Author: Taylor Lowery

When Apple revealed the iPhone 17e on March 2, 2026, consumers were halted in their tracks by the price point. Six hundred bucks. Not $799, not the $699 that some analysts had anticipated due to component cost pressures, but $599—with 256 gigabytes of base storage, which is twice as much as the previous low-cost model came with. Market analysts and component suppliers were conducting the same calculations on the day Apple made the announcement: how did they arrive at that conclusion and what does it signify? The most intriguing part is the chip decision. The A19, the same silicon generation…

A large chunk of the internet went down in October 2016. Not in a single nation, but throughout the United States and in waves that also impacted several regions of Europe. Twitter was not loading. Netflix went out. The New York Times, Reddit, and Spotify were all unavailable for periods of time that Friday. A sophisticated nation-state attack on government infrastructure was not the cause. It included digital video recorders, webcams, and routers. Malware known as Mirai had surreptitiously infected hundreds of thousands of common consumer devices, using them as cannon fodder to flood one business, Dyn, a DNS provider,…

A well-known issue has been resurfacing in novel forms in the conference rooms of the European Parliament in Strasbourg and Brussels. To help manage the volume of work, staff members who draft legislative texts and briefing documents have been turning to generative AI tools, which are accessible to anyone with a browser. Errors can occasionally be found in the outputs. unconfirmed information. statistics that don’t add up. The kind of false information that seems credible and spreads as a draft before anyone considers verifying the source. Officials from the European Parliament took note. In order to lessen reliance on external…

A structure the size of several football fields exists somewhere in the desert outside of Phoenix, Arizona. It never goes dark and hums nonstop. It is a data center that uses enough water to fill multiple Olympic swimming pools and enough electricity to run a small city each day. It appears to be a warehouse from the roadway. It appears to be an increasing issue from the standpoint of the electricity system. The environmental cost of the AI boom has been growing for years; it has been debated in technical circles but has not received much attention from the general…

A COBOL program has been operating continuously since about 1978 somewhere in a government data center that is rarely visited. At the moment, no one at the agency has a thorough understanding of how it operates. The author passed away in 2011 after retiring in the middle of the 1990s. Benefit payments are processed by the program. Every night, it operates. It hasn’t broken yet. In the sentence, the word “so far” does a lot of work. The developers developing AI systems or delivering new cloud infrastructure are not the ones preventing the collapse of the world’s legacy code. They…

Sitting across from a laptop and microphone in a community center in the Canadian Arctic, an elder speaks slowly in Inuktitut. The researcher next to her is not a linguist in the conventional sense. With the help of the elder’s words, her perseverance, and several months of recordings, the computer scientist is creating a speech recognition model that has been trained on a language that the majority of people have never heard. The elder has knowledge that cannot be found in any database. Whether the technology can record enough of it in time is the question. There are now about…

The data showed warning indicators in the months prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Subprime mortgage delinquency rates had been increasing. The markets for credit default swaps were under strain. In important markets, the expansion of housing prices had stopped. In the forensic accounting that follows a collapse, economists discovered the majority of these signals after the fact. This led to the inquiry, “Why didn’t the models catch this in advance?” Since then, it has been spearheading a subtle but important change in the way governments anticipate the economy. The majority of nations have decided to use machine learning and…

Because cracked phone screens are so common, they have their own economy: high-street screen repair shops, online marketplaces that sell replacement glass in bulk, and insurance plans that are partially based on the statistical certainty that a glass rectangle carried in a pocket and dropped repeatedly will eventually break. Most people don’t question it since it has been taken for granted as an engineering given for so long. One atomic layer at a time, nanotechnology is beginning to subtly alter that presumption. Nanotechnology creates materials that behave considerably differently from the same things at conventional sizes since it operates at…

A significant amount of the internet data between Europe and Asia is carried by a cable about the diameter of a garden hose somewhere on the Red Sea floor, in water too deep for daylight and too cold for comfort. The physical reality of it is worth pondering for a moment, even if it’s not alone down there—many pathways converge through that tight passage. At its most basic level, the infrastructure that powers global finance, communication, and increasingly AI-dependent services consists of a network of thin cables lying on the ocean floor, frequently in locations where enforcement is practically impossible…

In some sections of Silicon Valley, the response to DeepSeek’s early 2025 publication of its R1 model and the benchmarks’ circulation in AI research forums was a mix of unease and sincere recalibration. The model apparently required a quarter of the computational cost to train while matching the performance of American counterparts on important tasks. This was unsettling information for an industry that was predicated on the idea that frontier AI necessitated significant infrastructure investment, the kind that only a small number of US businesses and their data center providers could afford. It implied that the moat was smaller than…