Ever since the rollout of ChatGPT in November 2022, many people in science, business, and media have been obsessed with AI. A cursory look at my own published work during that period fingers me as among the guilty. My defense is that I share with those other obsessives a belief …
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Call it a bug zapper, not a feature. Data from Fakespot, a service owned by Mozilla that helps consumers spot fake reviews and scams on shopping sites, shows a bizarre rise in the number of listings for bug zappers on Amazon over the past three years. At the same time, …
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I’m fond of effective altruists. When you meet one, ask them how many people they’ve killed. Effective altruism is the philosophy of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto wunderkind now sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud and money laundering. Elon Musk has said that EA is close to what he …
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My boyfriend says he must meditate for one hour every day. Why does this annoy me so much? He works in tech, if that’s relevant. —Seeking Enlightenment Dear Seeking, I think it’s pretty obvious. On the one hand, meditation is the most self-centered, antisocial habit there is—or one of them, …
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For weeks now, the world has been awash in conspiracy theories spurred by weird artifacts in a photographic image of the missing Princess of Wales that she eventually admitted had been edited. Some of them got pretty crazy, ranging from a cover-up of Kate’s alleged death, to a theory that …
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The first time someone invited me to a Slack Huddle—an audio call that happens inside the app—I didn’t know that I had to hang up at the end of it. I heard a series of descending bloops after my coworker signed off, so I assumed the huddle was over and …
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When Michael Seibel lost his position at the startup incubator Y Combinator, he didn’t find out in typical tech industry fashion, which might entail an email calling him to a Zoom meeting where the bad news would be delivered. He did it to himself. Today Seibel is announcing that he’s …
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The US economy is showing remarkable health, but in the tech industry, layoffs keep coming. For those out of work, finding a new position can become a full-time job. And in tech—a sector notoriously always looking for the next hot, new thing—some people whose days as fresh-faced coders are long …
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Jalon Hall thought she was being scammed when a recruiter reached out on LinkedIn about a job moderating YouTube videos in 2020. Months after earning a master’s degree in criminal justice, her only job had been at a law firm investigating discrimination cases. But the offer was real, and Hall, …
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More than 600 Google workers and counting have signed a letter addressed to Google marketing leadership demanding that it drop its sponsorship of Mind the Tech, an annual conference promoting the Israeli tech industry taking place in New York this week. “Please withdraw from Mind the Tech, issue an apology, …
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