So, about that Signal chat. On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was…

Image by Shawn Thew / Pool via Getty / Futurism Amid his newfound role as unelected government wrecker, Elon Musk's use of the powerful tranquilizer ketamine is once again in the press. 0:13 As The Atlantic reports, research into the effects of sustained ketamine use may offer some insights into the…

What is Devin? What makes Devin unique is its infrastructure. Unlike typical AI assistants, Devin operates through Slack and spins up its own computing environment. When you chat with Devin, you’re talking to an AI that has access to a full computing environment - complete with a web browser, code…

When it comes to Western languages, most long-form text you’ll encounter is either left-aligned (with an uneven, “ragged” right edge) or justified (with words spaced evenly across a line). But I’ve long avoided the latter in my web design work. Why? Hyphenation. To quote Matthew Butterick’s…

Memos from Howard Marks Listen to Memo Archived Memos Subscribe On Bubble Watch Exactly 25 years ago today, I published the first memo that brought a response from readers (after having written for almost ten years without receiving any). The memo was called bubble.com, and the subject was the…

We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I'm concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream: The costs of housing, healthcare, and education have soared far beyond the pace of inflation and wage growth.We are a democracy, but 144 million Americans – 42% of the adults who live…

In the beginning was the mainframe. In 1945 the U.S. government built ENIAC, an acronym for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, to do ballistics trajectory calculations for the military; World War 2 was nearing its conclusion, however, so ENIAC’s first major job was to do calculations that…

404 Media is an independent website whose work is written, reported, and owned by human journalists and whose intended audience is real people, not AI scrapers, bots, or a search algorithm. Become a paid subscriber here for access to all of our articles ad-free and bonus content. Automattic, the…

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former Representative Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after 9/11 to remedy what American policy makers believed was a lack of coordination among the various…

The News Seven years since its launch, the newsletter platform Substack has consolidated its dominance of the independent news business. Now, it’s trying to position itself as something more: a central platform for paying creators of all kinds, untethered to the news cycle and beyond the…

I’m a well-informed Hobbit—a Boffin from Overhill, thank you very much—who is in a kerfuffle about whom to throw my Hobbit-sized support behind. For some, the choice is clear, but for a little guy like me, I’m feeling awfully torn up, like a tear-and-share cheese bread during Winter Solstice! I…

404 Media is an independent website whose work is written, reported, and owned by human journalists and whose intended audience is real people, not AI scrapers, bots, or a search algorithm. Become a paid subscriber here for access to all of our articles ad-free and bonus content. After an exodus of…

I beam with pride when I see companies like Shopify, GitHub, Gusto, Zendesk, Instacart, Procore, Doximity, Coinbase, and others claim billion-dollar valuations from work done with Rails. It's beyond satisfying to see this much value created with a web framework I've spent the last two decades…

Nate Silver, the celebrity statistician who gained notoriety for his FiveThirtyEight election models, is facing backlash over alleged skewing in his new model. Silver left the ABC-owned company and launched his own Substack, the Silver Bulletin, last year. Since then, he’s become increasingly…

I’ll just remind everyone at the start that this is a respectful debate, and DHH and I tried to get on a call but couldn’t because we were both traveling. However, “Automattic is doing open source dirty” is an abomination of a headline, and David’s second post Open source royalty and mad kings, is…

404 Media is an independent website whose work is written, reported, and owned by human journalists and whose intended audience is real people, not AI scrapers, bots, or a search algorithm. Become a paid subscriber here for access to all of our articles ad-free and bonus content. WordPress.org users…

Juno for YouTube has been removed from the App Store October 1, 2024 For those not aware, a few months ago after reaching out to me, YouTube contacted the App Store stating that Juno does not adhere to YouTube guidelines and modifies the website in a way they don’t approve of, and alludes to their…

Y Combinator is arguably the most successful early-stage VC fund or accelerator ever. The issue, however, is that they never truly grasped the factors behind their success, which is why YC's peak is already behind them—it’s likely all downhill from here. In particular, Sam Altman didn’t grasp what…

Hursh here, CTO and Cofounder of The Browser Company. We want to let all Arc users know that a security vulnerability existed in Arc prior to 8/25/24. We were made aware of a vulnerability on 8/25, it was fixed on 8/26. This issue allowed the possibility of remote code execution on users’ computers.…

Sept. 13, 2024 9:00 pm ET AI’s boosters have billed it as a technology so revolutionary that it could become the dominant intelligence on Earth. In reality it is shaping up as more a product feature than a new product category. As recent announcements from Apple and Google show, it is proving most…

The former Scotto Funeral Home, a landmark of bygone Brooklyn, is reopening after a multiyear renovation and Catholic blessing — as a boutique gym. Listen to this article · 7:18 min Learn more The former Scotto Funeral Home, a mainstay in Carroll Gardens for nearly a century, is reopening on Friday…

I don’t really love you anymore That gold mine changed you Manchester Orchestra I am no longer investing in new companies. This isn’t an indictment of investing now, it’s just that my strategy has run its course. I started angel investing to help out a few friends while I thought of an idea for my…

Terror on repeat A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings Editor’s note: The photos, videos and personal accounts below are extremely…

Nick Chirls is the Founder of Asylum Ventures, a new venture firm dedicated to the creative act of building companies; treating founders like artists, not assets. Asylum raised $55 million to invest $1-2 million in early-stage founders practising the art of making startups. Prior to Asylum, Nick…

Larry David is a writer, actor and television producer. “It must be remembered that the Democrats are the radical ones on this position because they support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth mo

You don’t even have to watch Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist to consider it a conversation-starter: The debate begins with that title, a bold, unlikely statement that may feel at odds with most experiences of the world. Watching the movie complicates that response even further, given some of…

With those words from United States District judge Amit Mehta on Monday, Google suffered a historic antitrust case loss at the hands of the U.S. Department of Justice. Mehta, the judge presiding over

The Economist explains The Democrats have a deep bench of talent Photograph: Getty Images (updated Jul 22nd 2024) Editor’s note: On July 21st President Joe Biden said that he would not stand as the Democratic Party’s candidate in November’s election, and endorsed Kamala Harris, his vice-president,…

In the early days of high-performance computing, the major tech companies of the day each invested heavily in developing their own closed source versions of Unix. It was hard to imagine at the time that any other approach could develop such advanced software. Eventually though, open source Linux…

Winston Nguyen, a Saint Ann’s teacher charged with preying on students, during his arraignment last week. Photo: Alex Kent This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. The texts started coming in right after the arrest, a…

Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times OpinionGuest Essay Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times By Mr. Sanders is the senior senator from Vermont. July 13, 2024 Update: This guest essay was published before the assassination attempt on former President Trump and has been updated by the author…

Tech Fix Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test To block ads or not to block ads on your mobile device? That’s the philosophical dilemma facing consumers since Apple added support for ad blockers to i

Nivi: We spoke earlier about picking a business model that has leverage from scale economies, network effects and zero marginal cost of replication. There were a few other ideas on the cutting-room fl

The documents, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission at the end of March, say that the fund will be called a16z Perennial Private Equity Fund, and that it will “invest in the private equit

The Brookings Institution did a fascinating survey series over the last five years. I have two takeways from this: The first is that focused and persistent propaganda is able to shift public opinion a