Matthew Ervin delivers meals several days a week for DoorDash in Seattle. A few months ago, he had just picked up an order at Buffalo Wild Wings, when the dispatch system went down. With information about his destination no longer visible, Ervin couldn’t take the delivery to his customer. Nor could he take any other orders until the system came back online—three hours later. Ervin says he’s often unable to start or complete a delivery because the company’s dispatch sy
Financial advisors advocate for a diverse portfolio, but few could have foreseen the level of variety that many people would embark on in 2021. Investment in NFTs and cryptocurrencies soared nearly as fast as the price of those digital assets. Now, however, some of those newbie investors are in for a reckoning. It’s tax time—and the Internal Revenue Service is taking a special interest in non-fungible tokens (along with people who bet on Bitcoin). That means collectors could be in
As a Black transgender woman, it is hard to imagine my life without social media. It was essential for me to live my truth. It provided connection with others like me near and far. It remains a space where individuals who are isolated physically can find meaning by linking with a wider community. Right now, queer youth, especially trans youth, need these vital bonds, which are often easier to form virtually. But in their current, unchecked incarnations, these platforms—especially Facebook
Slack, the workplace chat tool that’s become the default way for workers at many companies to stay in touch with each other, reported an outage Tuesday morning. “Some customers are unable to load Slack,” the Salesforce-owned company reported. “We’re still actively investigating this issue, but we don’t have any new information to share at this time. We’ll keep you posted as soon as we have an update.” And, as is tradition whenever Slack has
NASA has announced plans for the International Space Station (ISS) to be officially decommissioned in 2031. After dozens of launches since 1998 got the station up and into orbit, bringing it down will be a feat of its own—and the risks are serious if things go wrong. NASA’s plans for the decommissioning operation will culminate in a fiery plunge into the middle of the Pacific Ocean to a location called Point Nemo, also known as the “spacecraft graveyard,” the furthest
For a quick way to view upcoming calendar events and join virtual meetings with one click, check out Logi Tune for Windows and Mac. Ostensibly, Logi Tune is a free companion app for Logitech’s webcams and headsets, letting you adjust device settings through a button on your Windows taskbar or Mac menu bar. But that same app also has a handy agenda view for Google Calendar and Outlook, and doesn’t require any Logitech hardware to use.
Just install the app from Logitech’s web
So much hype swirls around the blockchain and cryptocurrencies and NFTs that it can sometimes be hard to see the real utility in the technology. It’s hard to understand the intrinsic value of a crypto coin or an NFT, when their prices are based mostly on their value as a speculative instrument. Understanding the utility of DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, is a little more straightforward, although the concept is still very young and has been tried in only a small number of
If I allow myself a moment of harsh but truthful introspection, it turns out that I have too many tablets. Android tablets. iPads. Chromebook tablets. Amazon tablets. Tablets everywhere. And many of them are just old enough that it doesn’t make sense to use them for anything more than very limited tasks. Oh, and also: I keep buying tablets! But I generally just use the newest one while all the others stack up higher and higher in a pile of uncharged, unused silicon and glass. So, what to
The pursuit of happiness is as old as consciousness itself, but the actual desire to be happy seems to be burning brighter than ever before, especially for young professionals. For example, Harvard’s “happiness” course is one of the most sought-out classes among its MBA students. Young entrepreneurs aren’t the only ones seeking happiness, however. High demand across all groups has given birth to a variety of apps and gadgets with the promise of improving our mental we
You might be confident in your ability to tell a real face from one created using artificial intelligence. But a new study has found that your chance of choosing accurately would be slightly better if you just flipped a coin—as you are more likely to trust the fake face over the real one. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study was conducted by Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Sophie J. Nightingale, a lecturer at En