Weekend Longreads 2023

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Friday, December 22 2023

• The Race to Fill Crypto’s FTX-Shaped Hole
• As the AI era begins, Reddit is leaning into its humanity (Fast Company)
• Tolkien Estate Wins Court Order to Destroy Fan’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ Sequel (NYTimes)

Friday, December 15 2023

• OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever Has a Plan for Keeping Super-Intelligent AI in Check (Wired)
• Tesla Autopilot Recall Threatens Its Defense in Lawsuits Over Crashes (Bloomberg)
• Microsoft’s Digital Crime Unit Goes Deep on How It Disrupts Cybercrime (Wired)

Friday, December 08 2023

• The real research behind the wild rumors about OpenAI’s Q* project (Ars Technica)
• AI and Mass Spying
• The race to 5G is over — now it’s time to pay the bill (The Verge)
• In the Hall v. Oates legal feud, fans don’t want to play favorites

Friday, December 01 2023

• ChatGPT is winning the future — but what future is that? (The Verge)
• This Nvidia Cofounder Could Have Been Worth $70 Billion. Instead He Lives Off The Grid (Forbes)
• Anduril Builds a Tiny, Reusable Fighter Jet That Blows Up Drones (Bloomberg)
• The Real Story Behind Shane MacGowan’s ‘Boys of the N.Y.P.D. Choir’ (NYTimes)

Friday, November 17 2023

• Inside Marques Brownlee’s tech review studio: The YouTube star on gadgets, growth, and staying chill (Fast Company)
• A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft (The New Yorker)

Friday, November 10 2023

• AI is about to completely change how you use computers
• Elon Musk’s Brain Implant Startup Is Ready to Start Surgery (Bloomberg)
• Inside an OnlyFans empire: Sex, influence and the new American Dream (Washington Post)

Friday, November 03 2023

• The EV transition trips over its own cord (The Verge)
• Joe Rogan’s big decision (The Verge)

Friday, October 27 2023

• They Cracked the Code to a Locked USB Drive Worth $235 Million in Bitcoin. Then It Got Weird (Wired)
• “Math is hard” — if you are an LLM – and why that matters
• The poster’s guide to the internet of the future (The Verge)

Friday, October 20 2023

• An Industry Insider Drives an Open Alternative to Big Tech’s A.I. (NYTimes)
• ‘Oof’: Sam Bankman-Fried’s Trial Reveals Inside Details of How FTX Died (NYTimes)
• Computers Are Learning to Smell (The Atlantic)

Friday, October 13 2023

• Adobe Is Focused on AI Rather Than Figma With Acquisition in Limbo (Bloomberg)
• Can EA’s FIFA-Free Soccer Game Win Fans? (Bloomberg)
• Has Bob Iger Lost the Magic? (Bloomberg)
• Why Dizziness Is Still a Mystery (The New Yorker)

Friday, October 06 2023

• How Will A.I. Learn Next? (The New Yorker)
• How Bandcamp makes more money than Spotify (Fast Company)
• Long gone, DEC is still powering the world of computing (Ars Technica)
• The Genius Behind Hollywood’s Most Indelible Sets (NYTimes)

Friday, September 29 2023

• The new phone call etiquette: Text first and never leave a voice mail (Washington Post)
• Can FTX Be Revived—Without Sam Bankman-Fried? (Wired)
• Could ‘The Terminator’ really happen? Experts assess Hollywood’s visions of AI. (Washington Post)
• ‘Nerfball’ introduces Nerf’s smartest foam yet — it detects dart impacts (The Verge)
• Netflix Prepares to Send Its Final Red Envelope (NYTimes)

Friday, September 22 2023

• Amazon’s rumored home projector can turn anything into a screen (The Verge)
• The Physical Process That Powers a New Type of Generative AI (Quanta Magazine)
• Unraveling The AI-Generated Spiral Art Phenomenon
• The Early Days of American English

Friday, September 15 2023

• Startup That Lets You Instantly Talk in Foreign Language Targets a Nasdaq IPO at $1 Billion Value (Bloomberg)
• From $1 Billion to Almost Worthless: FaZe Clan Runs Out of Hype (Bloomberg)
• The Pumpkin Spice Latte just turned 20. This is how we got here. (Washington Post)

Friday, September 08 2023

• The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes (Vulture)
• What OpenAI Really Wants (Wired)
• How artificial intelligence could help us talk to animals

Thursday, August 31 2023

• Despite Cheating Fears, Schools Repeal ChatGPT Bans (NYTimes)
• A Startup in the New Jersey Suburbs Is Battling the Giants of Silicon Valley (WSJ)
• Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly

Friday, August 25 2023

• What Happened to Wirecutter? (The Atlantic)
• Michael Mann Fulfills a 30-Year Journey Directing the Operatic, Thrilling ‘Ferrari’ — And Teases ‘Heat 2’: ‘I Don’t Think About Mortality. I’m Busy’ (Variety)

Friday, August 18 2023

• A Rare Look Into the Finances of Elon Musk’s Secretive SpaceX (WSJ)
• How the iMac saved Apple (The Verge)
• A Living History of The Humble Paper Airplane
• A New Role for Werner Herzog: The Voice of A.I. Poetry (NYTimes)

Friday, August 11 2023

• Where have all the fitness bands gone? (The Verge)
• 4 Actual Use Cases for Blockchain and AI That Are More Than Just Hype
• The Looming Catalog Crisis (Vulture)
• Paul F. Tompkins Is Getting Back Into It (Vulture)

Friday, August 04 2023

• The Chip Titan Whose Life’s Work Is at the Center of a Tech Cold War (NYTimes)
• When AI Is Trained on AI-Generated Data, Strange Things Start to Happen
• How “windfall profits” from AI companies could fund a universal basic income (Vox)
• How Modelo became America’s new favorite beer (Vox)

Friday, July 28 2023

• Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon
• The making of ‘Acquired,’ the No. 1 tech podcast sensation (Fast Company)
• Internet cafes introduced Uganda to the internet (Rest of World)

Friday, July 21 2023

• A $25,000 Prize Still Sits in the Maine Woods. Meteorite Hunters Aren’t Giving Up. (WSJ)
• Fable unveils Showrunner AI to create South Park-like TV shows with you as the star
• The Airstocracy: Six things to know about flying with the superrich. (New York Magazine)
• THE REAL LESSON FROM THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB (The Atlantic)

Friday, July 14 2023

• Apple, Lionel Messi and the $2.5bn question: What’s next?

Friday, July 07 2023

• What Did People Do Before Smartphones? (The Atlantic)
• The Man Who Broke Bowling (GQ)

Friday, June 30 2023

• When Will AI Generate a Hollywood Blockbuster? “Give It About Three Years.”
• These Tech Companies Think They Can ‘Solve’ the Wildfire Crisis (Vice)
• Who killed Google Reader? (The Verge)
• Mixtape Sites Like DatPiff Propelled Rap. Can They Be Preserved? (NYTimes)

Friday, June 23 2023

• Dolby Atmos Wants You to Listen Up. (And Down. And Sideways.) (NYTimes)
• The hottest new perk in tech is freedom (Vox)
• This Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
• Meet the Vocal Coach Who’s Helping Timothée Chalamet Sound Like Bob Dylan (GQ)

Friday, June 16 2023

• Microsoft’s Sudden AI Dominance Is Scrambling Silicon Valley’s Power Structure (Bloomberg)
• How Nvidia Became ChatGPT’s Brain and Joined the $1 Trillion Club (Bloomberg)
• How MrBeast Became the Willy Wonka of YouTube (NYTimes)

Friday, June 09 2023

• The Binge Purge TV’s streaming model is broken. It’s also not going away. For Hollywood, figuring that out will be a horror show. (Vulture)
• The Simpsons Is Good Again After 34 seasons, 750 episodes, and a decades-long funk, the show innovated its way back to popularity and relevance. (Vulture)
• First Impressions of Vision Pro and VisionOS (Daring Fireball)

Friday, June 02 2023

• How a $13 Billion Fintech That Angered Jamie Dimon Won Over Banks (Bloomberg)
• A Week With the Wild Children of the A.I. Boom (NYTimes)
• China Is Drilling a 10,000-Meter-Deep Hole Into the Earth (Bloomberg)

Friday, May 26 2023

• Meta’s ‘Efficiency’ Layoffs Take a Toll on Employee Productivity (Bloomberg)
• Sergey Brin Has a Secret Plan to Put Airships Back in the Skies (Bloomberg)
• Some Neural Networks Learn Language Like Humans (Quanta Magazine)
• A husband hid $500,000 in bitcoin during a divorce — and got busted by a crypto hunter (CNBC)
• Going for a walk with Shift’s Moonwalker electric shoe-skates (TechCrunch)

Friday, May 19 2023

• In Battle Over A.I., Meta Decides to Give Away Its Crown Jewels (NYTimes)
• This Is Catfishing on an Industrial Scale (Wired)
• Cheesier, Saucier, and Drowning in Caviar; How TikTok took over the menu.
• Japan’s sleepy tech scene is ready for a comeback (Rest of World)

Friday, May 12 2023

• End of the Billable Hour? Law Firms Get On Board With Artificial Intelligence (WSJ)
• “We Were Always Playing An Entirely Different Game”: The Ultimate Oral History Of BuzzFeed News
• Taiwan Is Running Low on a Strategic Asset: Engineers (NYTimes)
• The Plot to Steal the Other Secret Inside a Can of Coca-Cola (Bloomberg)

Friday, May 05 2023

• AI Singers Are Unnervingly Good and Already Ubiquitous (Vulture)
• Is the Federal Government Trying to Kill Off Crypto? (New York Magazine)
• Why Chatbots Are Not the Future
• ESPN’s Jimmy Pitaro Will Decide the Fate of Cable Television (Bloomberg)

Friday, April 28 2023

• Apple’s Siri Chief Struggles With Turf Wars as New AI Era Begins (The Information)
• ASML, Europe’s Most Valuable Tech Firm, Is at the Heart of the US-China Chip War (Bloomberg)
• The Unexpected Reason Apple Is Dominating the U.S. Smartphone Market (WSJ)
• 35 Ways Real People Are Using A.I. Right Now (NYTimes)

Friday, April 07 2023

• Behind the curtain: what it feels like to work in AI right now
• Think of language models like ChatGPT as a “calculator for words”
• Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI (TechCrunch)
• Blockbuster pushed HBO to start investing in original content, cable giant’s ex-chief says (CNBC)

Friday, March 31 2023

• Fitbit’s attempt to disappear the button proved why they matter (The Verge)
• The influencers getting rich by teaching you how to get rich (Vox)
• “I’LL WALK AWAY FROM ANYTHING”: KARA SWISHER CALLS THE SHOTS

Friday, March 24 2023

• Cheating is All You Need
• The Age of AI has begun
• The secret history of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI
• The case for slowing down AI (Vox)
• Epic’s new motion-capture animation tech has to be seen to be believed (Ars Technica)

Friday, March 17 2023

• The Guardians
• The Future Smartphone: More Folds, Less Phone, a Whole Lot of AI (Wired)
• LinkedIn turns 20: An oral history of an unlikely champion (Fast Company)
• ‘It changed the world’: 50 years on, the story of Pong’s Bay Area origins

Friday, March 10 2023

• In AI, is bigger always better? (Nature)
• Can Xerox reinvent itself for another 100 years? (The Verge)
• Why Are So Many Guys Obsessed With Master and Commander? (GQ)

Friday, March 03 2023

• Alexa, what happened?
• The Satellite Hack Everyone Is Finally Talking About (Bloomberg)
• The next big threat to AI might already be lurking on the web
• 50 YEARS LATER, WE’RE STILL LIVING IN THE XEROX ALTO’S WORLD (IEEE Spectrum)

Friday, February 24 2023

• What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
• Getting My ChatGPT Plus Subscription Is an Inflection Point
• Why China Didn’t Invent ChatGPT (NYTimes)
• Meet the $10,000 Nvidia chip powering the race for A.I. (CNBC)
• Inside Meta’s Push to Solve the Noisy Office (WSJ)
• Are bioinspired drones the next big thing in unmanned flight?

Friday, February 17 2023

• It’s Always Sunny Inside a Generative AI Conference (Wired)
• Billionaire Kuok Family-Backed Music App BandLab Taps Into AI For TikTok’s Breakout Stars (Forbes)
• PlayStation VR2 is exciting, exhausting and a new standard for VR (Washington Post)
• How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language (MIT Technology Review)
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
• Roko’s basilisk

Friday, February 10 2023

• ‘Disrespectful to the Craft:’ Actors Say They’re Being Asked to Sign Away Their Voice to AI (Vice)
• ChatGPT Can Be Broken by Entering These Strange Words, And Nobody Is Sure Why (Vice)
• ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web (The New Yorker)
• The Inference Cost Of Search Disruption – Large Language Model Cost Analysis
• Stripe Can’t Lose (Every)

Friday, February 03 2023

• The generative AI revolution has begun—how did we get here? (Ars Technica)

• [Who will compete with ChatGPT? Meet the contenders

  The AI Beat](https://venturebeat.com/ai/who-will-compete-with-chatgpt-meet-the-contenders-the-ai-beat/)

• The Difference Between Speaking and Thinking (The Atlantic)
• A de-extinction company is trying to resurrect the dodo (MIT Technology Review)
• A Calculated Move: Calculators Now Emulated at Internet Archive

Friday, January 27 2023

• The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok (Wired)
• The Chess World’s New Villain: A Cat Named Mittens (WSJ)
• Welcome to the Shoppy Shop
• The Disappearance of the Ashtray
• Why Not Mars

Friday, January 20 2023

• How Amazon Became Ordinary
• Who Owns the Generative AI Platform?
• The Steam Deck wasn’t born ready, but it’s ready now (The Verge)
• A WIRED compendium
• You Don’t Know How Bad the Pizza Box Is (The Atlantic)

Friday, January 13 2023

• Microsoft + OpenAI: Inside Tech’s Hottest Romance (The Information)
• Is Microsoft about to get the deal of the century? Or is Sam Altman unloading OpenAI at just the right time?
• Robert Tinney’s Visions Of The Future
• Dungeons & Dragons content creators are fighting to protect their livelihoods (TechCrunch)