Weekend Longreads 2024

Longread Links from The Ride Home Podcast

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Friday, December 27 2024

• Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good (NYTimes)
• Hawk Tuah Wasn’t What It Seemed (The Atlantic)
• The Paper Passport Is Dying (Wired)
• You Need to Create a Secret Password With Your Family (Wired)

Friday, December 13 2024

• The Cult of Claude (NYTimes)
• How WhatsApp ate the world (Rest of World)

Friday, December 06 2024

• He Was Going to Save Intel. He Destroyed $150 Billion of Value Instead. (WSJ)
• Friend or Faux (The Verge)
• When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk (The Atlantic)

Wednesday, November 27 2024

• Should You Still Learn to Code in an A.I. World? (NYTimes)
• Bad influence (The Verge)

Friday, November 22 2024

• Here’s some cool stuff you can do with Bluesky (The Verge)
• How Mark Zuckerberg has fully rebuilt Meta around Llama
• Are the robots finally coming?

Friday, November 15 2024

• Not even Spotify is safe from AI slop (The Verge)
• Klarna’s Seb Siemiatkowski — from burger flipping to billionaire club (FT)
• Inside the Billion-Dollar Startup Bringing AI Into the Physical World (Wired)

Friday, November 08 2024

• Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse. (Ars Technica)
• What I Learned From Destroying Myself at the NYC Marathon (New York Magazine)

Friday, November 01 2024

• Meta’s AI Abundance (Stratechery)
• After Era of Bloat, Veteran Video-Game Developers Are Going Smaller (Bloomberg)

Friday, October 25 2024

• The mystifying, acrimonious battle between Arm and Qualcomm (FT)
• Who Gets the TikTok in the Divorce? The Messy Fight Over Valuable Social Media Accounts (WSJ)

Friday, October 11 2024

• Google’s Nobel Haul Puts Spotlight on Changing Focus of Scientific Research (Bloomberg)
• The Miraculous Resurrection of Notre-Dame (GQ)

Friday, October 04 2024

• Saving Cyberpunk 2077: How CD Projekt Red recovered from one of video games’ most disastrous launches
• The Flying Car Is Finally Here. It’s Slightly Illegal. (New York Magazine)

Friday, September 27 2024

• McDonald’s touchscreen kiosks were feared as job killers. Instead, something surprising happened
• Apple Rolls Back Its Big Plans to Release Movies in Theaters (Bloomberg)
• The 27-Year-Old Economic Adviser for Gen Z (WSJ)

Friday, September 20 2024

• American Vulcan - Palmer Luckey
• The Death of the Minivan (The Atlantic)

Friday, September 13 2024

• Intel Has Only Tough Options After Its Long and Stinging Fall From Grace (Bloomberg)

Friday, September 06 2024

• Waymo’s Robot Taxis Are Almost Mainstream. Can They Now Turn a Profit? (NYTimes)
• When the Bitcoin Scammers Came for Me (The Atlantic)
• Among the Idlers

Friday, August 30 2024

• Sunk cost (the Open Sea story) (The Verge)
• The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
• I Watched Footage of Jerry Lewis’s Unreleased 1972 Holocaust Film
• End of the Road: An AnandTech Farewell

Friday, August 23 2024

• New Breed of EV Promises 700 Miles per Charge (Just Add Gas) (Bloomberg)
• Popping the Bubble of Noise-Cancelling Headphones (The New Yorker)

Friday, August 16 2024

• Inside the Snowflake-Databricks Rivalry, and Why Both Fear Microsoft (Bloomberg)
• The Little Streamer That Could (NYTimes)
• Your Air Conditioner Is Lying to You (The Atlantic)

Friday, August 09 2024

• Why are so many car YouTubers quitting? (The Verge)
• Moscow’s Spies Were Stealing US Tech — Until the FBI Started a Sabotage Campaign (Politico)

Friday, August 02 2024

• A $500 Open Source Tool Lets Anyone Hack Computer Chips With Lasers (Wired)
• The AI Keeps Score (The Verge)

Friday, July 26 2024

• Airbnb Hosts Want Guests to Come to Them Directly (Bloomberg)
• Physicists may now have a way to make element 120 – the heaviest ever
• He says he invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. He didn’t, said Frito-Lay. Now he’s suing

Friday, July 19 2024

• A One-Man Telemundo on TikTok (NYTimes)
• Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business (Wired)

Thursday, July 11 2024

• Defeated by A.I., a Legend in the Board Game Go Warns: Get Ready for What’s Next (NYTimes)

Wednesday, July 03 2024

• Internet Browsers Are Getting a Makeover for the Workplace (WSJ)
• A.I. Begins Ushering In an Age of Killer Robots (NYTimes)

Friday, June 28 2024

• YouTube dominates streaming, forcing media companies to decide whether it’s friend or foe (CNBC)

Friday, June 21 2024

• Why are mobile game ads so weird and bad?
• From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction (Ars Technica)
• The song Stevie Nicks wrote to “haunt” Lindsey Buckingham

Friday, June 14 2024

• I Know What the Apple Vision Pro Is For (New York Magazine)

Friday, June 07 2024

• Behind ‘Suicide Squad,’ the Year’s Biggest Video-Game Flop (Bloomberg)
• The Unistellar Odyssey smart telescope made me question what stargazing means (Ars Technica)

Friday, May 31 2024

• Disney Is Banking On Sequels to Help Get Pixar Back on Track (Bloomberg)
• They Built a $100 Million Watch Empire. Then the Market Tanked. (WSJ)
• The Creator Of ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Knows Exactly Where It All Went Wrong

Friday, May 24 2024

• VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads (TechCrunch)
• Two students find security bug that could let millions do laundry for free (The Verge)

Friday, May 17 2024

• In a single night, self-driving startup Cruise went from sizzling startup to cautionary tale. Here’s what really happened—and how GM is scrambling to save its $10B bet
• How cuddly robots could change dementia care (MIT Technology Review)
• Where Did All The Stocks Go?

Friday, May 10 2024

• Tim Cook Can’t Run Apple Forever. Who’s Next? (Bloomberg)
• World’s Biggest Construction Project Gets a Reality Check (WSJ)

Friday, May 03 2024

• The Revenge of the Home Page (The New Yorker)
• Nick Bostrom Made the World Fear AI. Now He Asks: What if It Fixes Everything? (Wired)

Friday, April 26 2024

• The Chips Act has been surprisingly successful so far (FT)
• Why You Can’t Get a Restaurant Reservation (The New Yorker)

Friday, April 19 2024

• How Perfectly Can Reality Be Simulated? (The New Yorker)
• The Life and Death of Hollywood
• How Neopets’ nostalgic revival tripled users in six months (The Guardian)

Friday, April 12 2024

• AI-Music Arms Race: Meet Udio, the Other ChatGPT for Music (Rolling Stone)
• How Bluey Became a $2 Billion Smash Hit—With an Uncertain Future (Bloomberg)

Friday, April 05 2024

• How One Tech Skeptic Decided A.I. Might Benefit the Middle Class (NYTimes)
• How WhatsApp became the world’s default communication app
• The 18 most interesting startups from YC’s Demo Day show we’re in an AI bubble (TechCrunch)
• YC’s latest Demo Day shows fascinating wagers on healthcare, chip design, AI and more (TechCrunch)

Friday, March 29 2024

• How We’ll Reach a 1 Trillion Transistor GPU (IEEE Spectrum)
• How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything

Friday, March 22 2024

• 8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story (Wired)
• China’s Super-Cheap EVs Offer Hope for Average American Buyers (Bloomberg)
• Indie, rocked (The Verge)

Friday, March 15 2024

• Can Reddit Survive Its Own IPO? (Wired)
• One Big Reason Gen Z Is Still on Facebook: To Save Money (NYTimes)
• How Nvidia beat everyone else in the AI race (Vox)

Friday, March 08 2024

• The Nvidia Chips Inside Powerful AI Supercomputers (WSJ)
• Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power (Washington Post)
• How Netflix’s Massive Paydays, COVID and TikTok Caused ‘Explosion of Comedians’ (Variety)

Friday, March 01 2024

• Wait. Why is Reddit losing so much money?
• The 9-Month-Old AI Startup Challenging Silicon Valley’s Giants (WSJ)
• What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet (The New Yorker)

Friday, February 23 2024

• Tech Job Interviews Are Out of Control (Wired)
• Nvidia Hardware Is Eating the World (Wired)

Friday, February 16 2024

• The fediverse, explained (The Verge)
• How an African streaming service dethroned Netflix (Rest of World)

Friday, February 09 2024

• Can AI Unlock the Secrets of the Ancient World? (Bloomberg)
• AI Just Discovered ‘Unreadable’ Ancient Scrolls

Friday, February 02 2024

• AI Can Speed Drug Discovery. But Is It Really Better Than a Human? (Bloomberg)
• The scariest sound on TikTok (The Verge)
• The 150 Greatest Science Fiction Movies of All Time (Rolling Stone)
• LATE BLOOMER

Friday, January 19 2024

• How Twitch lost its way (Fast Company)
• Astronomers spotted something perplexing near the beginning of time (Vox)

Friday, January 12 2024

• How AI Replaced the Metaverse as Zuckerberg’s Top Priority (Bloomberg)
• Avi Schiffmann’s Tab AI necklace has raised $1.9 million to replace God (Fast Company)
• How much detail is too much? Midjourney v6 attempts to find out (Ars Technica)

Friday, January 05 2024

• A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People. The Law Is Powerless. (Politico)
• New Spin on a Revolving Door: Pentagon Officials Turned Venture Capitalists (NYTimes)
• Boy, 13, Is Believed to Be the First to ‘Beat’ Tetris (NYTimes)
• Full game of Tetris beaten for the first time by 13-year-old Willis Gibson AKA ‘Blue Scuti’ (YouTube)