Thoughts and musings of David Greenberg, a polymath
Technology-related items
Over the weekend, the tally of measles cases reached 1,281, setting a new case record since the highly contagious viral disease was declared eliminated from the country in 2000. The…
Both New York and Minnesota just passed laws requiring social media platforms to slap warning labels on their sites—warning labels based on zero scientific evidence, likely to be struck down…
In a memo to employees earlier this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a vision for a near-future in which “personal superintelligence for everyone” forms “the beginning of a new…
In mid-June, a federal judge issued a stinging rebuke to the Trump administration, declaring that its decision to cancel the funding for many grants issued by the National Institutes of…
The maker of a phone app that is advertised as providing a stealthy means for monitoring all activities on an Android device spilled email addresses, plain-text passwords, and other sensitive…
Welcome to Edition 8.01 of the Rocket Report! Today’s edition will be a little shorter than normal because, for one day only, we celebrate fake rockets—fireworks—rather than the real thing.…
Over the past few years, LG has set off a strange tech trend that’s been rolling onto devices sold across Amazon and other online electronics retailers. In 2022, the company…
Dmitri Mendeleev famously saw the complete arrangement of the periodic table after falling asleep on his desk. He claimed in his dream he saw a table where all the elements…
In April 2023, a few weeks after the launch of GPT-4, the Internet went wild for two new software projects with the audacious names BabyAGI and AutoGPT. “Over the past…
The heat dome that oppressed much of Europe has broken. Not a drop of rain marred the 24 hour races at Le Mans, the Nürburgring, or Spa-Francorchamps, held unusually over…