In a 2016 episode of Black Mirror, Bryce Dallas Howard played a woman obsessed with her social capital. In this alternate version of reality, users give each other ratings between one and five stars, which in turn affects their socioeconomic status. What was once science fiction may be closer to becoming a reality, according to a report from the Financial Times. Sources within the company told FT, Meta is looking to develop “social tokens” or “reputation tokens,”
Office workers often see videoconferencing as a distraction from solitary work like writing or coding, but a company called Flow Club thinks it could also be a key way to help people get things done. Its new app, also called Flow Club, lets users host remote coworking sessions designed to help people get into a productive flow state. “It’s basically Peleton for coworking,” says cofounder and CEO Ricky Yean. While users typically stay on video for an entire hour-long session,
Google is releasing a new feature for its search engine that tries to mimic how we inquire about things in the real world. Instead of just typing into a search box, you can now present an image with Google Lens, then tailor the results with follow-up questions. You might, for instance, submit a picture of a dress, then ask to see the same style in different colors or skirt lengths. Or, if you spot a pattern you like on a shirt, you can ask to see that same pattern on other items, such as drapes
Scott Keller is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company. He is the author of six books, including Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Create Ultimate Competitive Advantage. Carolyn Dewar is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company. She has published over 30 articles in the Harvard Business Review and the McKinsey Quarterly and is a frequent keynote speaker. Vikram (Vik) Malhotra is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company where he has worked since 1986. He has served on McKinsey
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Emma Chamberlain has been called “the most important YouTuber today” and social media’s “it girl,” and it’s not hard to understand why. Since starting her eponymous channel in 2017, Chamberlain has amassed 11.3 million YouTube subscribers, in large part because of her wry comedic tone and signature editin
Six years ago, as Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert were sketching out ideas for Everything Everywhere All at Once, their interdimensional martial arts fantasy about a frazzled mother battling a series of increasingly comical and cosmic challenges, the writer-directors found themselves facing their own Nietzschean problems. Along with personal and career anxieties and undiagnosed struggles, there was a basic quandary about the story they wanted to tell: Could a movie set in the absurd chaos of infin
OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company best-known for its massive GPT-3 natural language model, announced on Wednesday it is releasing a second version of its text-to-image AI model. Like its predecessor, the new DALL-E 2 is a neural network that creates images based on natural language phrases fed in by the user. But while the original DALL-E‘s images were low-resolution and conceptually basic, images generated by DALL-E 2 are five times more realistic and accurate, OpenAI research
r/Place, the five-day collaborative digital artwork project on Reddit, ended on Tuesday, and the result is a captivating tapestry of the human experience. The project, which began as an April Fools’ Day experiment in 2017, allows any Reddit user to post a single colored pixel on a shared blank canvas, every five minutes. Over five days, a mosaic gradually emerges—and it is, by design, a product of myriad people, places, and perspectives, with the five-minute wait time making it imp
Pinterest, the virtual pinboard that has 431 million active users worldwide, is doing its part to take on the climate crisis: On Wednesday, the company announced it would ban any content that makes false claims around climate change.
The new climate misinformation policy sprang up due in part to a growing interest among users in sustainability-themed content. “We know that Pinners are coming to Pinterest to find ideas to incorporate sustainability into their lives, ” says Sarah Br
Laura Shin is a crypto journalist, host of the Unchained podcast, and former senior editor at Forbes. Below, she shares five key insights from her new book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze. Listen to the audio version—read by Laura herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
- Power is shifting from business people to coders. My book tells the story of Ethereum, the second-largest crypto asset by market capitalizati