the Holocaust (Austria, 1938). I particularly loved this bit about taking apart her grandmother’s iMac:
I took the Strawberry apart thirty-nine times. (I kept count.) I didn’t really know what I was doing. I cut my hands open on the logic board more than once. There’s still dried blood on the hard drive. But despite my best efforts at modernization, the Strawberry has refused to accept any of my updates. It only wants to exist in 1999, to connect to an old internet that hardly exists anymore. These days it mostly runs screen savers. Warp is still my favorite.
Recurring Screens[The Paris Review]
- Happy Birthday to Steve Jobs’ screed against Flash.
15 years ago today, Steve Jobs published “Thoughts on Flash,” railing on Adobe’s platform for being bad for batteries, apps, and the web. Still a good read!
If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
Also, don’t miss our friend Walt Mossberg grilling Jobs about Flash at the D8 Conference.
Thoughts on Flash - Apple[Archive.org]
- A wild look inside the world of organized crypto crime.
This New York Times caper is super revealing, both about how crypto-hacker crime rings work, and how investigators traced a quarter-billion-dollar heist. (There’s a Netflix movie in here somewhere, for sure.) But also, PSA: doing a 90-minute livestream that includes every imaginable bit of incriminating evidence is probably not going to help you get away with something.
- “The loss is incalculable.”
ProPublica zooms in on DOGE cuts’ destructive effect on the collection and distribution of critical data tracking fatal shootings, sexually transmitted infections, child welfare cases, greenhouse-gas emissions, and infinitely more, resulting in a “black hole of information.”
As one dataset after another falls by the wayside, the nation’s policymakers are losing their ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public is losing the ability to hold them accountable for their results.
- Yup.
Our colleagues at Polygon are calling out Nintendo for its obnoxiously wordy naming conventions for some Switch 2 games. We are inclined to agree.
- The New Yorker profiled Bluesky CEO Jay Graber.
It’s a pretty interesting article at about Graber and Bluesky as a whole.
It also includes a nugget that Graber and Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko met about having the platforms interoperate, but “each told me that the other seemed more interested in having the rival platform migrate onto their own protocol,” author Kyle Chayka writes.
Bluesky’s Quest to Build Nontoxic Social Media[newyorker.com]
- Meet the very latest in baseball bat technology.
The baseball season is only a few days old, and a new “bowling pin” bat has set the game on fire. It’s the result of some fascinating science, and a whole bunch of supply chain optimization:
Bowling pin bats take precision to produce. Every fraction of an ounce in bat manufacturing matters. Bats are measured not only on a standard scale but via pendulum-swing tests. The more balanced a bat, the more it oscillates.
- There’s some wild stuff in this profile of Google’s AI efforts.
This big piece from Wired includes, for example, a tidbit that one Google executive “switched from calling her sister during her commutes to gabbing out loud with Gemini Live.”
The whole thing is an interesting read.
- Go read this battery chemical-eating story.
Rest of World looks at a small-town political fight over whether a planned EV battery plant from Chinese company Gotion was a boon for employment, an environmental disaster-in-the-making, or a “Communist Trojan horse.”
It opens with the VP of Gotion’s US subsidiary deciding “he would have to eat part of a battery” to prove they’re safe. So far, the plant hasn’t been built.
- Touch grass, but at work.
Kate Siber documented her recent experience taking her work outside every day for a month for Outside (via Jason Kottke). After reading this, I kind of want to try it, too.
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