Weekend Longreads 2020

Longread Links from The Ride Home Podcast

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Wednesday, December 30 2020

• The Turing Test is obsolete. It’s time to build a new barometer for AI (Fast Company)
• Tech Choices Dictate Teen Friendships During Pandemic (WSJ)
• Ambani Sold a Tech Dream for $27 Billion. Now He Has to Deliver (Bloomberg)
• Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Take Us (The Atlantic)
• With Money, and Waste, China Fights for Chip Independence (NYTimes)
• The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s Game of Life (NYTimes)

Wednesday, December 23 2020

• Our Digital Lives Drive a Brick-and-Mortar Boom in Data Centers (NYTimes)
• The North Carolina Kid Who Cracked YouTube’s Secret Code (Bloomberg)
• What if life were a video game? These 650,000 people imagine it that way. (The Washington Post)
• Czech Startup Founders Turn Billionaires Without VC Help (Bloomberg)
• Inside the Whale: An Interview with an Anonymous Amazonian (Logic Magazine)
• Star Wars toys keep changing, and leaving kids behind (Polygon)
• Shigeru Miyamoto Wants to Create a Kinder World (The New Yorker)

Friday, December 18 2020

• Where Tech Workers Are Moving: New LinkedIn Data vs. the Narrative (Big Technology Newsletter)
• Why I Decided to Leave Substack (A Media Operator Newsletter)
• New WarnerMedia chief Jason Kilar is moving to shake up Hollywood. Insiders are questioning if he has what it takes to turn around the entertainment giant without destroying it. (Business Insider)
• Can’t get a PlayStation 5? Meet the Grinch bots snapping up the holidays’ hottest gift. (Washington Post)
• How AltaVista, our first good search engine, fell into the digital abyss (Tedium)
• My $200,000 Sushi Dinner (NYTimes)

Friday, December 11 2020

• Social Strikes Back (A16Z)
• “A damn stupid thing to do”—the origins of C (Ars Technica)
• 7 Rejections (Brian Chesky)
• Facebook Sees WhatsApp As Its Future, Antitrust Suit or Not (Bloomberg Businessweek)
• Who’s Behind the Fight Between Warner Bros. and Hollywood? It’s AT&T (NYTimes)
• Inside the Human Science of Spotify’s New Music Friday Playlist (Variety)
• How eBird Changed Birding Forever (Outside)

Friday, December 04 2020

• Hollywood’s Obituary, the Sequel. Now Streaming. (NYTimes)
• Why Most Newsletters Fail (What Went Wrong)
• These Tech Startups Want to Sell You Their Life Insurance (WSJ)
• A.A. to Zoom, Substance Abuse Treatment Goes Online (NYTimes)
• An oral history of the hamburger icon (by the people who were there) (invision)

Wednesday, November 25 2020

• Can Shopify Compete With Amazon Without Becoming Amazon? (NYTimes Magazine)
• Hollywood’s ‘We’re Not in Kansas Anymore’ Moment (NYTimes)
• How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism (The New Yorker)
• Substack got lucky, and so did Margins (Margins)
• Why a Paid Newsletter Won’t Be Enough Money for Most Writers (And That’s Fine): The Multi-SKU Creator (Hunter Walk)
• If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault (Anil Dash)

Friday, November 20 2020

• ‘An overnight success 10 years in the making’: Atlanta is the future for Black leaders in tech (Protocol)
• Huawei, 5G, and the Man Who Conquered Noise (Wired)
• The Substackerati (CJR)
• Jack Ma vs. the Party: Inside the collapse of the world’s biggest IPO (Nikkei Asia)
• Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys (Matthew Green’s Blog)
• ‘Like Being Grilled Alive’: The Fear of Living With a Hackable Heart (OneZero)

Friday, November 13 2020

• Twitter Thread on ARM history (@kenfhirriff)
• China Has Caught Up To U.S. In AI, Says AI Expert Kai-Fu Lee (Forbes)
• Welcome Back to the Office. Please Wear This Tracking Device. (OneZero)
• Students Have To Jump Through Absurd Hoops To Use Exam Monitoring Software (Motherboard)
• Masayoshi Son Again Pulled SoftBank From the Brink. This Time He Had Help. (WSJ)
• The Digital Nomads Did Not Prepare for This (NYTimes)

Friday, November 06 2020

• Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, Part 2 (Tim Wu)
• The Xenobot Future Is Coming—Start Planning Now (Wired)
• ‘This is revolutionary’: new online bookshop unites indies to rival Amazon (The Guardian)
• How a not-yet-mature web covered the Florida recount in 2000 (Fast Company)
• An Oral History of ‘Marge vs The Monorail’, the Episode That Changed ‘The Simpsons’ (Motherboard)

Friday, October 30 2020

• The 100X Club: Software Startup Valuations Skyrocket Despite Small Revenue (The Information)
• How Discord (somewhat accidentally) invented the future of the internet (Protocol)
• The Tech Antitrust Problem No One Is Talking About (Wired)
• Streaming was part of the future — now it’s the only future (The Verge)
• The Elysium effect: The coming backlash to the billionaire ‘NewSpace’ revolution (Space.com)

Friday, October 23 2020

• The Network: How a Secretive Phone Company Helped the Crime World Go Dark (Motherboard)
• Cloud gaming’s history of false starts and promising reboots (Polygon)
• ‘Virtual’ studios could offer a real alternative to green screen special effects (Engadget)
• The Google Case (Tim Wu)
• Audio’s Opportunity and Who Will Capture It (Mathew Ball)

Friday, October 16 2020

• Lidar used to cost $75,000—here’s how Apple brought it to the iPhone (Ars Technica)
• Car design is about to change forever. This video encapsulates how (Fast Company)
• Clear Conquered U.S. Airports. Now It Wants to Own Your Entire Digital Identity. (OneZero)
• THE CONTEST TO PROTECT ALMOST EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET (WSJ)
• Cory Doctorow’s Writing Radicalized Young Hackers. Now He Wants to Redeem Them (Wired)

Friday, October 09 2020

• Inside the US campaign to cut China out of the tech supply chain (NikkeiAsia)
• Why media formats (like Snapchat Stories and TikTok music videos) become hits? (Medium)
• THE MASK BARONS OF ETSY (The Verge)
• A Major Online Learning Platform Was Created by a Subterranean Religious ‘Cult’ Whose Leader Has Been Accused of Violence and Abuse (OneZero)
• Definitely not Windows 95: What operating systems keep things running in space? (Ars Technica)

Friday, October 02 2020

• What Opening Day for Asana and Palantir Says About Private Tech Stock Values (The Information)
• Techie Software Soldier Spy (Intelligencer)
• Sourcegraph: Devs are managing 100x more code now than they did in 2010 (Ars Technica)
• HOTorNOT shaped the social web as we know it (Mashable)
• Inside Facebook’s quadruple play: How the company is finally melding its apps (Fast Company)
• HYPE MANOF THE CENTURY (The Verge)

Friday, September 25 2020

• Huang’s Law Is the New Moore’s Law, and Explains Why Nvidia Wants Arm (WSJ)
• How Nvidia’s CEO Cooked Up America’s Biggest Semiconductor Company (WSJ)
• This Deal Helped Turn Google Into an Ad Powerhouse. Is That a Problem? (NYTimes)
• The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite (The Atlantic)
• Why iPhone users are suddenly going wild creating custom looks for their home screens (CNBC)

Friday, September 18 2020

• Exclusive: The Billionaire Who Wanted To Die Broke . . . Is Now Officially Broke (Forbes)
• ‘Interactive entertainment is the standard bearer of the entertainment business’ (Protocol)
• Remote Work Is Killing the Hidden Trillion-Dollar Office Economy (Marker)
• Your Teenage Email Account Is a Lost Time Capsule (One Zero)
• Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters (Vintage Computing And Gaming)
• [This unheard Steve Jobs tape is part of an amazing trove of tech history](https://www.fastcompany.com/90541084/this-unheard-steve-jobs-tape-is-part-of-an-amazing-trove-of-tech-history?partner=feedburner&utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=webfeeds&utm_campaign=Feed:+fastcompany/headlines+(Fast+Company) (Fast Company)

Friday, September 11 2020

• Apple’s Rising Class of Leaders Will Shape a Post-Tim Cook Era (Bloomberg)
• Your Phone Wasn’t Built for the Apocalypse (The Atlantic)
• Esports Pros Have ‘Dream’ Jobs—but Game Publishers Have All the Power (Wired)
• How Netflix’s Reed Hastings Rewrote the Hollywood Script (Forbes)
• [I was skeptical about attending Burning Man in VR, but it’s great](https://www.fastcompany.com/90547369/i-was-skeptical-about-attending-burning-man-in-vr-but-its-great?partner=feedburner&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+fastcompany/headlines+(Fast+Company) (Fast Company)

Friday, September 04 2020

• Cash App’s Surge During Covid-19 Pandemic Fuels Square Stock (WSJ)
• The Digital Future of Tabletop Games (A16Z)
• Robot Boats Leave Autonomous Cars in Their Wake (WSJ)
• Tech Startup, Trying to Be Amazon for Farms, Runs Into Ag Giants (WSJ)
• Inside Fitbit’s Plan to Detect Covid Symptoms With a New Wearable (OneZero)
• How I hacked my Lego NES into a real console (Input)

Friday, August 28 2020

• The Anti-Facebook: 12 Years In, Facebook’s Cofounder Dustin Moskovitz’s Slow-Burn Second Act Asana Finally Has Its Moment (Forbes)
• Palantir: On Business, Cults, and Politics (The Diff)
• Belarus Turned Off the Internet. Its Citizens Hot-Wired It. (Gizmodo)
• The Event Industry Is Being Confronted By Its Napster Moment (Skift)
• Amazon and FedEx Push to Put Delivery Robots on Your Sidewalk (Wired)
• The Conscience of Silicon Valley (GQ)

Friday, August 21 2020

• MONUMENTAL FAILURE - How Tulsa, Oklahoma, almost won Elon Musk using the language he knows best: memes (The Verge)
• The Case of the Top Secret iPod (TidBits)
• The Inside Story Of Robinhood’s Billionaire Founders, Option Kid Cowboys And The Wall Street Sharks That Feed On Them (Forbes)
• Sex, lies, and video games: Inside Roblox’s war on porn (Fast Company)
• Why the Facebookening of Oculus VR is bad for users, devs, competition (Ars Technica)
• Microsoft Flight Simulator review: clear skies with some light chop (Polygon)
• Why Microsoft’s new Flight Simulator should make Google and Amazon nervous (Protocol)

Friday, August 14 2020

• The Secret SIMs Used By Criminals to Spoof Any Number (Motherboard)
• How We Got the Favicon (The History of the Web)
• The Black Internet Gold Rush That Wiped Away $75 Million in 18 Months (Level)
• A college kid’s fake, AI-generated blog fooled tens of thousands. This is how he made it. (Technology Review)
• The Return of Anonymous (The Atlantic)

Friday, August 07 2020

• Pinduoduo: Vertically Integrated Social Commerce (Turner Novak’s Substack)
• The New Network (The Bulwark)
• The Vigilante Hunting Down Cheaters in Video Games (Motherboard)
• The Next ‘Mafia’? Mapping The Alumni Of Square (Protocol)
• Dan Rose Kindle Tweet Thread (Twitter)
• How TikTok’s Owner Tried, and Failed, to Cross the U.S.-China Divide (NYTimes)

Friday, July 31 2020

• Philosophers On GPT-3 (updated with replies by GPT-3) (Daily Nous)
• Independence, autonomy, and too many small teams (Kislay Verma)
• Tech Sector Feeling COVID-19’s Economic Pain (Indeed Hiring Lab)
• The Gig Economy Is Failing. Say Hello to the Hustle Economy. (OneZero)
• Car Companies Want to Monitor Your Every Move With Emotion-Detecting AI (Motherboard)

Friday, July 24 2020

• Robinhood Has Lured Young Traders, Sometimes With Devastating Results (NYTimes)
• Robinhood and How to Lose Money (The Margins)
• Want to buy a parrot? Please login via Facebook. (Rest Of World)
• The Inside Story of How a Sleep Tracker Became the Hottest Device of the Pandemic (Marker)
• How Harvard’s Star Computer-Science Professor Built a Distance-Learning Empire (The New Yorker)
• The case for and against banning TikTok (Vox)
• The App of the Summer Is Just a Random-Number Generator (The Atlantic)

Friday, July 17 2020

• Some of Reddit’s Wildest Relationship Stories Are Lies. I’d Know – I Wrote Them (Motherboard)
• Google’s secretive ATAP lab is imagining the future of smart devices (Fast Company)
• Inside Peacock’s Ambitious Plan to Crash a Crowded Streaming Field (Variety)
• Everything you need to know about Palantir, the secretive company coming for all your data (Recode)
• Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of Ethereum’s 2014 Premine (Coindesk)
• Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel (MondayNote)

Friday, July 10 2020

• How Prosperity Transformed the Falklands (The New Yorker)
• Our Ghost-Kitchen Future (The New Yorker)
• Is Anyone Watching Quibi? (Vulture)
• How Wirecard Went From Tech Star to Bankrupt (WSJ)
• DE-ESCALATING SOCIAL MEDIA (NickPunt.com)
• Algorithms are now commodities (The Shape of Code)
• Hacker News thread about the above (Hacker News)

Thursday, July 02 2020

• Mirror Wanted to Be the Next iPhone. Instead, It’s Selling to Lululemon. (Marker)
• There are more streaming choices than ever — why are prices going up? (The Verge)
• Apple’s Relentless Strategy, Execution, and Point of View (Learn By Shipping)
• Strategy Behind Blockbuster Grubhub Deal: Don’t Deliver (WSJ)
• Networks of self-driving trucks are becoming a reality in the US (recode)
• Did a Chinese Hack Kill Canada’s Greatest Tech Company? (Bloomberg Businessweek)
• Disney’s Developed Movie-Quality Face-Swapping Technology That Promises to Change Filmmaking (Gizmodo)

Friday, June 26 2020

• How India’s Jio Won Facebook’s Heart (The Information)
• How a “crazy Dutch guy” won the online food delivery war (Silicon Canals)
• How Uber Turned a Promising Bikeshare Company Into Literal Garbage (Vice)
• The Credit-Card Fees Merchants Hate, Banks Love and Consumers Pay (WSJ)
• Top composers used to head to Hollywood. Now they’re into games (Wired)
• Reddit turns 15: The dramatic moments that shaped the internet’s front page (Mashable)

Friday, June 19 2020

• Why venture capital doesn’t build the things we really need (MIT Technology Review)
• Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump (Craigmod.com)
• The Grandmaster Who Got Twitch Hooked on Chess (Wired)
• healthOS (Divinations newsletter)
• The Segway’s Inventor Has a New Project: Manufacturing Human Organs (OneZero)
• We spent a fortune on police body cams. Why haven’t they fixed policing? (Fast Company)
• What to expect from Apple’s WWDC 2020 (TechCrunch)

Friday, June 12 2020

• With Real-Life Games Halted, Betting World Puts Action on E-Sports (NYTimes)
• Advertisers eye in-game ads as audiences swell in lockdown (Digiday)
• This Is How Much More Money Artists Earn From Bandcamp Compared to Streaming Services (Pitchfork)
• The most interesting man at Microsoft (Protocol)

Friday, June 05 2020

• Worst. Deal. Ever. (Forbes)
• The Font That Solves The Big Problem With Dark Mode (Forbes)
• Indie history: How shareware helped build Epic Games (Engadget)
• Charli D’Amelio is TikTok’s biggest star. She has no idea why. (Washington Post)
• From RealPlayer to Toshiba, Tech Companies Cash in on the Facial Recognition Gold Rush (OneZero)
• Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? (Nautilus)

Friday, May 29 2020

• Amazon’s Big Breakdown (NYTimes)
• Remember the MOOCs? After Near-Death, They’re Booming (NYTimes)
• Who Will Own the Cars That Drive Themselves? (NYTimes)
• The rise of React (Increment)
• ‘We had no idea how to do it’: YouTube’s founders, investors, and first employees tell the chaotic inside story of how it rose from failed dating site to $1.65 billion video behemoth (Business Insider)
• Poolside.fm is the chillest place you should be hanging out right now (The Verge)

Friday, May 22 2020

• A Case for Cooperation Between Machines and Humans (NYTimes)
• Copyright bots and classical musicians are fighting online. The bots are winning. (Washington Post)
• This DIY laptop costs as much as a MacBook Air — How is it selling so well? (Laptop)
• The State of the Self-Driving Car Race 2020 (Bloomberg)
• MEET THE FIRST NASA ASTRONAUTS SPACEX WILL LAUNCH TO ORBIT (The Verge)

Friday, May 15 2020

• OnlyFans, Influencers, And The Politics Of Selling Nudes During A Pandemic (Elle.com)
• How Sporcle followed trivia fans from bars to Zoom and built a $2.5M business (Protocol)
• Founder Of Borders Bookstores, Webvan Returns With Dreams Of Beating Amazon At Food Delivery (Forbes)
• Inside HBO Max, the $4 Billion Bet to Stand Out in the Streaming Wars (Variety)
• The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet (Wired)
• Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models (MIT Technology Review)
• Yes, websites really are starting to look more similar (The Conversation)

Friday, May 08 2020

• The System That Actually Worked (The Atlantic)
• THE WORLD’S BIGGEST PC GAMES ARE FIGHTING A NEW SURGE OF CHEATERS AND HACKERS (The Verge)
• How Apple reinvented the cursor for iPad (TechCrunch)
• Instacart’s Frantic Dash From Grocery App to Essential Service (Bloomberg Businessweek)
• It’s the 50th Anniversary of Humanity’s Favorite Activity: Staring at an LCD (WSJ)
• Steven Sinofsky lived Microsoft history. Now he’s writing it (Fast Company)
• One-Man Hedge Fund Gains 56% With Virus-Resistant Tech Bets (Bloomberg)

Friday, May 01 2020

• Common Sense Comes Closer to Computers (Quanta)
• The challenges of developing autonomous vehicles during a pandemic (VentureBeat)
• This Should Be V.R.’s Moment. Why Is It Still So Niche? (NYTimes)
• Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them (Apple Insider)
• How Well Can Algorithms Recognize Your Masked Face? (Wired)
• Inside the MIT spinoff that’s making Inception-style dream manipulation possible (Digital Trends)
• You Have a TikTok Hit! Now, Quick — Change the Title (Rolling Stone)

Friday, April 24 2020

• Silicon Valley balanced grueling schedules with workplace perks. Coronavirus is forcing change (CNET)
• Preppers Are Quite Prepared to Enjoy Some Vindication (NYTimes)
• Following the money in a massive “sextortion” spam scheme (Sophos)
• How Instagram managed to survive antitrust scrutiny when it was acquired by Facebook (Fast Company)
• IN THE CORONAVIRUS ERA, THE FORCE IS STILL WITH JACK DORSEY (Vanity Fair)

Friday, April 17 2020

• ‘Needle in a haystack’: Reborn tech offices may need distance and mass testing (Protocol)
• The coronavirus pandemic turned Folding@Home into an exaFLOP supercomputer (Ars Technica)
• Can Comic Books Survive the Coronavirus Era? (NYTimes)
• LIDAR: Peek Into The Future With iPad Pro (Halide)
• The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder (Wired)
• In Half-Life’s improv scene, anyone can speak for Gordon Freeman (Ars Technica)

Friday, April 10 2020

• Can Airbnb Survive Coronavirus? (Citylab)
• Atlassian’s tools helped build today’s tech. How’s it prepping for the future? (Protocol)
• Zuckerberg’s Jealousy Held Back Instagram and Drove Off Founders (Bloomberg Businessweek)
• Was Leisure Suit Larry Really an Accomplice in Early Banking Cyberattacks? (Vice)
• Has Apple finally bitten off way more than it can chew? (Wired)
• Apple, Amazon, and Common Enemies (Stratechery)

Friday, April 03 2020

• Google Data Centers’ Secret Cost: Billions of Gallons of Water (Bloomberg Green)
• Microsoft Edge is becoming the browser you didn’t know you needed (Ars Technica)
• The Xbox Series X master plan (Polygon)
• From courts to consoles: With live sports canceled, pro athletes join the streaming surge (The Washington Post)
• Telemedicine, Once a Hard Sell, Can’t Keep Up With Demand (WSJ)
• The Medical News Site That Saw the Coronavirus Coming Months Ago (NYTimes)

Friday, March 27 2020

• Everything Is So Fucked, You Might As Well Get A Facebook Portal (Buzzfeed News)
• We Need A Massive Surveillance Program (IdleWords.com)
• Bosses Panic-Buy Spy Software to Keep Tabs on Remote Workers (Bloomberg)
• Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising? (Wired)
• DJI Won the Drone Wars, and Now It’s Paying the Price (BusinessWeek)
• We visited a small Virginia town where drone deliveries have begun for real (Input Magazine)

Friday, March 20 2020

• How Reddit’s coronavirus community became a destination (NBC News)
• Can Smart Thermometers Track the Spread of the Coronavirus? (NYTimes)
• Correlation and Market Meltdowns (Fred Wilson)
• Zoom conquered video chat — now it has even bigger plans (Protocol)
• The tech industry’s quest to help us sleep better is just beginning (Fast Company)
• How TikTok Is Taking the Tunes out of Pop (HighSnobiety)

Friday, March 13 2020

• The Secret History of a Cold War Mastermind (Wired)
• TIM COOK’S TRICK FOR MAKING IPHONES IS NOW AT RISK FROM THE PANDEMIC (The Verge)
• Why All the Warby Parker Clones Are Now Imploding (Marker)
• How Google kneecapped Amazon’s smart TV efforts (Protocol)
• A Chatty Auction Site Is Taking the Classic Car World by Storm (NYTimes)
• The History of the URL (Cloudflare)

Friday, March 06 2020

• So you wanna buy a used IP address block? (Web Informant)
• The Untold Story of the Man That Made Mainstream Encryption Possible (One Zero)
• Sportswriting’s future may depend on the Athletic, which is either reassuring or terrifying (Washington Post)
• Hideo Kojima’s Strange, Unforgettable Video-Game Worlds (NYTimes Magazine)
• Can You Really Hire a Hit Man on the Dark Web? (NYTimes)
• This Utility Heats New York State—And Mines Its Own Bitcoin (Bloomberg)
• Classic iPod Hackers Say There’s No Better Way to Listen to Music (One Zero)

Friday, February 28 2020

• How Monzo brought Silicon Valley’s ‘wild ideas’ to Britain’s staid banking system (CNBC)
• The bank manager will see you now: is Monzo ready to grow up? (The Guardian)
• Inside the race to build the best quantum computer on Earth (MIT Technology Review)
• A parody Twitter account hits a nerve with Silicon Valley VCs (Protocol)
• How North Korean Hackers Rob Banks Around the World (Wired)
• YC’s New Guide to Raising a Series A (Y Combinator)
• Printing’s Not Dead: The $35 Billion Fight Over Ink Cartridges (Bloomberg Businessweek)

Friday, February 21 2020

• Did the Early Internet Activists Blow It? (Slate)
• Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet (Wired)
• How the BBC’s Netflix-killing plan was snuffed by myopic regulation (Wired)
• Could micro-credentials compete with traditional degrees? (BBC)
• Debt is Coming (AlexDanco.com)
• The New Business of AI (and How It’s Different From Traditional Software) (A16Z)
• Aircraft, Big and Small, Are Changing Our Relationship With Flight (NYTimes)

Friday, February 14 2020

• Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebook (Wired)
• THE HIGH COST OF A FREE CODING BOOTCAMP (The Verge)
• Cost Cutting Algorithms Are Making Your Job Search a Living Hell (Vice)
• Are Algorithmically-Generated Term Papers the Next Big Challenge to Academic Integrity? (EdSurge)
• SoftBank’s $375 Million Bet on Pizza Went Really Bad Really Fast (Bloomberg Businessweek)
• How a Space Engineer Made Her Own Rotary Cell Phone (Wired)

Friday, February 07 2020

• MICROSOFT’S WINDOWS FUTURE IS NOW TIED TO HARDWARE (The Verge)
• Steven Levy’s Plaintext
• An Algorithm That Grants Freedom, or Takes It Away (NYTimes)
• ‘ClassPass Is Squeezing Studios to the Point of Death’ (Vice)
• Elon Musk Can’t Lose (BuzzFeed News)
• A SMALL ROCKET MAKER IS RUNNING A DIFFERENT KIND OF SPACE RACE (Bloomberg)

Friday, January 31 2020

• Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company (Angela Strange)
• Don’t Brush Off Mouth Tech As a Passing Fad (Wired)
• The iPad’s original software designer and program lead look back on the device’s first 10 years (InPut)
• Super Bowl 2020: The madness and magic behind the game’s first 4K HDR broadcast (Digital Trends)
• Researchers Are Racing to Make a Coronavirus Vaccine. Will It Help? (NYTimes)
• How Do Bats Live With So Many Viruses? (NYTimes)
• Facial Recognition- The controversial and nearly ever-present technology that could replace the fingerprint (California Sunday Magazine)
• CollegeHumor Helped Shape Online Comedy. What Went Wrong? (Wired)

Friday, January 24 2020

• Inside the World’s Highest-Stakes Industrial Hacking Contest (Wired)
• We’re Banning Facial Recognition. We’re Missing the Point. (NYTimes)
• The Secret History of Facial Recognition (Wired)
• Behind the Scenes at Rotten Tomatoes (Wired)
• Jobs, Cook, Ive—Blevins? The Rise of Apple’s Cost Cutter (WSJ)
• The Tesla Skeptics Who Bet Against Elon Musk (Bloomberg Businessweek)
• The Internet of Beefs (Ribbonfarm.com)
• The Hacker News Thread on The Internet of Beefs

Friday, January 17 2020

• How Mormons Built the Next Silicon Valley While No One Was Looking (Marker)
• All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen (Polygon)
• The Promise of Cloud-Native Games (A16Z)
• The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find it, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite (MatthewBall.vc)
• Islamic fintechs are on the rise — but how viable is this tailored offering? (Sifted)
• The Big Question Now Facing Apple (Above Avalon)

Friday, January 10 2020

• QUIBI VERSUS THE WORLD (The Verge)
• The hidden world and overlooked problems of acting in video games (Washington Post)
• Why your favorite celebs are ditching Twitter for an app you’ve never heard of (Fast Company)
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF RICKROLLING (Mel)
• Admit It: You Have a Box of Cords You’ll Never, Ever Use Again (WSJ)

Friday, January 03 2020

• How to lose a monopoly: Microsoft, IBM and anti-trust (Benedict Evans)
• Windows: Facing the New Decade (2010–2020) (Steven Sinofsky)
• Ghosts in the Clouds: Inside China’s Major Corporate Hack (WSJ)
• ‘Shattered’: Inside the secret battle to save America’s undercover spies in the digital age (Yahoo News)
• This time, for sure! Ars Technica’s 2020 Deathwatch (Ars Technica)