Tag Archives: tech-culture

Every summer, the Spanish Twitch streamer Ibai Llanos hosts a livestreamed boxing tournament called La Velada del Año (The Evening of the Year). In just four years, it has gone from a relatively small event featuring matches between a few influencers from Spain to an enormous global phenomenon featuring over …

When Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta in 2021, he estimated the metaverse could reach a billion people over a decade. Not long after, Bill Gates predicted that within two or three years “most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids—which I call the Hollywood Squares model, although …

Jessamyn West used to describe Metafilter as a social network for non-friends, a description belied in part by the tight-knit camaraderie that emerges in an online group of only a few thousand people. West herself is an example: She met her partner on the site. She also describes the Metafilter …

In late May, Meta invited New York staff to what it called a “summery showcase” to learn about clubs across the company. Its promotional poster featured colorful slushies and watermelon desserts. But when a club for Muslim workers revealed plans to spend $200 in company funds to serve nine dozen …

Amazon appeared to have significantly heightened security for its New York Amazon Web Services Summit on Wednesday, two weeks after a number of activists disrupted the Washington, DC, AWS Summit in protest against Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. The clampdown in …

In 2016, Google engineer Illia Polosukhin had lunch with a colleague, Jacob Uszkoreit. Polosukhin had been frustrated by a lack of progress in his project, using AI to provide useful answers to questions posed by users, and Uszkoreit suggested he try a technique he had been brainstorming that he called …

“People make fun of me about the fridges,” said Tassos Stassopoulos. “I am fridge-obsessed.” As the founder and managing partner of Trinetra, a London-based investment firm, Stassopoulos has pioneered an unusual strategy: peeking inside refrigerators in homes around the world in order to predict the future—and monetize those insights. By …

In R. C. Sherriff’s novel The Hopkins Manuscript, readers are transported to a world 800 years after a cataclysmic event ended Western civilization. In pursuit of clues about a blank spot in their planet’s history, scientists belonging to a new world order discover diary entries in a swamp-infested wasteland formerly …

Search for Airbnbs in Paris in late July and you’ll be offered options ranging from a tiny studio with glimpses of the Eiffel Tower for $167 a night up to a stunning luxury apartment steps from the Champs-Élysées for nearly $3,500 a night. The company is also offering two lucky …

A Sam Altman–funded nonprofit studying the effects of giving monthly checks of up to $1,000 to lower-income households in the US espouses transparency in its operations. “We aim to share data, findings, and insights widely,” OpenResearch says on its website, which describes its work as a “public good.” But like …