Author: Taylor Lowery

A few years ago, the statement “someone playing Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p/60fps on their phone while sitting in a truck in the middle of a snowstorm, before going to sleep” would have seemed ridiculous. However, people are currently using Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is a feature of the Game Pass Ultimate subscription, to do precisely that. It’s one of those little instances that seems almost too easy to use as a metaphor, but it did occur, and it’s important to take note of. The release of Cyberpunk 2077 on Xbox Game Pass in early 2026 is more than just a…

Seeing a man with hundreds of millions of dollars refuse to look a stranger in the eye because it might “overstimulate” him is subtly ridiculous. However, that is precisely where parts of Silicon Valley have arrived: cold showers before sunrise, purposeful meal skipping, months-in-advance reservations for meditation retreats, and a Kindle devoted to ancient Greek philosophy. It’s important to comprehend the motivations behind and implications of the tech industry’s romance with stoicism and dopamine fasting. Stoicism has been the unofficial tenet of startup culture for at least ten years. According to Tim Ferriss, it’s the perfect operating system for high-stress…

A decision used to take days in the interim between obtaining intelligence and carrying out a strike. It supposedly takes seconds now. The US military’s position in 2026 is defined more by that compression than by any one weapon system or change in policy. Over 1,000 targets inside Iran were hit during the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury. That figure had risen above 13,000 by April 9th. The Maven Smart System, a Palantir-built platform that grew out of a 2017 Pentagon initiative and is subtly positioned as the most significant targeting tool the US military has ever used…

Adam Rodman has vivid memories of the incident. He got stuck on a patient case while he was a second-year medical student. He went to the library, looked through the catalog, photocopied documents, and returned them to the team, just like medical students did in the early 2000s. Two hours were needed. Today, while still standing in the patient’s room, he takes out his phone and obtains the same level of detail in fifteen seconds. This quiet, seemingly insignificant change is at the core of what Harvard researchers are now referring to as one of the most important advancements in…

A security researcher eventually realizes that what they are holding is more than just a technical curiosity—it’s money—during their regular work. Much of it. If you discover a bug in Apple’s iOS, you shouldn’t just report it and move on. For some, it entails going into a shadow economy where payouts can reach the millions, buyers are strong, and regulations are ambiguous. The zero-day economy is this. Additionally, Apple’s price chart places it close to the top. For those who don’t know, a zero-day vulnerability is a software flaw that the vendor is unaware of, allowing attackers to take advantage…

It seemed almost absurd the first time someone asked a smartphone to set a reminder by holding it up. A bit dramatic. Now that conversational AI has been around for a few years, asking a machine to do something for you feels expected rather than just normal. Silently and swiftly, the bar has shifted, and businesses that haven’t kept up are beginning to notice the difference. In Cupertino, that tension is most apparent at the moment. For the better part of two years, rivals have outperformed Apple, the company that essentially created the category of the personal AI assistant with…

For many years, physicists have joked that nuclear fusion is always thirty years away. No matter what year you ask, it makes no difference. The response is the same every time. And that joke hurt for the majority of the twentieth century because it was mostly accurate. However, something has changed. Not overnight, not dramatically; rather, it’s more akin to how a long-stalled train eventually begins to move. At first, slowly, almost imperceptibly. Then you realize the platform is behind you when you look up. Fusion remained a theoretical marvel that constantly ran afoul of practical constraints for more than…

Most people can identify this moment. At 11 p.m., you’re aimlessly scrolling through your phone, and you know deep down that you’re not searching for anything. You’re simply… uneasy. Naturally, the phone is unaware of that. It simply continues to deliver content. However, an increasing number of scientists and engineers have chosen to address the discrepancy between your actual emotions and what your gadget perceives. Smartphones with emotional intelligence are not a novel concept. Researchers at the University of Rochester began experimenting in 2012 with methods for using passive phone signals to identify emotional states. The science has become more…

There’s a little white dish on a rooftop somewhere in Tehran, angled toward the sky, that most of the neighbors probably don’t look at very closely. It’s not overly dramatic. It doesn’t appear to be resistance. However, that dish is everything to some people in a nation where the government can cut off 92 million people’s access to the internet with just two phone calls to two businesses. Iran has become proficient in blackouts. The fuel protests in 2019 resulted in a nearly two-week shutdown. Access was once again cut off during the most recent crackdown, which coincided with the…

When you stand at a baggage carousel and watch the same three suitcases go around for the fourth time and none of them are yours, a certain kind of helplessness sets in. Anyone who has been there is aware of it. The slow walk to the airline desk, the mild panic, the apologetic-looking agent who enters something into a computer and then basically informs you that your bag has disappeared into the system. Not lost, not stolen, just out there. In comparison to the previous year, the rate of bag mishandling increased by almost 75% in 2022. SITA, an IT…