Ideas

If you read George Orwell’s classic political satire Animal Farm in seventh grade, you probably remember the basic contours of the plot: fed up with human rule, a group of well-intentioned barnyard animals set up their own egalitarian…

The flyer on a pole in San Francisco was very straightforward, if a little bewildering. It read, “Seeking New Polycule Member: We recently had a defector in our polycule and are seeking a new member.”A link at the bottom invited anyone…

For its famous intractability, the Bloomberg Terminal has long inspired devotion, bordering on obsession. Among traders, the ability to chart a path through the software’s dizzying scrolls of numbers and text to isolate far-flung…

David Silver gave the world its very first glimpse of superintelligence.In 2016, an AI program he developed at Google DeepMind, AlphaGo, taught itself to play the famously difficult game of Go with a kind of mastery that went far beyond…

I’ve used ChatGPT to help me build a budget before, and it was genuinely helpful. After I input my monthly salary as well as my standard utilities and recurring expenses, the chatbot drafted a few solid options, and I tweaked them into…

Some Rednote users have reported that their accounts were automatically converted from the Chinese to the international version of the website recently. One American user, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid being punished by the…

As ceasefire announcements between the US and Iran—and separately between Israel and Lebanon—dominated headlines over the past two weeks, they also prompted a look back at how war spread online: through memes.There were jokes about…

If you could travel back in time, what year would you choose? What would you change about history? For a surprising number of Chinese people, their answer turns out to be the same: Use what they know today to save China from its unglorious…

To anyone with a pulse and a smartphone, it’s obvious that the internet has an AI slop problem. The issue has grown more severe since ChatGPT launched in 2022, with some social platforms flooded with AI-generated writing. Now, there’s data…

Minutes after President Donald Trump announced that he would not wipe out “a whole civilization” on Tuesday evening, a team of self-described young Iranian activists jumped into action.Members of the group known as Explosive Media were…