celebrate

Eight years ago, the November US election results profoundly shocked the small staff at Backchannel, the boutique tech publication I headed. The morning after, an editor posted on our Slack that working on a technology story seemed…

Four years ago, one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ top donors—the billionaire cofounder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman—celebrated the IPO of Airbnb, a company he was heavily invested in, by fashioning Monopoly boards where the game’s “jail”…

Even if Trump were to restrict the reserve to bitcoin seized through law enforcement activity, his administration must also weigh up the opportunity cost associated with holding onto bitcoin. Whereas some assets such as bonds generate a…

Before Orkut launched in January 2004, Büyükkökten warned the team that the platform he’d built it on could handle only 200,000 users. It wouldn't be able to scale. “They said, let's just launch and see what happens,” he explains. The rest…

When the Ordinals system was first released, it divided bitcoiners. Inscriptions were a near-instant hit, but some felt they were a bastardization of bitcoin’s true purpose—as a system for peer-to-peer payments—or had a “reflexive allergic…

Jerome Pesenti has a few reasons to celebrate Meta’s decision last week to release Llama 3, a powerful open source large language model that anyone can download, run, and build on.Pesenti used to be vice president of artificial intelligence…

Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has been sentenced to four months in prison.Judge Richard Jones, who presided over the sentencing hearing in the Western District of Washington on Tuesday,…

A group of former customers of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX are rebelling against a proposed plan that would return the entirety of the money they lost. In a lawsuit filed this week, the customers argue they are due a whole lot more.The…

It’s been 20 years since Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg released a program called Thefacebook to his college community, launching a company that would capture over 3 billion users, flirt with a trillion-dollar valuation, and make so much…

When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI’s impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom—with a side effect that caught her off guard.…