technology

When Caron Morse’s 9-year-old daughter asked for a smartphone last year, her reaction, she told me, was unambiguous: “A hard ‘Hell no.’” Morse is a mental-health provider in the Portland, Maine, public-school system, and she was firmly against smartphones, having seen how social media and abundant screen time could shorten students’ attention spans and give them new anxieties. But she wanted her children to have some independence—to be able to call friends, arrange playdates, and reach out to their grandparents on their own. She also needed a break. “I was so sick,” she said, “of being the middle person in any correspondence.”

So when her daughter turned 10, Morse did get her a phone: a landline.

So if these fans aren’t AI-generated fakes, what’s going on here?

The video features real performances and real audiences, but I believe they were manipulated on two levels:

• Will Smith’s team generated several short AI image-to-video clips from professionally-shot audience photos
• YouTube post-processed the resulting Shorts montage, making everything look so much worse

OKLCH is a newer color model that is designed to be perceptually uniform. This means that colors are much more accurate in terms of how humans perceive them and it makes working with them much easier.

…this is where font-size-adjust comes in. If I specify

font-size-adjust: ex-height 0.5,

I ask the browser to scale the font such that the letter “x” is exactly half of the box. This makes the fonts comparable…

…That’s why we created X1, a sleek device that attaches under any watch, turning it into a smart companion. With X1, you get notifications, fitness tracking, and more—all while keeping the watch you already love.

Lorde fans are clearly struggling to play the CD version of her new album. Customers who purchased the special edition of Virgin released on a transparent plastic disc are reporting on Reddit and TikTok that many CD players, car stereos, and other sound systems they’ve tried are unable to play it.

“LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities,” one of the moderators of r/accelerate, wrote in an announcement. “There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.”

Yes, he did The Big Short, except with Donald Trump’s meme coin. “Bet you 10 percent of dinner participants are doing this,” he told me before the contest ended. “Everyone knows $TRUMP price will fall inevitably as more supply comes online in the future and gets dumped on retail.”

When I spoke to him again after the dinner, he told me that “the majority of people I spoke with, particularly the crypto traders and folks who are very close to the crypto ecosystem, are like, ‘Yeah, I dumped this. I already sold the coin.’”

compost.party is a repurposed smartphone running on solar power. It’s a web server pieced together from scraps, humming in the attic of an apartment building.

In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:”