Villages looked for niches they could fill in the global market. The town of Xuchang, for instance, capitalized on its legacy of making hairpieces for opera performers—and on the willingness of rural women to sell their black ponytails—and turned itself into a hub for wigs. Zhuangzhai became the largest supplier of caskets to Japan, in part through its proximity to groves of paulownia, a lightweight, slow-burning wood favored in Japanese cremation ceremonies. The town of Qiaotou became the world’s button-making capital after three brothers found a handful of discarded buttons in a gutter and decided to resell them, or so…
You may walk past your neighbor’s house and see some new solar panels quietly absorbing sunlight and turning it into electricity. Your neighbor is smiling because solar is now the least expensive electricity in history. So, your neighbor is almost certainly saving a lot of money. This will be better…
Against that backdrop, Europe’s reliance on American-made AI begins to look more and more like a liability. In a worst case scenario, though experts consider the possibility remote, the US could choose to withhold access to AI services and crucial digital infrastructure. More plausibly, the Trump administration could use Europe’s…
It’s Wordle Wednesday, which means we have an extra riddle to solve before we get to the day’s Wordle itself. Here’s your bonus riddle:Sometimes big, sometimes small, I carry weight but weigh nothing at all. What am I?I’ll post the answer tomorrow. Let’s solve this Wordle!Looking for Tuesday’s Wordle? Check…
I hope everyone had a nice holiday Monday, but now we’re back to the grind. Fortunately, we have some fun diversions, like the newest NYT Games App puzzle game, Pips. Let’s grab some dominos and solve today’s Easy, Medium and Hard puzzles!Looking for Monday’s Pips? Read our guide right here.How…
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House last January, the biggest names in tech have mostly fallen in line with the new regime, attending dinners with officials, heaping praise upon the administration, presenting the president with lavish gifts, and pleading for Trump’s permission to sell their products to China.…
Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Wordlers! I hope you have a nice time with friends and family, especially if you have the day off of work (or school). We have a Wordle to solve, so let’s solve it!Looking for Sunday’s Wordle? Check out our guide right here.Today’s Bonus WordleNow…
If someone ever makes an HBO Max series about the AI industry, the events of this week will make quite the episode.On Wednesday, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, announced the company had rehired Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, cofounders of Mira Murati’s AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab. Zoph and…
NASA has started to roll out Artemis, and there is quite the buzz on social media. I normally write about weather and climate topics, but I spent twelve years of my career as a NASA scientist. Being NASA-attentive, I feel qualified to provide you with a little “101” on Artemis…
I just got back from the JP Morgan conference. A few learnings that apply to any industry, not just healthcare:Humans + AI will change the industry. Not AI alone.Cash flow matters. Not AI hype.The real AI revolution is operational.One of the most hyperbolic promises in healthcare in the last month…
An indie app with only one function is currently all the rage in China. It’s called si le ma (死了吗), which translates literally to “Are You Dead Yet.” The app asks users to tap a button once every day, and if they fail to do so for two consecutive days,…
I’m not a mathematician, but GPT is helping me to become one.Let’s start with an assertion that I saw somewhere on the web, which is that a certain company is trying to “solve” something called the Riemann hypothesis, indicated in the Millennium Prize question set (I’ll get to that later),…
Reid Hoffman doesn’t do much in half measures. He cofounded LinkedIn, of course, and helped bankroll companies including Meta and Airbnb in their startup days. He has also fashioned himself, via books, podcasts, and other public appearances, as something of a public intellectual—a pro-capitalist philosopher who still insists that tech…
It was clear in the run up to the recent (Jan 6-9) CES in Las Vegas that when it came to TVs, RGB MiniLED technology was going to be the biggest game in town. The early buzz from multiple brands was that they would be embracing the new RGB MiniLED…
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is being used to flood X with thousands of sexualized images of adults and apparent minors wearing minimal clothing. Some of this content appears to not only violate X’s own policies, which prohibit sharing illegal content such as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but may…
Spotlight
OpenAI has quietly reversed a major change to how hundreds of millions…
South Korean crypto entrepreneur and prosecuted fraudster Do Kwon was sentenced to…
SpaceX is planning to raise tens of billions of dollars through an…
President Donald Trump signed a highly anticipated executive order on Thursday that…
