Category Archives: Uncategorized

Experts are calling them the two most important free-speech cases of this generation. On Monday, the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments in two cases that have the potential to remake online speech in America by weighing how the First Amendment applies to social media platforms. In Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, the justices will decide the constitutionalityContinue reading “What’s at stake for Big Tech in the Supreme Court’s landmark social media cases?”

Facial-recognition data is typically used to prompt more vending machine sales. Canada-based University of Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting facial-recognition data without their consent. The scandal started when a student using the alias SquidKid47 posted an image on Reddit showing a campusContinue reading “Vending machine error reveals secret face image database of college students.”

Tesla has shared its latest clip of the Optimus humanoid robot, once again showing off how smoothly the bot is able to walk around. On Saturday, Tesla’s Optimus account on X shared footage of the humanoid robot walking around one of its testing facilities, featuring the caption “Getting my daily steps in.” The robot appearsContinue reading “Tesla shares more footage of Optimus walking improvements.”

After a nail-biting descent, the Odysseus spacecraft has landed near the lunar south pole and prepares to kick off a week of data gathering. In a historic lunar accomplishment, the first private spacecraft to land successfully on the Moon touched down on 22 February. The spacecraft, named Odysseus and built by Intuitive Machines in Houston, Texas, alsoContinue reading “First private Moon lander touches down on lunar surface to make history.”

Electronic Data Interchange came on the scene in the early 1970s, and ever since  we’ve all been trying various ways to make different pieces of software work together. Although we’ve made a lot of progress, it still feels like getting software to cooperate is harder than it should be, and I think that’s because we’reContinue reading “We’ve been thinking about software integration wrong for the past 50 years”

For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.  For three decades, a tiny text file has kept the internet from chaos. This text file has no particular legal or technical authority, and it’sContinue reading “The text file that runs the internet.”

As you all know, I am a techno-optimist. The current decade truly seems like a time of marvels, with major simultaneous advances in energy technology, AI, biotech, space, and a number of other fields. But whereas I’m pretty well-equipped to understand some of those technologies, the biotech industry often feels like a completely separate world. Thus, I relyContinue reading “We’re entering a golden age of engineering biology.”

Let’s get started! Dropping a website out into the wild web is a big deal, so making sure every last detail is tightened up first is key. I mean, you wanna make sure your site looks slick on phones and tablets, not just desktops(Responsiveness). And you want real people to be able to find andContinue reading “14 Things To Check Before Deploying a Website”

Waymark Signal also identified a racial bias in existing Medicaid risk models. New technology from public benefit corporation Waymark predicted avoidable emergency room and hospital utilization with 90% accuracy, according to a new study released this month. The machine learning tool, Waymark Signal, looks at “social risk factors and patient risk trajectories,” along with healthcareContinue reading “Study: Machine learning tool predicts avoidable emergency room and hospital utilization with 90% accuracy.”

One of the reasons I think AI is going to have a hard time taking over all our driving duties, our medical care, or even just our customer support interactions, is that being as good as a human isn’t good enough for a robot. They need to be computer good. That is, virtually perfect. That’sContinue reading “It’s easier to forgive a human than a robot.”