Author: Taylor Lowery

A firm with four workers and a functional AI product is choosing where to incorporate in a serviced office in King’s Cross, just a short stroll from Google DeepMind’s London team. Dutch and German people founded the company. The product was manufactured in Berlin. They’re going to raise a Series A round, the product works, and the early customers are satisfied. They are attempting to determine whether to proceed with that round as a German GmbH or a UK limited company; in contrast to two years ago, the EU AI Act is one of the factors in that decision. The…

A graduate student is soldering a sensor package onto a dinner plate-sized carbon fiber frame in a Stanford robotics lab on a workbench littered with partially assembled quadrotor frames, spare propellers, and the kind of cable management that appears disorganized until you realize everything is labeled. A specialty aerospace supplier is not the source of the sensor. This MEMS inertial measurement unit, which combines an accelerometer and gyroscope into a chip smaller than a fingernail, was sourced from a component catalog that also provides smartphone makers. In university labs all around the world, the same fundamental sensor architecture that knows…

Somewhere in the British Library’s Boston Spa facility in West Yorkshire, a researcher is working with gear in a temperature-controlled storage room that most people would pass by in a charity store. A tiny, rectangular device that resembles a deck of cards and is heavier than you might anticipate. It has a screen that illuminates when you press the correct button and a tiny pen that slides into its side. Windows Mobile 6 is installed on it. The calendar program launches. There are no contacts in the list. The GPS chip is searching for satellites that are not present in…

A young woman sits in front of a laptop at a co-working space in Nairobi’s Westlands neighborhood, surrounded by the kind of open-plan office furniture that could belong to any startup anywhere in the globe. When pressed, she refuses to describe the image she is staring at. She presses one button, proceeds to the next, and then presses once more. She spends eight hours doing this. The images originate from a queue created by software run by a subcontractor employed by an American AI business whose name appears frequently in the media. There is not a single mention of her…

An advisor sits across from a couple in their early fifties who have just asked a question that would have been impossible to answer in real time five years ago in one of those conference rooms with a view of the Chicago River that traditional wealth management firms use to remind clients where they are and what kind of firm they’re dealing with on the 42nd floor of a building off Wacker Drive. If one of them claims Social Security early while the other does not, they want to know what happens to their tax situation under two different market…

Something that has been redefined in value over the past few years is located on the archive floor of a London media firm. It is now made up of rows of hard drives instead of filing cabinets, but it still bears the weight of decades of verified reporting. It was always referred to as the archive. It used to refer to cost centers, storage issues, and difficulties with digital preservation. In the pitch meetings, it’s now referred to as training data. It turns out that training data has actual financial value for the corporations creating the massive language models that…

You can find them on eBay on any given Tuesday if you know what to look for. The sale describes a Glofiish X500 in its original packaging as “rare vintage Windows Mobile PDA, working condition, stylus included.” Compared to five years ago, the asking price is now higher. Not significantly, not in a way that makes financial headlines, but enough that the person who listed it is obviously aware that they have something that a particular kind of person desires. When one shows up, the buyer is most likely someone who worked in technology in 2006 and recalls using one…

The proprietor of a little store off George Street in Sydney’s central business district, nestled between a phone repair shop and a shop selling reconditioned computers, has a shelf that isn’t featured on the internet. It contains three sealed boxes, among other things. The product photography on the front has that specific early-2000s graphic design aesthetic—many diagonal angles, silver gradients, and the word “GPS” presented like a trophy—and the cardboard and plastic wrap are still intact. Each box contains an identical E-TEN Glofiish that was manufactured in Taiwan sometime in 2006 or 2007. The proprietor is aware of their possessions.…

On a Tuesday afternoon, the Informatics Forum on Crichton Street feels like a university research center trying to pass for a startup campus. Postdocs work in groups at standing desks surrounded by whiteboards covered in diagrams that appear to non-specialists like complex riddles. Founders who came to Edinburgh six months ago with nothing more than a hypothesis and a pitch deck are now able to access some of the most potent computing infrastructure available to any UK startup team only a few rooms down. It is not an accidental pairing. It’s the result of intentional strategy and substantial public investment,…

There are machines in the hallways of Canberra’s government buildings that are running software that was no longer supported by the companies who created it. This is not exclusive to Australia, nor is it a secret. Every developed country’s government environments continue to use legacy systems for a variety of reasons: replacing them is costly, integrating replacements with current infrastructure is challenging, and the urgency of doing so before something goes wrong tends to be subordinated to more pressing budgetary priorities. Until anything goes awry. No one working in professional cybersecurity today would suggest Windows Mobile, the Microsoft platform that…