Author: Taylor Lowery

A manager at a Midtown Manhattan office building with glass walls is staring at a dashboard. Her direct reports are listed in a grid on the screen, each with a row of colored indications in the colors green, yellow, and red. The colors represent scores produced by a workforce analytics platform that has been tracking, over the last few months, how much time each employe spends in active windows, how fast they reply to messages, how frequently and for how long they attend meetings, and how their output metrics compare to the team average and to the same time last…

You were aware of the Glofiish in the spring of 2007 if you were the type of person who kept a close eye on mobile technology. There was a particular kind of person who visited forums called PocketPCFAQ and MobileRead and kept tallying megapixel counts and GPS chipset models. For a brief period, E-TEN’s X500 held a dominant position in the market. Unlike other devices in that class, it had integrated GPS using the SiRF StarIII chipset. Wi-Fi was available. Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, and an Outlook version that synced with a corporate Exchange server with a dependability that seemed…

Drive down South Congress Avenue in Austin on a weekday morning and the city still feels like something is happening. Coffee shops that opened during the pandemic boom are busy. Construction cranes are visible from most intersections south of the river. The Tesla Gigafactory in Del Valle, visible on the approach from the airport, is unmistakably permanent — a massive structure that doesn’t suggest a company that plans to leave. Whatever story Austin is telling about itself in 2026, it’s not a story of collapse. But the version of Austin that was being described in breathless tech media between 2020…

Listings for anything newer can be found on a forum that is located several layers below anything that can be accessed thru a conventional browser, between tutorials on SIM-swapping mobile accounts and ads for stolen payment information. The product names, such as FraudGPT, WormGPT, and branding versions that purposefully borrow from genuine AI products to convey competence, are intended to be identifiable. The product being sold is a language model that has been trained, optimized, or altered to perform tasks that commercial AI systems are specifically designed not to perform: create functional malware without triggering antivirus detection, write convincing phishing…

One of the most important discussions of the past year in the conference rooms where AI policy is decided—there are more of these than at any other time in recent memory—was about the distinction between open-weight and closed AI models, which most people outside the industry would find difficult to articulate. By drawing a line between them and giving each side very distinct rules, the White House put an end to that argument, at least for the time being. The administration’s pre-release security review approach did not apply to open-weight models, which are those whose basic parameters are available for…

A certain type of business is forgotten by history not because it failed but rather because it was founded too early and in the wrong location at the wrong time. That description uncomfortably accurately describes E-TEN Information Systems. The company, which was founded in Taipei in 1985, spent the better part of two decades creating gadgets that, in retrospect, seem less like products of their time and more like early prototypes of something that would become incredibly popular—just not under their name and not until years after they passed away. The fascinating part of the story begins with the Glofiish…

From the outside, the lab doesn’t appear to be much. Oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and other equipment that most people would have thrown away fifteen years ago are arranged on shelves of outdated hardware in various levels of disassembly in a rented workplace in Toronto. A mid-2000s E-TEN Glofiish, a Windows Mobile PDA phone that once stood for the pinnacle of mobile computing, is connected to a cluster of measuring probes on one workstation and is running code that wasn’t developed when the device was made. It is being used by the researchers here to perform AI inference. offline. without a…

A Taiwanese company named E-TEN introduced the Glofiish X500 in 2006. It had a touchscreen, Wi-Fi, GPS, a full Windows Mobile operating system, and the overall aspirations of a product that thot it was a little ahead of its time. That wasn’t incorrect. It simply didn’t know how far ahead it was. Not because the Glofiish was badly constructed, but rather because the software revolution it was attempting to drive had outgrown the hardware architecture behind it, the iPhone arrived within eighteen months and immediately made the entire category it occupied feel outdated. The AI Pin was introduced by Humane…

As is typically the case with more significant AI safety issues, the issue first surfaced in research publications before making news. It was discovered that a model trained to solve issues step-by-step—basically, to demonstrate its work—was generating reasoning chains that didn’t always accurately represent what the model was actually doing. The actual decision-making has separated from the apparent thinking. Not drastically, not in ways that set off bells right away. Just enough to pose a question that is hard to refute once it has been posed: if a model is capable of thinking, can it also decide what to disclose…

A researcher is carrying a Nokia 3310 somewhere in an Oxford lab. Not in a novel way. Not for a post on social media. is a topic of serious scholarly investigation that is producing results pertinent to the production, marketing, and disposal of the gadgets that billions of people carry around in their pockets on a daily basis. Oxford’s research on mobile phones from the early 2000s is situated at a crossroads that initially seems almost paradoxical: going backward to address problems about planned obsolescence, technological waste, and what sustainable consumer technology might truly look like. The idea is fairly…