Vibe coding Nothing’s apps is fun, until you try to make them useful
Vibe coding Nothing’s apps is fun, until you try to make them useful

After a week vibe coding apps using Nothing’s Essential Apps Builder, I’m conflicted. I buy into the smartphone maker’s vision for software that adapts to you, not the other way around, but right now it doesn’t deliver. It’s hard to see how this goes from cool novelty to a reliable tool without serious refinement, and […]

AI-generated ads dropped the ball at this year’s Super Bowl
AI-generated ads dropped the ball at this year’s Super Bowl

It feels like everyone who produced ad spots for this year’s Super Bowl with generative AI failed in terms of making gen AI seem useful or like something worth getting excited about. Though we’ve seen plenty of AI-generated commercials before (at previous Super Bowls, no less), this year’s event was oversaturated with them. That’s in […]

This whistle fights fascists
This whistle fights fascists

Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan have a knack for drawing attention to a cause. The bestselling romance novelists helped raise half a million dollars for Georgia voting rights in 2020. Now, their cause is whistles, because whistles let neighbors alert each other when they see ICE agents abducting people. They’ve helped create a group that’s […]

Section 230 turns 30 as it faces its biggest tests yet
Section 230 turns 30 as it faces its biggest tests yet

Thirty years ago today, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a bill credited with creating the groundwork for the modern internet, became law and set off a chain of events that would make it a lightning rod for the techlash. The statute has survived everything from the dot-com bubble to a Supreme Court challenge […]

I went back to Linux and it was a mistake
I went back to Linux and it was a mistake

It’s a complete coincidence that I installed Linux around the same time as my colleagues Nathan Edwards and Stevie Bonifield. A few months ago, I decided to breathe new life into a 2019 Dell XPS 15 that had been collecting dust for a couple of years. Despite its (at the time) high-end Core i7 CPU […]

This is the Trump Phone
This is the Trump Phone

Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone’s whereabouts. This time, surprisingly, we received a response – and an interview. The Trump phone is real – maybe, sort of, soon? – and I’ve seen it. Not in the flesh, […]

How the men in the Epstein files defeated #MeToo
How the men in the Epstein files defeated #MeToo

He might be dead, but it sure seems like Jeffrey Epstein won. Sure, Epstein was arrested on charges of sex trafficking minors. Sure, he died in jail. (I am not going to wade into the debate about how.) But he subscribed to a racist, misogynist ideology that meant rich white men like him could do […]

Iron Lung’s path to theaters was unique, even if the movie isn’t
Iron Lung’s path to theaters was unique, even if the movie isn’t

As a movie, Iron Lung is occasionally thrilling but mostly forgettable. It’s a small-budget horror flick that has some cool ideas and pulls them off in an extremely efficient way, creating a sense of tension that unfortunately never turns into outright scares. But the most important thing about it is what it represents. At a […]

Claude has been having a moment — can it keep it up?
Claude has been having a moment — can it keep it up?

Boris Cherny gets recognized in public relatively often. At the bar, at the airport, and in generally any public space, people want to take selfies with the creator and head of Claude Code. For the last couple of months, Anthropic’s Claude and its coding platform have been having a moment – on social media, in […]

Why Waymo is having a hard time time stopping for school buses 
Why Waymo is having a hard time time stopping for school buses 

For years, Alphabet-owned Waymo has tried to set itself apart from other self-driving startups by emphasizing a culture of caution and safety. Now, just ahead of major planned rollouts across the country, it is facing a recurring failure in one of the most sensitive places imaginable: school zones. In December, the National Highway Traffic Safety […]