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The city’s bumpy experiment with self-driving taxis is spreading nationwide, too.

Self-driving taxis are ferrying passengers across San Francisco and Phoenix, and they could be coming to a street near you very soon.

The two leading robotaxi companies, GM’s Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo, are expanding commercial services to cities across the country, including Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City. They’re scaling up fast, and a third company, Amazon’s Zoox, is playing catch-up.

On August 10, the California Public Utilities Commission handed Cruise and Waymo a victory by allowing them to operate across San Francisco at all hours and charge fares. During a six-and-a-half-hour hearing, hundreds of residents testified for and against the robotaxis. Supporters claimed they were safer and more reliable than human-driven vehicles, and disabled people said they were more accessible, especially for service animals. Opponents, including transit and fire officials, argued that the taxis had repeatedly gotten in the way of emergency responders and had become a nuisance.

The very next day, Cruise cars snarled traffic in the city’s North Beach neighborhood after the Outside Lands Music Festival being held in the western part of the city caused wireless service problems and the cars lost contact with their central office. The traffic meltdown was proof to many that the cars were not ready for a larger rollout.

Then, on Wednesday, August 16 — less than a week after California regulators lifted restrictions on Cruise and Waymo — San Francisco officials asked for that approval to be halted, arguing the city “will suffer serious harm” with the services expanded to daytime hours.

Liz Lindqwister, a data journalist at the nonprofit news startup the San Francisco Standard, has been documenting the bumpy expansion of robotaxis — while using them herself to commute around town.

“People like to say that San Francisco is at the heart of the robotaxi revolution. And they’re practically everywhere in the city now. You can see them crawling on every single street,” Lindqwister said.

To learn more about riding in cars with robots, Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke to Lindqwister on Vox’s daily news explainer podcast. Read on for a partial transcript of the conversation, edited and condensed for length and clarity, and listen to the full conversation wherever you find podcasts.

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This isn’t an experiment. This is the future. This is reality.

It’s very real. And it’s happening right in my backyard. You’ll see them every single day when you’re going to work. I’ve taken them out to go get drinks with friends and stuff, and they’ve become about as ubiquitous as an Uber or a Lyft.

I did not know it was so ubiquitous that people were just taking them out to go get drinks with their friends on a Friday night or whatever. What was the experience like?

It’s very surreal because in a lot of ways the experience of riding in a robotaxi is just like an Uber. It’s a normal car. When you’re in a Waymo, it’ll be a Jaguar ...

A Jaguar robot car?!

Yeah, it’s very bougie. It feels very fancy and luxurious. But you’ll just be riding through town, and it just doesn’t have a driver. You’ll see the wheel moving and spinning and the pedals going, but there won’t be any driver up front.

Do you tip the robot taxi?

I have never tipped a robot taxi. Maybe that makes me a stingy rider, but I don’t really feel the need to tip the technology.

Does it ask you to tip the robot driver?

No, it doesn’t. And in the case of Waymo, it wasn’t able to even charge me for rides up until literally Thursday of last week. Basically, this robotaxi revolution really got kicked into high gear last Thursday because of this big state vote by the California Public Utilities Commission.

There were dozens of people who lined up outside of the meeting on Thursday, and they gave six hours of public comment to say how much they really dislike these cars or how much they love them. Waymo and Cruise, they had a pretty big contingent there and support. Mothers Against Drunk Driving like to support Cruise because they like to plug that these robotaxis are safer than the average driver.

On the flip side, there’s just a whole slew of people that have seen how they’ve really disrupted life in San Francisco. There’s been a lot of pushback from city officials, from the fire department, and from local activists who really don’t want to see more cars on the street. But it still passed. They basically granted these robotaxis the ability to expand, unlimited, through all parts of the city and drive all hours of the day and charge money for it, basically making them like taxis.

So these rides were free for a time. How much are they now that they’re not free?

It depends on the company, because until now, Cruise was actually able to charge for its rides. The confusing part about this is that different companies had different rules. But basically Waymo hasn’t released its pricing model. They say that there’s going to be a base fee, and that there’s going to be cost per mile, cost per time. And the same thing with Cruise, except Cruise has been more public about their base fee of $5 and the additional costs on top of it.

How is this changing the experience of calling a cab? Are people doing different things in the car now that they’re alone?

In some of my reporting, we found that people are starting to do debaucherous things or unseemly things in the car. We found a handful of people who had either had sex or hooked up in the back of a robotaxi because there’s just no driver to tell you you can’t do that. And I’d imagine the same goes for alcohol or drugs. The companies obviously don’t plug this as something that you should do in their vehicles.

Why not?! Is sex illegal in San Francisco?

Definitely not in robotaxis, according to some of our more adventurous readers.

Well, have there been any problems yet with these robocars?

That’s an understatement, honestly. It’s pretty crazy. These cars will just get caught. Let’s say there are 10 fire trucks coming down to stop a blaze in San Francisco. The Cruise cars don’t know what to do. They’ll just brick up on the street and not move. The issue with that is that they’ll be blocking traffic. They’ll be blocking the emergency vehicles.

So they crumble under pressure.

They definitely crumble under pressure. And they were put to the test this Friday. San Francisco has this pretty famous music festival called Outside Lands. Tens of thousands of people attend. It’s a really big event for the city. And Cruise and Waymo were still operating around the park where the festival was held.

This was day one of the new world that we were living in in San Francisco.

Day one of the new world. And they had a meltdown. As many as a dozen stalled Cruise cars blocked the streets in a neighborhood in the north part of the city. The company said that it was because all of the people at Outside Lands disrupted the cellphone signal or the signal that the Cruise cars use to operate.

The robots blamed the people.

Yeah, the robots blamed the people. A lot of people said that the robotaxis just couldn’t handle the floods of people walking on the street. They’ll just stop. And it’s kind of funny to see because the cars kind of look clueless. And there’s no driver in them either. So you really can’t yell at them to move or honk at them either. I think something that people don’t talk enough about too, with Cruise, is that they’re such cute little cars, that it really, truly is comical when they mess up.

But of course, it’s all cute and fun until someone gets hurt. And hearing that these cars just have a meltdown when there’s emergency vehicles flying through a crowded street or when there’s lots of people around is concerning.

Yeah. Having driven in so many robotaxis at this point, it’s most interesting to see humans’ relationships to these robot cars and not necessarily the robot cars themselves. When I’m inside them, I’ll see people flipping me off or just glaring or yelling at me because they feel so strongly about it. They’re so frustrated with these dinky little robot cars.

They’re also coning the cars. It sounds funny, but it’s literally traffic cones that activists are placing on top of robotaxi sensors so that they can’t move. The city has even taken it into their own hands where, a firefighter in an emergency situation, they coned a Cruise car because they didn’t want it to keep moving into an emergency situation.

Even the firefighters are getting in on it. So it hasn’t been a totally smooth transition. But that’s sort of to be expected, I imagine.

Yeah. And I think the big question now, too, is where this is going to fit in in the broader transportation landscape of not just San Francisco, but the state and the country. We have Ubers and Lyfts that still exist. But I imagine a lot of those drivers are frustrated that there are all these self-driving cars that might take their positions.

And then, of course, there are transit problems with funding in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Our public transportation system is really struggling. So for another car option, private option, to show up like this, that gets a lot of folks really frustrated. Like, is this the right use of our time, of our priorities, of our funding? I don’t know.

Right. Is the answer more cars?

Yeah, And that’s a lot of the criticism, is that San Francisco’s a dense city. It’s a small city. Does it really need thousands more of these robotaxis?

It sounds like what you’re saying is that people ought to get used to the idea of being driven around by robots.

I think the CPUC vote basically said that. Whether or not San Franciscans like it, robotaxis are here to stay. And now they have unlimited access to the city and can charge money for it. And there are a lot of people excited about it. Waymo likes to say that they have a wait list of over 100,000 people. That’s a lot of people that are excited to drive in their cars.

Or it’s just 100,000 people who are really excited about having sex in a robot car.

I mean, you said it, not me!

At the end of the day, it’s definitely a novelty to try out one of these cars. My parents are going to come visit in a month, and that’ll be the first thing I do, is show them the future in a robotaxi.

Generative AI tools are generating less interest than just a few months ago.

When generative AI products started rolling out to the general public last year, it kicked off a frenzy of excitement and fear.

People were amazed at the images and words these tools could create from just a single text prompt. Silicon Valley salivated over the prospect of a transformative new technology, one that it could make a lot of money off of after years of stagnation and the flops of crypto and the metaverse. And then there were the concerns about what the world would be after generative AI transformed it. Millions of jobs could be lost. It might become impossible to tell what was real or what was made by a computer. And if you want to get really dramatic about it, the end of humanity may be near. We glorified and dreaded the incredible potential this technology had.

Several months later, the bloom is coming off the AI-generated rose. Governments are ramping up efforts to regulate the technology, creators are suing over alleged intellectual property and copyright violations, people are balking at the privacy invasions (both real and perceived) that these products enable, and there are plenty of reasons to question how accurate AI-powered chatbots really are and how much people should depend on them.

Assuming, that is, they’re still using them. Recent reports suggest that consumers are starting to lose interest: The new AI-powered Bing search hasn’t made a dent in Google’s market share, ChatGPT is losing users for the first time, and the bots are still prone to basic errors that make them impossible to trust. In some cases, they may be even less accurate now than they were before. A recent Pew survey found that only 18 percent of US adults had ever used ChatGPT, and another said they’re becoming increasingly concerned about the use of AI. Is the party over for this party trick?

Generative AI is a powerful technology that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and the chatbots built with this new technology are one of the most accessible tools for consumers, who can directly access and try them out for themselves. But recent reports suggest that, as the initial burst of excitement and curiosity fades, people may not be as into chatbots as many expected.

OpenAI and its ChatGPT chatbot quickly took the lead as the buzziest generative AI company and tool out there, no doubt helped along by being one of the first companies to release tools to the general public, as well as a partnership with Microsoft worth billions of dollars. That partnership led to Microsoft’s big February announcement about how it was incorporating a custom chatbot built with OpenAI’s large language model (LLM) — this is also what powers ChatGPT — into Bing, its web search engine. Microsoft hailed generative AI-infused search as the future of web search. Instead of getting a bunch of links or knowledge windows back, this new AI chatbot would combine information from multiple websites into one response.

There was plenty of hype, and Bing suddenly went from being a punchline to a potential rival in a market so completely dominated by Google that it’s literally synonymous with it. Google rushed to release a chatbot of its own, called Bard. Meta, not to be outdone and possibly still smarting from its disastrous metaverse pivot, released not one but two open source(ish) versions of its large language model. OpenAI licensed ChatGPT out to other companies, and dozens lined up to put it in their own products.

That reinvention may be a longer way off than the excitement from a few months ago suggested, assuming it happens at all. A recent Wall Street Journal article said that the new Bing isn’t catching on with consumers, citing two different analytics firms that had Bing’s market share at roughly the same now as it was in the pre-AI days of January. (Microsoft told WSJ that those firms were underestimating the numbers but wouldn’t share its internal data.) According to Statcounter, Microsoft’s web browser, Edge, which consumers had to use in order to access Bing Chat, did get a user bump, but still barely moved the needle and has already started to recede, while Chrome’s market share increased during that time. There is still hope for Microsoft, however. When Bing Chat is easier or possible to access on different and more popular browsers, it may well get more use. Microsoft told WSJ it plans to do this soon.

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s ChatGPT seems to be flagging, too. For the first time since its release last year, traffic to the ChatGPT website fell by almost 10 percent in June, according to the Washington Post. Downloads of its iPhone app have fallen off, too, the report said, although OpenAI wouldn’t comment on the numbers.

And Google has yet to integrate its chatbot into its search services as extensively as Microsoft did, keeping it off the main search page and continuing to frame it as an experimental technology that “may display inaccurate or offensive information.” Google didn’t respond to a request for comment on Bard usage numbers.

Google’s approach may be the right one, given how problematic some of these chatbots can be. We now have myriad examples of chatbots going off the rails, from getting really personal with a user to spouting off complete inaccuracies as truth to containing the inherent biases that seem to permeate all of tech. And while some of those issues have been mitigated by some companies to some degree along the way, things seem to be getting worse, not better. The Federal Trade Commission is looking into ChatGPT’s inaccurate responses. A recent study showed that OpenAI’s GPT-4, the newest version of its LLM, showed marked declines in accuracy in some areas in just a few months, indicating that, if nothing else, the model is changing or being changed over time, which can cause drastic differences in its output. And attempts by journalistic outlets to fill pages with AI-generated content have resulted in multiple and egregious errors. As chatbot-fueled cheating proliferated, OpenAI had to pull its own tool to detect ChatGPT-generated text because it sucked.

Last week, eight companies behind LLMs, including OpenAI, Google, and Meta, took their models to DEF CON, a massive hacker convention, to have as many people as possible test their models for accuracy and safety in a first-of-its-kind stress test, a process called “red teaming.” The Biden administration, which has been making a lot of noise about the importance of AI technology being developed and deployed safely, supported and promoted the event. President Biden’s science adviser and the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, Arati Prabhakar, told Vox it was a chance to “really figure out how well these chatbots are working; how hard or easy is it to get them to come off the rails?”

The goal of the challenge was to give the companies some much-needed data on if and how their models break, supplied by a diverse group of people who would presumably test it in ways the companies’ internal teams hadn’t. We’ll see what they do with that data, and it’s a good sign that they participated in the event at all, though the fact that the White House urged them to do so surely was a motivating factor.

In the meantime, these models and the chatbots created from them are already out there being used by hundreds of millions of people, many of whom will take what these chatbots say at face value. Especially when they may not know that the information is coming from a chatbot in the first place (CNET, for example, barely disclosed which articles were written by bots). As various reports show a waning interest in some AI-powered tools from the public, however, they need to get better if they want to survive. We also don’t even know if the technology actually can be fixed, given how even their own developers claim not to know all of their inner workings.

Generative AI can do some amazing things. There’s a reason why Silicon Valley is excited about it and so many people have tried it out. What remains to be seen is whether it can be more than a party trick, which, given its still-prevalent flaws, is probably all it should be for now.

A version of this story was also published in the Vox technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Update, August 28, 3 pm ET: This story was originally published on August 19 and has had news about Pew Research surveys added.

Invasion was a curious addition to the sci-fi TV landscape when it debuted in 2021. For much of its runtime, it barely felt like science fiction at all. We all knew something alien was happening — it’s right there in the show’s title, after all — but the story was much more focused on the human-level drama going down as the world steadily succumbed to the invading forces. The result was a show that started very slowly, though things did eventually pick up mid-season. Ultimately, season 1 felt like a prologue to a much bigger story.

With all of that setup out of the way, the second season starts out much more exciting — and it doesn’t let up for the first few episodes.

Note: this write-up is based on the first five (of 10) episodes of...

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Microsoft is discontinuing the Kinect — again. The company officially stopped manufacturing the depth camera and microphone in 2017 and brought it back in a new form in 2019 as the Azure Kinect Developer Kit. Now, Microsoft is ending production of that, too, but it has partnered with some outside companies to provide options available for people who need similar types of devices.

If you want to get one of the remaining Azure Kinect Developer Kits, they’ll be available to buy through the end of October or “until supplies last,” Microsoft’s Swati Mehta said in a post on the company’s website. If you already have one, Mehta promises that you can keep using it “without disruption.”

“As the needs of our customers and partners evolve, we...

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Almost half of “Environmental Twitter” has vanished from the platform now called X, new research shows. A wave of “environmentally oriented” users abandoned the site after Elon Musk took over, according to a study published this week in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

The study confirms fears about how Musk’s leadership might quell climate discourse and scientific research on the platform. Before he took the wheel, Twitter was an important tool for environmental researchers and activists alike.

“We saw that there was a vibrant community engaging in discourse around environmental topics. This then raised the question of how this community may be impacted by changes to Twitter’s governance,” Charlotte Chang, lead author of the...

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Earlier this week, Google Maps reportedly demoted gas stations in the points of interest categories list for electric vehicle owners while using Android Auto. Google confirmed the changes, which it noted have been available to EV drivers since 2022.

“To help people get the most relevant information when navigating, last year we added the ability for EV drivers to see a shortcut for charging stations instead of gas stations on Google Maps for Android Auto,” Google spokesperson Pearl Xu told The Verge. Xu added that the feature has also been live for vehicles equipped with Google built-in vehicle software since 2020.

Xu sent over a list of all the EV-centric capabilities of Google Maps:

Real-time charging port availability: Just search...

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Last year, all signs indicated that 2023 would be an exciting year for ChromeOS gaming. Early on, 9to5Google reported that Chromebooks supporting Nvidia GPUs were in the works. In October, several OEMs announced gaming-focused models (with integrated graphics) in a snazzy joint announcement. It seemed like there was a lot on the horizon for the Chromebook gaming enthusiast.

Those hopes, however, appear to have been dashed. The eagle-eyed folks over at About Chromebooks have spotted language in Google’s code indicating that multiple Nvidia Chromebook projects (including the specific models that were rumored last year) have been canceled. Google has not yet responded to a request for comment on this language.

Photo by...

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By switching nearly a quarter of its computers to ChromeOS from Windows, global electronics manufacturer Sanmina has cut the total cost of ownership and support costs for client devices in half, which has resulted in an annual savings of roughly $3 million, the company’s CIO, Manesh Patel, says in an exclusive interview with CRN.

Threads is adding reposts (aka retweets) to its reverse-chronological “Following” feed, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced in a Threads post on Thursday. It’s a small but nice addition to the app that makes the Following feed a bit more useful, and while Mosseri said Meta added it “based on your feedback,” the Following feed does still have its flaws.

That’s not the only repost-related update from Meta. It’s also rolling out a reposts tab on your profile so that you and others can more easily find the threads that you’ve reposted. I don’t appear to have either update yet on iOS, but I do have the reposts tab when I view my profile on the web. (I think I need to repost more.)

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge ...

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Slack briefly experienced some major issues on Thursday. On The Verge’s Slack, I found that some posts just wouldn’t send in both channels and threads, and a few of my colleagues were reporting similar issues.

We weren’t the only ones. At one point, Downdetector showed that more than 10,000 users reported issues, but the site now says that number peaked at a bit under that. I also saw a bunch of posts about Slack problems on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The company confirmed the issues were fixed in a 12:58PM ET message on its status page. “We’ve restored full functionality of Slack for all impacted users. Sorry for the trouble, we appreciate your patience today.” At 12:37PM ET, the company’s status page had confirmed...

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Elon Musk hired Linda Yaccarino to be “CEO” of exTwitter (despite saying he doesn’t believe in the role of a CEO) because he desperately needed someone who worked well with advertisers to try to lure back some of the many, many, many advertisers who had fled the platform in disgust at what Elon has done with it.

To date Yaccarino has shown a talent for… using buzzwords to say absolutely meaningless nonsense that everyone knows is laughable. And not much else. The latest example was in an interview where Yaccarino continued to throw out a bunch of buzzwords that add up to nothing, combined with obvious lies. I mean…

“The rebrand really represented a liberation from Twitter, a liberation that allows us to evolve past a legacy mindset and to reimagine how everyone … around the world is going to change how we congregate, how we transact, all in one place,” Yaccarino said, adding that users would soon be able to make video calls and payments through the platform.

“It’s developing into this global town square that is fueled by free expression, where the public gathers in real time,” she said.

This is exactly the kind of empty platitude, meaningless business jargon, nonsense speech that Elon Musk himself would mock mercilessly if it came from a competing platform’s CEO.

In an interview with CNBC she also claimed, ridiculously, that exTwitter was “objectively” safer than it had been before:

“There’s also a lot of hate and a lot of vitriol and conspiracy theories and those attract a lot of eyeballs too,” Eisen countered. “And so, if you’re a brand and a business, why would you feel safe advertising?”

Conceding that it was an “appropriate question,” Yaccarino then claimed some of these “headline comments and phrases need to be continually brought to light and debunked.” Referencing her time as a top ad executive for NBCUniversal, she noted that Twitter was “our number one social partner” and was always considered safe.

“A lot of brands have left,” Eisen shot back.

“I hear you,” Yaccarino replied. “I want to take that last 10 years and put it in perspective, because by all objective metrics, X is a much healthier and safer platform than it was a year ago.”

There is no rational human being on earth who believes this.

Meanwhile, around the same time, exTwitter rolled out its new “brand safety sensitivity settings.” In theory, if the platform were really as safe as Yaccarino claims, why does it need these tools?

Of course, all of this is basically begging folks to go looking at where ads are appearing on exTwitter, and Media Matters came up with quite a scoop on that front, showing that major advertisers had their ads appearing next to a verified account that praises Hitler.

Under the leadership of CEO Linda Yaccarino, X (formerly known as Twitter) has been placing ads for brands like The New York Times Co.’s The Athletic, MLB, the Atlanta Falcons, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, Amazon, and Office Depot on a verified pro-Adolf Hitler account that encourages antisemitic harassment. The company continues to monetize the openly antisemitic account despite reportedly acknowledging it had violated the platform’s “rules against violent speech.”

The link includes some more details about the account, New American Union, and the pro-Hitler memes it posted. We’re not posting them here, but anyone looking at that account will come away thinking “boy, that account sure likes Hitler.” And it’s verified.

Soon after the Media Matters article started to go viral, the account was finally suspended. But, as Media Matters notes, the account had been “verified” since April, had amassed many thousands of followers, and had been posting pro-Hitler rhetoric for a while.

CNN later reported that some advertisers whose ads were appearing next to that account have paused all advertising on exTwitter. So, good going, Linda Yaccarino. Your job was to attract advertisers to come back, and somehow you’ve instead convinced more to leave by trying to bullshit them about how the site was safer for brands.

Of course, most of the attention on this story was focused on the big name advertisers and where their brands were appearing. But as Jason O. Gilbert noted on Bluesky, it kinda seems like that story should be secondary to the fact that exTwitter had a VERIFIED pro-Hitler account:

Of course, I kinda see both sides to this. If the focus were just on the neo-Nazi account, people would shrug and say “yeah, well, we already know that Elon is cool with platforming Nazis, what’s the story?” But if you talk about the advertisers, well, they might just pull their ads. The “marketplace of ideas” at work.

Anyway, I look forward to Yaccarino excitedly announcing next week how X has expanded its sensitivity settings to include a “don’t show my ads next the neo-Nazis that are core to the platform” setting.

Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is getting a major new feature: it will be able to summarize articles you’re reading on the web, according to a Google blog post. SGE can already summarize search results for you so that you don’t have to scroll forever to find what you’re looking for, and this new feature is designed to take that further by helping you out after you’ve actually clicked a link.

You probably won’t see this feature, which Google is calling “SGE while browsing,” right away.

Google says it’s a new feature that’s starting to roll out Tuesday as “an early experiment” in its opt-in Search Labs program. (You’ll get access to it if you already opted in to SGE, but if you...

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With streaming services across the board raising their prices, you owe it to yourself to have a good deep think about what you want out of all these subscriptions and what you’re actually getting for your money.

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When presented with 517 user-written questions, ChatGPT gets more than half wrong, according to researchers from Purdue University.

Electric vehicle owners are overall not satisfied with the reliability of the charging infrastructure available in the US, according to a new survey conducted by JD Power. In some cases, things are looking even worse than last year.

The survey finds that 20 percent of survey takers have, at least once, arrived and departed a charging station without gaining any range on their EV. This is attributable not only to broken charging equipment, but also due to long queues of people waiting to charge.

Using a 1,000-point scale, overall satisfaction with DC fast charging experiences has dropped from 674 down to 654. And for Level 2 charging stations, satisfaction has also decreased this year, from 633 down to 617. These are the lowest scores...

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Fisker is the latest automaker to adopt Tesla’s charging connector for its future vehicles. Following the marching band of major automakers, Fisker is going to add a Tesla North American Charging Standard (NACS) port to its first vehicles in 2025, the company announced today.

For customers of Fisker’s Ocean SUV — of which 22 have been confirmed delivered as of June 23rd — the company will be providing an adapter to enable access to 12,000 Tesla Superchargers in the first quarter of 2025. The adapter will convert the widely used Combined Charging System (CCS) port that’s on most EVs, including the Ocean, into Tesla’s leaner and now standardized NACS port.

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The Roku Channel is adding a whole mess of new linear channels, and while some are fun times like Murder, She Wrote and MrBeast, the most exciting additions are the more than 30 local and national news channels from CBS and Fox.

The Roku Channel is one of a few increasingly popular free ad-supported TV services — also known as FAST. With FAST, you get to watch lots of content for free, but you have to sit through ads. It’s basically like terrestrial TV but with a wider offering of content and no antenna. And Roku’s iteration is wildly popular since it’s built directly into the Roku UI, so anyone with a Roku box or TV can just start watching. No account and no real thought necessary.

However, one of the major downsides of FAST that I’ve...

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Including how you can help.

The search for survivors is far from over, yet it’s already clear: The Maui fires are the nation’s deadliest wildfire event in more than a century. The blazes burned thousands of acres and killed at least 114 people — a greater death toll than any wildfire in California, where summer blazes are common. Hundreds remain missing on Maui, and the number of fatalities is expected to rise.

“This is the largest natural disaster in our history,” Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said, referring to Hawaii, in a statement on August 13. “It is a harrowing sight in Maui.”

Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty Images

Sebastien Vuagnat/AFP via Getty Images

Much of Lāhainā, a historic town on Maui’s west coast, has been reduced to rubble and ashes. The fire moved so quickly there early last week that 17 people ran into the ocean for safety, where they had to be rescued by the Coast Guard.

With the fires now largely contained, attention is shifting to questions about what sparked the blazes, why residents weren’t given more time to flee, and who will control the reconstruction of Lāhainā. Experts are also warning that this kind of disaster could happen again as climate change deepens droughts and makes vegetation more likely to burn.

As with many natural disasters, several factors contributed to the devastation, and the consequences will haunt the region for years to come. Here’s what to know about this historic tragedy.

1) This is the nation’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century

The wildfires have killed at least 114 people, the Maui Police Department said on August 18. Officials expect that number to rise. Roughly three quarters of the burned areas have been searched, and hundreds of people are still unaccounted for.

“This is unprecedented,” Maui County police chief, John Pelletier, told reporters on August 16. “No one has ever seen this that is alive today — not this size, not this number, not this volume, and we’re not done.”

The event is the deadliest natural disaster in Hawaii’s history — deadlier, even, than a tsunami that struck the state in 1960, killing 61 people. And it now has a higher death toll than any wildfire in the US since 1918, when blazes in Minnesota killed as many as 1,000 people.

It may be weeks before officials know the exact death toll.

Paula Ramon/AFP via Getty Images

2) More than 2,200 structures in the town of Lāhainā were damaged or destroyed

The fires, which began in grasslands, utterly devastated Lāhainā, a town of roughly 13,000 people known for its historic buildings and cultural significance. There, the blazes damaged or destroyed more than 2,200 structures, which have an estimated value of $5.5 billion, according to the Pacific Disaster Center and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“There’s very little left there,” Green said of Lāhainā on August 13.

The Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)

One of the town’s most iconic landmarks, a large banyan tree that stretches an entire block, has been badly charred but it remains standing. It’s not clear whether it will ultimately survive the impact. The tree is 150 years old and some say it represents the spirit of Lāhainā.

Paula Ramon/AFP via Getty Images

3) It’s still not clear what ignited all the fires, but we know how they became extreme

Officials have not yet pinpointed a source of ignition. The majority of wildfires in Hawaii (and the US mainland) are caused by people or human infrastructure, such as power lines, versus lightning or other natural sources.

But it’s clear that Maui was primed to burn. Summer is the dry season in Hawaii, and dry, hot weather provides the foundation for extreme wildfires. Heat sucks the moisture out of vegetation, essentially turning it into kindling. When the blazes took off, nearly 16 percent of Maui County was in a severe drought, according to the US Drought Monitor. Climate change is likely making these droughts worse (more on that below).

Meanwhile, much of Hawaii and Maui is covered in invasive grasses, which (literally) add fuel to the fire. Introduced over the last century by colonists, in part to feed cattle, guinea grass and other nonnative varieties are known to outcompete native species and burn easily. According to the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, nonnative grasslands and shrublands cover nearly one-quarter of the land area in Hawaii.

Strong winds only added to the problem. Hurricane Dora, which churned hundreds of miles offshore as a Category 4 storm, brought gusts of wind that at times reached 80 miles per hour, fueling the flames and helping them race across western Maui at a dangerous pace.

4) The government faces scrutiny for failing to warn residents and responding slowly in the aftermath

The fires on Maui weren’t particularly large, engulfing only a few thousand acres, compared to those in, say, California, which can burn through tens or even hundreds of thousands of acres. So why were they so deadly?

It will likely take weeks for investigators to fully answer this question, but there are a few reasons we know so far.

The big one: People had very little time to evacuate. That’s partly due to the nature of the fires, which were supercharged by strong winds and moved quickly, jumping from rural grasslands into residential neighborhoods. Strong winds and power outages also made it challenging for firefighters to extinguish or even contain the blazes. At one point, fire hydrants started running dry, according to the New York Times.

Rick Bowmer/AP

But some residents have also pointed out problems in the island’s disaster response. Maui has one of the world’s largest systems of outdoor warning sirens, which are designed to alert people of threatening events like hurricanes and tsunamis. They didn’t go off. And while officials did broadcast alerts to mobile phones, and over radio and television programs, power and cellphone service was out in much of West Maui.

In a press conference on August 14, Gov. Green said that while residents obviously need more notice for an event like this, the sirens are typically used for tsunamis and hurricanes. The sirens tend to signal to residents that they should flee uphill, where the fire was more intense. Two days later, in a news conference, the head of the Maui Emergency Management Agency, Herman Andaya, defended his decision not to sound the sirens, citing similar reasons. Shortly after, facing intense scrutiny for his decision, Andaya resigned from the agency for “health reasons.”

Some residents have also criticized the response from local and federal agencies in the wake of the blazes. They say they’ve struggled to find food, shelter, gasoline, and other necessities, the New York Times reported, often finding more support from community groups and volunteers than officials. (You can find a recent list of services provided by government agencies here.)

Hawaii Attorney General Anne E. Lopez launched an investigation on August 11 into how the island responded to the fires and their impact.

5) Despite warnings of fire weather, the island’s main electric utility kept power lines electrified

Days before the fires broke out in Lāhainā, weather forecasters warned officials that strong winds could create fire conditions in parts of Hawaii, according to the Washington Post. Yet Hawaiian Electric, a utility that provides power to 95 percent of the state’s residents, didn’t shut off power in regions where those conditions might damage power lines and spark a blaze.

Rick Bowmer/AP

Around when the fires broke out, winds on Maui downed several power lines. (Some of California’s most damaging blazes, including the 2018 Camp Fire, were ignited by power lines.)

Security video footage and data from the grid-monitoring company Whisker Labs suggest a power line may have sparked one of the fires, beginning in the small town of Makawao, according to reporting by the Washington Post’s Brianna Sacks. “This is strong confirmation — based on real data — that utility grid faults were likely the ignition source for multiple wildfires on Maui,” Whisker Labs’s founder and CEO Bob Marshall told the Washington Post.

The power company told the Post that it did take some steps to make its power lines safer ahead of the forecasted strong winds. The utility also said it’s challenging to shut off power with short notice, especially because firefighting crews might need power to pump water. It declined to comment on data from the Washington Post linking one of its power lines to a wildfire.

6) The fires are now mostly contained but environmental hazards remain

Wildfires are still burning in parts of Maui, but the worst appears to be over. The Lāhainā fire was 90 percent contained as of August 18, having burned 2,168 acres, according to Maui County. “There are no active threats at this time,” the county said about the Lāhainā fire. Two other fires on Maui, burning in higher elevations, are each 85 percent contained, and a third is 100 percent contained.

Meanwhile, Hawaiian Electric said it has restored power to more than 80 percent of its customers who lost electricity, as of August 18.

Yet health hazards could remain for weeks or even months after the last flames are extinguished. The fires burned through all kinds of infrastructure and materials, which can leak harmful chemicals into the air and water, such as lead or asbestos from older buildings. Residents in Lāhainā and some other parts of Maui are under an “unsafe water advisory” and have been told to use bottled water for drinking and brushing their teeth.

The EPA is now working to remove hazardous waste including the remains of paint solvents, pesticides, and ammunition, the agency said in its August 16 press conference. Hawaii’s Health Department, meanwhile, is “urging caution” for residents who return home. “Dangers include ash that may contain toxic and cancer-causing chemicals including asbestos, arsenic, and lead, and debris including broken glass, exposed electrical wires, nails, wood, plastics, and other objects,” the department warns.

Scientists also warn that runoff from burned land — expected during future rain storms — could carry toxins and silt to the ocean that can damage Maui’s prized coral reef.

7) Climate change is priming Hawaii for extreme wildfires

Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are making the planet hotter and deepening droughts worldwide. Hawaii is no exception. The state is roughly two degrees warmer than it was in 1950. Meanwhile, there’s less rainfall in 90 percent of the state compared to a century ago, according to the state government.

Together, hotter air and less rainfall dries out vegetation, making it more likely to burn. That’s why places like California and Canada have seen larger and more destructive wildfires in recent years, compared to past decades.

Climate change can also screw with the pattern and severity of storms, though it’s not clear how exactly that will affect the likelihood of future fires in Hawaii.

8) Some Maui residents are concerned that predatory realtors will try to gobble up land in Lāhainā

In the days after wildfires ravaged Lāhainā — destroying hundreds of homes — some residents reported that developers and realtors reached out to ask about purchasing their land or selling it on their behalf. Not only are those inquiries insensitive, residents say, but they’re also stoking fears that the reconstruction of Lāhainā will fall into the hands of wealthy developers from the continental US.

“We will be making sure that we do all that we can to prevent that land from falling into the hands of people from the outside,” Gov. Green said in a video message on August 15. “You can be sure I will not be allowing anyone to build or rezone or do anything of that sort if they’ve taken advantage of anyone here.”

The day before, Gov. Green said he had asked Anne E. Lopez, the state attorney general, to explore options for placing a moratorium on selling properties on Maui that have been damaged or destroyed by the wildfires. Gov. Green also said that the state will embed lawyers at response centers to provide free legal advice to Lāhainā residents regarding their property.

“For my part, I will try to allow no one from outside our state to buy any land till we get through this crisis and decide what Lāhainā should be in the future,” Gov. Green said.

Rick Bowmer/AP

9) Now is the wrong time to visit West Maui. But there are ways to help.

Traveling to West Maui right now is a bad idea, as the region is focusing its resources on evacuees and people in need, not on housing and feeding tourists.

“In the weeks ahead, the collective resources and attention of the federal, state, and county government, the West Maui community, and the travel industry must be focused on the recovery of residents who were forced to evacuate their homes and businesses,” the Hawaii Tourism Authority said in a statement.

Many hotels have temporarily stopped accepting new reservations and made their rooms available to local residents who cannot yet return home.

But if you want to help from afar, a number of groups are accepting monetary donations, including the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, Maui United Way, and the Maui Food Bank. GoFundMe also has a running list of verified fundraisers. (For more places to donate, see here.)

Maui Humane Society

You can also help lost or injured pets. Roughly 3,000 animals have been lost due to the fires, Lisa Labrecque, who runs the Maui Humane Society, said in a press conference on August 14. The Humane Society is accepting donations (see image above), or you can purchase items on the group’s Amazon wishlist. “The fires have left thousands of both humans and animals displaced,” the group wrote on Facebook, “causing immense distress and creating an urgent need for solidarity within the community.”

Update, August 18, 10:30 am ET: This story was originally published on August 14 and has been updated multiple times, most recently with the latest information on fatalities, fire containment, and health concerns in the wake of the fires.

The first smart door has landed at The Home Depot, and if you’re good with dropping at least $4,000 on your front door, then you can order one today. That price doesn’t include installation, though, and no matter how handy you are, this one needs the pros — including an electrician to wire it up.

First showcased at CES 2022, the Masonite M-PWR Smart Door is the first residential door to come with a Yale smart door lock and Ring video doorbell built in, but the big selling point is they are all powered by your home’s electrics, so there’s no need to worry about recharging or replacing batteries — a common issue with most smart locks and some video doorbells.

Image: Masonite

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WhatsApp is rolling out a call scheduling feature within group chats that will take it a step closer to the likes of Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

The new feature allows WhatsApp group users to plan calls and automatically notify the other participants, leading to more convenient and effective communication on the messaging and calling app.

WABetaInfo, an independent and trusted WhatsApp news provider, revealed the group call scheduling release information yesterday.

This includes the announcement that it is now available for some beta testers via WhatApp’s new beta version 2.23.17.7, with a rollout to a wider audience taking place over the coming weeks.

The WhatsApp news source also shared its view on the latest feature release: “In our opinion, scheduling calls within group chats offers several significant advantages.

“We think a scheduled group call improves the process of planning and coordinating discussions.

“Instead of multiple back-and-forth messages to agree on a suitable time, users can decide a certain time that works for everyone.

“This also ensures that everyone is available and reduces the risk of missed or late calls.”

The feature will enable users to schedule calls by simply tapping the call button, which will already be possible for some beta testers.

Next, users can add a call subject, schedule a call date, and choose the type of group call i.e. video or voice.

When users confirm the scheduled group call information, an event will be automatically created in the group chat for the other participants to see.

Group members will then receive a notification 15 minutes before the call begins.

The new feature brings a range of benefits to users, including streamlining call planning, simplifying discussions around suitable call times, and automatic event notifications and call reminders will reduce the number of missed or forgotten calls.

Group call scheduling in WhatsApp was announced by WABetaInfo in February 2023, since which time it has been under development.

A Growing Competitor

In May this year, WhatsApp released a screen-sharing feature, rivalling other video conferencing platforms which already provide screen-sharing, such as Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.

The screen-sharing feature allows others to view your phone screen while you are on a video call with them.

This move was a major step forward for WhatsApp which had, until then, kept its communications features relatively simple.

Group call scheduling adds yet another feature taking it towards the complex functionality you might expect from the biggest video conferencing platforms.

Naturally, these releases directly compete with other communications platforms as it will draw users away from them.

Already WhatsApp represents an appealing option to those looking for a simpler solution, particularly where it is already being used for chats.

The added video features appearing on the popular application could be a tempting option to save them from having to switch platforms.

WhatsApp is also creating a username feature that will compete with Telegram’s equivalent capability by allowing people to connect without sharing their phone numbers is in development.

In April 2023,  Zuckerberg also included a call capacity teaser, alongside the release of Call Links for WhatsApp.

 

 

Employment, for now, is still for humans.

If you hadn’t noticed, it’s not just good enough for a publicly traded company to provide an excellent, affordable product that people like. Wall Street demands improved quarterly returns at any cost, which, sooner or later, causes any successful company to begin cannibalizing itself to feed the “growth for growth’s sake” gods. Mergers, price hikes, offshored labor, whatever it takes.

While high level executives and some shareholders benefit from this enshittification, there’s just an endless list of casualties from this process, whether it’s product value, quality, customer satisfaction, customer support, employee pay, jobs, or even the long-term health of the company itself.

As the streaming market saturates and competition grows, enshittification has come to the streaming video sector in a big way. Products once heralded for low cost convenience now see relentless price hikes at the same time there’s been an erosion in quality and convenience. All to a backdrop of striking workers, many of whom say they were never paid a living wage during the sector’s heyday.

Netflix, as we’ve well documented, seems intent on charging more and more money for a lower quality product, while it demonizes the kind of password sharing it once praised for contributing to its success. Disney now seems intent on following suit on password crackdowns, as Hulu, Disney, and all the other streaming giants race each other to impose sometimes biannual price hikes.

On many fronts, streaming was a notable improvement to the traditional cable TV model, which mandated that consumers purchase massive bundles of largely unwatched channels. Or pay their cable company a ridiculous monthly fee to purchase a dusty old cable box. The problem: a lot of streaming’s novelty and innovation obfuscated many other long-percolating problems in the sector, including unchecked media consolidation and attacks on labor.

Alena Smith, showrunner of Apple TV+’s Dickinson, wrote about how new streaming Hollywood in many was is worse that what it disrupted, especially when it comes to creative pay and the transparency creatives have into the success and impact of their work:

…to this day I have no earthly clue how many people have seen it [Dickinson], nor what value my near-decade of creative labor generated for the company. Not only do I have no metrics for my own success, I don’t even know how Apple would determine those metrics in the first place.) In their mad rush off the digital cliff, these companies transformed Hollywood from a high-wage, high-profit, hits-driven industry into a low-wage, low-profit, subscription-driven one. They also broke the basic bargain at the heart of show business, which is that creative artists and independent producers will share in the financial success their work creates.

Like most of America’s problems, the one two punch of mindless consolidation with feckless regulatory antitrust oversight has had some fairly unsurprising results, especially for workers. Executives like Discovery CEO David Zaslav fail endlessly upward, receiving outsized compensation for blistering incompetence. All while their products, customers, and workers take the hit for pointless merger mania (see: the broad dipshittery that has been the AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery series of mergers).

Smith is correct to affix the blame on greed, mindless consolidation, and feckless regulatory oversight as opposed to blaming the underlying tech:

You might say if you were a viewer of my limited series about the streaming wars, we’ve seen this movie before. Unregulated platform capitalism has already chewed up and spat out most of the 20th century’s once-profitable culture industry, from music to journalism to books. People often blame “the internet” for this rampant destruction of livelihoods, as if the technology itself were some kind of demon, hellbent on erasing the value of creative work. 

We can control and structure the marketplace of the internet through our laws and the enforcement of those laws. We can eliminate glaring corporate conflicts of interest and make the web — our now-de facto gathering space as a society — a better place to be an artist and an audience member. We’ve done it before: through laws like the Paramount Consent Decree, which legally separated the production and distribution of films, thereby ending the autocratic “Studio System” of that era; or the “fin-syn” rules of 1970, which blocked TV networks from distributing their own content during prime-time hours, ushering in a golden age of independent TV production.

None of these problems are new or unique to Hollywood. You see the same grotesque dysfunction in journalism, health care, education, telecom, traditional cable TV, transportation, energy, and countless other heavily consolidated sectors and industries. In large part because we’ve utterly normalized corruption and greed and let it run amok; often under the pretense of unbridled, patriotic free market American innovation.

There are counterbalances to Wall Street greed and the brunchlord hubris of the executive set. Antitrust reform (not the GOP performative type, but real antitrust reform), properly and competently staffed regulatory agencies, functional merger review, unionization of exploited work forces, functional consumer and labor abuse protection, checks and balances for monopoly and monopsony power, campaign financing and lobbying reform, and more.

You can feel the seed of real change growing thanks to unprecedented anger at the now comically tilted playing field by savvier, younger generations, but it remains an open question of how stupid and unbalanced we’re willing to let things get before meaningful, consensus-driven reform actually arrives. Judging from our trajectory from the 80s, 90s, and early aughts, we could be waiting a while.

Google is adding native support for eSignatures to Docs and Drive in an attempt to make it easier for users to request signatures and sign documents from within its cloud-based productivity software, the company has announced. Google is now releasing the ability to request and leave eSignatures in beta, after more than a year of testing the feature in alpha.

There are plenty of pieces of software that already offer eSignature support, ranging from cloud-based options like Dropbox through to local programs like Adobe Acrobat. So Google’s addition of this feature is more about offering parity with its competitors rather than forging new ground, and means user’s shouldn’t have to switch between different apps and tabs as much while working...

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It’s been 20 years since the final flight of one of the most beautiful planes ever made — the supersonic Concorde — and you’ll soon be able to buy one in Lego form.

The $200 Lego Icons Concorde is nearly three and a half feet long, has a 17-inch (43cm) wingspan, and three neat tricks up its sleeve. Not only does it capture many of the real plane’s iconic curves, but it’s also got an incredible Lego mechanism hidden inside to raise and lower its landing gear with a twist of the tail cone on the end.

The hidden gears run nearly the full length...

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Last week Zoom Video Communications Inc convened Zoom Perspectives, its annual analysts’ summit. During two-plus days of discussions, top executives shared insights technology trends, competitive factors and market dynamics shaping its current and future service offerings. In his opening remarks, founder Eric Yuan reminded attendees that the company had very modest goals when it started in 2011. “When we started our goals were very small,” he said.” “To be a better videoconferencing service.”

That proved to be a winning strategy. Supernormal growth was driven by the ease of setting up remote meetings during Covid lockdowns. Zoom’s core technology delivered high quality video and audio without requiring users to purchase special equipment. Its scheduling resources drove integration with the most popular calendaring and email services. December 2020 Zoom’s platform supported around 350 million meetings every day. In April 2023, over 810 million unique global visitors accessed Zoom.us.

Revenues and retained earnings grew exponentially during the pandemic. In the post-pandemic world, Zoom’s top line growth has flattened as travel bans evaporated, schools and medical offices reopened and businesses, including Zoom itself, require employees to show up “live” in the office for specified period sof time. For many that might mean joining Zoom conferences from their cubicles. When they do so, they are bound to discover truly useful features, functions and utilities that are baked into the Zoom platform courtesy of internal development, timely acquisitions and an ecosystem of dozens of partners with deep integrations into Zoom’s platform.

AI is “Top of Mind”

As “hybrid” work becomes a fact of life, Zoom has determined that profitability and customer loyalty will depend on how well it applies Federated LLMs, Generative AI and vertical knowledge toward transforming its core technology from a conferencing platform to one that, in CFO Kelly Steckelberg’s words, services as “one platform for human connection.” That means support of efficient, results-oriented collaboration among enterprises, their partners and customers. To that end, its most important investments are those being made in the fast-changing world of Large Language Models (LLMs), Generative AI and Contact Center. 

Experience taught Zoom’s product managers that more than one foundation model will be necessary to support specific use cases and domains. So its approach, pictured below, employs foundation LLMs from selected partners. The list includes OpenAI, Anthropic (another proprietary model) and Meta’s LLama 2 (Open Source) at this time. Zoom also has its own LLM that enables the platform to be trained with an enterprise’s own conversational data without escaping to the public Internet.

Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim was the first to use the magic word when she said “our AI approach is set on the principles of federation.” The company already had a partnership with OpenAI which when it introduced its smart companion ZoomIQ in March 2023. At that time Zoom demonstrated a number of features designed both to delight employees and to make them more productive and efficient. According to Hashim, there are already “3,000 distinct organizations” using the generative AI features, primarily summarization. But that’s just a starting point. ZoomIQ is a smart companion could provide recaps of videoconference-related chats, extract and categorize discussions to support further meetings, or build virtual whiteboards to support brainstorming. Then, of course, it offers to start composing follow-up messages and emails to share with collaborators to move projects along.

Catching Up With Conversational AI

Zoom customers no longer have to make “false choices” among available foundation models. According to Mahesh Ram, founding CEO of Solvvy (which was acquired by Zoom in 2022), Zoom is constantly testing the output of 3rd party models to determine which works best for a specific use case. Zoom takes responsibility for results and for compensating those vendors. Large enterprise customers are also able to bring their own LLMs into the mix. Over the next three years Opus Research expects enterprises to choose solution providers based on their ability to provide the most convenient and safe way to employ the content of customer and employee conversations to hone their competitive advantages.

In that respect, a feature called “Meeting Catchup” feels like the right application at the right time. Knowing that individuals often join Zoom meetings after they have begun, it is a virtual assistant that can provide a recap of the meeting, along with personal highlights, to bring the laggards up-to-speed with the conversation. The value of such a resource for meeting attendees is readily apparent. But there are applications for such a “catch-up” resource that looks across the persistent chats that arise from a Zoom meeting or the asynchronous messages between contact center agents, subject matter experts and customers that can answer the question “what did I miss?” or highlight “what’s important?” for an individual who joins in the middle.

Zoom’s Federated CX Continuum

Vi Chau, head of product for Zoom Contact Center and Zoom Phone, captured the gist of Zoom’s positioning in the market by saying “continuity of conversation is key.” Zoom CX – the umbrella organization for Zoom Contact Center, Zoom Virtual Agents and Zoom Workforce Management – embodies the continuity by defining how AI is applied to improve personal performance for agents, customers and the subject matter experts brought in to build virtual agents or respond to customer queries. Once again, summarization is the starting point. As with “catch-up” mentioned above, agents can review a summary before they engage with a customer. They can be presented with suggested scripts and, when the conversation is over, a Generative AI resource can provide a list of follow-up tasks.

Another big differentiator is bound to be video. As you think of the rich context provided by understanding facial expression and gestures, the prospects of supporting more empathetic customer care are definitely increased. Zoom has catching up to do. Zoom Contact Center has been in the marketplace for only a year and sales cycles in this domain are notoriously long.  Its federated managing and deploying LLMs will play a big part in its acceptance in the marketplace.

The post For Zoom, The Future Is Now, And “Federated LLMs” Are The Key appeared first on .

How the Tesla dream was built on a mirage.

Fisker showed off a series of prototype vehicles at its first “Product Vision Day” event, outlining the EV startup’s wide-ranging roadmap for the coming years. These included the sub-$30,000 Pear SUV, the Ronin sports car, Alaska pickup truck, and a new off-road package for the Ocean SUV that Fisker just started delivering a few short months ago.

Although the company had teased a few of these vehicles beforehand (and even opened reservations for the Pear last year), TechCrunch notes the event marked the first time they were all shown off in prototype form. Fisker hopes to put more than one of the cars into production within the next couple of years — an ambitious target given, as Reuters notes, the supply chain disruptions the small...

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The global meat forecast, explained by 85 billion chickens.

In the century since the modern chicken industry was born, chicken has overtaken beef and pork as the most popular meat in the world. According to a report published last month by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), that trend is expected to rapidly accelerate in the decade ahead — and it’s one that will have enormous implications for climate change, animal welfare, and economic development.

Humanity currently raises and slaughters a staggering 74 billion chickens each year, which will jump to around 85 billion annually by 2032, a 15 percent increase, the report predicts. By comparison, the number of beef cattle and pigs raised for meat will rise to around 365 million and 1.5 billion, respectively, by 2032.

High-income countries account for just 16 percent of the world’s population and 33 percent of its meat intake. But that’s quickly changing: while meat consumption is stagnating in high-income countries and expected to decline in Europe over the next decade, it’s growing rapidly in middle-income regions like much of Asia and Latin America.

Chalk it up to what economists call Bennett’s Law, which predicts that as people climb out of poverty, they tend to shift away from largely plant-based, low-emissions diets heavy in grains and starches, to a more diverse, high-emissions diet heavy in meat and dairy, as well as fruits and vegetables. As hundreds of millions more people enter the global middle class, the world’s population of chickens is expected to surge to unfathomable levels.

Why the world is hooked on chicken

The global shift from red to white meat can be explained, in part, by simple economics: Chickens convert feed to meat more efficiently than pigs and cattle, and are thus much cheaper to raise. Inflation, combined with global wage stagnation, has people reaching for cheaper meats.

Consumers and governments are thinking about health and the environment, too. Poultry and fish are generally perceived as healthier than pork and beef, and while chicken and fish production are both terrible for the environment, they have a much smaller carbon footprint than red meat.

It adds up to a world that is dominated by chickens; more than nine are slaughtered each year for every human on Earth. Because chickens are small, it takes about 100 of them to get the equivalent amount of meat from one cow.

We eat so much chicken that some archaeologists believe their bones will define our modern age. (To try to grasp the astonishing scale of chicken farming, take a look at this clever visualization of US production levels.)

The trillions of chicken bones we’ll leave behind for future civilizations will speak to our ingenuity in dominating nature to produce more and more meat, our inability to consume it within planetary boundaries, and our cold indifference to animal welfare.

What we’ve done to the chicken

In its pursuit to put more meat on the table, the US poultry industry has turned chickens into Frankenchickens.

Today’s chickens have been bred to grow incredibly large and at breakneck speeds, reaching market weight in just six to seven weeks and weighing in at five times the size of previous breeds. It’s all caused a range of health and welfare issues, leading animal activists to call chickens “prisoners in their own bodies.”

Many chickens struggle to walk and end up spending much of their short lives sitting in their own waste, in massive, dimly lit warehouses with tens of thousands of other chickens. In recent years, animal welfare groups have successfully campaigned to get major food corporations to pledge to treat chickens better, but a recent report found that many companies either withdrew their pledges or have failed to report progress.

We might start to eat less meat ... in 2075

Last year, I wrote about how human prosperity and animal suffering exist in a kind of twisted symbiosis:

Economic growth leads to more food production and consumption, which in turn results in faster population growth and longer life expectancy, which then requires more intensive, factory-farmed meat to satiate growing populations.

The cycle has been miraculous for humans…far fewer people are undernourished today than they were in the 1970s, and the specter of famine has largely diminished. But the cycle has been disastrous for the environment and animals.

But the OECD-FAO report speculates that this cycle might begin to reverse itself around 2075. Upper-middle-income countries will drive an increase in meat consumption until 2040, the report predicts, and then low-income countries will drive demand until 2075. After that, global meat demand could start to decline.

The decline could come even sooner due to resource and environmental constraints, the report notes, and the livestock sector faces a host of uncertainties that will affect growth: public health and animal welfare concerns, trade policies, and climate impacts, like extreme weather events that destroy crops and livestock, which are expected to increase in the years ahead.

There’s also zoonotic disease. In recent years, African swine fever has decimated China’s pig industry, while bird flu outbreaks have devastated poultry markets.

The decline has more or less already begun in Europe, where meat production is falling and consumption is expected to fall over the next decade.

What we’ve learned from a meat-centric food system

It’s understandable that, after seeing high-income countries consume so much meat over the last half-century, governments of low- and middle-income countries aspire to reach Western levels of animal product consumption. But we’ve learned what comes with abundant cheap meat and dairy: air and water pollution, mass deforestation, biodiversity collapse, chronic diseases of affluence, acceleration of climate change, increased pandemic risk, and animal cruelty on an immense scale.

If the OECD and FAO are right, the industrial meat machine will continue churning out ever-increasing supplies at precisely the moment when climate authorities say we have to rapidly scale back livestock production to keep the planet habitable.

Environmental, Indigenous, and animal protection groups in the Global South are pushing back against factory farming expansionism. That fight is perhaps most heated in Latin America, including in Brazil, where Indigenous land is illegally grabbed for cattle grazing and planting livestock feed, and in Ecuador, where international institutions like the World Bank have financed large pig and poultry farms.

Only the people in low- and middle-income countries can determine the right level of meat production and intensification to balance their food supply needs against public health, environmental, and animal welfare concerns. But the 100-year experiment in American-style factory farming has proven to be an environmental and moral disaster we’re just now waking up to. Hopefully, it’s one that other parts of the world can learn to avoid.

If you go to Threads.net to access Meta’s popular Twitter clone, you’ll still find a spinning placeholder galaxy — but that should change in the next few weeks, according to a new tweet from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“Search and web coming in the next few weeks,” he tweets, saying he’s “excited about the team’s pace of shipping.”

Meta took a gamble on launching a barebones Twitter alternative at breakneck speed while Twitter continued to crumble, and it may have paid off — my colleague Alex Heath recently wrote that Threads hit 100 million signups faster than any consumer software product in history.

But more than half of those users didn’t stick around, according to Reuters, and while that may be expected for any software product,...

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WhatsApp’s latest beta has a new voice chat feature that lets groups of up to 32 people connect for a spoken session, according to beta notes published by WABetaInfo. WhatsApp beta version 2.23.16.19 is rolling out to testers on Android, adding features similar to Telegram and Discord chats, Slack’s Huddles, and even Meta’s own Messenger platform.

If it’s live in your version of the app, you’ll notice a waveform icon within group chats — but only if the WhatsApp account has the feature enabled and includes compatibility with the group. Tapping the button immediately launches voice chat, along with its own interface. Then, anyone in the group, up to 32 people, can just jump in and start talking. Unlike the existing group calls feature,...

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