Author: Taylor Lowery

When you know that the thing that is supposed to protect you could also be the thing that is coming for you, you feel uneasy. That’s about where cybersecurity stands at the moment. It is becoming more common to use artificial intelligence against the systems it was designed to protect, rather than using it to find threats and mark strange behavior. It’s no longer science fiction. It’s been a while. For many years, cybersecurity was based on a pretty simple idea: find a threat, make a list of them, and block anything that matches. It mostly worked. But that model…

Rachael Smith built a life in the restaurant business for more than 30 years. It was in Monterey that she owned The Salty Seal. In May 2025, she opened The Salty Otter Sports Grill in downtown Santa Cruz with all the money she had saved. After that came the logo. The reviews came next. The logo in question was a happy river otter riding a surfboard. It was unique, specific, and personal. Smith made it herself. She used a generative AI tool to make the base image and then used her design background to color and improve it for a…

A flat, ordinary piece of land outside of Miami is now surrounded by a chain-link fence and the sound of cooling equipment can be heard in the background. This is the kind of lot that might have once been home to a strip mall or a mid-rise apartment building. It’s not exciting. But it’s likely worth more per square foot than most condos near the beach. That’s the quiet truth about what’s been going on in Florida real estate for the past two years. People who used to trade in apartment buildings, business parks, and shopping corridors for decades are…

Most people have been through that moment of confusion when a website seems to be taking you somewhere you didn’t mean to go. You might have signed up for a free trial and then forgotten about it until you were charged. Maybe you clicked on something that looked like a “close” button and were taken to a page where you could pay. You might have tried to cancel a subscription but got lost in a bunch of menus that didn’t lead anywhere useful. It doesn’t really feel like manipulation. It seems like the internet is being hard. It’s not a…

Right now, the lesson is being measured in some classrooms, not just taught. It’s not just grades or coming to class. That wasn’t intimate enough. A camera or sensor that is quietly connected to the room’s digital infrastructure is reading small changes in a student’s face and keeping track of their eye movements to keep track of whether they look interested, lost, or somewhere else. AI that can track emotions is now being used in real schools, not just in research papers. It’s not important to know if it works. It’s about whether it should. It makes sense to make…

Several thousand meters beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, far beyond where light reaches, the seafloor is covered in clusters of dark, misshapen rocks. They look unremarkable. They are anything but. These polymetallic nodules — encrusted with cobalt, nickel, manganese, and other metals that power electric vehicles, defense systems, and AI infrastructure — are quietly becoming one of the most contested resources on Earth. And right now, the United States and China are both circling the same stretch of ocean, racing to get there first. The Cook Islands, a small Pacific nation positioned roughly halfway between Hawaii and New…

People can be tired in a way that doesn’t show on their face right away. It shows up slowly, like when someone pauses before answering a question or talks less about certain things. Kauna Ibrahim Malgwi, a former Facebook content moderator who looked over some of the scariest things on the internet for over four years, says things about it that are hard to shake. She saw more than just bad things. She took it in one shift at a time, like how water turns into stone over time. Not only is her story unique, but it has also been…

A woman named Lil Miquela posts on Instagram, works with high-end fashion brands, and puts out music. She makes about ₹80–90 crore a year. She looks good, has her own style, and has an opinion about culture. She’s also not real. In no way, shape, or form. She was made from 3D models, is maintained by a small team in Los Angeles, and is used with an accuracy that a real person could not even reach on their best day. It’s hard not to notice how lightly this is taken in the marketing world. Virtual influencers were new and interesting…

There is a slight unease in the phrase “buying a house in New Zealand.” It sounds like money for retirement at first glance. A better way of life. A nice spot to watch the southern lights and raise sheep. But among a certain group of American tech billionaires, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Peter Thiel’s former PayPal coworker, has said that the phrase is more like a secret handshake. He said, “Kind of a wink, wink, say no more.” It looks like everyone in those groups knows what it means. It means you believe a terrible event is about…

Many people on the internet were skeptical when Bungie opened up Marathon for its Server Slam event, which was meant to be a limited-time stress test to hit infrastructure hard before the game’s full release. It had been said that extraction shooters were dead more times than most people could remember. Frontier was shut down. Scavengers went away. Even Escape from Tarkov, which is often called the “godfather” of the genre, had problems with player anger and controversy. It seemed like the genre was running out of gas. Then a lot of people still came. That is something to think…