AWS experienced a three-hour outage early Monday morning that disrupted thousands of websites and applications across the globe. The cloud computing provider reported DNS problems with DynamoDB in its US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia starting at 12:11 a.m. Pacific time. Over 4 million users reported issues, according to Downdetector. Snapchat… Read More »
A recent article in Noema magazines explores the issues in "editing nature to fix our failures." "It turns out playing God is neither difficult nor expensive," the article points out. "For about $2,000, I can go online and order a decent microscope, a precision injection rig, and a vial of enough CRISPR-Cas9 — an enzyme-based genome-editing… Read More »
"The gig economy is facing a reckoning," argues Business Insider's BI Today newsletter." Two stories this past week caught my eye. Uber unveiled a new way for its drivers to earn money. No, not by giving rides, but by helping train the ride-sharing company's AI models instead. On the same day, Waymo announced a partnership with DoorDash to… Read More »
Tom's Hardware. "It's a crucial piece of software that has now, unfortunately, been rendered useless (for many) as part… Read More »
Readers in 2025 "may struggle to remember the optimism of the aughts, when the internet seemed to offer endless possibilities for virtual art and writing that was free..." argues a new review at Bookforum. "The content we do create online, if we still create, often feels unreflectively automatic: predictable quote-tweet dunks, prefabricated poses… Read More »
On Cloudflare's blog, a senior research engineer shares a plan for "improving the trustworthiness of JavaScript on the web." "It is as true today as it was in 2011 that Javascript cryptography is Considered Harmful." The main problem is code distribution. Consider an end-to-end-encrypted messaging web application. The application generates… Read More »
"My boss thinks AI will solve every problem and is wildly enthusiastic about it," complains a mid-level worker at a Fortune 500 company, who considers the technology "unproven and wildly erratic." So how should they navigate the next 10 years until retirement, they ask the Washington Post's "Work Advice" columnist. The columnist first notes… Read More »