In one of Duolingo’s recent posts on TikTok, Duo, the language-learning app’s green owl mascot, explains to a support group of Teletubbies that there’s a restraining order against him. Commenters expressed concern: “Duo . . . where did you find the Teletubbies?” one asked. Duo promptly responded that he keeps them in his basement.
This unhinged behavior is typical of the character on social media. Duo’s popularity has exploded on the interne
Seeing is believing. Except when it’s not.
Here’s a familiar example. Last year, my wife and I bought a new Mazda SUV. I had never noticed one on the road before, but now they seem to be everywhere.
What happened? Did half of my neighbors decide to buy the same car at the same time? Surely not. But once the CX-5 secured a place of prominence in my consciousness, my mind automatically began sending off notification chimes every ti
Pinterest has always upended expectations, and for a service devoted to enabling its users to curate whatever they cared about, the company has also ironically defied categorization. It sits between social media and search. It pioneered the concept of the infinite scroll, yet it resisted the idea of a feed. It leaned heavily on Facebook alums to drive many elements of its business, yet it often made more sense as a visually driven alternative to Google search advertising. Women helped define
Pinterest is making me hungry.
I’ve logged on to the site, as I often have since buying my house, in search of furniture. Pinterest’s recommendation systems have risen to the challenge, accurately clocking my recent saves of rugs and nightstands as signs I might be looking to furnish a bedroom.
Pinterest, though, wants to go beyond showing me more of the same. It wants to inspire, as CEO Bill Ready tells me in a recent conversation. The platform pushes me to
I can’t remember now which email it was that made me click on the ‘Report Spam’ and ‘Unsubscribe’ links for the messages I received through Mynewsdesk, a service that companies can use to contact journalists with press releases. But I know I was shocked when, after opting out of the email in question, I was routed to a page that showed I had been unknowingly signed up for 46 separate email distribution lists.
My job as a journalist wouldn’t
Investors are having second thoughts about the generative AI boom, citing concerns about the real applicability of the budding technology and the difficulty competing with huge tech companies such as Amazon, which are investing heavily.
Pitchbook says investments in generative AI startups are down, both by number and by deal size. The firm counts 142 investments in April, May, and June, and only 101 investments in July, August, and September. The cumulative deal value in the Q3 was
Kids sometimes lie about their age online. Many do it because they want access to platforms or age-restricted content for the sheer thrill of engaging in what they perceive as “grown-up” activities. Others are driven by peer pressure and FOMO.
And, as any parent will tell you, it’s incredibly tough to control online activity. But that’s not the real problem.
When children misrepresent their age online, they expose themselves to inappro
When a food truck called Theo’s Gyros pulls up outside a neighborhood pub in Seattle, customers now notice what’s missing: They no longer hear the hum of a generator while they eat at a table nearby.
When Netflix released The Most Hated Man on the Internet, we got an up-close glimpse of the harm that nefarious people can do by exposing the personal information of others online. The series illustrated how Hunter Moore used stolen or hacked images to populate a pornographic website, targeting women who did not consent for their images to be used—and introducing many people to the concept of “doxing.”
Derived from 1990s hacker culture, doxing is a play on the w
I’ll let you in on a little secret: Google’s apps and services are absolutely overflowing with buried treasures.
More than any other tech company, Google loves tucking interesting options and features into out-of-the-way places. Some of the best elements of Gmail, Google Calendar, and other popular productivity tools are almost completely out of sight, in fact, and all too easy to overlook if you don’t know where to find ’em.
Once you have a roa